Operation Breakthrough

by Dan J. Marlowe

  And right now I wasn’t sure where to go except to put distance between myself and anything the fragile Harrington had set in motion.

  SIX

  I HAD to wait for a traffic signal at Washington Street. The macadam near the curb was bubbling slowly in the muggy heat. I hurried across the intersection as soon as the light turned green, already uncomfortably sticky.

  Exactly what was I supposed to do now with the damn briefcase? I was tempted to leave it in a bus station or train station locker and mail the ticket to Lambert’s, but that type of solution wasn’t going to do Karl Erikson any good.

  The thought of Erikson suggested another tack. If I couldn’t backtrack to his organization via the briefcase, why not forget that route and seek information by the direct approach method? I couldn’t lose any more ground than I had already.

  I flagged down a Veterans’ cab cruising north on Washington Street almost at the intersection of Patrick. “The Navy Department in the District,” I told the cabbie. I sank back and tried to enjoy the breeze whipped up by our passage as our route took us over the Memorial Bridge to a three-story building on Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial.

  I climbed the outside stairs and was met by a young sailor in whites with an SP brassard around his left arm and a .45 caliber service revolver holstered on his hip. “Yes, sir?” he inquired.

  “I’m trying to locate a Navy man,” I said. “At least he was once. You keep personnel records here, don’t you?”

  The sailor turned me over to a chief petty officer. “Officer, petty officer, or enlisted man?” the chief asked when I explained.

  “Officer,” I said. “Commander.”

  “Then you want room 240, the Officer Locator Center. Take this corridor — ” he pointed “ — to room 236 and turn right.”

  I found a door with a placard on it reading 240 — Officer Locator. Inside there was the inevitable counter behind which battleship-gray metal desks were aligned in orderly ranks. A redhaired, freckle-faced WAVE with a scribe insignia on the sleeve of her blue tunic greeted me. “May I help you, sir?” she asked.

  “I hope so. I’ve lost touch with a Commander Karl Erikson, a reserve officer. He’s still in government in some capacity. Can you help me locate him or the office where he works?”

  “We’ll try, sir. Which branch of the Navy is he with?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

  The WAVE pulled a ruled card from a cubbyhole containing cards of different colors and placed it in front of me, then offered me the use of a ballpoint pen anchored to the counter by a chain. “If you’ll fill out this request for locator service card, sir, I’m almost sure we can help.”

  I glanced at the multilined, closely printed card with its various categorizations. I felt the barrier of red tape encircling me again. “I’m afraid I can’t begin to supply the information requested by this card,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Just fill out the spaces you can,” the WAVE told me. “We’ve got all kinds of cross-reference data, so even a few facts would be helpful. His serial number especially.”

  “I don’t know that.” I tried to think of the little I knew about Erikson’s background. I remembered him rigging the short wave radio in the bar at Key West before we went to Cuba. “He was in communications for a while. And he was in Vietnam early.”

  “Put it down,” the WAVE advised. “Put down everything you can remember.”

  Most of the spaces on the card were still blank after I filled in the little I knew. The WAVE took the card from me and punch-dialed a number on the counter-top phone and read off the meager data to someone at the other end of the line. She spelled out the letters of the name Erikson phonetically.

  She looked at me with the phone still in her hand. “They want to know if Commander Erikson is on active duty now?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.” There was almost no way he could have been on active duty, considering some of our escapades together. The Navy wouldn’t have wanted its coattails that near the grease pit.

  The WAVE spoke into the phone again, then hung up. I expected some computer with its limitless memory bank would search its magnetic brain and spit out the information instantly, but automation apparently hadn’t progressed that far in the Navy. Seven or eight minutes elapsed before the counter-top phone went brrrttt in a muted ring.

  The WAVE picked it up and listened. She started to say something, stopped, looked at me, and placed the phone on the counter. “Excuse me just a second, sir,” she said. She walked to a desk in the rear of the room where a jg lieutenant was seated.

