Sinister Barrier (14 page)

“Four.” The small man became more nervous than ever. “They have had a poke at four within the last few days. That made it pretty awful for us. There was no way of telling who they’d pick on next. We couldn’t work so well daytimes and we couldn’t sleep nights.” He gave Wohl a pathetic look, and went on, “They got the last one yesterday afternoon, and he went insane. They dropped him outside the gates and left him a gibbering idiot.”

“Well, there weren’t any about when we arrived,” remarked Wohl.

“Probably they’re satisfied that this counterstroke has prevented the plant from becoming a possible source of danger to them for the time being.” Graham could not restrain a smile as he noted how the jumpiness of the little man contrasted with the elephantine indifference of the police sergeant. “They’ll come back!”

He dismissed the witness and other waiting employees of the radio plant. With Wohl’s help, he searched the laboratory for notes, memo-pads or any seemingly insignificant piece of paper that might record a clew, his mind recalling the cryptic messages left behind by other and earlier martyrs.

Their efforts were in vain. One fact and one only was at their disposal—the fact that Bob Treleaven was decidedly dead.

“This is hell!” groaned Wohl, despairingly. “Not a lead. Not one miserable little lead. We’re sunk!”

“Use your imagination,” Graham chided.

“Don’t tell me you’ve picked up a line?” Wohl’s honest eyes popped in surprise. He scanned the laboratory, trying to find something he’d overlooked.

“I haven’t.” Bill Graham grabbed up his hat. “In this crazy business nobody lives long enough to hand us a useful line, and we’ve no choice but to spin our own. Come on—let’s get back.”

It was as they flashed through Stamford that Wohl shifted his thoughtful gaze from the road, glanced at his passenger, and said, “All right, all right—is it a family secret or something?”

“What d’you mean?”

“This line you’re spinning.”

“There are several. To start with, we’ve not got enough data concerning Padilla. We’ll have to get more, and some of it may prove well worth having. Then again, it seems that Treleaven had about five undisturbed minutes at that phone before he was put out of the running. He was on to Sangster for less than half a minute, and that was his last call in this sinful world. So unless it took him four and a half minutes to reach Sangster—which is not likely—I reckon maybe he phoned somebody else first. We’ll find out whether he did and, if so, whom he called.”

“You’re a marvel—and I’m dumber than I thought,” said Wohl.

Grinning sheepishly, Graham continued, “Lastly, there’s an unknown number of radio ham stations operating between Buenos Aires, Barranquilla and Bridgeport. One or two may have snooped the commercial beams while raking the ether. If any one of them happened to be listening in, and caught Padilla’s talk, we want him as badly as do the Vitons. We’ve got to find that guy before it’s too late!”

“Hope,” recited Wohl, “springs eternal in the human breast.” His eyes roamed up to the rear-view mirror, rising casually, then becoming fixed in fearful fascination. “But not in mine!” he added, in choked tones.

Slewing around in his seat, Graham peered through the car’s rear window. “Vitons—after us!”

His sharp eyes switched to the front, the sides, taking in the terrain with photographic accuracy. “Step on it!” His thumb found and jabbed the emergency button just as Wohl shoved the accelerator to the limit. The crisis-bank of extra batteries added their power, and with the dynamo screaming its top note, the gyrocar leaped forward.

“No use—they’ve as good as got us!” gasped Wohl. He manhandled the machine around an acute bend, corrected three successive side-slips, straightened up. The road was a broad ribbon streaming past their wildly whirling wheels. “We couldn’t escape at twice this pace.”

“The bridge!” Graham warned. Feeling surprised by his own coolness, he nodded toward the bridge rushing nearer at tremendous pace. “Hop the bank and dive into the river. It’s a chance.”

“A… lousy… chance!” breathed Wohl.

Offering no comment, Bill Graham again glanced backward, saw their ominously glowing pursuers about two hundred yards behind and gaining rapidly. There were ten of the things speeding through the atmosphere in single file, moving with that apparently effortless but bulletlike pace characteristic of their kind.

The bridge widened in perspective as it shot nearer; the ghostly horde picked up fifty yards. Anxiously, Graham divided his attention between the scenes in front and at rear. This, he could see, was going to prove touch and go. A split second would be the difference between one chance in a million and no chance at all.

