She met Shayne’s look squarely. “You have to understand the situation, and that seems to be quite a large part of it. It wasn’t that much of a miracle, really. It happened the way such things are supposed to happen.”
“Don’t explain,” Little said gently. “I’m grateful to you, my dear. It was enjoyable, as well as surprising. That doesn’t mean I intend to drape myself about your neck like an albatross the rest of my life. It was the sort of incident that takes place on ocean liners, and it demonstrated to me that I might look forward to other such incidents with other people, if this luck stays with me. You have a strong grip on life. That is what turned me around, not the love making.”
He looked back at Shayne. “I have felt myself caught in a spiral, you see, and this has broken the spiral. Why do I need to go on living with my wife? I don’t. I have no real obligation to assume the debts of my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. I can get out of weapons work. It has all turned out to be easy. Anne has wrenched me through a forty-five-degree arc, and now I see myself from a different angle. Not that my problems are over, they’re beginning.”
“Let’s get back to Dessau. When did that start?”
“In the spring. At first we only saw him over the weekends—he came down from London. He described himself as a commission man who could procure anything—pornographic film, drugs, girls, boys. Not a bad sort to have a drink with. There are always four or five chaps from the Facility at the Three Heads, and Pierre cultivated us, rather. We tabbed him as one of those romantics who have seen too many James Bond films, who imagine if they can get to be pals with a genuine real-life atomic physicist he will let slip some secret tidbit they can sell to the Russians. It’s all a great joke. He plied us with drinks, hinting at the availability of other delights. He actually did introduce one of the chaps to a girl who didn’t turn out to be so bad. It wasn’t secret intelligence he was after, it developed. It was the actual bomb.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I put myself in his hands.”
Little looked into the bowl of his dead pipe. The lines around his mouth had deepened.
“I had undergone a—humiliation, of the personal type we have been discussing, and this one seemed final to me. I heard my sixteen-year-old son talking about me to a friend, in unflattering terms. Unflattering, my eye—abusive. I was passed over by the Academy of Sciences. I decided there was no use in continuing. It was a Saturday night. I stupefied myself with gin and hooked a rubber hose to the exhaust of my Humber. Pierre had followed me home and observed these preparations.”
He stood up and started to move about the cabin. His tone became more agitated.
“He waited till I got into the car and turned on the engine, and then tore open the door and dragged me out. We had more to drink, a great deal more, and at last he broached his fantastic proposal. He had no objection to suicide per se. Every man, he believed, should be allowed to make that decision for himself. But to do it in such a silly way, with carbon monoxide. Why not arrange the thing so as to make a point? He wanted to know exactly what was bothering me, and I told him—money, the scorn of my children, sex—the lot. He could promise me nothing about sex, but he promised money; he promised to show me a way to redeem myself politically and morally in my children’s eyes, and how to pull a thundering swindle on the United States Treasury. Because I found life meaningless, did death have to be meaningless? He was offering a way to break into history.”
“Was this off the top of his head,” Shayne said, “or did he seem to know what he was talking about?”
Little was puzzled. “I think he had carried that cutting around a long time.”
“He doesn’t have a chance in hell of collecting the reward. Does he realize that? It could make a difference.”
Little stared at him. He took off his glasses and began polishing them on his shirttail. Without the glasses, he looked younger and more helpless.
“You don’t believe in the reward.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Congress may have passed Such an act and maybe it’s still on the books. That doesn’t mean payment is automatic. No government gives away half a million dollars to a noncitizen, with no political muscle, unless it has to. He’ll have to sue. All kinds of loopholes are going to turn up. If there’s any hint of collusion—it wouldn’t have to be proved; all I’d have to do is go in and testify to what you’ve just told me—he wouldn’t collect a cent. With lots of luck, he might end up in a couple of years with twenty-five thousand. Fifty would be tops.”
“Shayne, you understand this thing has been an obsession with him. He researched it thoroughly. He’s positive the reward has never been withdrawn—it’s still the law of the land. I was under the impression that paying informers in smuggling cases is common practice.”
“A judge can award an informer as much as fifty percent of any smuggling fine,” Shayne explained. “He can. That doesn’t mean he has to. If they hope to use the same informer again, they’ll want to keep him happy. But this is a one-shot. It’s always hard to collect any one-shot reward. That’s a well-known fact of life, and what I want to find out is whether you think he knows it.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t! Can you seriously maintain that the Congress of the United States can post a half-million-dollar reward, and only pay twenty-five thousand?”
“Hardly seems fair, does it?”
Little fitted his face into his glasses. “Pierre will be very, very disillusioned with American democracy if that proves to be true. In fantasy, I’m quite sure he has invested the entire half million in consoles and conservative bank stocks, and is financially secure for life. As for collusion—of course he didn’t anticipate that I would give the scheme away to a stranger, a private detective, whose testimony would be accepted by a jury. He was planning the story along the following lines: he overheard me making anti-American statements, which were more than a little odd, coming from a man in my position. I said something about what a political success it would be to blow up Capitol Hill. He inquired about my off-job activities. I had purchased an expensive second-hand motorcar. It was in excellent running condition, but nonetheless, he noticed, I was doing some mysterious tinkering on it in my garage workshop very late at night. When I accepted an American job and decided to go by boat, taking my tinkered-with Bentley, everything coalesced. He flew to Miami and alerted the authorities. ‘Look closely at this Left-wing scientist. Examine his car.’ I thought myself it was an excellent plan.”