  The WAVE spoke to him in a low tone. The lieutenant looked at me, shook his head negatively, then said something to the WAVE. She came back to the counter.

  “Any problem?” I asked casually.

  “Do you have security clearance, sir?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She picked up the phone again. “No clearance,” she said into it. “Yes, I understand. No, of course not. Yes, sir.”

  She replaced the phone in its cradle and faced me again, her previously pleasant-looking freckled face wearing a closed look. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid we can’t be of any help except to confirm there is a Commander Karl Erikson who is a member of the Naval Reserve. Any information concerning Commander Erikson is classified, though, and cannot be given out by this office. That’s all I can tell you.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the jg leiutenant who nodded approvingly. I hated to accept the brushoff, but I had a feeling from the way the lieutenant was watching me that if I appeared too inquisitive, he’d intervene with a few questions of his own.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said to the WAVE and left quickly. When I reached the sidewalk, I turned up Constitution Avenue toward the Ellipse. I found a bench on the Mall and sank down upon it while crowds of tourists streamed by. I looked at the briefcase at my feet. Once again I was tempted to say the hell with it and take off for the mountain valley surrounding Ely, Nevada. The WAVE’s red hair had reminded me of Hazel’s chestnut mane. No one had a gun in my back forcing me to continue this frustrating pilgrimage in Washington’s ungodly heat.

  I counted my money, putting aside enough for one-way fare to Reno. At the rate I’d been spending, my available cash could only last another day or two anyway. But to what point? What could I try that had any better chance of success? If only Jock McLaren had been in that phony export-import office in New York —

  McLaren.

  When Erikson and I had been inside the bank vault, he said something about having dinner with McLaren at his home in Arlington. I hoisted myself from the bench, conscious of how hot, sticky, and dirty I felt. I walked along the Mall until I found a phone booth.

  The Arlington directory listed nine McLarens. I sifted through the change in my pocket. I had only three dimes. I left the booth long enough to stop groups of tourists and beg change for quarters, then stepped back inside the booth and stacked the dimes up on the shelf.

  I planned to ask the same question of all phone answerers: “Is Jock at home?” I ran through six McLaren phone numbers who had never heard of Jock. On the seventh dime a pleasant feminine voice responded that Jock was at work at the Old Treasury Building Annex on Twenty-Second Street.

  “Could you give me his office phone, please? Is this Mrs. McLaren? It’s important.”

  The timbre of the feminine voice changed. “Call the Treasury Department,” she said. “If your business is official, they’ll give you his office phone number.” She didn’t sound as though she believed they would, though, when she hung up on me. I didn’t even know if it was Mrs. McLaren; she had never identified herself. Erikson’s wolf pack hid their trails well.

  I glanced at my watch. Too late to call the Treasury now. The bureaucrats were in their smug Maryland and Virginia homes relaxing over cocktails. I’d call in the morning and see if I could get through to McLaren. Or should I take a chance and land on his
doorstep tonight? I had his address on the directory page of McLarens I’d ripped from the phone book and put into my wallet.

  I discarded the idea. Trying to bull my way past Jock’s wife into his home could do me no good with McLaren. I’d try the Treasury Department in the morning.

  But that meant another overnight stay. A few years before when in Washington I’d stayed at the Carroll Arms Hotel near Union Station. The setting sun had cooled things off somewhat. In a burst of frugality I began walking. At Fourteenth Street I turned left to Pennsylvania Avenue and then began the hike crosstown. There was the usual crowd waiting for the Virginia buses at Twelfth Street, but otherwise, pedestrian traffic on the streets had already thinned out.

  I stopped in a haberdashery and bought a white shirt. The one I was wearing was beginning to feel permanently attached to me. So was my underwear, but I could do something about that at the hotel.

