The Doomsday Bag

by Michael Avallone

  The cab went about two or three miles down a changeless lane of trees, foliage, and underbrush. There wasn't much visibility to either side. The ball of the sun kept pace with us and the glare only made picking up landmarks worse. I saw the blasted stump of a big tree once. And then a torn-down picket fence where the white paint had grayed with age. Then suddenly, the cab slowed, swung around in nearly a U-turn past a copse of what looked like poison ivy and voilà, there stood a barn.

  I mean a barn.

  It was so dilapidated it had no doors; the aperture on the second level where the hay is pitched up and down was splintered and jagged. The reddish hues had long given up the ghost. The place was maybe twenty years past its last paint job. There was an ancient wagon wheel so rutted and worn that it looked as spindly as a spider's web. This was propped on the ground to the left of the doorless entrance. The brown earth and dead grass encroaching on all four sides of the place was ugly, sodden, and lifeless. It was as if all life had stopped here long ago; there was no silo, no farm, so sign of a well. The place reminded me of something out of The Grapes of Wrath movie. To make the setting perfect, a gnarled, grotesque hanging tree stood about fifteen feet to the left of the barn. But all around the small enclosed area, the woods and the bushes had lustily kept on growing, year in and year out, so that where I stood with the pump-gunner and the cab driver behind me, urging me toward the barn, was about as secluded and invisible a spot as you could find. Even from the air, viewed by a helicoptor, the area would have seemed like no more than a burned-out patch of real estate. I doubted if the roof of the barn could have been distinguished from an altitude of five hundred feet. What a garden spot. I doubted if even the Loads would have tolerated a dump like this one.

  "Sorry," I said over my shoulder to the two men. "This isn't what the wife and I had in mind. We were looking for a place with a little more of the Colonial in it. This is too—"

  The pump gun nicked a disk on my spinal column. The cab driver was a different breed. He laughed out loud. His voice was muffled in the thick walls of trees and bushes surrounding us and the barn.

  "Inside," the pump-gunner said.

  I walked ahead, skirting a broken soda bottle jutting from the worn, tired earth. There were bits and scraps of newspaper and the handle of an umbrella lying between me and the entrance to the barn. They looked like they'd been here since the Civil War. I don't think I would have been surprised if a Confederate skirmisher had suddenly come jumping out of the brush with a rebel yell. The white world of Washington with its monumental grandeurs was as remote as a lost continent. Mustiness, dead air, and lifeless aura clung to the old barn like a shroud. Clocks had stood still here. It was a very uncomfortable feeling.

  The interior of the barn was a solid square of gloom. The sunlight might have come in through the broken upstairs hayloft entrance, but something was shutting out the daylight. Probably the hayloft itself. I couldn't be sure. I paused on the threshold, measuring the gloom. The pump-gunner nudged me again. With the weapon.

  "All the way in," he growled. The cab driver seemed to titter.

  "Afraid of the dark, big man?" he jeered.

  Sweat had formed on my forehead. It was a hot day, of course, and the enclosure was muggy, but the visions I had had in the cab were back in business. Who had set me up for this? Was a smiling sensation of a woman, all curves and softness in a man's bed, the one who had told them where to find me? Could be. Felicia Carr had known I was going to see the Congressman this morning. And what had happened to all those nice, sweet Secret Service and FBI bastards who should have been dogging my steps all over town? Why hadn't they shadowed me, presidential pass or no? I pushed the mad, paradoxical, contradictory ideas out of my head. With my hands raised high, the pump-gunner behind me, and the cab driver, probably armed with a handgun at least, there was really no place to hide. All I could do was run and take it in the back.

  The interior of the barn was a dark cavern. An oven. Waves of heat closed over me. The gloom dissipated as my eyes adjusted to the change in lighting. I could make out things now. The floor was more sand and dust rather than the hard sod it should have been. The place was frame-like, skeletal, empty. No wagon wheels, no pitchforks, no hanging harness straps, no tools, no blacksmith's anvil. Not even a discarded wheelbarrow. Just the four wooden walls, with slats missing at random points, and the mysterious darkened upper loft where you couldn't see a thing yet. There were also no signs of recent habitation. No soda bottles, empty beer cans, or crumpled cigarette packs, let alone any stubs on the ground beneath us. It began to look awesomely like a first visit and my hopes really fell.

