Assignment to Disaster (18 page)

He followed hard on Jeffry's heels. Without warning, his heart began to hammer heavily, and for no reason at all he suddenly felt he had made a fatal mistake. But it was too late to turn back. Jeffry went down a long dim hallway and started up a graceful staircase.

"Wait a moment," Durell said. "Is anyone else in the house besides you and the General?"

"No, sir."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, sir."

At the head of the stairs, Jeffry pointed to a door at the end of the hall. "General McFee is in his study. Will that be all?"

Durell smiled. "Come with me."

"I have work to do, sir."

"You know what I mean," Durell said. "I wouldn't like to think you might call the police while I was with the General. Go ahead, Jeffry. And when we get inside, just sit down in a chair where I can see you. And don't try to leave. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

From inside the room came the sound of McFee's voice, apparently on the telephone that Durell had heard ringing when he was out in the back yard. Jeffry knocked and Durell pushed him inside and quickly closed the door.

Dickinson McFee looked up with the telephone poised in his hand. His eyes were shocked.

"Put it down," Durell said. "Quick."

McFee breathed out. "I'll be triple damned."

"I mean it, General. Now."

McFee did not move. His eyes were bright and penetrating, pale and cool, intelligent and remote. His mouth twitched. He covered the telephone mouthpiece with his hand before he spoke.

"Are you armed, Sam?"

"Yes," Durell said, and he wished he hadn't yielded to Deirdre's sudden request that he give up his gun before coming in here. "Say good-by and hang up, whoever it is."

"I'm talking to General Aiken. He's here from Las Tiengas."

"Hang up," Durell insisted.

McFee took his hand from the mouthpiece and spoke calmly. "I'll call back. Something important has just come up." He put the telephone down with slow care. His small physique seemed to expand, filling the room with his personality. He looked at the colored man. "You can go, Jeffry."

"I want him where I can see him," Durell said.

"Then sit down, Jeffry. You're not afraid of Sam, are you? Sit down and try not to hear too much."

Durell leaned back against the door. His mouth felt dry. He looked at McFee and wished he had been greeted in almost any other manner than this cool objectivity.

"General," he said, "I've come a long way. I'm tired and I'm confused and you're the only man I can count on to listen. You sent me out there, you told me to trust nobody. I tried to get you on the phone, but it was always impossible. So I'm here. It wasn't easy to get here. But I've had no choice. All I want is for you to listen to me."

"I'm listening," McFee said.

"And believe me."

"That depends."

For a moment Durell felt defeated, with no will to go on. He stared blankly at McFee and saw beyond even this man the mindless efficiency of government bureaus, the maze of routine that formed a dark labyrinth in which a simple truth could be hopelessly lost. It was very quiet in the house. He thought of Deirdre, sitting alone in the car outside. A man had to trust his hunches. He forced his mind back to McFee, seated at the desk.

"General," he said quietly, "would I have come here if I had done anything wrong? Would I have come to you if I were guilty of treason, as Swayney says I am?"

"I admit I am surprised. You've cut a wide swath, Sam."

"It was necessary. Nobody would listen. I'm not saying that Aiken or Larabee or Swayney meant wrong, or tried to suppress me because of treasonous motives. But your own instructions forced me to do what I did." Durell took out the sheaf of calculations he had carried so far. McFee didn't touch them when Durell tossed them to the desk. "Calvin Padgett was not permitted the use of an electronic computer to check these equations. They'll show a need to delay the Cyclops launching. That's all he wanted. And I don't ask for anything more than having these figures checked. If they're wrong, then I've been wrong. But if they're right, then you'll know what must be done about Cyclops. You can't afford not to check them."

McFee said, "I've talked to Swayney, General Aiken, and Larabee. And I've been talked
at
by the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, and the White House. There can be no delay in getting Cyclops off the ground and into patrol orbit."

"But Cyclops will not orbit. It won't break away from earth's gravity pull. It will come down…"

"Wait." McFee waved a slim hand. "Every priority has been given to launching Cyclops as soon as possible. Now General Aiken and Larabee brought me the medical records on Calvin Padgett, and Swayney brought in the dossiers on Padgett's sister and her husband. Swayney says the girl simply took you for a sweet ride."

