Free Metzger's Dog by Thomas Perry Page B

running off with—get this—a million dollars’ worth of cocaine.”
    “What was that doing there?”
    “It’s nothing to do with our projects, just some damned medical research thing that was easier to run from there than from the ULA hospital complex. I double-checked. We’ve got nothing to do with it.”
    “What did they get from Donahue?”
    “That’s part of the problem,” said Pines. He glared at Morrison. “We don’t know yet. We know something is gone, that they were in the office. That’s all we do know. They went in and got into two rooms in a building that has two hundred.”
    Porterfield turned to Morrison. “What could they have gotten?”
    Morrison leaned from side to side, staring off at the wall behind Porterfield’s head, deep in thought, as though the question had never occurred to him before. “Oh, that’s hard to say. I would imagine there are copies of his yearly reports to the National Research Foundation, maybe a few grant proposals.” Morrison was becoming more and more uncomfortable under the gaze of the five men around the table. “And then there was his correspondence with NRF. With me, really—no connection with Langley, nothing to worry about, really.”
    Goldschmidt looked at Porterfield, his lips pursed and his eyes bulging as though there were an immense pressure behind them.
    Porterfield said quietly, “You really don’t know what Donahue had, do you?”
    Morrison chuckled, nervously. “No, of course not, not exactly, but—”
    “Oh shit,” said Kearns.
    Pines said, “Thank you, Morrison.” He glanced at his watch. “Wow! Almost six o’clock. We’d better get you out of here before we blow your cover. There’s a car waiting.”
    Morrison seemed about to protest. He looked around the table and for some insane reason settled his gaze on Hadley, as though Hadley would assert Morrison’s right to stay. Porterfield had watched Hadley’s jaw flexing and loosening rhythmically for the past few moments. It was the same unconscious gesture a cat made before it leaped on a bird, while it imagined the feeling of grinding the bird’s fragile bones. Morrison nodded to a spot somewhere near the middle of the table, grinned stupidly, and said, “Good point, thanks,” as he left the room.
    “So,” said Porterfield. “Worst case?”
    Pines turned to Goldschmidt, who said, “Impossible to say, really. What amazes me most about this is just that. That man”—he paused and looked around the room—“that…man…has been supporting the…research…of this Donahue person for upward of twenty years. He seems to have had some authorization for it.” Goldschmidt’s gaze settled on Pines, and it was a look of hatred. “We have to assume that what these people have is the sum of what Professor Donahue knows, what he has proposed, what he imagines, and what that insufferable moron has let him know. What we’re sure of is an embarrassment. What we don’t know may be a catastrophe.”
    Porterfield waited, and Kearns spoke. “We’re pretty sure that what he had in that office included a lot of psywar tactical information that has been used in Latin America. It also probably included a lot of stuff nobody has ever used—some of it so crazy we wouldn’t have considered it, some of it right out of the contingency plans.”
    “It may not be that bad,” said Pines. “Ben, you’ve read the abstracts this guy Donahue wrote. It’s really pretty amateurish stuff. He tries to find out what form the bogeyman takes in a country and devises means to make the bogeyman come to life. It’s a mixture of stating the obvious and a pseudoscientific quantifying of things that can’t be measured.”
    “Preposterous,” Hadley agreed. “The real problem is that there seems to be a pretty sophisticated team of terrorists capable of operating in L.A. We don’t know what they are, where they came from.”
    “Sounds right,” said Porterfield, but he was watching Goldschmidt and Kearns