“How powerful a bomb is it?”
“You dignify it by calling it a bomb. Plutonium in the usual form of tiny metallic balls, plus a crude triggering device with a three-switch arming mechanism. You couldn’t explode it by dropping it from an airplane, but use an ordinary fulminating cap and you might get a rather impressive bang. Ridiculously low yield. Stated in commonly understood terms, it would have a force of twenty kilotons, twenty thousand tons of TNT. And of course very dirty—radioactivity would be a continuing problem. You understand that the object is not actually to blow up anything, but to frighten people.”
“How did you get it out of the laboratory?”
Little shrugged. “I happened to be in charge of security. At one time we were very meticulous, but as the decades have passed with nothing out of the way happening, we have become lax. The inventory figures on fissionable material can be played with. There is a battery of counters at each exit. One of my routine duties has been to check daily to make sure each counter is operational. You know the principle of the Geiger counter—a simple electrode in a cylinder filled with gas, which will set up a current in an electric field when ionized by radiation. An electrical source is necessary. I simply interrupted the circuits at one of the lesser-used exits. For years and years those counters have never clicked except when being tested. They didn’t click when I walked past with the vials of plutonium in my raincoat pockets.”
“Would a counter get a reading from the Bentley’s gas tank?” Shayne
asked.
“No, no. The material’s enclosed in a lead sheath.”
Anne burst out, “All right, that’s the situation. Now what are we going to do about it?”
“Just a minute,” Shayne said. “Who paid the insurance premium?”
“I did. It wasn’t that much. We thought forty thousand pounds would be a reasonable figure. More might seem suspicious. The policy contains a clause obliging the assurance company to pay double for accidental death. Will being shot by Customs agents qualify as an accident? The lawyers will have to argue about that.”
“Quentin, it’s not going to happen!” Anne said.
Little repeated his one-shoulder shrug.
Shayne said, “Dessau has turned in his tip by this time. The Customs people will give your car a close inspection and find the bomb. Then what?”
“I will be a bit nervy, understandably. When they start unscrewing the cap of the petrol tank I will snatch out my gun and attempt to bolt. And they will shoot me. Dessau will be standing by, to administer the coup de grace, if need be. The punishment for the crime I will ostensibly be committing is, I suppose, death. I intend to avoid a long-drawn-out-show trial at any cost. A quick burst of gunfire—a much less banal way to die than running a hose from an exhaust pipe.”
“Quent—” Anne said helplessly.
“As I’ve been telling you, you worked your miracle too late. Granted that Mike Shayne is as resourceful as you say. What can he do?” He spread his hands. “There is no hope of emerging from this unscathed, and as soon as Shayne understands the dimensions of the problem, I know he will agree.”
“I don’t understand it yet,” Shayne said. “What else do you know about Dessau?”
“Very little. A difficult man to take seriously. More of a talker than anything, it would seem, but let me drop in an anecdote. At one point I wavered. It all struck me as much too elaborate for such a simple end. Pierre didn’t try to debate, he simply punched up my daughter Cecily. She lost a front tooth and spent some days in hospital. It was effective. I agreed to continue.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He’s tall, some inches taller than you. Six feet four, I’d say. Pale skin—definitely a nighttime look. Modish clothes.”
“He’s definitely not aboard?”
“He’s flying. Why?”
“Anne’s been seen with you. When people have just had sex, there are sometimes little things that give it away. She pulled me out of a poker game tonight and kicked me on the ankle. All very much in public. OK. Two guys tried to club me on my way to bed, obviously to keep me from hearing this.”
Little had listened in amazement. “There can’t be a connection. Pierre kept repeating that the really beautiful thing about his plan was that we two could do it alone, with no fellow conspirators to weaken and give it away. Only the two of us.”
Anne said urgently, “There’s only one thing to do. Take the tank out and throw it in the ocean.”
“Leaving aside the question of how we do that,” Little said, “without a forklift, without access to a machine shop, what happens then? The Customs inspector will look for a place where seventeen pounds of sheathed plutonium can be hidden. Aha, no petrol tank. ‘How do you explain this, Dr. Little?’ Inquiries will be made at Camberwell, the theft will be discovered. I have recently become a member of some notoriously Left-wing committees. Obviously I stole the plutonium to give to my country’s enemies. I see myself coming out of prison twenty years later. No.”
Shayne’s mind was running. The story was fantastic, and at the same time, in a real-life context, too plausible. Pierre Dessau had needed precisely the collaborator Little had turned out to be—an atomic physicist who could steal the raw materials for an atom bomb, who had a chessplayer’s temperament, a wife he hated, a financial problem, a pair of heckling children, a disposition toward suicide. It was far too pat. All con games fall into a few basic categories, but most of them can be modified to fit the mark’s requirements. The first thing to establish was where to place Little—was he the swindler, or the swindler’s victim?