Durell felt sudden anger. "She never asked me for anything. There's nothing wrong about her
or
Calvin Padgett. I know it. I feel it. Why won't you listen? Are you afraid for your own skin, General? Have the bureaucrats paralyzed you, too?"

"Shut up," McFee said tightly.

"Why? Isn't it true that you're afraid to risk your own judgment and order Cyclops grounded? Just check these figures of Cal Padgett's. Is that asking too much? All I request is that you keep an open mind."

McFee stood up, both hands on the desk, near the sheaf of paper Durell had tossed there. His eyes were cold and inimical. Jeffry moved in his chair and the leather creaked. Abruptly the telephone began to ring again. McFee did not look at it. The sound was shrill and strident, tearing at Durell's nerves.

Durell drew a deep breath when the ringing stopped.

"All I came here for was to get some help on this. I came to deliver these equations on your desk, to get somebody to look at them and do what has to be done. I'm not sure who the traitor is. I think it's John Padgett, but I can't prove anything. Yet somebody gimmicked the relays in Cyclops' brain so it will run amok. It won't orbit. It will go up in an arc and come down somewhere on the continental United States and its warhead will spray bombs over a wide area. It can destroy us all. Somebody has to do something about it. If you won't help, I don't know what else to do, because time is running out and in a few hours somebody will push a button and it will happen."

McFee said quietly, "You're under arrest, Sam. Give me your gun."

"No."

The telephone rang again. It rang four times and was silent. Durell saw that McFee did not believe him. He saw it was hopeless. There was nothing he could do.

"Your gun, Sam," McFee said sharply.

Durell said flatly, "I don't have one."

McFee looked surprised. Then he reached in his desk and took out a small revolver and pointed it at Durell. Jeffry made a small sound and sat tightly in his leather chair.

"I'm sorry to do this, Sam," McFee said. "But I can't take any chances. All you have is a hunch, against all the evidence that weighs against you. Come over to the desk. Put your hands flat."

He obeyed. The papers he had put on the desk had been brushed aside. McFee circled him and went over his pockets quickly and deftly. Then Durell's mind suddenly jolted free of his paralysis as he considered the papers before him. McFee had not looked at them. In a world turned upside down, where right was wrong and friends were enemies, he knew what he had to do.

Suddenly he spun on his heel, dropped one shoulder, and slashed at McFee's gun. The edge of his hand struck McFee's wrist and the gun clattered on the floor. McFee yelled and Durell hit him hard and McFee went backward, arms wide, fingers splayed. Durell kicked the gun under the desk. He saw Jeffry lunge up from the chair and he hit Jeffry and the man went down, screaming in a thin, high voice. McFee was standing still, eyes glazed. Durell rubbed his right hand. There was blood on his knuckles.

Jeffry kept on screaming. Durell yanked open the door and plunged into the hall. His legs trembled. He felt sick. For a moment he dragged in deep, retching breaths of air. He couldn't move. From inside the room came the sound of Jeffry clawing under the desk for the gun and still screaming for help. He stumbled on the first stair riser and fell halfway down to the lower floor before he caught himself. His trouser leg was torn and flapping. He stared at it, then went all the way down and trotted through the house to the kitchen. Nobody got in his way. It was only as he crossed the back yard that he remembered Padgett's papers left on McFee's desk. It was too late to go back now. He ran across the yard and opened the gate in the high fence and plunged into the alley, running for Deirdre and his car.

The car was where he had left it. But Deirdre wasn't in it. She was gone.

Durell stared at the empty car and looked up and down the dark driveway and then ran to the exit and looked both ways up and down the street. She was not in sight. He stood as if paralyzed. Even from here he could hear Jeffry's screeching. A man came out of one of the back yards, dressed in pajamas, and stood indecisively in his gateway. He glanced at Durell and trotted back inside. Durell felt as if he could not move without Deirdre. He could not leave without her. He felt desperately alone.

