Goodbye California (23 page)

Morro gestured towards the sleeping man. ‘Recognize him?’

The four men studied him without recognition, then Burnett said contemptuously: ‘This is your trump card? This your mastermind behind the alleged nuclear weapons? You forget, Morro, that I know every top-ranking nuclear physicist in the country. I’ve never seen this man before.’

‘People can change,’ Morro said mildly. He shook the old man by the shoulder until he started and opened his eyelids to reveal clouded and bloodshot eyes. With a hand under a thin
arm, Morro persuaded him to his feet and urged him out into the brighter light of the assembly room. ‘Perhaps you recognize him now?’

‘What kind of try-on is this?’ Burnett peered closely and shook his head. ‘I repeat, I have never seen this man.’

Morro said: ‘It’s sad how one can forget old friends. You know him very well, Professor. Imagine if he were, say, seventy pounds heavier. Imagine if the lines had gone from his face and his hair was as black as it now is white. Think, Professor, think.’

Burnett thought. Suddenly his searching gaze changed to a stare, his face drained of expression just as his complexion drained of blood. He seized the old man by the shoulders.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty! Willi Aachen! Willi Aachen! What in God’s name have they done to you?’

‘My old friend Andy!’ The voice matched the appearance, a voice old and faint and quavering. ‘How good to see you again.’

‘What have they done to you?’

‘Well. You can see. Kidnapped.’ He shivered and tried to smile at the same time. ‘They persuaded me to work for them.’

Burnett flung himself on Morro but didn’t get within halfway. Dubois’s great hands closed on his upper arms from behind. Burnett was a powerful man and his fury gave him a momentarily berserker strength, but he had no more chance of
freeing himself from that monstrous grip than the wasted and shrunken Aachen would have had.

‘It’s no use, Andy.’ Aachen sounded sad. ‘No use. We are powerless.’

Burnett stopped his futile struggling. Breathing heavily, he said for the third time: ‘What have they done to you? How? Who did it?’

Lopez, certainly in answer to some unseen signal from Morro, appeared at Aachen’s elbow. Aachen saw him and took an involuntary step backwards, flinging up an arm as if to protect a face suddenly contorted with fear. Morro, still holding him by the arm, smiled at Burnett.

‘How naïve, how childlike and unthinking even the highest intelligences can be. There are in existence, Professor Burnett, only two copies of plans for the Aunt Sally, drawn up by yourself and Professor Aachen, and those are in the vaults of the Atomic Energy Commission. You must know that they are still there, so I could have obtained those plans from only two men in America. They are both with me now. Do you understand?’

Burnett was still having difficulty with his breathing. ‘I know Professor Aachen. I know him better than anyone. No one could have made him work for you. No one! No one!’

Lopez broadened his ever-genial smile. ‘Perhaps, Señor Morro, if I had a friendly little chat in my room with Professor Burnett here. Ten minutes would suffice, I think.’

‘I agree. That should be sufficient to convince him that anyone on earth would work for me.’

‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’ Aachen was close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, Andy, you’ve got to believe Morro.’ He looked in loathing at Lopez. ‘This monster knows more awful, more fiendish tortures than any sane man can conceive of. In the name of heaven, Andy, don’t be mad: this creature will break you as he broke me.’

‘I’m convinced.’ Healey had stepped forward and taken Burnett by the arm just as Dubois released his grip. He looked at Schmidt and Bramwell, then turned back to Burnett. ‘The three of us are convinced. Absolutely. What’s the point of being broken on the modern equivalent of the rack if it’s going to prove nothing? We
have
the proof. God’s sake, you couldn’t recognize an old friend you last saw ten weeks ago. Isn’t that proof? And those six zombie technicians. Isn’t that proof?’ He looked at Morro. ‘There could, of course, be a final proof. If those Aunt Sallies are for real you must have some way of triggering them off, and the only ways can be either by a time device or radio. It wouldn’t be the former, because then you would have committed yourself to an irrevocable decision, and I can’t see a man like you committing yourself to the irrevocable: so I assume you have elected for a controllable radio impulse.’

‘Well, well.’ Morro smiled. ‘This time you have not been just superficially obtuse. You are correct, of course. Follow me, gentlemen.’