  The walk to the Carroll Arms was relaxing, and I arrived in a better mood than I’d been in all day. I checked in, had dinner, bought a cigar and a newspaper at the newsstand, and went up to the room. I stripped down and put underwear and socks to soak in the wash basin while I took a hot shower. I hand scrubbed my laundry afterward and hung everything over the shower-curtain bar.

  Wrapped in a thin-threaded towel, I sat down in the room’s armchair with cigar and newspaper. The world news on page one was depressing enough to make me turn the page. I scanned pages two and three, and was halfway through an item of local news before I realized it had personal implications. I sat up straighter and began it again.

  The headline said “NO CLUES IN VETERAN’S DEATH.” The story began:

  Police today confirmed they had no suspects in the torture death of Vietnam veteran William Long, 32, whose badly beaten body was found yesterday in Rock Creek Park. Contents of a National Airlines carry-on flight bag were scattered around the body. Detective James Nolan stated that Long’s landlady said he had just returned yesterday morning from a ten day vacation in Nassau. Long, who had been badly wounded in Vietnam, sustaining facial burns requiring extensive plastic surgery, was still an outpatient at the Walter Reed Medical Center. Police today were checking Long’s friends and acquaintances for possible clues.

  I dropped the paper on the floor and studied the ash on the tip of my cigar. A man who had received extensive plastic surgery had returned from Nassau yesterday, the same day I had, and had been tortured and killed. Had the long arm of the syndicate reached out, thinking it was my plastic surgery?

  But why Washington? How had they known to look in Washington? I hadn’t said anything to Candy or Chen Yi about Washington. But then a memory intruded. During the dimly recalled, brandy-dazed hours in the Incense Room, hadn’t I offhandedly said “Washington” when the blond Hermione inquired where I was from?

  Candy Kane had said forthrightly that Hermione was a gangster’s girl. With the hullabaloo in underworld Nassau about the rifling of the syndicate’s safe deposit boxes, she could have mentioned to her boy friend the stranger she’d met. She could have described me. In fullest detail actually, considering the nude circumstances of our romp together.

  Considering circumstances of my escape from syndicate goons at the Oakes Field airstrip, any hint at all would have been seized upon eagerly by syndicate henchmen. And that poor devil Long had had the bad luck to return with his scarred face from Nassau the very day they were looking for me.

  Whoever grabbed him would have to be stupid not to know before too long that they had the wrong man, but Long’s really bad luck was that this crowd left no witnesses. They killed him, and now they were still looking for me. I had no way to hide a face easily remembered by anyone who had been in my company as long as Hermione had been. At Hazel’s ranch I had hair pieces and makeup which could change my appearance considerably but none of it was here.

  It was my good fortune that someone had discovered Long’s body and an alert reporter had covered the story so that it appeared in tonight’s paper. Otherwise I might have walked right into someone’s arms when I was ready to leave town. Airline terminals were surely being checked for scar-faced men with any kind of luggage that might contain what the mobsters wanted to retrieve.

  I looked at the briefcase sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed. That innocent-looking item was double dynamite now. If I couldn’t get any satisfaction at the Treasury Department in the morning, the briefcase and I were going to get out of Washington fast. But not together. Oh no, not together.

  I went to bed, but my sleep was fitful. I was downstairs in the morning before the coffee shop opened. I bought a paper to see if there were any further developments in the Long case, but the morning Post‘s item was almost identical with the story carried in the previous evening’s Star.

  I went back to the room after coffee and Danish to wait impatiently until I figured government offices would be open. I’d already verified from the torn-out phone directory page that McLaren’s first name was Albert. I’d always known him only as Jock. I dialed the Treasury Department number, waited for three rings, and then heard a bright-voiced “Treasury Department; good morning.”

  “Good morning,” I replied. “I’d like to speak to Albert McLaren. He’s a Treasury Department employee, but I don’t know in what section.”

  “Let me check our alphabetical index, sir.” There was a silence broken only by the sound of rustling pages. “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator’s voice said finally. “Mr. McLaren is in a section which can only be reached through a classified extension number. Do you know the extension?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to contact Mr. McLaren outside business hours, sir.”