  A globule of perspiration trickled down my neck and worked icily down my spine. Nobody was talking. The tension was growing. I decided to break it.

  "Mind if I turn around? If you're going to give it to me, I'd rather be looking in your faces so I can spit before I finally bow out."

  "Sure," the pump-gunner said. "Turn around. I'd like to see the expression on your face anyway."

  I turned slowly, easily, taking all the time in the world. Since I was certain there wasn't much left, I took it almost in slow motion. It was just as well. The surprise I was about to get would have made me do something foolish. If I had seen it too fast.

  Another person had come into the barn. Walking on cat feet behind the pump-gunner and the cab driver and I couldn't have heard him in a million light-years.

  There were three of them now, fanned out in a wide arc, about ten feet behind me, so I had all the room in the world to make a bum move to get myself killed.

  The cab driver was on the extreme left, almost lounging back against one of the four wooden pillars that supported the second floor of the barn. He was wearing a leather jacket, dirty corduroy slacks, and a smile to match. He looked about twenty-five and the grin on his face was insolent, waiting, and expectant. His hands were thrust into the leather jacket's pockets.

  The pump-gunner was way over on the right. The fedora was pushed back now, either in deference to the heat or just for the hell of it. The face was cold, darkly tanned, and now I could see a hooked nose and badly discolored teeth. The man was wearing a light blue suit in the latest style, but the most outstanding thing about him was still the double-barreled destroyer in his idle hands. The pump gun was solidly zeroed in on my middle. He was right. At that distance he could have cut me in half before I went three feet.

  The man in the middle—surprise, surprise—was the kicker.

  His smile was just as full-hearted and generous as ever. Not even the situation and the setting could disturb the sheer Pearl Harbor expression of tanned, outdoorsy face. He was still medium-sized, athletic-looking, and had fun-in-the-sun written all over him. But to find him here, in a setup like this, was one of the all-time reversals on the record. I had a bad second catching my breath, collecting my thoughts, and generally persuading myself that the world was indeed mad and maybe we all better give up and lie down and die.

  His sober gray suit, blue foulard tie, and nice porkpie fedora with a gaily colored band and Tyrolean feather in it was the final touch of whimsy I couldn't take.

  "Judas Iscariot," I said, "as I live and breathe."

  "You should have stayed in New York," Rowles murmured in a faint, almost angry voice. "This way you give us no choice."

  I checked the flood of anger washing over me, wanting to fill me up and spill out.

  "What's FBI really stand for? Fink Bastards, Incorporated?"

  The pump-gunner surprised me. He chuckled. A low, mirthless laugh.

  "Game guy. I'll give him that. But you call it, Rowles. Say when."

  Rowles made a brushing gesture with his left hand. His right hand was digging into his left inside pocket.

  "No," he said. "We'll have to wait. They have an idea how to use this character. Something about helping set the Congressman up for a big scandal that'll rock the boat all the way."

  The pump-gunner frowned, but he didn't take his eyes off me. For a mom
ent his face looked bewildered.

  "Say—what the hell is this? My people said to blast. You sure you got it right?"

  "Yes," Rowles snapped, winking at me. "As right as I'll ever get it."

  It was at that precise moment that he drew a long-nosed .38 pistol out of his inside pocket and quickly turned and shot the pump-gunner in the side of the head. I saw it coming and I did the only thing I could. I raced toward the cab driver. A lot of things happened at once. The pump-gunner's hands tightened reflexively on the trigger of his weapon, and the big empty barn thundered with violence. A spraying canister of lead made the air foam and fleck with explosion, and the other end of the barn disintegrated in a shower of flying wood and splintering slats. The cab driver tried to get his hands up out of his jacket pockets to find a gun—the one thrust muzzle-first into the waistband of his trousers. I hit him with all the hate I had in me. A vicious karate slice across the Adam's apple. He went down, strangling, threshing. Screaming. I got behind him and the pillar, waiting for Rowles' next move. The FBI turncoat had reholstered his service pistol and brushed his hands in a gesture of finality. His hearty face was now leavened with a touch of genuine sadness.

