Goodbye California (26 page)

‘Phony?’

‘Ah! So the documents do exist. I wonder why Morro wanted you to provide him with the names of engineers, drillers, oil-rig men. Even more, I wonder why twenty-six of them are missing.’

‘God knows what you’re talking about.’

‘And you. Watch TV this morning?’ LeWinter shook his head in a dazed and uncomprehending manner. ‘So perhaps you don’t know he’s
detonating a hydrogen bomb in Santa Monica Bay or thereabouts at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’ LeWinter made no reply and registered no expression, no doubt because he’d no expressions left to register. ‘For an eminent judge you do keep odd company, LeWinter.’

It was a measure of LeWinter’s mental distress that comprehension came so slowly. He said in a dull voice: ‘You were the man who was here last night?’

‘Yes.’ Ryder nodded to Jeff. ‘And this is Perkins. Remember Perkins? Patrolman Ryder. My son. Unless you’re blind and deaf you must know that your friend Morro holds two of our family captive. One of them, my daughter – my son’s sister – has been wounded. We feel kindly disposed to you. Well, LeWinter, apart from being as corrupt as all hell, a lecherous old goat, a traitor and accessory to murder, you’re also a patsy, a sucker, a fall-guy, a scape-goat – call it what you will. You were conned, LeWinter, just as you thought you were conning Donahure and Miss Ivanov and Hartman. Used as a red herring to set up a non-existent Russian connection.

‘Only two things I want to know: who gave you something and to whom did you give something? Who gave you the money, the code-book, the instructions to hire Miss Ivanov and to obtain the names and addresses of the now-missing twenty-six men – and to whom did
you
give the names and addresses?’

LeWinter eventually registered an expression: he clamped his lips shut. Jeff winced as his father stepped forward, his expression, or lack of it, not changing, a gun swinging in his hand. LeWinter shut his eyes, flung up a protective forearm, stepped quickly back, caught his heel in a throw rug and fell heavily, striking the back of his head against a chair. He lay on the floor for ten seconds, perhaps longer, then slowly sat up. He looked dazed, as if having difficulty in relating himself to the circumstances in which he found himself – and he was clearly not acting.

He said in a croaking voice: I’ve got a bad heart.’ Looking at and listening to him it was impossible to doubt it.

I’ll cry tomorrow. Meantime, you think your heart will last out long enough to let you get to your feet?’ Slowly, shaking, using both a chair and a table, LeWinter got to his unsteady feet. He still had to hang on to the table for support. Ryder remained unmoved. He said: ‘The man who gave you all those things. The man to whom you gave the names. Was it the same man?’

‘Call my doctor.’ LeWinter was clutching his chest. ‘God’s sake, I’ve already
had
two heart attacks.’ His face was registering an expression now. It was contorted in fear and pain. He clearly felt – and was probably right – that his life was in mortal danger, and was begging to have it saved. Ryder regarded him with the dispassionate eye of a medieval headsman.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Jeff looked at him in something close to horror but Ryder had eyes only for LeWinter. ‘Then I’ll have nothing on my conscience if you die and there won’t be a mark on you when the mortuary wagon comes to collect you. Was it the same man?’

‘Yes.’ A barely audible whisper.

‘The same man as called from Bakersfield?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ryder half-lifted his gun. LeWinter looked at him in defeat and despair and repeated: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

Jeff spoke for the first time and his voice was urgent. ‘He
doesn’t
know.’

‘I believe him.’ Ryder hadn’t looked away from LeWinter. ‘Describe this man.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Or won’t?’

‘He wore a hood. Before God, he wore a hood.’

‘If Donahure got ten thousand dollars, then you got a lot more. Probably a great deal more. Give him a receipt?’

‘No.’ LeWinter shuddered. ‘Just said if I would break my word he would break my back. He could have done it too. Biggest man I ever saw.’

‘Ah!’ Ryder paused, seemed to relax, smiled briefly and went on, far from encouragingly: ‘He could still come and do it. Look at all the trouble it would save the law and the prison hospital.’ He
produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them round LeWinter’s wrists.

The judge’s voice was weak and lacked conviction. ‘You have no arrest warrant.’

‘Don’t be simple-minded and don’t make me laugh. I don’t want any vertebrae snapping. I don’t want you getting on the wrong phone. I don’t want any escape attempt. And I don’t want any suicide.’ He looked at the photograph he still held. I’ll be a long time forgetting. I want to see you rot in San Quentin.’ He led him towards the door, stopped and looked at Parker and Jeff. ‘Observe, if you will. I never laid a finger on him.’

Jeff said: ‘Major Dunne will never believe it. Neither do I.’

‘You used us!’ Burnett’s face was white and bitter and he was shaking with such uncontrollable anger that his Glenfiddich was slopping over on to the floor of Morro’s study, a shocking waste of which he was uncharacteristically oblivious. ‘You double-crossed us. You evil, wicked bastard! A beautiful job, wasn’t it, the way you spliced together our recordings and your own recording?’

Morro raised an admonitory finger. ‘Come now, Professor. This helps no one. You really must learn to control yourself.’

