Under The Wheel by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Forester walked into the RCA Building lobby carrying a worn brown briefcase, and walking hunched down in his coat. He didn’t pause for anything, or look around, just walked straight to an elevator and pushed the button for 25. No one paid any attention to him.

The floor was empty, all the glass doors dark. Forester paused before American Dynamics, thinking. Then he opened the briefcase and took out a piece of metal, something like a bent icepick. He raked the lock tumblers and was inside the office in fifteen seconds. No alarms went off, no lights came on.

He checked the side door, where Caladon had gone to place her call to the head office. There was a small switchboard in there, a desk with a typewriter, and a teletype machine. The paper in the teletype was blank, and the bin to catch printouts was empty.

In fact, Forester noticed, all the wastebaskets were empty, except for one that had a white delicatessen bag and a sandwich wrapper in it. So they hadn’t been emptied by maintenance; there was no trash, and nobody had no trash.

He went back out to the office with the file cabinets. He pulled at a drawer; the cabinet was locked. And it wobbled. Forester picked the lock. The cabinet was empty.

He opened the drawer Jane Caladon had opened. It was Rill of file folders. All of them were stuffed with blank paper.

Forester closed up carefully and went back downstairs. There was a man in a gray coat in the lobby, pretending to make a phone call and not doing a very good job of it. Forester went out of the lobby and the hood came after, hands in his pockets just like in the movies.

Forester knew he could lose the hood, but that wouldn’t get him anything; besides, whoever sent him might send someone good the next time. Forester walked a couple of blocks west; sparkling Rockefeller City faded fast into dingy West Side warehouses.

Forester turned down an alley, went fifty feet and stepped behind a trash dumpster. The hood appeared, a black silhouette. He took a hesitant step.

Forester stepped out and said, “Like to talk to me?”

The man in the gray coat took out a gun and shot at Forester. It wasn’t a very precise shot, but Forester didn’t like being shot at. He took out his own gun and put one high over the hood’s head. The hood ducked and flinched. Forester went back and grabbed him, made him drop his gun.

“Wait, wait,” Gray Coat said.

“No.” He was a lad, maybe twenty. Not too young to learn.

There was a movement up the alley, and a whining sound, and then blue lightning came at Forester and the hood. Forester stepped back. The light showed the hood’s mouth open wide, his face pale as a dead man’s in the instant before he was.

The bolt tore away half of the man’s skull. Forester felt the blue fire tingling his skin. The body fell down, still wrapped in blue lightning, still twitching.

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