“Listen to me,” Durell gasped. “Are you listening?”
A frantic nod.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you or your family, understand? I’m not a spy. Not a traitor. If there are people waiting in your house for me, it’s they that betrayed our country. Do you believe that?”
The boy’s eyes glittered. He did not believe it. Without releasing his grip, Durell found the shotgun with his free hand and dragged it to his side. “When I let go, don’t yell. I’m desperate. I’ll kill you if you make a sound.“
The boy made a spitting, choking noise.
Durell eased his grip. Tommy drew a great shuddering
breath. His eyes hated Durell. Durell leveled the shotgun at Tommy Henderson.
“Believe me,” he said quietly.
“Lousy traitor,” Tommy whispered.
A screen door whined and slammed. A man stood in the fan of light spraying the front porch; his head was thrust forward in an attitude of listening and searching. One of Quenton’s guards. Durell raked the boy’s ribs lightly with the shotgun in warning. The guard looked this way and that and then went inside, letting the door slam again.
“Who was that?” Durell whispered.
“One of the FBI guys.”
“He’s not. He‘s one of the thugs we’ve been fighting. Did your dad give them the envelope?"
“l don’t know.”
“Ii he did, why are they still here?”
“I wouldn't know."
“How long have you been out of the house?”
“I told you. Since after supper.”
“Did you tell them why you went to the creek?”
Tommy looked sullen and sheepish. “Nope. I wanted to do this myself.” His eyes glittered with tears of frustration. “You spoiled it.”
Durell studied the house. At that moment a high, thin scream of anguish carne from a lower window at the rear. It was instantly cut off, but the boy heard it, too. He made a noise in his throat.
“What was that?”
“I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so,” Durell whispered.
That was your father.”
“But—”
“They‘re questioning him about the envelope.”
“Listen, they can’t—"
Durell slapped the boy lightly. He stood shaking, teeth clenched. Big freckles stood out against his young face. Sweat shone on his cheeks. The scream was not repeated. A shadow moved quickly across a window and was gone. Durell drew a deep breath. The shotgun was smooth and solid and comfortable in his grip.
“I’m going to see,” the boy said suddenly.
“Wait!”
Durell’s words checked him before he quit the shadow of the barn. He stood shaking. “If they’ve hurt Dad or Mon—”
“Make up your mind to it. They’ve been hurt. But it won’t help if you barge in now. I’ll go in. But you wait for my friends.”
“Friends?”
“They’re downstream. They’ll be following me up here soon. Go back to the bridge and meet them. Tell them I’m in the house with the Q men.”
“Q?"
They’ll understand. Go on!”
Durell shoved him toward the field. The boy ran stumbling, paused, looked back, licked his lips. Then suddenly he began to sprint as hard as he could toward the distant line of trees that marked the creek and the ravine they had come from.
Durell turned to the house.
chapter TWENTY
A WHIMPERING came from the dark.
It was the sound a strong man makes when he balances at the uttermost limit of his endurance—-a sound midway between a choked scream and a final, despairing yell of defiance.
Durell listened for it again, but there were only murmurous voices from the other side of the farmhouse. He stood in blackness on the back porch, flat against the wall. He heard a Woman speak, pleading. Her words were followed by a sharp slap, a mutter of rage. She pleaded again. She offered anything, anything. She spoke to someone named John, begging him to tell them.
The whimpering broke through again, ceased, came again.
“Soon,” someone said. “But where is that damned brat?"
“Out joy-riding, I guess.”
“I’d rather have him here."
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t waste more time at this!”
“What you want is somewhere in the house. He'll tell us."
“He’s dying. Where is the boy?”
Then, coaxingly: “Tell us, John. Tell us. You’ll die. He’ll die. Your Wife will die. Tell us, man. Speak up.”
Whimpering came through the darkness.
Someone stood on guard just inside the screened door from the back porch. Durell felt his presence there was a tangible block to his entry. He felt time running away through his fingers. The shotgun felt hot and slippery in his hand.