  "Show's over, Noon," he muttered glumly. He was staring down at the pump-gunner who was curled up like a rag doll on the dirty old floor of the barn. "No other way. Those silly things you can't take chances with. They spray like a hose—"

  "What the hell," I said, coming out from behind the pole. The cab driver wasn't going anyplace. He had lapsed into a haze of unconsciousness, still clutching his throat. But I felt silly.

  "Sorry you had to sweat it out," Rowles said. "Almost lost them when they made the turn off the highway. Had to double back."

  "What the hell," I said again.

  He looked at me, surprised. Then he understood and the healthy grin eclipsed his face once again.

  "You didn't really think an agent of the Bureau could be a double agent, did you? Be yourself, Noon. Hoover wouldn't stand for it in the first place, and in the second place, that's a trick that couldn't be accomplished in nine million years."

  I shook my head. "All well and good. I believe you but how in the name of sweet insanity did you convince these guys you were one of them?" I indicated the two fallen gladiators, one of whom was never going to rise again. "They have to be the ones who killed Miflow—"

  Rowles frowned again. "I can't tell you that, Noon, until this whole mess is over."

  "We talking about the same mess?"

  "We are. Satchel is still missing."

  I took out my Camels and offered him one. We both lit up and filled the dead barn with fresh smoke. Now I could hear a big dragonfly buzzing for the altitude of the dark hayloft. The second level above our heads, with a rickety staircase, several steps missing, going straight up out of sight. The darkness was a mockery somehow.

  I looked at Rowles. He looked at me. He nodded.

  "Yeah. Let's take a look. Then we'll see if these characters are carrying anything worthwhile."

  He took out his .38 again and I unsheathed my .45. Then he led the way. I followed. Indian file, we mounted the dangerous ladder.

  Our footfalls made dry, slapping noises on the few remaining steps of the staircase. In the new stillness of the big ramshackle barn, we sounded like an army.

  A large rat, gray and ugly-looking, frightened by the noise of our approach, suddenly let out a fierce low squeal and gave us a wide berth, shooting along an overhead beam until it vanished into a gaping hole in the frame of the building. Fear is very relative. After the carnage below and pump-gun terror, neither Rowles nor I batted an eye. Our minds, strangers that we were, must have been dwelling upon the enormous possibilities of what exactly we might or might not find in the desolate hayloft before us.

  Rowles saw it first. There in the unnatural gloom, somewhere on the rotting floorboards of a pitched hayloft that hadn't known a sheaf of hay since maybe the night that Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in '43. As dark as the upper environs of the barn were, Rowles must have expected it, I guess. I didn't. I was thinking of things like a dead body or maybe just nothing at all.

  "Sonofabitch," Rowles muttered softly, "the football!"

  The Fatal Football

  It was the thirty-pound black metal bag, of course. The Bagman's Doomsday Football. Lying in the gloom of the loft, as if someone had just set it down. Rowles pounced on it, almost with a whoop, and I stood back, because I supposed he knew what he was doing. It was better than even-money he had seen the thing more than once.

  The whoop transformed into a despairing whimper of great disappointment. Then Rowles cursed again. A four-letter word he very probably hadn't used in years. I didn't have to ask him what all the fuss was about. He had turned and I could see the bag clearly now. It was dangling lightly in his right hand, and even in the poor light where no sunlight shined, I could see the lock mechanism had been rent asunder. There were deep scratches and grooves and marks of the jimmying and prying that had inevitably gotten the bag open. The intricate lock mechanism that the President had mentioned had yielded to brute force. What price Security and a lock combination known only to a few insiders?

  Rowles set the bag down dumbly, turned away, and walked to the jagged opening where hay had been pitched in the long ago for storage in the loft. I stared down at the bag, then crouched to examine it. With Rowles gazing disconsolately from the opening, I studied the bag. It was as heavy and durably constructed as a bag could be, without being a safe, but even a cursory examination of the interior showed the utter emptiness of the thing. It had been picked clean. No nuclear codes or patterns or thick manila envelopes with important wax seals and signatures of Joint Chiefs were in evidence. Not even the crude hot line to Great Britain and France. I had no idea what that might look like but it didn't matter. The black bag was as empty as the promises of some politicians.