  There was a click, and the connection was gone. So that was that.

  I didn’t have to think what to do because I’d already planned it. I checked out of the Carroll Arms and walked down the hill to Union Station. In the concourse I found a shop that sold luggage. I bought a fiberboard case of the type college students used to send dirty laundry home to mother before the country became so affluent. Then I placed the briefcase in the laundry box. I used crumped pages from my Washington Post to serve as padding. When I finally buckled the cloth straps around the laundry box, the briefcase was secure.

  Washington’s main post office is just down the street from Union Station. I carried the laundry box there and filled out a label that fit into the metal frame riveted to the cover. I addressed the label to Hazel Andrews, Rancho Dolorosa, Ely, Nevada. I made out the return address the same way. Then I stepped up to the air parcel post window and paid $7.35 to mail the case.

  Back in Union Station I purchased a Senator Claghorn, Virginia plantation hat and pulled it down firmly around my ears. Hair piece wearers are told not to wear hats, but this was an exception. I took a cab to National Airport, which seemed well on its way to becoming my semipermanent residence in this merry-go-round I found myself on.

  I couldn’t get to Salt Lake City in time to catch the once-a-day United flight to Ely which would have put me on the ground there shortly after noon.

  I settled for the 10:30 A.M. United flight to Reno via Chicago. Then I called Hazel when I had myself ticketed. “I’m getting into Reno on the 3:35 P.M. flight from Washington, Big Stuff,” I said to her. “How about picking me up?”

  “Sure thing, Horseman,” she responded cheerfully. “How did it go?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  “That doesn’t sound as though it went very well.” Her voice was concerned.

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” I repeated and hung up.

  Nobody bothered me or — so far as I could tell — even noticed me when I boarded the Reno plane.

  I slept better on the westbound flight than I had the previous night. It’s a 320 mile drive between Ely and Reno, and even the way Hazel drives, it takes seven hours. I had time for a meal before she showed up at the airport. She had on her usual ranch costume of sleeveless buckskin vest,
levis, and silver-conched cowboy boots. “Hi, lover,” she said and kissed me.

  I waited till we were in the parking lot in her Corvette before I told her what had happened. She listened intently, her capable hands gripping the motionless steering wheel. “You mean Erikson is stuck there?” she interrupted me at one point. “Won’t his agency brass hats get him out?”

  “I believe they will in time,” I answered. “But right now I’m the only one who knows where he is, and I can’t break through to let anyone know.”

  “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard.” Hazel started up the Corvette and eased out of the parking lot into traffic.

  I told her about the syndicate involvement and the possibility they knew where to look for Erikson. And about the laundry case I’d mailed to the ranch. The only thing I didn’t tell her was the tragedy of the scar-faced veteran in Washington. I didn’t want her upset about the syndicate’s fast reaction time.

  Hazel rocketed the Corvette along Highway 80 east and turned off on Alternate 95 to Fallon. She hadn’t eaten, so we stopped for a sandwich at the casino in the center of town. Back on the road she really used that automobile. Every time I glanced across the front seat at her profile her flaming red hair was standing straight out in the breeze of our ninety-mph passage along Route 50.

  At one point she passed a truck on a hill. I unclenched my hands forcibly after we got back into our own lane at a point that seemed like ten yards from the top. “Do you think Karl Erikson is in physical danger?” Hazel asked, breaking a silence that had lasted for fifty miles and seemingly not at all concerned that a lot of hardworking horsepower could have been coming from the other direction and challenged us severely.

  I found I’d been avoiding her question in my own mind.

  Hazel removed her eyes from the road to look at me. “Watch what the hell you’re doing, woman!” I growled, but I was aware that my irritation was more with myself than with her.

  Another mile of highway buzzed past us in a blur of telephone poles that looked like a picket fence. “Not really,” I finally said in answer to her question. “Not in Nassau with British-style justice involved …”