He led the way to the small booth from which he had telephoned. Its inner wall held yet another steel door. There was no press button to open this: instead, alongside the door was a small brass panel, highly polished, measuring about ten inches by six. Morro placed his flat palm and fingers against it. The door slid smoothly open.

Inside was a tiny room, not more than six feet by six. On the wall opposite the door was a metal table which supported a simple radio transmitter, smaller than an attaché case, with calibrated dials and tuning knobs. On top of the case was a perspex-covered red button. Clamped to one side of the table was an eight-inch cylinder with a diameter about half that. At one end of the cylinder was a cranking handle: at the other end an insulated lead to a socket in one side of the transmitter. There were two other sockets close by that one. From one, a lead reached down to a lead-acid battery on the floor: the third socket was connected to a wall socket.

‘An almost childishly simple device, gentlemen,’ Morro said. ‘A perfectly ordinary radio transmitter, but one serving a most extraordinary purpose. It is programmed with a specific code on a pre-set wave-length. The chances of anyone duplicating both the wave-length and the code are so astronomically remote they can be said to be non-existent. We have, as you see, guarded against any chance of a power failure: we have mains, battery and the hand-cranked generator.’ He touched the perspex-covered red button on
top. ‘To operate, one simply unscrews the plastic dome, turns the button through ninety degrees and presses.’ He ushered them out, laid his hand against the brass panel and watched the door slide close. ‘One cannot very well have buttons for this purpose. Some careless person might accidentally lean against them.’

Healey said: ‘Only your handprint can open that door?’

‘You didn’t imagine that plate was simply an elaborate press-button? Well, gentlemen, the recording.’

‘One last thing,’ Burnett said. He nodded towards the row of Aunt Sallies. ‘There are two empty sets of clamps there. Why?’

‘Well, now.’ Morro smiled his empty smile. ‘I thought you might ask me that.’

The four physicists sat round the table in Burnett’s room, contemplating both their brandies and the future with an understandably profound gloom.

‘Well, I said it, didn’t I?’ Burnett said heavily. ‘“Mark my words”, I said. Didn’t I say that?’

No one said whether he’d said it or not. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

‘Even that control room could have been part of a massive hoax.’ Schmidt was grasping at nonexistent straws.

No one said anything to that either, and for the same reason.

‘And to think that we said he wasn’t amoral as a madman should be,’ Burnett said. ‘That if he were really mad he’d set off his atomic bomb in the Wilshire Boulevard.’

No one had anything to say to that either. Burnett rose and said: ‘Back shortly, gentlemen.’

Peggy was still in bed but looked considerably better than she had done on her arrival at the Adlerheim. Her mother sat in an armchair to one side. Burnett had a brandy glass in his hand. He hadn’t brought his own with him; he’d gone straight behind Susan’s wet bar the moment he had arrived. He was still behind it, his elbows on the counter, bending an apocalyptic gaze upon his audience and addressing them in apocalyptic tones. Armageddon, it was clear, was at hand, and the dark angel was there to announce the fact.

‘You will not, ladies, doubt our unanimous conclusion that we are sitting atop enough nuclear explosive power to blast the biggest man-made crater of all time, enough to send us all into orbit – in a vaporized state, that is? The equivalent of thirty-five million tons of conventional explosive. It should cause quite a bang, don’t you think?’

It was a night for silences, for unanswered questions. Burnett’s doom-laden gaze homed in on Susan.

‘“Kindly, gentle, humane, considerate” – that’s what you said Morro was. He may very well go
down in history as the most cold-blooded, calculating monster ever. Seven broken men down in the vaults there whom he has tortured – or has had tortured – beyond the breaking point of screaming agony. “Humane, considerate.”

‘And this kindly gentleman – where has he put the missing hydrogen bomb? It’s a rather scaled-down version of the Aunt Sally – a trifling one-and-a-half megatons, about seventy-five times as powerful as the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Released at a height of between ten and twenty thousand feet it could destroy half the population of Southern California. Those whom the blast didn’t get radiation and fire-storms would. But as this bomb is already in position it must be on or below ground level. The results will still be unimaginably dreadful. So, tell me, where do you think this gentle Christ-like figure placed this hydrogen device so that no harm will come to any of God’s children?’

