Operation Breakthrough (10 page)

I walked the short distance to the Fifth Avenue office. The second I stepped off the fifteenth floor elevator I knew my luck was no better today than it had been yesterday. The crates that had lined the corridor were gone. Why the hell hadn’t I had the idea yesterday when I could have done something about it?

I stopped near the elevator when I saw the crates had disappeared. The door of Erikson’s former office was open again, and I could hear someone moving around inside. I went to the door and looked in. A stoop-shouldered janitor wearing a three-day growth of beard and a frazzled yachting cap was pushing a long-handled broom around the cardboard scraps and excelsior waste on the floor.

“Nobody here,” the janitor informed me needlessly when he saw me in the doorway.

“I’m just checking out the office,” I said.

“If you wanna rent, you gotta see the building super,” he said. He scooped up a nest of assorted trash and dumped it into a large bin resting on a wooden frame equipped with swivel caster wheels.

Projecting from a corner of the movable trash bin was a segment of brown, stiff, oily paper smeared with black paint. Something clicked when I looked at it. I set down the briefcase, walked to the bin, took hold of a corner of the paint-smudged stiff brown paper, and pulled it out. A handful of dust devils and bits of excelsior flew up into the air and settled down upon the freshly swept floor.

“Hey!” the janitor complained. “I’m tryin’ to get this place cleaned up!”

I dug into my pocket and handed him a bill. That choked off the complaints. I unfolded the stiff, crumpled-up paper which I’d spotted as a stencil and stretched it out to its full length. It wasn’t too difficult to make out that the punched-out, ink-stained gaps spelled out Lambert Warehouse and Storage Co., 28 Pendleton St., Alexandria, Va. This was the place where the crates had been taken, and it stood to reason that someone at 28 Pendleton St., Alexandria, Va., should be receptive to information about Karl Erikson, to say nothing of the contents of the briefcase.

I dropped the stencil back into the bin, wiped off my hands with a bit of excelsior, and left the office with the janitor’s thanks following me down the hall. I stood on the Fifth Avenue curb trying to hail a cab, and I had the feeling I was on a treadmill. All roads might not lead to Rome, but in Karl Erikson’s case they apparently led to the very near vicinity of Washington, D.C.

I had to wait forty minutes at La Guardia for the next commuter flight to Washington. I used most of it sitting in the snack bar, making up for a few of the meals I’d missed recently. This was after a trip to the men’s room to get the rest of the stencil ink off my hands.

I picked up a copy of the
Daily Mirror
because that paper carries the more sensational crime stories and I’m always interested in reading about activity in my former line of work. Bank robberies had been in short supply the previous day, however, and I turned to the sports pages and checked out the action at Aqueduct and the other eastern tracks. I knew Hazel had a little something riding almost every day, but I didn’t find the names of any of her favorites.

I was refolding the paper when an item in the general news caught my eye. The Justice Department had asked for a postponement in a case brought against alleged syndicate members “to allow time for the introduction of new evidence now in the process of preparation for presentation to this court.” The defense had objected strenuously, but the trial judge had granted the delay.

The briefcase resting against my leg seemed to press a little harder. The odds against the briefcase material being the evidence mentioned in the newspaper article were the same as the odds against the first successful moon shot. But
somebody
in reasonably high-up government circles wanted the material in the briefcase, or Karl Erikson never would have been sent after it.

From the look of it, certainly, it was destined to be evidence in a courtroom somewhere if only I could place it in the right hands.

I boarded the plane and spent eighty minutes in fruitless speculation about ways to break through the barrier of official silence surrounding Erikson. With the usual undercover agencies’ need-to-know restrictions there probably weren’t too many men who could talk about Erikson knowledgeably even if they wanted to.

We arrived at National Airport just after another rain shower. Wisps of steam were drifting upward from the greasy, brown surface of the sluggish Potomac River as the approach pattern carried us across it. The newly present bright sunlight promised a hot, humid afternoon.

