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                      SEX, LIES, AND NECROMANCY

                                  by

                    Daniel Parsons and Brandi Weed

                    It is wise to keep in mind that
              no success or failure is necessarily final.

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After a lot of haggling, Paul was able to get the report on Castimir's
attack back from Braithe and get out of the hospital.  She'd seemed
like she was going to get up right out of bed and hunt those guys down
herself, and heaven help them if she caught them.
     But that didn't change the fact that her story still didn't fit.
Sure, it didn't matter much; they had the Cray back, it was going to
Glasgow, and would be wired into Britain's National Defense Network
just fine.  That was all good, nothing wrong with that.  But still...
there had to be more to it than 'an insane professor, a fraternal
organization, and a bunch of people from a small, dirt-poor town on a
frozen little island stole it from under our noses and programmed it
to do astrological calculations.'  It hadn't made any sense when he
first heard it, and it didn't make any sense now.  There had to be
somebody else involved, somebody more capable of doing this; but why
would anyone with those kinds of resources work with an insane
professor, a fraternal organization, and a bunch of people from some
small, dirt-poor town on a frozen little island?
     It would be very tempting to say they must be lying.  None of
them could give any good reason why they found the Cray where they
did, which made him wonder how they'd found it at all.  What's more,
they weren't interested in knowing how it got there.  Braithe could
only say, "Perhaps we have missed something"; Castamir just shrugged.
Calder sat there with this weird half-smile on her face for the whole
interview, like she knew something, but would never say it out loud.
     The parking lot was wet, of course.  Walking through puddles,
Paul made his way towards his car.  There was no way he could ferret
any answers out of them without more to go on.  He needed some facts.
But just about everyone who'd had any was dead or not talking.  Were
they under some kind of threat?  Maybe he should track down Finger;
rumor had it he'd fled to the States.  Or talk to their ex-supervisor
again, though he hadn't been deeply involved in the case even before
he got put in the hospital.  In fact, he didn't seem deeply involved
with reality as Paul knew it.
     Then something hit him on the back of the head, and the whole
world very abruptly shifted to black.  When it faded back into view,
something liquid was being forced down his throat.  He coughed, and
tried to spit it out, but someone hit him in the stomach and some went
down.  Then he was thrown back into a soft seat, and his hands were
handcuffed behind his back.
     He was in the back of a moving car, a limousine, he thought.
There were three men with him, dark-skinned and dark-haired, Arabic-
looking.  One of them had a knife in both hands; it had one of those
wavy blades like you see wielded by the evil high priest in bad
barbarian movies.  Whatever they'd given him was making him feel very
weird.
     "Give us your name, your rank, and your serial number." one of
them said.
     "My name is Paul Harrison, I'm a CIA agent, and you are..." His
stomach turned over, and he threw up on the floor of the limousine.
The three men watched him impassively, and when he had stopped
heaving, pushed him back into the seat.
     "What are you doing here?"
     Paul felt very weak, and very strange, and decided to himself to
just go along with it for now and maybe figure something out when he
didn't feel so sick. "Someone hit me over the head, you know."
     The man with the knife snarled, "Why did your organization send
you to England?"
     "To investigate the recovery of a big computer from a lunatic
philosophy professor."
     "We know what the papers have said.  Why did the professor take
your machine?"
     "You got me.  What I've been trying to figure out myself."
     The man with the knife sneered. "You do not know?"
     "Well... maybe he was using it to calculate his horoscope."
     One of the men whispered something into the ear of the man with
the knife, who silently nodded. "How far did the professor get with
his... horoscope?"
     Paul thought for a minute, though it was hard to think now; maybe
he'd better just answer. "Not very.  It was calculating nonsense."
     "And what answer did these nonsense calculations give?"
     "They didn't." Paul blinked, feeling the words come out even
though he really didn't want them to. "They wanted the Cray for NATO
defense calculations, so they dumped its memory and sent it to Glasgow
for re-programming."
     Their eyes widened.  If Paul had been in any normal frame of
mind, he would have smiled at the sight.  "NATO?"
     "Yes.  It stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization."
     One of the underlings punched him in the gut. "We know what it
means!  Do you fools know what you have thrown away?"
     Paul was glad he couldn't answer that.  They hadn't thrown it
away, of course; the entire program had been archived before the Cray
was wiped, and some programmers were looking it over right now.  It
still looked like garbage, but, if these guys were to be believed,
there might be something to it after all.
     The three were arguing very loudly in some Middle Eastern
language now; it didn't sound like Arabic.  Paul blinked at them in a
stupor for a while, wondering where this would end up, before they
noticed him again.
     "All right, American.  Where is the man who programmed the
machine for the professor?"
     "We think that must have been Issac MacIntree, the Shriners
accountant.  He was shot at the house."
     The man with the knife screamed something at the driver, and the
car pulled over and stopped.  The other two shoved Paul out of the car
into a ditch by the side of the road, pausing to spit in his face.
"You are all such fools!  You have no knowledge what you have lost to
us, for the second time!"
     Paul turned over, watching the limousine drive away.  After he
was sure he'd gotten the license number, he stumbled to his feet and
started walking towards a police box down the road.  The second time?
The second time for what?  Very mysterious, but at least he felt like
he was getting somewhere.  When they grab you off the street and beat
you up, you know you're getting somewhere.