He was still looking fixedly at Susan but she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t avoiding his gaze; her mind, like those of the others, was numbed with shock and incomprehension: she just wasn’t seeing anything.

‘So must I tell you?’

It was still a night for silences.

‘Los Angeles.’

On the following morning the absenteeism rate at work was the highest in the history of the State. The same almost certainly applied to the other States in the Union, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, through many of the civilized countries throughout the world, for the TV coverage of the projected – or threatened – atomic explosion in the Yucca Flat was being transmitted by satellite. Europe was hardly affected – though nonetheless concerned – for there the day’s work was all over and most Europeans were home for the evening.

But in California the absenteeism was almost total. Even the corporations running the public and utilities services, the transport system and police forces, had to operate with skeleton staffs. It could have been a great day for the criminals, particularly the robbers and burglars of California, were it not for the fact that they, too, had also stayed at home.

For reasons whether of prudence, sloth, the knowledge of the inaccessibility of the Yucca Flat or the at-hand convenience of their TV sets, not one Californian in ten thousand made his way to the explosion site that morning. Those who did make their way there – and there couldn’t have been over two thousand of them – were outnumbered by members of the military, the National Guard and police who found their task to keeping civilians at the mandatory five miles distance almost ridiculously easy.

Among the spectators present were most of the ranking scientists in the State, especially and understandably those who specialized in the nuclear and earthquake fields. Why, precisely, they
were
there was difficult to see, for the blast, shock and radiation effects of an eighteen-kiloton atomic device had been known with sufficient precision for over thirty years. Most of them, admittedly, had never seen an atomic explosion before, but the reason lay elsewhere. Blessed or cursed by that insatiable curiosity that had been the driving force or bane of scientists since recorded history, they just wanted to see where the bomb would go off. They too could, of course, have stayed at home: but your true scientist is in the field or he is nothing.

Among those who stayed at home were Major Dunne in his office and Sergeant Ryder at his house. Even by helicopter the round trip was over five hundred miles, and that, for Dunne, represented
a waste of valuable investigative time: for Ryder it represented a waste of thinking time which he no longer regarded as being necessarily valuable but was better than not thinking at all. Jeff Ryder had originally wanted to go, but when coldly asked by his father how he hoped to help his family by spending what could be irreplaceable hours rubber-necking, he had readily agreed not to go, especially when Ryder had said that he wanted Jeff to help him. His father, Jeff thought, had a peculiar idea of what ‘helping’ meant for, as far as he could see, his parent was doing absolutely nothing. Jeff had been asked to type out every detail, however apparently insignificant, of the investigations that had been carried out till then, including, as far as possible, verbatim recollections of all conversations, and to this end he was employing his memory as best he could. From time to time he glanced resentfully at Ryder who appeared to be doing nothing other than leafing idly through the pile of earthquake literature he’d picked up from Professor Benson.

About ten minutes before ten Jeff switched on the TV. The screen showed a bluish-tinged stretch of extremely unprepossessing desert, so unattractive a spectacle that the commentator was trying – and making extremely heavy weather of it – to compensate by an intense and breathless account of what was taking place, a gallant and foredoomed effort as nothing whatsoever was taking place. He informed the watchers that the camera
was stationed in Frenchman’s Flat at a distance of five miles south-west from the estimated point of explosion, as if anyone cared from what direction his camera was pointing. He said that as the device was almost certainly buried to a considerable depth there wasn’t expected to be much in the way of a fireball, which everyone had been reminded of for hours past. They were, he said, using a colour filter, which everyone who wasn’t colour-blind could readily see. Finally, he told them that the time was nine minutes to ten, as if he were the only person in California who owned a watch. He had, of course, to say something, but it was an extremely mundane run-up to something that might prove to be of lunatic significance. Jeff looked at his father in some exasperation: Ryder was certainly not looking and very probably not listening to anything that was going on. He was no longer leafing through the pages but was gazing, apparently unseeing, at one particular page. He laid down the literature and headed for the telephone.

