Assignment to Disaster Read online

  He tried another reach. "Why did you go to Prince John tonight, Miss Padgett? I know your family home is there, but nobody lives there now, do they? Why did you go there tonight?"

  "I wanted to."

  "Just like that? You wanted to?"

  "I often go there."

  "But why tonight?"

  "No special reason."

  "What did you do there, or put there, or take from there?"

  "Nothing."

  "We can find out, you know. We'll have to search. And time is apparently important. It's important that we find your brother before he talks about his work."

  Silence.

  And the hating.

  He smiled at her, although he wanted to slap her. "What's the matter with me? Two heads? Green hair?"

  "You people did enough to Calvin," she said bitterly.

  "What?"

  "Last year. The Committee. Alleging he was disloyal. It was a terrible ordeal for Calvin. I began hating you then."

  "He's that Calvin Padgett?"

  "Yes. That one."

  Damn Swayney, the pursy-mouthed fool. The idiot. Waking him from a sound sleep, no briefing at all. He remembered about Calvin Padgett, and he was surprised to remember Padgett with sympathy. A nice-looking guy, one you warmed to instinctively, the kind you made friends with easily and liked and bought drinks for. Brilliant. Defiant. Denying any membership in the organizations that had his name down there on their rolls in black and white as a member. He was cleared. Judged loyal. A mistake had been made somewhere, but nobody was sure just what. Now he had disappeared. A royal mistake. Gone with some damned secret that could rip the world apart, to judge by the quiet, convulsive, desperate efforts being made to find him before it was too late. He looked at the girl with less warmth.

  "So you think your brother was hounded, mistreated, abused?"

  "I do."

  "He was given his job back, in a highly ticklish, sensitive position."

  "Only because the work couldn't have gone on without him!"

  "And you feel persecuted by us, too?"

  "I don't want to talk about it," she said.

  He was angry now. He thought of telling her what it could mean, putting personal pride, spite, petty hatred over the safety of the country. Hell, she would say he was waving the flag. Well, he was willing to wave it. He wanted to keep it waving. But surely she knew all that. There was an innocence in her that he could sense even through his anger. There was something else that kept her mouth shut. He looked for the fear in her eyes. It was still there. She glanced away from him.

  "Don't," she murmured.

  "It's important. Tell me where he is."

  "I can't tell you."

  "You can't — or you won't?"

  She gave no answer.

  "Did somebody warn you to keep quiet? Those men in the car, for instance?"

  She shook her head.

  "You still don't know who they are or what they want with you?"

  "No, no, no."

  He sighed.

  The telephone rang. Burritt Swayney.

  "Anything, Sam?"

  "Not yet"

  "What in hell?"

  "Yeah," Durell said.

  "She there with you now?"

  "Yes."

  "No talkee?"

  "No washee."

  "There's nothing on the punk Callahan ventilated between the ears. Absolutely nothing. We're working in high gear. FBI files checked negative. No identification on the body. Funny, hey?"

  "I'm laughing," Durell said.

  "And Kelly and French lost the black sedan."

  "I expected that."

  "Sam, you've got to find that man."

  "Make a song out of it," Durell said, and hung up.

  It was full daylight outside, suddenly. When he looked at Deirdre Padgett, he saw lhal she was crying silently, the tears sliding wet down her cheeks.

  Chapter Four

  When Durell left the apartment, a new crew took over the watch on the girl. Lew Osbourn was in charge, a gangling, pipe-smoking man with thinning hair and warm, friendly eyes. In Cologne, Lew had once saved Durell's life from a fanatic sniper perched in the skeletal ruins of the town. Lew had a wife, Sidonie, a French girl he had brought home from the wars. And now he had two children, twin girls. They lived in a new development out near Alexandria.

  In the lobby of the apartment house, Lew sent his men to various points of vantage and personally took the front hallway himself. He winked at Durell.

  "Go on over to the house and Sid will make you breakfast. You look beat, you stupid Cajun."