I followed the alighting passengers through the terminal until I located a bank of pay phones. I looked in the yellow pages of the phone directory for the Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company. A phone call might be able to tell me a good deal about Lambert.

I wasn’t too surprised to learn that there was no Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company listed in the yellow pages or in the white pages either. With the shortcut eliminated I went out to the cab rank, wondering if I was wasting cab fare checking out a nonexistent address.

At least it was a fairly short ride. And there was a Pendleton Street, a narrow paved lane that sloped from the main section of Alexandria toward the river. Pendleton Street came to a dead end at Royal Street, which paralleled the Potomac. Layer upon layer of resurfacing had covered the street until only a few of the original eighteenth century cobblestones showed through. The present day curbstones were mere ridges.

There was even a 28 Pendleton Street. It was an old, four-story brick structure that might have been a brewery at one time. It was surrounded by abandoned shops and broken-glassed buildings in such profusion that it was obvious that time had not done well by this section of old Alexandria.

At first I couldn’t see anything which identified the building. Then high on the front wall, off-center from the entrance, I saw a very small sign which said Lambert Warehouse and Storage Co. Both the size of the sign’s lettering and its placement indicated that Lambert didn’t believe in advertising itself. Since I was now sure there was a Lambert, I paid off the cab.

The concern hardly looked prosperous. Only the heavy, glass, double doors and the concrete steps leading up to them were new. But there were anachronisms in the building’s outwardly dilapidated condition. I could see through the windows that the interior was illuminated by modern fluorescent light fixtures. And each window was bordered with electronic alarm tape. Further inspection showed closed-circuit television lenses projecting from the beaks of open-mouth gargoyles at the corners of the building. Lambert’s was protected by a sophisticated security system that would furnish a challenge to the very best technicians.

The real giveaway, though, was the parking lot. There must have been three hundred cars parked there, and not a one of them looked more than three years old. Lambert’s employees were evidently quite well-to-do, a prosperity synonymous with a government pay check in most areas adjacent to the nation’s capitol.

I climbed the concrete steps and passed through the heavy glass doors. I expected to be intercepted at once, in view of the other precautions, but when I wasn’t, I noticed electronic eyes imbedded in the burnished aluminum door frames which signaled my entrance to someone. Whether out in the open or on a closed-circuit television screen, someone inside Lambert’s was monitoring my visit.

A long counter extended the width of the twenty-foot lobby, effectively blocking it except for a door at one end which had no handle but was opened by a key. Beyond the counter, under the fluorescent lights was a large open room crowded with long rows of desks. Most were occupied by attractive girls pounding typewriters or thumbing through tightly packed open-face files.

Lambert’s might have been an old building, but the office equipment was new. Banks of metal file cabinets butted side by side ranged three walls of the huge room. A glance was enough to assure an observer that the cabinets could hold records for a great deal more storage than a building the size of Lambert’s could accommodate. Whatever went on here extended far beyond the capacity of this single building. The office layout looked far more like the central accounting department of a large insurance company than a riverside warehouse.

No one paid the slightest attention to me as I stood at the counter. I propped the briefcase up on it in full view, and a head or two turned in my direction, but nothing happened. Two miniskirted girls at nearby desks huddled in earnest girl talk. They glanced at me once as if to guage my importance, then went back to their conversation.

I cleared my throat loudly. The nearest girl, a gum-chewing blonde, said something impatient to her friend. She disengaged herself from her desk and strolled to the counter. Her skirt must have just met establishment standards. Above it she was wearing a sleeveless knit pull-over whose twin highlights appeared to project a quarter of the way across the counter toward me. “Yes?” she inquired with a set smile which displayed irregular teeth, a demonstration of the law of life that no one has everything.

I pointed to the briefcase. “I’m turning this in for Mr. Erikson,” I said, hoping the name would register. “Mr. Karl Erikson.”

The blonde gave no sign that the name meant anything to her. She looked toward the rear of the room where a group of men were clustered around a soft drink vending machine. “Mr. Harrington is in charge of returns,” she informed me. “He’ll be with you in a moment.”