Jeff said: ‘Dad, do you mind? There’s just thirty seconds to go.’

‘Ah!’ Ryder returned to his seat and gazed placidly at the screen.

The commentator was now speaking in that tense, breathless, near-hysterical voice which commonly afflicts race-track commentators when they endeavour to generate some spurious excitement towards the end of a race. In this particular
instance the tone was quite misplaced: a calm relaxed voice would have been much more appropriate – the imminent event carried in itself all the excitement that could be generated. The commentator had now started a count-down, starting at thirty, the numbers decreasing as the dramatic impact of his voice decreased. The effect was rather spoilt because either his watch was wrong or Morro’s was. The device exploded fourteen seconds ahead of time.

To a people who had long become accustomed to seeing atomic explosions on the screen, whether at home or in the cinema, to a people who had become blasé about and bored with the spectacle of moon-rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral, the visual effect of this latest demonstration of science’s resolute retrograde march was curiously – or perhaps not so curiously – anti-climactic. True, the fireball was considerably greater than predicted – the searing blue-white flash was of an intensity that caused many viewers to wince or even momentarily shut their eyes – but the column of smoke, fire and desert dust that streaked up into the blue Nevada sky, a blueness dramatically intensified by the camera filters, culminating in the mushrooming of the deadly radio-active cloud, faithfully followed the accustomed scenario. To the inhabitants of the central Amazon basin such a titanic convulsion would presumably have heralded the end of the world: to the more sophisticated peoples of the world it was
passé
, old
hat, and had it occurred on some remote Pacific atoll the great majority of people wouldn’t even have bothered to watch it.

But it hadn’t happened on any remote Pacific atoll, nor had it been Morro’s purpose to provide the Californians with a diversionary spectacle to relieve the ennui of their daily lives. It had been intended, instead, to provide them with a chilling warning, an ominous threat, all the more frightening because unspecified, of impending evil, of some unimagined disaster that would strike at the whim of whoever had planted and triggered the atomic device: on a more mundane level it was intended to show that here was a man who meant what he said, who was not just there to play around and who had both the desire and ability to carry out whatever he had threatened. Had that been Morro’s intention – and there obviously had been none other – then he had succeeded to a degree which perhaps even he had not realized was possible. He had struck fear into the heart of the great majority of rational Californians, and from that time on there was practically only one topic of conversation in the State: when and where this unpredictable madman would strike again and what in the name of all that was holy – it wasn’t expressed in quite that way – were his motivations. This topic, to be precise, was to last for only ninety minutes: then they were to be given something definite and concrete about which to worry or, more accurately, to reduce that
part of California most directly concerned to a state of not unreasoning terror that was swiftly to shade off into panic.

Ryder rose. ‘Well, we never doubted that he was a man of his word. Aren’t you glad you didn’t waste your time going up to see that side-show? For that’s all it was. Ah, well, it should at least keep people’s minds off taxes and the latest shenanigans in Washington for a little.’

Jeff didn’t answer. It was doubtful if he’d even heard. He was still looking at the ever-expanding mushroom over the Nevada desert, still listening to the suitably awe-stricken voice of the commentator describing in great and wholly unnecessary detail what anyone with half an eye could see perfectly well for himself. Ryder shook his head and picked up the telephone. Dunne answered.

Ryder said: ‘Anything? You know this line is bugged.’

‘Something’s coming in.’

‘Interpol?’

‘Something’s coming in.’

‘How long?’

‘Half an hour.’

He hung up, called Parker, arranged to have them meet in Dunne’s office in half an hour, hung up, sat, briefly ruminated on the fact that both Dunne and Parker had taken the reality of Morro’s threat so much for granted that neither of them had thought fit to comment on it, then resumed his reading. Fully five minutes passed
before Jeff switched off the TV, glanced with some irritation at his father, sat down at his table, typed a few words and said acidly: ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Not at all. How many pages have you got down?’

‘Six.’

Ryder stretched out his hand and took them. ‘We’re leaving in fifteen minutes to see Dunne. Something’s come up – or is coming up.’

‘What?’

‘You have forgotten, perhaps, that one of Morro’s henchmen is wearing a headset tied in to our phone?’