“We’ll barely do it,” he shouted above the dynamo’s howl. “When we hit the water, fight out and swim downstream for as long as you can hold breath. Don’t come up for more than a quick gulp. Stay down for as long as they’re around even if you have to soak for a week. Better that than—” He left the sentence unfinished.

“But—” commenced Wohl, his face registering strain as the oncoming bridge leaped at their front wheel.

“Now!” roared Graham. He didn’t wait for Wohl to make up his mind; his powerful fingers clamped upon the wheel, twisted it with irresistible power.

With a protesting screech from the sorely maltreated gyroscope, the slender car went hell-for-leather up the bank. It vaulted the top a bare foot from the bridge’s concrete coping, described a spectacular parabola through the air. Like a monster, twenty-foot missile, it struck the water with force that sent shocked drops flying high above road-level. A tiny rainbow shimmered momentarily in the shower.

Down, down went the machine amid an upsurging fountain of waggling bubbles. It vanished leaving on the troubled surface a thin, multi-colored film of oil over which ten baffled luminosities skimmed in temporary defeat.

It was fortunate that he’d had the foresight to fling open his door the instant before they struck, Graham realized. Inward pressure of water would otherwise have kept him prisoner for several valuable seconds. Sinuously moving his tough, wiry body, and with a mighty kick of his feet, he got free of the car even as it settled lopsidedly upon the river’s bed.

Making fast, powerful strokes, he sped downstream at the utmost pace of which he was capable, his chest full of wind, his eyes straining to find a way through the liquid murk. Wohl, he knew, was out—he had felt the thrust upon the car as the police lieutenant got clear. But he couldn’t see Wohl; the muddiness of the river prevented that.

Bubbles trickled from his mouth as his lungs reached point of rebellion. He tried to increase the rate of his strokes, felt his heart palpitating, knew that his eyes were starting from their sockets. A lithe swerve shot him upward, his mouth and nostrils broke surface, he exhaled, drew in a great gasp of fresh air. He went down again, swimming strongly.

Four times he came up with the swiftness of a trout snatching at a floating fly, took in a deep, lung-expanding gulp, then slid back into the depths. Finally, he stroked to the shallows, his boots scraped pebbly bottom, his eyes rose cautiously above the surface.

The coruscant ten now were soaring from a point on the bank concealed by the bridge. The hidden watcher followed their ascent with calculating eyes, followed them until they were ten shining pinpoints under the edge of the clouds. As the blue specters changed direction, drifting rapidly eastward, Graham staggered out of the water and stood dripping on the bank.

Silently and undisturbed the river flowed along. The lone man regarded its placid surface with perplexity that quickly changed to open anxiety. He ran upstream, his clothes still shedding water, his mind eager yet fearing to see the other side of the bridge.

Wohl’s body grew visible through the concrete arch as the runner came nearer. Moisture squelched dismally in Graham’s boots while he pounded along the shred of bank beneath the arch and reached the police lieutenant’s quiet form.

Hastily combing wet hair from his forehead, Graham stooped over the other’s limp legs, wound his arms around them. His hands gripping the backs of Wohl’s cold thighs, Graham heaved himself upright, his muscles cracking under the other’s weight.

He hugged the body, looking downward at its dangling head. Water drooled from Wohl’s gaping mouth and over Graham’s boots. Graham shook him with a jerky upward motion, watching resultant drops. When no more came, he laid Wohl face downward, squatted astride him, placed wide, muscular hands over breathless ribs, began to press and relax with determined rhythm.

He was still working with an utterly weary but stubborn rocking motion when the body twitched and a watery rattle came from its throat. Half an hour later, he sat in the back of a hastily stopped gyrocar, his arms supporting Wohl’s racked form.

“Got a hell of a crack on the noggin, Bill,” wheezed Wohl. He coughed, gasped, let his head loll weakly on the other’s shoulder. “Stunned me at the start. Maybe it was the door. It faced upstream, and it slapped back on me. I sank, came up, sank again. I was breathing water.” His lungs made faint gurgling noises. “I feel like a month-old floater.”

“You’ll be all right,” Graham comforted.

“Goner… thought I was a goner. Said to myself this was the end. Hell of an end… just rubbish… garbage… in the river. Up and down, up and down, amid muck and bubbles, for ever and ever and ever.” He leaned forward, dribbling. Graham pulled him back again. “I was up… fighting like a maniac… lungs full. Broke top… and a goddam Viton grabbed me.”

“What?” shouted Graham.