He scratched lightly at the door.
Someone said, “That you, Amos?”
“Come on out,” Durell said softly.
“What in hell?”
The shadow stepped out, the door whined, slammed. Durell struck. The man slumped, folded over the porch rail. Durell did not look at him. He stepped inside.
He was in the kitchen. Light shone in a hallway ahead, where the sounds of torment crawled in the air. Durell moved silently in that direction. The woman’s voice lifted again, murmuring, pleading. He smelled cigar smoke, heavy and fragrant in the dead air. His stomach crawled. He sweated. He lifted the shotgun to his hip and walked into the room ahead just as the man in there screamed his way onto a high plane of anguish and fell away.
“Drop it,” Durell said from the doorway.
A White-haired man in blue denim overalls stared up from a wooden chair. His eyes looked blind in his weathered face. There were two other men in the room. One was Hereward Quenton. The other was Hackett. In a corner, huddled in a rocker with her knuckles in her mouth, biting on them until blood ran down her hand, was a middle-aged woman wearing a plain cotton house dress.
Quenton made a strangling sound.
“Get your gun, Amos,” Durell said. He did not recognize his own voice. He was shaking. “Go ahead, reach for it.”
“You’d kill me,” Hackett said in a kind of wonderment.
“That’s right.”
“Mister?” the woman asked feebly. “Mister, that’s my boy’s gun."
“Tommy is all right,” Durell said, not looking at her.
Hackett’s mouth crawled and twitched in his saturnine face. He stared in fascination at the shotgun. He stared at Durell. He shuddered.
Durell said to the woman, “Get your husband some water.”
“But they’ll—”
“Go ahead. No, Wait. Are there any other men here?”
“One. One in the kitchen.”
“No others?”
“I don’t think so."
“Go ahead, then.”
She got up, still biting her knuckles, and hurried out. Quenton sank down into the rocking chair. He looked like a shriveled mummy. His flaccid cheeks were gray and pinched. His eyes were like dead glass beads in his face. His mouth was a dark hole in which his tongue flicked from one corner to the other. He looked obscene.
“You made a mistake,” Durell told him, “in coming here with Hackett. I imagine you usually give a wide berth to the jobs Hackett does for you. But you had to be in on this one, didn’t you?”
Quenton made unintelligible sounds. His tongue flicked back and forth on rubbery lips.
“Did Henderson tell you where to find the file?" Durell asked.
“No. No.”
“But he has it, right?”
“Yes. Right. Yes, he has it.”
“You want it badly, eh?”
Something flickered to life in the glass-bead eyes. The twangy drawl quickened. “Real bad, son. Real bad. I could use it. I need it. I’ll pay plenty for it. Look here, son, I don’t know how you got here, but—”
>
“Don't call me son,” Durell said.
“I mean—I’ll pay you good. I’m rich. You don‘t know how rich. Hackett made a mistake. I should’ve hired you. I could’ve bought you into my side, couldn’t I? Sure I could. You told me you’re for sale. That’s right, isn’t it?"
“No,” Durell said.
“No?” Blank eyes stared at him.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
The woman carne back, carrying a tray of medicines, bandages, water, and some washcloths. She hesitated, looked at Durell. “I’m frightened for my husband. He needs a doctor. The things that man did—”
“Which man?”
She pointed at Hackett. “Him,” she whispered.
Hackett looked satanic, his dark curly hair in ringlets over his flat forehead. His eyes flickered, flashed, grew opaque like the eyes of a reptile, filmed over by retreating thought.
“Fix him up, Amos," Durell ordered. “Give him those things, ma’am.”
“I don’t want him to touch John."
“It will be all right. There’s a man on the back porch. Can you get some clothesline and tie him up so he won’t get free again?”
She nodded mutely. Then her face crumpled.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is there anything more?”
“Just—thank you. Thank you for coming here.”
“You can help me, Mrs. Henderson,” Durell said. “Do you know where my envelope is?"
