Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.
ORDEAL BY TERROR
BOOKS BY LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.
SCIENCE FICTION
The Angry Espers
The Fury Out Of Time
The Light That Never Was
Monument
Alien Main (with T. L. Sherred)
JAN DARZEK NOVELS
All the Colors of Darkness
Watchers of the Dark
This Darkening Universe
Silence Is Deadly
The Whirligig of Time
CULTURAL SURVEY NOVELS
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets
The World Menders
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Rule of the Door
The Metallic Muse
A Galaxy of Strangers
Nebula Award Stories Seven (Editor)
MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE
Pletcher and Lambert Novels
Interface for Murder
A Hazard of Losers
Where Dead Soldiers Walk
Murder Jambalaya
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Quallsford Inheritance
The Glendower Conspiracy
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2013 by Kenneth Lloyd Biggle and Donna Biggle Emerson.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
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Edited by Kenneth Lloyd Biggle and Donna Biggle Emerson
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All of the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The following business firms and places are wholly fictitious: In Ann Arbor, Feinstwaller Manor; Chateau Arb; the Arbor Vista Shopping Mall and its business firms; Solstead and Company; A&B Realty; the Vista Motel; the Boheme, and Z-R Publications; In Detroit, Rolls Realty; Shaller Realty; Boyd’s Printing; Lonnie’s U Bar; and the law firm of Laylor, Graffington, Bartley, and Kordro.
DEDICATION
In Memory of Dr. James V. McConnell
The generous interest, assistance, and encouragement
he gave to projects such as this one are sorely missed.
CHAPTER 1
The grandfather clock in the hallway struck eleven. It was a Friday morning in early July, and for Adelle Gernyan the moment was one she had commemorated. Three weeks earlier, an interview with an odd little woman whose name Adelle still did not know had resulted in her being hired as a Researcher/Word Processor by an even odder business establishment called Z-R Publications. The building she worked in and the room that served as her office were the quintessence of oddness. Oddest of all was her salary, which was fantastic.
Only the work was mundane. Z-R Publications used “Researcher/Word Processor” as a euphemism for typist. For eight hours each day, minus whatever breaks she decided to give herself, Adelle sat in front of a computer copying handwritten or typewritten material supplied by the firm’s other two employees and arranging it in attractive page formats for eventual publication.
She was doing excellent work, but any competent typist could have done as well. That was what made her salary so unbelievable. As a bonus, she had this incredible office and an entire unoccupied wing of the building to shield her from interruptions. Such splendid isolation would have been a distraction to some employees, but Adelle had always been able to work diligently without supervision.
On this particular morning, however, her concentration faltered. She sat frowning at her computer screen, fingers poised rigidly above its keyboard, while the clatter of a tractor lawn mower swelled to a sputtering roar. It was her fourteenth day of typing statistics—Z-R Publications had given its staff the 4th of July off—and she could copy scrawled numerals almost without thinking. She was oblivious to most disturbances, but the tractor defeated her. Its explosive pulsations sounded like an evil spirit frothing in frustration before gates where spirits of whatever intent were forbidden to enter.
As the racket continued, with the tractor roaming among the hedges of a charming formal garden and circling its large, sculpture-cluttered, unused fountain, Adelle left her desk and went to one of the room’s windows to look out. They were oriel windows, with stained glass in delicately leaded patterns that converted the outside world into a jigsaw mosaic of contrasting tints. The tractor, snorting its way from one color segment to another, looked out of place in all of them.
Its driver was known to Adelle only as Goon 2. Like the other Z-R Publications maintenance men, he wore a dark green shirt and trousers and was as incongruously neat and clean in appearance when shoveling dirt as when vacuuming plush carpets or fastidiously wielding a feather duster. Despite striking individual differences, all of the goons seemed cut from the same mold—large and hulking—and all of them were strangely inarticulate and anonymous. They neither introduced themselves nor were given in introductions. They did not speak even when spoken to. After enduring a week of that peculiar anonymity, Adelle dubbed them goons and assigned numbers to them.
Goon 2 was the eldest of the five. He had a circle of baldness on his head surrounded by a fringe of surprisingly black hair, and he was the only goon who wore glasses. The formidable disapproval with which he gazed at her when he thought she wasn’t looking had disturbed her until she noticed that he disapproved of everyone and everything else just as formidably. He was one of those unfortunate individuals who moved through life with the conviction that whoever was responsible for the universe hadn’t quite got it right.
Adelle was about to turn away when she saw two people standing in an opposite doorway. The starkly beautiful Romanesque contours of that wing made it her favorite, but she had never seen anyone using its entrance. Now the maintenance worker she called Goon 1 stood at the bottom of the steps, and above him, holding the door open, stood the little woman who was his boss—and Adelle’s.
Goon 1 was Adelle’s personal goon. He could be surprised watching her surreptitiously whenever she went anywhere—home, or to lunch, or to the rest room down the hall. Her two coworkers also had personal goons spying on them, which seemed ridiculous. If the firm wanted to know whether they were working, Adelle thought, all it had to do was study their productivity.
Goon 1 had a large, beefy face, a crew cut, and the sternest blue eyes she had ever encountered. She called him number one because he looked like a top sergeant and giver of orders. He was taking orders now and not liking them. He stood rigid with resentment, fists clenched, arms partially bent and held out from his sides.
The plump little woman who hovered above him, gesticulating impatiently, was known to Adelle only as Madam. She bustled about absent-mindedly and seemed like the most improbable person imaginable to be entrusted with running a business. Perhaps she didn’t run it. The indecipherable signature on the firm’s checks bore no resemblance to her handwriting, and the firm’s conspicuous prosperity and grandiose planning suggested clouds of invisible corporate officers and incognito directors.
But this odd creature was the boss, unmistakably. She hired and fired, she passed out work assignments, and she gave orders. Especially to the goons she gave orders.
Adelle couldn’t make out expressions at such a distance, but she had no difficulty imagining them. Goon 1’s face would be livid. As for Madam, her streaky gray hair always hung in a straight droop, and her wrinkled face was testimony to a lifetime of virginity at least from cosmetics. She would be peering down at Goon 1 through