“Viton got me,” Wohl repeated dully. “Felt its ghoulish fingers… feeling around… inside my brain… searching probing.” He coughed harshly. “All I remember.”

“They must have lugged you in to the bank,” declared Graham, excitedly. “If they’ve read your mind, they’ll anticipate our next moves.”

“Feeling around… in my brain,” murmured Wohl. He closed his eyes, breathed with vibrant, bronchial sounds.

Pursing his lips, Leamington asked, “Why didn’t they kill Wohl as they have done the others?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps they decided that he knows nothing really dangerous to them.” Bill Graham returned his superior’s steady stare. “Neither do I, for that matter—so don’t take it for granted that I’m apt to die on you every time I go out.”

“You don’t fool me,” Leamington scoffed. “It’s a marvel how your luck’s held out so far.”

Letting it pass, Graham said, “I’ll sure miss Art for the next few days.” He sighed gently. “Were you able to get me that data on Padilla?”

“We tried.” Leamington emitted a grunt of disgust. “Our man down there can discover sweet nothing. The authorities have their hands full and no time to bother with him.”

“Why? Have they got the usual attack of
mañana?”

“No, it’s not that. Buenos Aires was badly blitzed by the Asians shortly after we cabled. The city’s in a bad state.”

“Damn!” swore Graham. He bit his lips in vexation. “There goes one possible lead.”

“That leaves us the ham stations to check,” observed Leamington, dismally. “We’re on that job right now. It’ll take some time. Those blasted hams have a fondness for hiding themselves on mountain tops and in the depths of jungles. They pick the darnedest places.”

“Can’t you call them on the air?”

“Oh, yes, we can call them on the air—like I can call the wife when she’s someplace else. They listen out when the spirit moves them.” Sliding open a drawer, he extracted a sheet of paper, handed it across. “This came in just before you returned. It may mean something, or it may not. Does it convey anything to you?”

“United Press report,” read Graham, rapidly scanning the lines of type. “Professor Fergus McAndrew, internationally known atom-splitter, mysteriously disappeared this morning from his home in Kirkintilloch, Scotland.” He threw a sharp glance at the impassive Leamington, returned his attention to the sheet. “Vanished while in the middle of enjoying his breakfast, leaving his meal half eaten, his coffee still warm. Mrs. Martha Leslie, his elderly housekeeper, insists that he has been kidnaped by luminosities.”

“Well?” asked Leamington.

“Kidnaped—not killed! That’s queer!” The investigator frowned as his mind concentrated on this new aspect. “It looks as if he could not have known too much, else he’d have been left dead over his meal rather than snatched. Why snatch him if he was no menace?”

“That’s what gets me down.” For once in his disciplined life, Leamington permitted his feelings to gain the upper hand. He hammered on his desk, said loudly, “From the very beginning of this wacky affair we’ve been tangled in a mess of strings all of which lead to people who are corpses, or people who aren’t anything any longer. Every time we run after something we trip over a fresh cadaver. Every time we make a grab we grab a vacuum. Now they’ve started hoisting evidence clean out of existence. Not even a body.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone—like that! Where’s it going to end?
When
is it going to end—if ever it does end?”

“It’ll end when the last Viton ceases to be, or the last human being goes under.” Graham flourished the United Press report and changed the subject. “This McAndrew, I reckon, must have a mind fairly representative of the world’s best talent at this particular time.”

“So what?”

“They won’t content themselves with probing his mind, as they’ve been doing up to now. They’ll take his entire intellect to pieces and find what makes the wheels go round. I can’t see any other reason for making a snatch rather than the usual killing. My guess is that the Vitons have become uneasy, maybe scared, and they’ve taken him as a suitable subject for their super-surgery.” His eyes flamed with intensity that startled his listener. “They’re trying to measure an average in order to estimate probabilities. They’re losing confidence and want to know what’s coming to them. So they’ll weigh this McAndrew’s brain power, and from that they’ll deduce the likelihood of us being able to discover whatever they’re afraid of us finding.”

“And then?” Leamington hissed the question.

“We suspect that Padilla found something, maybe by design, or perhaps by accident, but we must also allow for the possibility that he was no more than a wild guesser who got wiped out deliberately to mislead us. A South American red herring.” Graham stood up, his tall form towering above his chief’s desk. He wagged an emphatic finger. “This kidnaping, if I’m right, means two things.”