A chagrined Jeff resumed his typing while Ryder began a placid reading of Jeff’s notes.

A much refreshed Dunne, who had obviously a good night’s rest behind him, was waiting with Delage and Leroy when Ryder, Jeff and Parker arrived. Delage and Leroy were looking a good deal less rested: the assumption was that they did not have a good night’s rest behind them. Dunne confirmed this, nodding at Delage and Leroy.

‘A couple of devoted agents who think their boss is past it. Quite right too.’ He tapped a sheaf of papers in front of him. ‘Up all night – the devoted agents, I mean – collecting snippets of this and that. Some possibly useful information, some dead ends. What did you think of friend Morro’s demonstration?’

‘Impressive. What do you have?’

Dunne sighed. ‘The niceties of salon conversation, Sergeant Ryder, are not for all. Report from Daimler, remember him?’

‘Security chief in the AEC reactor plant in Illinois?’

‘Yes. Nothing wrong with your memory.’

‘Even less with Jeff’s. I’ve just been reading some notes he typed out. Well?’

‘He says that Carlton did associate with some far-out group. As I said, we preferred to have one of our boys do the direct legwork. Interviewed Carlton’s landlady’s son. He wasn’t very forthcoming – he’d only attended two or three meetings then gave it up. Couldn’t stand the mumbo-jumbo, he said.’

‘What were they called?’

‘The Damascene Disciples. Nothing known of them. Never registered as a church or religious organization. Disbanded after six months.’

‘They had a religion? I mean, they preached, they had a message?’

‘They didn’t preach. They had a message, all right. They advocated the eternal damnation of all Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists – in fact, as far as I can make out, everybody who wasn’t a Damascene.’

‘Nothing original about that. Were the Muslims on their list, do you know?’

Dunne looked at a list. ‘Oddly enough, no. Why?’

‘Curiosity. Could this landlady’s son recognize any of them?’

‘That would have been difficult. The Damascenes wore cloaks, masks, and those pixie witches’ hats affected by the Ku-Klux Klan. Only this lot were dressed in black.’

‘Something in common, all the same – as I recall it the Ku-Klux Klan weren’t all that devoted to Jews, Catholics and negroes. Anyway, no possible means of identification?’

‘None. Except that this lad told our agent that one of them was the biggest man he had ever seen, a giant, maybe six-eight, and shoulders like a cart-horse.’

‘This person didn’t note anything peculiar about any of their voices?’

‘This person, according to our agent, just escaped being classified as a moron.’

‘But Carlton was no moron. Interesting, isn’t it? What word about Morro?’

‘Well, his accent. We’ve now had reports from – what shall we call them? – linguistic experts throughout the State. Thirty-eight so far, and more coming in every minute. All of them willing to stake their reputations etc., etc. Point is, no less than twenty-eight plump for a south-east Asian origin.’

‘Do they, indeed? Any attempt to pin-point the exact source?’

‘That’s as far as they will go.’

‘Again, still interesting. Interpol?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You have a list of all the places they’ve contacted?’ Dunne looked at Leroy, who nodded. ‘The Philippines, for instance?’

Leroy consulted a list. ‘No.’

‘Try Manila. Ask them to try around the Cotabato area in Mindanao.’

‘The what in what?’

‘Mindanao is the large southern island in the Philippines. Cotabato is a seaside town. Manila may not be too interested in what goes on in Cotabato – it’s at least five hundred and fifty miles away as the crow flies, maybe a thousand by road and ferry. Try, anyway.’

‘I see.’ Dunne paused. ‘You know something that we don’t know?’

‘No. Chances are I’m making a complete fool of myself, just a wild guess based upon ludicrous improbability and I’d rather not make an utter clown of myself. LeWinter?’

‘Two things. The first one is extraordinarily odd. You will recall that in his telephone notebook he’d listed the numbers of all kinds of people with whom – outside his court cases, of course – LeWinter would not be expected to be on either social or professional terms. Engineers, drillers, oil-rig men. There were forty-four of those in all. Barrow, for reasons best known to himself – he’s almost as close-mouthed as you – assigned a federal agent to interview each and every one of them.’