                             *     *     *

     Ardrin was sitting with Janie in the computer lab, staring at the
workstation screen.  A featureless face stared back at him, surrounded
by free-floating eyes, noses, and other pieces of disembodied faces.
"Are you sure you know how to work this thing?"
     "Yeah, I've used it before.  Now, give me a basic description of
one of those two."
     "The one with brown hair, or the tall one?"
     "Either one.  The program's supposed to make a picture from a
description, then match it with our files of foreign agents.  What say
we start with the brown-haired one?"
     "Okay.  Five-foot-nine, about 160 pounds..."
     "No, Ardrin.  Describe his face."
     "Um... yeah.  He had kind of a short little nose that turned up
at the end, so you could see his nose hairs."
     "Uh... well, we don't have to get too specific on the nose
hairs." Janie typed some commands, and a nose appeared in the middle
of the computer's face. "Did it look like that?"
     "Yeah, sort of.  It was wider.  Yeah, like that.  Real wide."
     "Huh, looks vaguely Asiatic.  You sure he was white?"
     "He was lighter than me."
     "That's not saying much, Ardrin.  What about his eyes?"
     "Kind of brown.  Thick eyebrows.  Uh, the eyes themselves were
not real deep set or anything, and he didn't have real strong
cheekbones or anything."
     "Okay..." Janie brought up a few eye shapes. "Any of these look
okay to you?"
     "The top one."
     Janie moused the indicated eyeballs into place, where they rested
uneasily on the wide bridge of the nose. "He looks weird.  Mouth?"
     "Uh... try that third pair of eyes." Janie moved them into place.
"Yeah, those look better.  His mouth had thick lips and strong bumps
on the top lip."
     "Strong whats on the top lip?"
     "This thing." Ardrin pointed to the groove on his upper lip.
     "Oh, the philtrum.  Like that?"
     "Yeah.  Can you make his lips narrower?  Not less thick, just
less wide on his face, you know what I mean?"
     "Sure."  The features slid into place at the command of the
mouse. "How's that look?"
     Ardrin frowned. "It doesn't look like him."
     "Well, I don't know what to say.  Do we have the right shape
head?  He looks like he should have a narrow head."
     "Yeah, make his head narrower.  And make his ears bigger.  Hey,
look, it's ugly.  Can you give him hair?"
     Within seconds, their subject was sporting a flattop you could
have landed an airplane on. "Cute, Janie.  Give him normal hair."
     The hair normalized itself. "Anything else?"
     Ardrin pondered. "Put a bump on his cheek, right near the nose."
     "One wart.  Our ugly killer from beyond our borders is now
complete.  Actually, he looks like a lorry driver I met once.  Want to
put together the other one?"
     "Nah, I'm gonna get some coffee."
     "Sounds good, actually."
     Down in the tea room, Ardrin absconded with several servings'
worth of scones while Janie got two cups of coffee.  No one they knew
was down there, so they found a table of their own and were about to
sit down, when Janie said, "Ardrin, you see him over there?"
     Ardrin looked around. "You mean the one going out that door?"
     "Yes." Janie put the coffee down, almost splashing Ardrin, and
took off towards the retreating figure's back.  Ardrin was right
behind her, wondering just how many of the people around them were
armed, and how many of those guns would be shooting at them if
anything got started.  But, maybe because most everyone there was
combat-trained, no one got in their way as they sprinted across the
room and out the door, into the hall outside.
     They looked up and down the hall.  There was no sign of him, just
a few people, both in the hall and back in the tea room, staring at
them. "Shit, he's gone."
     "Who was it?"
     "Ardrin, you remember back in Inverness, before we met up with
Prof. Samuels and his bikers?  Before we arrested that girl from the
bank who died later?  I thought I saw someone following us on a
motorcycle, but never saw him again.  That was him."
     "I thought he was one of Samuels' bikers."
     "I thought he was too, but we never saw him at the hotel with
Samuels.  Besides, he only had a little motorcycle.  I don't think any
of Samuels' bikers would have been caught dead on it.  What was he
doing here?"
     Ardrin shook his head. "I haven't a clue.  Let's get back and see
about that computer thing."
     "But Ardrin, he was following us!  What's he doing down here in
our tea room, then?"
     "Ya got me." Ardrin began clomping down the hall.  "How long does
that thing take to print, anyway?"
     "Hey, wait!" Janie sprinted after Ardrin, finally falling in
beside him about halfway back to the computer lab. "It won't print
unless I tell it.  And what about the bloke back there?"
     "What about him?" Ardrin glanced over his shoulder, then leaned
down, speaking in very low tones. "He probably works here."
     "Works here?"
     "Yeah.  And we'd probably not let anybody know we think that for
a while until we figure out what's going on."
     In silence, they walked into the lab and sat down again.  Their
job had finished; there were three possible matches, two of whom were
probably in other countries and one who had been dead two years.
Janie stared at the screen, but her mind was a million miles away.
"Why would he be following us if he works for us?"
     "Guess we better find out.  Are you sure it was the same guy?"
     "I'm mostly sure.  I only got a glimpse about 2 weeks ago, and he
was wearing a helmet."
     "Okay.  Then we go find out who he is."
     "I don't think they'll let us just go looking."
     "Then we better ask Hartree."
     Janie thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, we
better make an appointment then.  Hope he's not too miffed."
     Ardrin smirked.  "I think we got worse things to worry about than
a miffed Hartree.  Just call him."


Daniel Parsons                                             Brandi Weed
                          Questions or comments to dparsons@netcom.com
        Available for ftp from ftp.cs.pdx.edu, in /pub/frp/stories/SLN