John Dalmas - The Puppet Master

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The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real

people or incidents is purely coincidental.

1991.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31842-X

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, October 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Herbert D. Clough, 30 years with the FBI who, with the collaboration

of the originator, Leslie Charteris, resurrected the fabled SAINT magazine. Distribution

problems shot her down, but for three wonderful months in 1984, she flew. A lovely project.

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN DALMAS

The Puppet Master

Soldiers

The Regiment

The Regiment’s War

The Three-Cornered War

The Lion of Farside

The Bavarian Gate

The Lion Returns

The Lizard War

FOREWORD

These stories are set in a time line that branched from yours and mine sometime after the close of World War

Two. Much in it remains familiar; some things are very similar. But major differences have developed. The geo-

gravitic power converter has energized economies while greatly easing energy, water, and pollution problems.

But the blessing is mixed. The GPC has brought more than cheap, clean, abundant energy and the new

physics: The resulting flood of scientific and technological innovations is accelerating changes in society, with

outgrowths positive and negative, attractive and ugly, exciting and fearsome.

Homo sapiens has major adjustments to make.

A MOST SINGULAR MURDER

—

a novella

My name is Martti Seppanen, and I work for Prudential Investigations and Security, Inc. Things had been slow,

and I’d had nothing much to do for a day and a half—since I’d finished rounding up the collusion evidence

against Funsch, Carillo, and Wallace. So I stood there in my two-by-four office—ten by ten feet, actually—

looking westward across the L.A. basin toward the higher rises of Lower Wilshire. While drilling Spanish.

I don’t mind days like that. But there was the nagging worry that if business didn’t pick up, Joe might have to

lay people off. Me for example. Times like that you can wonder whether it had been a good idea when Joe leased

the whole ninth floor of this high-rent high rise. Of course, the old building got sold out from under him and

knocked down. The old buildings are disappearing.

Besides, when I don’t have a case, I get the munchies worse than usual, and I gain weight too easily.

I kept drilling, using a question and answer program on intermediate spoken Spanish. The computer would

voice a question in fairly simple Spanish, and I’d answer it. Or it would tell me to discuss some simple thing.

Then it would critique my diction, grammar, and pronunciation, and we’d repeat it till the program was satisfied

with my performance.

¿«Donde guardan los documentos financiales»? the computer asked me. (“Where do you keep your financial

records?”) The program is part of the department’s advanced language training.

«Debajo de la bañadera, I answered, donde nadie los buscaria». (“Under the bathtub, where no one would

ever look for them.”) You do enough of those drills, you learn what the program will accept.

That’s where things stood when Carlos looked in on me. “Come in my office,” he said. “We’ve got something

for you.”

“We” meant himself and Joe Keneely. Joe’s the founder, principal shareholder, and CEO of Prudential. Carlos

is the senior investigator, and I was his protégé, top of the list of junior investigators. And the something would

be an assignment.

I followed Carlos down the hall. His office was big enough for a small conference without people sitting in

each other’s laps. He sat down behind his desk, and I took the chair across from him. Fingering his computer, he

turned on the wall screen. A picture formed and stopped. It showed Joe Keneely’s office, with Joe and Carlos,

and some guy I’d never seen before.

“The client is Donald C. Pasco,” Carlos said. “All the way down from Sacramento. Joe just signed a contract

with him.” He said it as if it tasted bad. I’d heard of Pasco. He was director of the Anti-Fraud Division of the

California Department of Commerce, and had a reputation as an aye-aitch.

The picture came to life, and I watched their conference. Actually I watched Pasco bitch and snarl. About

three weeks earlier, an astronomer named Arthur Ashkenazi had read a paper to the California Section of the

Astronomical Society of America, at the section’s annual meeting. The paper was what had gotten Pasco upset.

Pasco didn’t have much presence, but he had rank and venom. After playing back the meeting with Pasco, Carlos

ran Ashkenazi’s talk for me. I’d been aware of it before, just barely. It had been written up in the papers, but I

hadn’t read it. I read fast, but the L.A. Times is thick, and the talk hadn’t had any significance for me.