  Durell grinned. "Brioches and hot chocolate?"

  "Hell, no. I'm teaching Sid how to cook American style. Buttermilk pancakes and black coffee. I hear the babe upstairs is quite something."

  "Look out for rough stuff, Lew. Can I take a rain check?"

  "The twins miss you. Especially the candy you bring."

  Durell grinned again. "You're a lucky dog."

  "Hell, who's stopping you from the same?"

  "Maybe if Sid had a sister," Durell said. "See you, Lew."

  He went out into the light of the new day, found his car parked under the poplar trees where he had left it at three in the morning, and drove through the winding, early-morning streets of Washington, N.W. It was the first of July, and it was already hot, as he had expected. He felt better for having talked to Lew, after Deirdre Padgett's silent tears.

  He had breakfast at a stand on Fourteenth. Stale coffee and doughnuts, left over from the night before. The morning sun made the wet streets steam. At seven o'clock he drove toward Rock Creek Park and 20 Annapolis Street.

  The brass plaque on the gray-stone front of the big Georgian house read simply, "The Johnson-Kimball Company," in dignified letters. He felt gritty and tired, his shirt already sticking to his back as he entered. As he went through the Italian marble foyer he heard the busy rattle of office machines in the cover offices that formed a façade for the real business conducted in the building. The elevator man was young and husky. He looked at Durell with photographic eyes and said, "Good morning, Mr. Durell. Hazel's called down twice to see if you showed."

  "Thanks, Alex." Durell went up in the elevator to the third floor, passed two doors that looked wooden but that were built of armor-plate steel, and down a long corridor into the adjacent gray-stone house. All the light was artificial, since none of the windows were really windows. When he opened his office door, Hazel looked up and quickly gathered some papers from her desk.

  "Hi, Sam. You, too, eh? Nobody got any sleep last night. Swayney is waiting for you."

  "Don't fret, Hazel."

  He went into his inner office and flicked a finger across the neat stack of personal mail that included an alumni bulletin from Yale, a clothing bill, a rent bill, a letter from a couple he had befriended in England during the war, and a battered, dog-eared envelope postmarked Bayou Peche Rouge and addressed in fine copperplate. He put the last in his pocket and went to the outer office again and Hazel.

  "Set up an interview for me with Dickinson McFee, will you, please?"

  She looked appalled. "The General? If you top Swayney, he'll pout for a month."

  "Can't be helped. I need the information. Set it up, eh?"

  On the second floor Durell paused and took a handkerchief and dried his palms meticulously and then walked through a room that contained a battery of electronic computers, through another room where charts and graphs covered the walls, and a Class R administrator was struggling to analyze Middle Eastern reports while teletype bells and phones jangled next door. Swayney's office was beyond all these.

  Burritt Swayney, as chief of section, rated a large, airy room with an air-conditioner snoring quietly in a window overlooking a tidy, enclosed garden. Swayney was round and plump and pale, with a habit of making sucking sounds with his small mouth. His eyes were the coldest, palest blue Durell had ever seen. The man was a human memory machine and a confirmed lecher. Durell didn't
like him, but for the sake of the work, he got along with him.

  "Oh. Sam, hey?" Swayney said. He waved plump hands. "Sit you down."

  Durell sat. "I want some facts, Burritt."

  "Sure. Sorry there was no time for a thorough briefing. I've got most of the poop. You drop everything else until this is over."

  "It's that important?"

  "Nothing else matters. Find Calvin Padgett."

  "Tell me."

  Swayney closed his eyes and recited: "Born in Prince John. Parents, Franklin Padgett, Mary Sprague Lewis. Good stock. Old aristocracy. Lots of money then. Two siblings — John Franklin Padgett, Deirdre Sprague Padgett. When their investments turned sour, father and mother turned on a gas oven and went out on the kitchen floor. The oldest boy, John, was then eleven. He found them. Something happened, nobody knows what — explosion. John's leg injured. Still a cripple. Brilliant man. Physicist. In charge of electronics at Las Tiengas."

