Free Metzger's Dog by Thomas Perry Page A

Alice in the bed, warm and soft, by now sleeping again, her face calm and somehow still beautiful almost thirty years after he’d met her.
    When she heard the front door closing, Alice got out of bed and padded quietly to the living room in her bare feet. She stood in silence and watched the car pull out of the driveway and creep up the dark, empty street. Alice stood absolutely still, staring out the window for a long time after the car had disappeared, her face calm and thoughtful. Then she lit a cigarette and went to the kitchen without turning on the lights, and started the coffee. Soon the birds would start singing, she thought, and then the cold, bluish tinge of dawn would warm to yellow, the sun itself appearing first right over the chimney of the house across the street.
             
    P ORTERFIELD ENTERED THE C OMMITTEE R OOM and classified the problem at a glance. There were no junior people scurrying in and out with earnest expressions, which meant the problem hadn’t yet reached the moment when nothing could be done about it—the great flurry of pointless activity hadn’t begun.
    He noticed Hadley, who ran the Domestic Operations arm of Clandestine Services. He was predictable enough, and Pines, the Deputy Director, was no surprise. Their presence only certified that the trouble was worth getting out of bed at four-thirty to talk about. Kearns had had some shadowy relationship with the Latin America desk for so long nobody even thought about what his actual job was anymore. When Porterfield saw Goldschmidt he became curious. Goldschmidt was chief of Technical Services. If Goldschmidt was here it meant the problem was serious enough to draw his attention away from all the spy satellites and the research facilities built into Company proprietaries and affiliates, the arsenals, and nobody but Goldschmidt knew what else. Then Porterfield noticed John Knox Morrison sitting at the far end of the table and snorted. Morrison had managed, at this hour, to select a red necktie with a pattern that at first seemed to be white dots, but on second examination were small, perfect copies of the Harvard seal, with even the motto
veritas
legible from eight feet away. If Morrison was here, it was a disaster. Morrison wasn’t someone who’d be called in to discuss strategies or solve problems. His only value was that he was someone who could be placed in positions that required the right family, a certain kind of influence. The fact that he appeared to be a fool was part of his protection as an operative; the fact that he was a genuine fool meant the disguise was impenetrable. Morrison’s tanned, beefy face was looking uncomfortably pink, and his pale blue eyes darted furtively up occasionally to stare in secret alarm, first at Goldschmidt, then at Deputy Director Pines.
    Pines spoke to Porterfield. “Hello, Ben. We’ve got troubles. We don’t know what kind yet, but they’re real enough to start figuring the options.”
    Porterfield nodded, and glanced at Morrison, who was intently tracing the grain of the wooden conference table with a pudgy forefinger.
    “You’re familiar with the Donahue psywar grants?”
    “The Director mentioned them the other day,” said Porterfield. “I’ve read most of the reports.”
    “Last night—early evening, actually—some kind of terrorist group attacked the campus of the University of Los Angeles. We don’t know much about it yet. It was apparently something on the order of a commando raid. They blew up a parking service kiosk. That points to foreign groups, because if they picked that they probably thought it was a police guard post.”
    “Is that it?” asked Porterfield.
    “They broke into the Social Sciences Building. That’s Ian Donahue’s building. It was early enough to make the eleven-o’clock news in Los Angeles.”
    “Great.”
    “Fortunately, they didn’t want this kind of publicity any more than we do. They covered it by breaking into a research lab and