She sauntered toward the vending machine with a hip sway that would have done credit to a contestant in the Miss America pageant. I saw her speak to one of the men, who glanced in my direction, nodded, then continued talking to his companions. Mr. Harrington was a sandy-haired, bespectacled young man, and it was for much longer than a moment that he continued his conversation.

I’d already made up my mind to dislike Mr. Harrington by the time he crumpled his paper cup and dropped it into a waste container. Even then he detoured en route to the counter to pass a desk where a languorous looking brunette was sitting at a card punch machine. He spent another two minutes with her, from their mutual smiles evidently relaying the dirty joke he had just picked up at the soft drink machine. Finally he deigned to walk to the counter. “Turn in?” he asked in a world-weary tone.

“That’s right,” I said, trying to keep my voice civil.

“Where’s your form 357?”

“My what?”

Behind his spectacles Mr. Harrington’s weak-looking eyes expressed boredom. He was bored with me, and he was bored with himself. “Your record of withdrawal and return. If you took it out, you signed for it.”

“I didn’t take it out. I’m just returning it.”

“Oh, you want it placed in dead storage, is that it?”

“Correct. To be marked for Mr. Karl Erikson.”

Harrington also gave no sign that the name meant anything to him. “You’ve got the proper release to authorize our acceptance?”

“Release?”

This time Harrington looked pitying. “Form 684B. Didn’t your office give you one?”

I took a stab. “I was told you’d give me a receipt.”

Harrington shook his head. “Someone’s putting you on, friend. You must be new. I remember I went through the same routine when I started with the State Department. They had me chasing all over town looking for a map of China showing the location of Poon Tang.” He tittered on a high-pitched note. A limp-wristed gesture of his long-fingered, narrow hands invited me to appreciate his situation. “How many places have you been steered to today trying to unload this briefcase?”

“You mean you won’t take it?”

His supercilious half-smile faded. “Not without a form 684B, certainly. And not without the chain and handcuff attachment which goes with this type of courier case.” For the first time he evinced curiosity. “Where did you say you got it?”

“From Karl Erikson.”

“Well, then I suggest you take it back to this Mr. Erikson, whoever he is, and tell him I think he’s carrying his little joke a bit too far.” Mr. Harrington’s thin lips screwed up in distaste. “With friends like this Erikson you don’t need enemies. I think he’s setting you up for a hard time.” The foppish young man looked me over more carefully than he had previously. “If you’re actually in unauthorized possession of classified material, you’re going to have to do a lot of explaining to someone. You know I have to make out an incident report on this, don’t you?”

“Incident report?” I sounded like a damned parrot.

“Any irregularity in procedure must be reported the same day,” Mr. Harrington said solemnly. He didn’t seem displeased about it.

I looked at the briefcase sitting on the counter, mocking me in my effort to get rid of it. Young Mr. Harrington’s expression seemed no less mocking, although I might have exaggerated it. At any rate I wasn’t doing any good with him, and I’d had enough of him. I leaned across the counter as though to speak confidentially. “There’s one thing I’m curious about,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Did you ever find Poon Tang?” Young Mr. Harrington stared at me uncomprehendingly. “And would you know what to do with it if you did?”

“Oh, you’re one of those,” he said haughtily and flounced away from the counter. He returned to a glass-partitioned office and immediately picked up his telephone. I grabbed the briefcase from the counter and headed for the door. I couldn’t afford any question-and-answer sessions with any official types summoned by the perturbed Mr. Harrington’s phone call. His remark about unauthorized possession of classified material had carried a hard core of truth.

“Damn all regulation-bound pretty boys, anyway,” I muttered to myself as I ran down the concrete steps.

I set off along Pendleton Street toward the center of Alexandria in long strides.

It had been foolish to provoke the foppish Mr. Harrington. He had made clear two things of which I was previously unaware: (1) no government office of the Lambert Warehouse type would accept a pig in a poke, and (2) if anything went wrong in my attempt to get rid of the briefcase, I had no one to speak for me to account for my possession of it.