  I hefted the bag. It was heavy, all right. A good load for anybody to carry, especially filled. I imagined that Leonard Kanin's six-foot-two 220-pound physique was really necessary.

  "No mistake?" I asked softly of Rowles' back.

  He shook his head without turning around.

  "It's Kanin's all right. Check the upper right-hand corner. See the dent right near the top? Kanin dropped it once, running to catch a plane in Memphis. It's his. Stake my life on it. The big question is, why is it empty and what's it doing here?"

  "And where's Leonard Kanin?" I amended. "Tell me, Rowles. Is this the only bag or are there two? Seems to me you people would have a backup bag with something this important."

  That turned him around. He glared at me across the empty space of the ramshackle loft.

  "Ask the S squad, Noon. Or Markham. That's their department. I work for the Bureau. Well, no use crying over spilled milk. Pick it up. We'll go downstairs and see about those sleeping beauties."

  I'd heard about the bitter rivalry between Security and investigational branches of the government but this was one of the first times I'd heard it spelled out a little. But I did as he told me and he swept on by me, picking his way carefully down the battered stairway again. Except for the bag, the loft was a complete washout. There was nothing to show that anyone had been there or lived there. No dust had collected on the ancient floorboards to betray telltale signs of occupation. I suppose daily winds and breezes whipping through the open hay door and the deep cracks in the barn walls would have provided plenty of spring cleaning without human hands.

  Downstairs, Rowles was once more the brisk, businesslike agent. He rolled the dead pump-gunner over, turning the side of the head with the slug in it down to the floor, and went through the corpse's pockets. While he was doing that, I performed a similar routine on the bogus cab driver. The karate chop had all but crippled the poor bastard. He was breathing with great difficulty and his eyes were glazed and agonized. But I could see he would live. Miflow, Thomas, wouldn't.

  His pockets, such as they were, unloaded a harvest of junk. A set of keys, crumple
d bills, and no wallet. There was an old stub from the President Theatre, yellowed with age and curled tightly in one nook of a pants pocket. It was dated a month ago for a performance of a play that had opened and closed in two nights on Broadway just last week. But there was nothing on him that would identify him. Only the .32 Smith and Wesson pistol in his waistband labeled him for the lawbreaker he seemed to be.

  Disgusted, I let him lie, and looked to see if Rowles had had any luck.

  "Nothing on this one," I said. "But he's local talent. Ticket stub for a show he saw a month ago in town. Chances are he's been here at least that long. Maybe they needed somebody who could push a car."

  Rowles was busy with the pump-gunner's pockets, but he grunted. "Probably a rap sheet on him in the files as long as my arm. But this one is a little more interesting—look."

  I went over to him and he held out a brown moroccan billfold. His other hand was loaded with a balled handkerchief, keys, change, and assorted bits of nothing. The wallet was something else. I scanned it quickly.

  Besides holding something like two hundred dollars in large-denomination bills—one was a fifty—the billfold held an ID card and a slip of paper. The ID card showed the tanned, hawk-like face of the pump-gunner and identified him as Manuel de Rojas of the Cuban Intelligence Department, Havana, Cuba. The slip of paper had a set of handwritten numbers on it, 1417335. The numbers were meaningless right then but I felt as Rowles must have. Anything the pump-gunner was carrying had to mean something.

  "Cuban Intelligence." I whistled. "Think it's bona fide?"

  "Well check it out," Rowles said grimly, replacing the other articles in a small heap at the dead man's side. "Wouldn't be the first time Castro's horsed around—" He broke off again, as if realizing he was saying too much in front of an outsider. I handed him back the moroccan beauty and he dropped it in his side pocket. Then he shrugged and reached into his breast pocket and took out a fountain pen. It looked like a fountain pen, that is. But he quickly stretched it so that a radio antenna suddenly poked about a half foot into the air, and he thumbed the fastener attachment on as if it were a button. Immediately, the big barn was filled with a steady beep-beep sound.