“No. John called somebody in Washington when Tommy found those papers, and then he put them somewhere until these men came.”
“Whom did he call? Was it General McFee?”
She nodded anxiously. “Yes, that was the name.”
“And then these men arrived?”
She nodded again, quickly, her eyes darting from Quenton to Hackett and then to her dazed, bloodied husband. “Yes. John was suspicious as soon as they walked in. He said that McFee couldn’t have sent them. Then he recognized this —this man, here. Called him Senator Quenton. I guess he’s the one you read about in the papers. A very rich man. He hates everybody, but he seems like nothing but a cotton-picker dressed up in Sunday best, to me. They wanted the envelope, but John wouldn’t give it to them, and when he insisted on calling McFee again, they wouldn’t let him. That man—” She pointed an accusing finger at Hackett. “That man began to do things to John that I never thought —I couldn’t believe—” Her mouth shook.
Durell said quickly, “All right, Mrs. Henderson. Go ahead, tie up that man on the porch. Then come back here.”
Durell waited until she left. Hackett had made no move to do anything with the Water the woman had brought for her husband. Durell wondered at the depth of hatred in him as he looked at Quenton and Hackett. He wanted to use the shotgun then and there. He looked at the tortured man. John Henderson was slumped forward with his slack jaw on his bloody chest. He looked dead. Nothing in heaven or on earth could make the man talk now, Durell thought bitterly. He turned to Quenton, aware of time running out, of pressure along his muscles and nerves.
Quenton said quaveringly, “Durell, we can make a deal, eh? You can join us. I’ll give you Hackett’s job. I can clear you with the loyalty board. You want that, eh?”
“I don’t need or want your fixing,” Durell said flatly.
Hackett said thinly, “Like I told you. Senator. He never stole that file. It was given to him, for bait. He’s a plant. His job is to get the goods on you.”
Quenton’s eyes were opaque. “That right? That right, Durell?”
“Right,” Durell said. “I started out to tie a can to someone Who was pilfering classified data from K Section. We had a line on Gibney, and I worked on it through him. You didn’t come into the picture until Hackett dug at me a little, that first night, and made me lose the file. The file was supposed to convince Gibney I was a bona fide traitor.”
“I don’t believe you,” Quenton whispered, shocked.
Hackett laughed. “You goddamn senile fool! Stop dribbling and let Durell lay it on the line. Maybe you can still buy us out.“
“No deals,” Durell said. “No buys.”
“But you can’t prove anything,” Quenton whispered. He sat in his chair like a shriveled spider, and his head rocked back and forth on his pipestem neck. Durell wondered how he could once have conceived of this little monster as dangerous. Even Hackett exhibited only contempt for him. Durell frowned. He felt for an instant as if he had put a finger on one incongruity more important than anything else he had discovered.
“What are you after, Quenton?” he asked. “What’s the purpose of your Q Board? Why all the foaming at the mouth about patriotism and loyalty? Why set up an elaborate blackmail system to get government clerks and brass alike under your dirty thumb?”
“Tell him,” Hackett said. He laughed silently. “Maybe Durell will buy it.”
“There’s too much talk about peace,” Quenton whispered.
“Too much?” Durell asked.
Quenton seemed hypnotized by Durell’s shotgun. His tongue flicked over his lips in the manner of an old man adjusting his dentures. “They’ll trick us,” he Whispered. “It’s all lies, see? All smiles and soft talk, while they get ready to throw the bomb at us. Well, we got to drop the bomb first. Never mind what they say at Geneva, never mind those fool conferences! Hit ’em now, while they think they got us fooled and off guard.”
Durell felt incredulous. “You don’t really believe that’s the best thing to do?"
“It’s the only thing!” Quenton’s voice was stronger, but it assumed the singsong quality of a parrot. “The only way we can be safe is to destroy ’em, once and for all. Wipe ’em off the earth!”
“You’re talking about the deaths of millions of people."