Now, watching him deliver it, it turned out to be pretty interesting. It didn’t offend me at all, but it had

offended Ashkenazi’s audience. He’d hardly gotten well underway when people started to leave. “Stalked out” is

the best description.

About halfway through his talk and three-quarters of the way through his audience, one of them got up and

shouted that Ashkenazi should be thrown out. That what he was spieling was astrology, not astronomy. And

another guy stood up then, apparently an officer of the meeting, and told the guy yelling that he’d either have to

sit down and be quiet, or leave. The guy left, madder than hell, most of the remaining audience following him out

in a bunch. Ashkenazi finished to a dozen listeners, probably mostly reporters, and didn’t seem upset at the

exodus. I suppose he wasn’t surprised.

Basically what Ashkenazi was reporting was, he’d run correlations of events of one sort and another against

the positions of stars and planets. Which did amount to astrology, as far as I could see. And while I’m no

statistical analyst, I do know that the kind of correlation coefficients he was claiming aren’t the sort of thing you

get by chance. Not in the real world.

He’d done it the hard way, too, or that’s how it looked. He hadn’t picked a scattering of historical events that

fitted his purpose. Over a period of almost thirty years he’d predicted events, supposedly from the positions of

stars and planets, and published them in various newsletters put out by different astrology groups, New Age

groups, and groups into psychic phenomena. And a lot of his predictions came out as forecast, his scores getting

better as he improved his system. Predictions like droughts, major political shifts, uprisings, big stock market

swings, major deaths . . . If the publications were real. In 1994 he’d even predicted that a then-unknown source

of electrical power would be released in 1997 that would change the world. Which of course was Haugen’s geo-

gravitic power converter! That was uncanny.

I could see why astronomers might get spooky about stuff like that. But why was Pasco so upset? Even if

Ashkenazi made it all up, it wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t commerce. Which was what the Anti-Fraud Division was

supposed to be concerned with—criminal fraud in commerce. This was something the astronomers could take

care of themselves if they wanted to, by kicking Ashkenazi out of their society. Which in fact they had, for

misrepresenting his talk to the program committee.

From the recording of the meeting with Pasco, I could see that Joe felt uncomfortable with the job, the same

as I did. Because what Pasco wanted was a fishing expedition at taxpayers’ expense. We were supposed to

investigate every damned thing about Arthur Ashkenazi. Everything but his finances; the California Commerce

Department’s Audit Division would cover that. To quote Pasco: “Find something discreditable about this

Ashkenazi, preferably something criminal.”

I asked Carlos why Joe had accepted the contract. I guess I knew, but Joe spelled it out for me: “A fair amount

of our business comes from Commerce. We’re their number one contractor in southern California, and we can’t

afford their turning to another investigation firm.”

I could have turned the assignment down. Joe’s used to my being a hardhead, and I’d earned enough points with

him and Carlos that they wouldn’t have been too mad at me. But somehow I took it.

Back in my office, I sat down at my computer, accessed the L.A. library and called up what the media—print,

Webworks, and TV—had said about Ashkenazi’s talk. The professional media had had people there of course—-

probably stringers and junior staff. And since the news had been dull for a while, they’d played up the Ashkenazi

flap pretty big. Mostly tongue in cheek, but pretty much without ridiculing it. The syndicates had gotten hold of

it then, pontificating. Then Time magazine did a feature on it, treating it straight, and Ashkenazi made the talk

show circuit.

All of which had burned Pasco up, and he was using his position, and us, to try to punish Ashkenazi at pubic

expense.

Usually you start a case with evidence of a crime, and that gives you something to orient on. This one was

different.

Since it was almost five o’clock, I killed a few minutes, then left the office promptly at quitting time. It wasn’t

a workout day, and I had a date that evening, so I went straight home, showered, re-shaved, dressed semi-dressy,

and picked up Tuuli. We took my car—hers is nicer, but she’s considerate about things like that—and drove to

Mr. Ethel’s on North La Cienega. They specialize in health foods, especially low-fat foods, but the quality is

excellent and the prices affordable. The waiters are a little strange, but they’re at least as courteous as their

customers.