“Is there any chance the gas tank you put in the car isn’t the one that’s in it now?”
“I delivered the car to the dock myself.”
Shayne flicked his dead cigarette into a wastebasket. “What would be your idea of a happy ending?”
“I find happy endings depressing,” Little said. “And under these circumstances, is a happy ending possible? Of course if you could persuade the captain to turn around and go back to England, so I can return the plutonium before anyone realizes it’s missing—”
“Could you do that?” Anne said quickly.
“I still have my security clearance. A way could be found. But what will Dessau be doing in the meantime? How about the Customs inspection?”
“Look,” Anne said excitedly, “let’s say Mike can take care of that. Don’t ask me how—for the sake of argument. You could report for work, complain about the office they give you and break your contract. Can you get the old job back?”
“Easily. There’s a shortage of Englishmen with my qualifications.”
“Mike, I know you’d have to be some kind of magician to work it, but can you think of any possible way—”
“Not if the story he’s told me is true. On the other hand, I think there’s a chance that not all of it is.” He studied Little. “How much cash do you have with you?”
“For a retainer, you mean? In your terms of reference, not enough, probably. I could give you a note.”
“I don’t do this kind of favor for people I don’t know unless I’m paid in advance. That insurance policy seems to be your only negotiable asset. Cut me in for a third and I’ll see what I can do.”
Little was startled. “Which would mean,” he said slowly, “that you collect only if I die.”
“On the facts you’ve given me, you’re a long shot to get through twenty-four hours. If you live, pay me five thousand dollars over the next two years.”
“Very well, I accept,” Little said after a moment.
The necessary paperwork took several more minutes. He entered Shayne’s name on the back of the policy, in the space provided for beneficiary changes, and Anne witnessed his signature. Then, on ship’s stationery, he prepared two copies of a letter to the London company, and gave one of these to Shayne. The preparations had the surprising effect of making him more cheerful.
“We have ourselves a bet. If you win, Shayne, never mind shipping my body back. I want to be burned. I want my ashes to be disposed of through the Miami municipal sewerage system.”
“You’re such ghouls!” Anne exclaimed.
“No, there’s something to be said for professionalism,” Little declared. “If Shayne can do anything about it, he will, and I intend to put the whole thing out of my mind. Will you stay with me, dear? I would like to receive what under the circumstances may be my last rites.”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly. “Mike, can I talk to you alone for a minute? I don’t mean anything elaborate, but I hope you don’t think I can put it out of my mind. I have to know what you think is possible.”
“Will you promise to come back?” Little said quietly as she stood up.
She came over and kissed him. “In one minute or less.” She followed Shayne to the corridor. To his surprise, he saw that she had started crying.
He let her come in against him, although there were other things he should have been doing. Her words were muffled against his chest.
“I didn’t know I was getting involved in anything like this. I was just—oh, looking for entertainment. There was something patronizing about it.” She pushed away and looked up at him defiantly. “The cheerleader being nice to the school creep, to score an easy win and show everybody what an open mind she has.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“I’m explaining to myself. I’ve never—well, taken sex as seriously as some people do. And we got to the point wh
ere I would have cut him to ribbons if I’d turned him off. I thought I had to go on.”
She hammered her fist against his shoulder. “It was curiosity! I wanted to find out what was bothering him. Now I know. I have to go back in and stay with him, Mike. He claims that last night made a difference, but it didn’t, really. He’s still intending to get himself shot.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I can tell. Sex isn’t medicine. He was still the same person after it was over. Big deal, you know? But he thinks he has to convince me he’s a changed man. It’s his way of being polite. He’s willing to talk about squeezing through and going back to the old job, but he knows it can’t happen. And of course he’s scared.”
“You believe him, then.”
“I always believe what people tell me after an orgasm. It’s one of my rules. My mind’s going around in circles, around and around and around. He’s spent the last six months establishing himself as a red-hot radical, and he’s such a total political innocent, Mike! He’s been down inside that atom all these years. Whatever happens, there’s trouble ahead, isn’t there?”
CHAPTER 5
Shayne returned to his cabin.
He seldom carried a gun, but when Sally Marquand had called from Bermuda to tell him that she found herself in what was turning into a rather bad jam, he had taken a .38 with him. He hadn’t used it. Coming aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he had tossed it into a drawer. Now he pulled out his shirt so it hung loosely over his slacks, and stuck the gun in the belt.
He hesitated, about to leave the cabin, and took out the gun again to check the clip. It was empty.
He weighed the gun thoughtfully, and returned it to the drawer. He had left his passport beside it. Taking it out, he flipped it open. The passport photograph, in which Shayne looked like one of the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals, had been sliced out.
He swore briefly. It had been adroitly done. Only someone with Shayne’s highly developed sense of smell would have discovered the mutilation before disembarking. Presenting his passport to the Immigration officials, he would have been delayed until he could prove his identity.
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