“They don’t count,” Quenton said with contempt. “They ain’t hardly human, them slaves over there.”
“And the Americans who will die? They’ll drop bombs on us, too. The cities will be wiped out, the country laid waste. Suppose we win at that cost? What then?”
Quenton grinned slyly. “Then there Won‘t be so many big Yankee mouths around sayin’ how to run things. There’ll be fewer to share in what’s left. Anyway, it’s survival of the fittest, hey, Amos?” He appealed to Hackett. “I ain‘t so good at explaining. Amos knows the line we’re gonna follow when we get the war started. Amos don’t worry about gettin’ killed himself. We got it all planned. We’ll be safe. Our people in Washington know what to do, too, when the bombs come. We’ll come out when it’s all over and show them snooty labor bastards and city folk what the score is. We‘ll run things right."
“How many people have you got lined up in key government spots?” Durell asked quietly.
“Hundreds. Thousands.”
“All organized?”
“Every department can be reconstructed from scratch, using our own people to head things.”
“You must have an extensive filing system,” Durell suggested.
Quenton’s eyes were suddenly veiled. “Not so extensive. We don’t need a big setup to control it.” Hatred edged his words. It was the voice of a cropper, illiterate, prejudiced, fanatical with resentment. “I waited a long time for this, Durell. Times were when I never figured a way to get even. I took a lot of dirt when I was a boy, and then I found the oil, and the oil got me cattle, and then some folks liked my ideas and put me into politics. I learned me how to live good. But I ain’t never forgot what it’s like to be hungry. I’ll never be hungry again. We got to think right in this country! We got to do right! We can’t ever sit down and talk to them fellers over there. They’ll knife us in the back and take everything away from us, everything I ever got. But I won’t let ’em. Trouble is,” the old man said, his voice dropping, a sly insane wink squeezing one side of his face, “folks don’t know what’s best for ‘em. So we do it this way. Start trouble over there, make ‘em mad, make ’em shoot down a couple of our planes. Get folks stirred up so we can throw the bomb, start the war. When i
t’s over, we run things.”
Durell watched the loose, wet mouth of the old man work back and forth in his tirade. Quenton went on, but Durell no longer listened. This was not the true face of his enemy, this senile old man who had terrorized the nation’s capital, this old man like a bottle filled to the brim with crazy hatreds and crazier plans for dominating those who had kicked him and starved him when he was a boy long ago. There was nothing to fear here. The balance wheel of sanity in the nation could control this old man with his ranting, raving poisons.
The real danger was elsewhere. In another face, still shadowy, still hidden, in another mind that was cool and clever, intelligent enough to hide behind this overt mask of political lunacy.
He looked at Hackett.
The saturnine man was smiling, and as Durell met his dark gaze he caught a flash of comprehension in the conspirator’s eyes.
Hackett said, “You’re getting the picture now, Durell.”
“Is it you?" Durell asked. He was touched by a terrible fear. “You’re the one who’s fed the old man this nonsense?”
“It’s not nonsense. It can happen.”
“And they’re your ideas?”
“No. Not mine.”
“Then there’s someone else. Who is it?” Durell asked.
The fear grew in him. It was like a dark spreading wave shot through with chuckling white. He had made a mistake and overlooked the most obvious answer of all. He did not want Hackett. He knew what Hackett was. The answer was not here in this frothing old man, and not in Hackett, the man who carried out orders with violence as his weapon. The enemy was safely hidden behind a dark curtain. He could not see his face. But he would learn to know it.
He stared at Hackett. His finger tightened on the shotgun trigger and Hackett saw this and something changed in his face.
His smile faded. “Wait a moment.”
“I want to know his name,” Durell said.
“I don’t know it! I swear, I’m not lying, I don’t know it!”
Mrs. Henderson came back suddenly from the porch, where she had been tying up the guard. She paused in the doorway and the back of her hand went up to her mouth. Her whisper was a lost, forlorn sound.
Assignment - Treason Page 16