Tuuli doesn’t worry about fat. That’s my problem. She’s the same age as me, thirty, but only five feet tall and

fine-boned. She probably doesn’t weigh more than 85 or 90 pounds, which is 40 percent of what I weigh. About

a third of what I weigh, sometimes. She’s the only Lapp immigrant I know; actually half-Lapp. Her father’s a

Finn, same as mine was. Born in the little mining town of Tuollivaara in Swedish Lapland, she grew up partly

there, and partly on a backwoods farm near Koivujoki, in Finnish Lapland. Came to America when she turned

eighteen. Her story is, she decided to emigrate when someone told her that in California women could be

shamans, and all the shamans were rich.

She’s been psychic, she says, since she was a little kid. From what I’ve seen, it’s easy to believe. Her great-

great-grandfather had been one of the last active Lapp shamans; the state church pretty much shut shamanism

down in Sweden a hundred and fifty years ago. The basic lore got passed down to Tuuli through her mother,

even though they were females. How I got to know her is, she sometimes consults for police agencies and private

investigation firms in greater Los Angeles. The police don’t like to acknowledge it—bad for their image—and

she doesn’t publicize it. She just deposits their credit transfers in her bank account.

But she built her reputation through the rich and famous. There’s a lot of rich people around L.A., and most of

her income is from them. It doesn’t hurt that Tuuli Waanila’s an interesting looking woman, either. Not just tiny.

She has elfin features, sandy hair, and slanty hazel eyes. It especially helps with entertainment people. Looks

mean a lot to them. Also she sounds good. She’s got a light accent that sounds pretty much Finnish. She’s well-

named, too. Her full name is Tuulikki, which in Finnish means graceful. Her dad named her that when she was

born, and it turned out to fit.

Anyway, at Mr. Ethel’s we got a booth in a corner, and while we waited, we drank coffee and talked. “What

do you think of astrology?” I asked.

Her eyes were direct, as usual. “Astrology? I’m not very informed about it. I don’t practice it. But I usually

look up my horoscope in the paper, in the morning.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It’s good to have a source of outside information. Psychics usually see better for others than for

ourselves.”

I didn’t leave it at that. I had to pump her a little. It goes with the profession. “But astrology!” I said. “I mean,

I can imagine people getting information through the omega matrix maybe, but from the positions of the

planets?”

She shrugged. “You read the papers.”

“Not the horoscopes, I don’t.”

“Did you read about the astronomer, Ashkenazi?”

“Do you believe him?”

“Nobody seemed anxious to try proving him wrong.” She paused, looking pointedly at me. “Why don’t you

tell me why you brought this up?”

So I did. “And now Ashkenazi’s my job. Thanks to Mr. Paska. Oops, Pasco.”

She tried to grin and wrinkle her nose at the same time. The nose won out. “Paska is a good name for him.”

“You know Pasco?”

“In my business, he has a reputation. He hates people like me. He’s California’s main agitator for laws to stop

us from practicing our profession.” Her eyes looked thoughtfully at me. “You’ve heard the saying, ‘In the land of

the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ ”

“Yeah?”

“The person who said it was mistaken. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is apt to be considered a liar

and a fraud.” She paused again. This time her eyes seemed to focus somewhere above and beyond my right

shoulder. “You’re likelier to find something criminal about Pasco than about Ashkenazi.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes I’m serious.”

“What should I look for?”

Tuuli shrugged. “I don’t know. If you’re interested in Ashkenazi, look way back. To when he was young.”

She paused. “Ashkenazi’s not his real name, his original name.”

“How do you know?” I assumed she’d read it somewhere. “What is his real name?”

“I don’t know. You should be able to find out. And it’s something you really should look into. And find out

about his twin. His twin brother. I’m pretty sure it’s a brother.”

I didn’t know how to take that—whether she’d read something, or if she was being psychic. “And you say I

can find something criminal about Pasco if I try?”

“I’m not sure. The feeling I get is a little confusing. It may be something he hasn’t done yet.”

“Huh! I’ll keep that in mind,” I told her. “But tomorrow I start checking on Ashkenazi.”

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ThePuppetMasterbyJohnDalmasThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2001byJohnDalmas.“AMostSingularMurder”wasfirstpublishedinAnalog,Vol.CXI,No.5,April1991.Allrightsreserved,includingtherightto...

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