  "What?" Durell said. "Calvin's brother was there, too?"

  "And still there. Why?"

  "Nothing," Durell said. "I didn't know about it."

  "Not important. John is perfectly sound. What else?"

  "Calvin had trouble with the Senate Investigating Committee."

  Swayney nodded, his round head loose on his pipe-stem neck. "Somebody used his name to join various subversive organizations. Calvin was cleared, put back to work under his brother. John vouched for him."

  "I see. Anything on the girl?"

  "Two years younger than Calvin. Goucher graduate. Brilliant in her own way, works on the newspapers here. Had an unhappy love affair, boy killed in Korea. Keeps to herself since then. Passionately devoted to family, keeps the home fires burning. Quite a babe. Well stacked, I hear."

  "Stop licking your chops. Anything else on her?"

  "Devoted to Calvin. Cool toward John. Understandable. John is much older than Calvin and Deirdre." Swayney's eyes popped wide open, glacial blue. "Why won't the girl talk, hey?"

  "I gather she resents the treatment Calvin got last year."

  "Doesn't she understand how important this is?"

  "I don't know," Durell said.

  "Can we make her talk?"

  Durell shrugged. "Twist her arm. But I don't think it will work."

  "What about the men who tried to grab her? She say anything?"

  "A blank," Durell said.

  "I identified the meat, finally," Swayney said. "A steel worker named Stanislaus Lujec. Immigrant, hard-working type, no record of crime or subversive affiliations. Looked at his hands, figured his occupation, checked Pittsburgh. Neat, hey?"

  "Pin a rose on yourself."

  Swayney leaned forward. "You sore about something?"

  "I'm in the dark. I want to know more about this."

  "Wait a minute. Two hoods try to grab the girl. Why? She knows where her brother is, hey? And they want to know, too. They'd like to get Calvin Padgett. It's neck and neck, who gets him first. And maybe he'll spill everything to the newspapers beforehand. If he does, slit your throat, Sam. Hell breaks loose."

  "Why?" Durell asked.

  "Cyclops."

  "I asked you before. What is Cyclops?"

  "Something. A gimmick. If the world hears about it, kaput. Maybe bombers come over to blow Las Tiengas off the map. It's that hot."

  "You said we had five days to find Calvin Padgett," Durell said. "Why five days?"

  "Cyclops goes up on the Fourth of July. Symbolic date. You stand corrected. There are only four days left."

  Durell said angrily, "He must be somewhere!"

  "Everything else is covered. Your job is the sister. Calvin called her, we know that. She knows something, hey? You squeeze it out of her."

  "She hates us all," Durell said.

  Swayney grinned. "Put some wax on your mustache. Make her talk."

  Durell got up and went out.

  General Dickinson McFee was dictating a footnote for the minority opinion to be appended to the weekly intelligence estimate being readied for the President's desk, with copies for the intelligence heads of Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Chiefs, the State Department, the AEC, and the FBL McFee was a small man, narrow-shouldered, with a bulging intellectual forehead and pale-brown, tired eyes. You forgot how small he was physically after you were with him any length of time. After a moment he seemed to fill the room. He waved Durell to a metal chair while he continued talking into a tape recorder. Durell smoked and waited.

  Then McFee said, "Sam, you need some sleep. You can spare two hours, I suppose. Who is with the girl now?"

  "Lew Osbourn."

  "He's good, but not that good. You'll have to crack her. Sleep, and then go back there. Talk to her. Take an hour or so. If she won't tell, bring her down here."

  "All right. But I need something to convince her. I'm not even convinced myself."

  "Anything I can do…"

  "Am I a good enough security risk to know about Cyclops?" Durell asked bluntly.

  McFee got up and shut the office door and then returned to the desk and snapped off two switches placed in the kneehole. Nothing changed in his small, hard face. Durell watched him and smoked his cigarette and waited, and the General said, "Why do you want to know?"

