Shandor read off his list, giving dates. The silence continued for
several minutes as he waited impatiently. He was about to hang up and
leave when the voice spoke up again. "I'm sorry, sir. Most of that
material has no by-line. Except for one or two items it's all
staff-written."
"By whom?"
"I'm sorry, no source is available. Perhaps the PIB offices could help
you--"
"All right, ring them for me, please." He waited another five minutes,
saw the PIB cross-index clerk appear on the video screen. "Hello, Mr.
Shandor. Can I help you?"
"I'm trying to trace down the names of the Associated Press and PIB
writers who covered stories on David Ingersoll over a period from June
1961 to the present date--"
The girl disappeared for several moments. When she reappeared, her face
was puzzled. "Why, Mr. Shandor, you've been doing the work on Ingersoll
from August, 1978 to Sept. 1982. We haven't closed the files on this
last month yet--"
He scowled in annoyance. "Yes, yes, I know that. I want the writers
before I came."
The clerk paused. "Until you started your work there was no definite
assignment. The information just isn't here. But the man you replaced in
PIB was named Frank Mariel."
Shandor turned the name over in his mind, decided that it was familiar,
but that he couldn't quite place it. "What's this man doing now?"
The girl shrugged. "I don't know, just now, and have no sources. But
according to our files he left Public Information Board to go to work in
some capacity for Dartmouth Bearing Corporation."
Shandor flipped the switch, and settled back in the reading chair. Once
again he fingered through his notes, frowning, a doubt gnawing through
his mind into certainty. He took up a dozen of the stories, analyzed
them carefully, word for word, sentence by sentence. Then he sat back,
his body tired, eyes closed in concentration, an incredible idea
twisting and writhing and solidifying in his mind.
It takes one to catch one. That was his job--telling lies. Writing
stories that weren't true, and making them believable. Making people
think one thing when the truth was something else. It wasn't so strange
that he could detect exactly the same sort of thing when he ran into it.
He thought it through again and again, and every time he came up with
the same answer. There was no doubt.
Reading the newspaper files had accomplished only one thing. He had
spent the afternoon reading a voluminous, neat, smoothly written,
extremely convincing batch of bold-faced lies. Lies about David
Ingersoll. Somewhere, at the bottom of those lies was a shred or two of
truth, a shred hard to analyze, impossible to segregate from the garbage
surrounding it. But somebody had written the lies. That meant that
somebody knew the truths behind them.
Suddenly he galvanized into action. The video blinked protestingly at
his urgent summons, and the Washington visiphone operator answered.
"Somewhere in those listings of yours," Shandor said, "you've got a man
named Frank Mariel. I want his number."
* * * * *
He reached the downtown restaurant half an hour early, and ducked into a
nearby visiphone station to ring Hart. The PIB director's chubby face
materialized on the screen after a moment's confusion, and Shandor said:
"John--what are your plans for releasing the Ingersoll story? The
morning papers left him with a slight head cold, if I remember right--"
Try as he would, he couldn't conceal the edge of sarcasm in his voice.