But she was gone. And in the distance was the sound of a siren. The siren made him think of the police, and his mind began to work again. He returned to his car and got in and drove out of the alley. The tires screeched as he turned into the street. He went once around the dark block, hoping for a glimpse of Deirdre. When he returned to the alley entrance, he saw a small crowd gathered at the back of Dickinson McFee's house. He gave up looking for her then and drove away.

Afterward, he was not sure where he went or what roads he took. McFee had failed him; and Deirdre, whom he had trusted, who had convinced him that he ought to undertake the mission when Calvin was killed, was gone. He did not know which blow was worse. He did not try to avoid the police especially; he did not think too much about them. His mind turned and twisted, alternating between the two poles of his problem. He could not understand why Deirdre had left the car. Something must have happened, something had caught her attention. He could not accept the possibility that Swayney was right and she had deserted him. He had gambled on her, on his instinct. If he was wrong, his whole life was wrong. Panic touched him and swelled violently while his mind jumped this way and that, and then the panic subsided and left only a deep hopelessness.

He did not consider the danger to himself when he found himself following the highway to the Chesapeake shore and the Padgett house. A dim hope flickered that somehow Deirdre might have gone there.

The big, empty house on the shore at Prince John was quiet, dreaming under the summer moonlight. It was past three in the morning. Everything was dark. He knew the main house was an empty, abandoned shell. He parked in front of the gate cottage and sat for a moment with his forehead against the cool wheel, then got out and walked around the house, trying the doors. Everything was locked. She was not here.

The Chesapeake glimmered with silver under the light of the moon. He turned and tramped through the weeds toward the main house, a hundred yards away. Crickets sang in the wild grass. There was a warm, steady breeze from over the water. The rose bricks of the old Padgett house looked dark in the silvery light. A shutter banged uneasily. A screen door flapped. He swerved toward the arched opening of what had once been a carriage shed.

A dark sedan was parked here in the darkness. Metal creaked as it cooled. He felt the hood. It was warm.

Durell's head came up sharply. He listened, but there was no sound from the deserted house. Then he turned and crossed the area of waist-high brush that had been a back lawn and tried the kitchen door. It was not locked.

He let the screen door slam behind him. Moonlight lay black on the red Belgian tiles of the floor.

"Deirdre?"

The house was silent.

In the dim light he saw a half-empty bottle of bourbon and a tumbler, partially full, on the kitchen table. A piece of melting ice cube still floated in it. The silence was absolute except for the shrill singing of the crickets outside.

"Deirdre!" he called again.

No answer. A trap? Who could be here? Nobody. Somebody. Close at hand. He quit the kitchen and walked boldly down a wide center corridor to the front of the house. The front door stood open and he could see the Chesapeake shining in the moonlight. A warm wind whined through the empty, dusty house. There was a smell of mildew and decay in the bare walls, the emptily echoing rooms. He looked into a long chamber at his right and saw the dark outlines of a huge brick fireplace and started to turn away, then halted and stood as he was, unable to go farther.

The moonlight showed him a man seated in a dusty, rotting wing chair beside the fireplace, facing him as he stood in the doorway.

Gustav Weederman, alias George West, manager of the Salamander.

Dead.

He told himself it was some mistake. Weederman could not be here. But it was no mistake. Durell walked into the room and halted and saw that Weederman had been shot in the back of the head. The man's hard, handsome face was half blown away. Durell shivered suddenly as if a cold wind had touched him. Weederman's flesh was still warm. The bullet wound in the back of his head was small, but the internal pressure of the slug's impact on the brain had bulged Weederman's eyes grotesquely.

Durell was not startled when he heard a scraping footfall behind him from the hallway entrance. He turned and looked at the man who stood smiling in the moonlight.

"Hello, Mr. Durell."

It was John Padgett. He stood tall and gaunt, leaning heavily on his knobby cane, his predatory head thrust forward a little, bony shoulders hunched, his right hand in his pocket. He might have been standing like that, about to lecture a class in the technology of astrophysics. Or he might have been ready to offer Durell a drink. He looked at ease. He looked deadly.