  Durell said, "So I can talk sense. If I'm not convinced, I can't convince the girl. I think she's all right. Just mixed up a little. I think she'll do the right thing, if it's put to her correctly."

  "She must not be told about Cyclops."

  "All right. And me?"

  "Aside from the men working under Dr. John Padgett at Las Tiengas, only half a dozen others here in Washington really know about it. Why should you know, too?"

  Durell stood up. "I see. Thanks anyway, General."

  He got to the door before McFee told him to wait. He sat down again. He felt tense, hungry, and angry. He didn't know why. The girl was in him, in the back of his mind, and he saw again the ugly animal of fear crawling over her face. His throat felt dry and harsh, and he crushed out his cigarette, noting that he had smoked too much this morning. Dickinson McFee tapped on the desk with a pencil.

  "Colonel Mike Larabee is chief security man out at the Las Tiengas Base," McFee said. "Both Padgetts were doing a fine job. You know the type of installation it is?" Durell shook his head. McFee went on: "It has top priority on guided missiles. They've worked on all classifications out there in the desert; those machines don't need men, they think for themselves. They carry tactical lightweight A-bombs. And they've experimented with aerodynamic shapes, functions, propulsive mechanisms, long-range guidance. Everything you can think of. But at Las Tiengas they've gone way to hell and gone beyond ballistic missiles like the Corporal or Honest John. They've worked on rockets, turbojets, pulse jets, ram jets; they've aimed for altitude, guidance, accuracy in beam-riders as in the Nike and Viking, distance hi the Regulus and Matador. Hell, I don't have to break it down for you, Sam. You know what our space scientists have done, and what the other side can do. Well, Cyclops tops them all."

  "In what way?" Durell asked.

  "Cyclops does not come down."

  "She free-flights in space?"

  "Cyclops orbits at one thousand miles up, circling the globe once every ninety minutes. They hope. Target date is the Fourth."

  "I didn't think we were up to that yet," Durell said.

  "Nobody thinks so. A lot of money went into it. More than for the Manhattan Project, which developed the A-bomb. We've compressed maybe twenty-five, maybe fifty years of research into the last five. Money talks. Organized effort wins. The thing will work."

  "And Calvin Padgett knows all about it?"

  McFee nodded. "He worked on the brain for Cyclops. It's all in his head. Suppose he tells the newspapers about it? The world will rock. Or suppose the other side gets their hands on him? Hell to pay."

  "Why did he run?"

  "Nerves," McFee said. "Emotional disturbance. It's not clear to me, but he broke down somewhere. He was under medical care, but he escaped
. Nobody knows how."

  "He's a maniac?"

  "Hell, no. Psychotic, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they bought him and he's already across the ocean. Who knows? All we can do is hope it's not so. You know the only clue we've got is his sister. We hope she knows where he's hiding out, and why. Your job is to find that out for us."

  Durell stood up. "I appreciate your confidence. I'll get what we need from the girl. She's got the fright bug from somewhere, but I'll try to break it down."

  Frowning, Dickinson McFee tapped the pencil against his teeth. 'There is one more thing about Cyclops. She's to be the arbiter of peace, according to the top brass. She circles the earth like a Valkyrie, and if I may mix time and place in my speech, she carries a sword of Damocles poised at the throat of any who may be our enemies."

  Durell was startled. "Cyclops will be armed?"

  "To the hilt. Policy figures there isn't time to build two of them and just use Mark One for test and research. Cyclops goes up with a warhead and all that will be left will be the man with the push button to make her drop. I told you, we covered twenty-five or more years in the last five. There will be a new star in the heavens after the Fourth of July. What's the matter, Sam?"

  "I don't know if I like it."

  "Nobody likes it. It scares you, eh?"

  "Yes," Durell said. "Doesn't it scare you, General?"

  McFee grinned for the first time. "My innards have been green ever since I was briefed on it. Welcome to the club, Sam."