‘Why the hell should he?’ Schmidt’s fury was as great as Burnett’s, but he had it under better control. All five physicists were there, together with Morro, Dubois and two guards. ‘We’re not thinking just about our good names, our reputations. We’re thinking about lives, maybe thousands of them, and if those lives are lost we’re going to be held responsible. Morally at least. Every viewer, every listener, every reader in the State is going to
be convinced that the hydrogen device you left off the coast is in the one-and-a-half range. We know damn well it’s in the three-and-a-half. But because people will believe – they can’t help believing – that it was all part of the same recording they’re going to imagine that what you said was said with our tacit approval. You – you monster! Why did you do it?’

‘Effect.’ Morro was unruffled. ‘Very elementary psychology. The detonation of this three-and-a-half megaton device is going to have rather spectacular consequences, and I want people to say to themselves: if this is the effect of a mere one-and-a-half megaton what in the name of heaven will the cataclysmic effects of thirty-five megatons be like? It will lend persuasive weights to my demands, don’t you think? In the climate of terror all things are possible.’

‘I can believe anything of you,’ Burnett said. He looked at the shattered wreck of what had once been Willi Aachen. ‘Anything. Even that you are prepared to put thousands of lives at risk in order to achieve a psychological effect. You can have no idea what this
tsunamai
will be like, what height it will reach, whether or not the Newport-Inglewood Fault will trigger an earthquake. And you don’t care. The effect is all.’

‘I think you exaggerate, Professor. I think that, where height is concerned, people will leave a very considerable margin of safety between the water levels I suggested and the worst they can
fear. As for the Newport-Inglewood Fault, only a madman would remain in the area at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I do not visualize throngs of people heading for the Hollywood Park Race Track – if they head there, at that time of the morning, which I don’t know. I think your fears are mainly groundless.’

‘Mainly! Mainly! You mean only a few thousand may drown?’

‘I have no cause to love American people.’ Morro still maintained his monolithic calm. ‘They have not exactly been kind to mine.’

There was a brief silence then Healey said in a low voice: ‘This is even worse than I feared. Race, religion, politics, I don’t know. The man’s a zealot, a fanatic’

‘He’s nuts.’ Burnett reached for the bottle.

‘Judge LeWinter wishes to make a voluntary statement,’ Ryder said.

‘Does he now?’ Dunne peered at the trembling, fearful figure, a pale and almost unimaginable shadow of the imposing figure who had so long dominated the Centre Court. ‘Is that the case, Judge?’

Ryder was impatient. ‘Sure it is.’

‘Look, Sergeant, I was asking the judge.’

‘We were there,’ Parker said. ‘Jeff and I. There was no coercion, no force, the only time Sergeant Ryder touched him was to put on handcuffs. We wouldn’t perjure ourselves, Major Dunne.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ He turned to Delage. ‘Next door. I’ll take his statement in a minute.’

‘One moment before he goes,’ Ryder said. ‘Any word about Hartman?’

Dunne permitted himself his first smile. ‘For once, some luck. Just come in. Hartman, it seems, has been living out there for some years. With his widowed sister, which accounts for the fact that his name was not in the phone book. Didn’t spend much time there until a year or so ago. Travelled a lot. You’d never guess what his business is – well, was, till last year.’

‘Oil rigs.’

Dunne said without heat: ‘Damn you, Ryder, you spoil a man’s simplest pleasures. Yes. Boss roustabout. First-class record. How did you know?’

‘I didn’t. Who were his sponsors – you know, character referees?’

‘Two prominent local business men and – well?’

‘Donahure and LeWinter.’

‘Indeed.’

Ryder looked at LeWinter. ‘You and Hartman made up that list of drillers and engineers together, you from your court cases and extensive briefs from the oil companies, Hartman from his field experience?’

LeWinter said nothing.

‘Well, at least he doesn’t deny it. Tell me, LeWinter, was it his job to recruit those men?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘To kidnap them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, then, to contact them, one way or another?’

‘Yes.’

‘And deliver them?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Yes or no.’

LeWinter gathered together the shreds of his dignity and turned to Dunne. ‘I am being subjected to harassment.’

‘If that’s what you choose to call it,’ Dunne said unsympathetically. ‘Proceed, Sergeant.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes, damn you, yes.’

‘So, to be obvious, he must have known where to deliver those men after recruitment, voluntary or not So, assuming it
was
Morro who was responsible for their disappearance, Hartman had a direct line to Morro or knew how to contact him. You must agree with that.’

LeWinter sat down in a chair. He looked more like a cadaver than ever. ‘If you say so.’

‘And, of course, you and Donahure had the same line.’

‘No!’ The denial was immediate and almost vehement.

‘Well.’ Ryder was approving. ‘That’s more like it.’

Dunne said: ‘You believe him? That he’s no line on Morro?’

‘Sure. If he had, he’d be dead by now. A sweet lad, this Morro. Even playing the cards close to the chest he never lets his left hand know what the right is doing. Only Hartman knew. Morro thought that Hartman was totally in the clear. How was he to know, how was anyone to guess that I’d trace him because of the alarm linking LeWinter’s safe and Hartman’s office? Morro certainly knew nothing about that. If he did, he’d never have exposed LeWinter and Donahure by planting misleading evidence on them. But Morro had taken no chances He’d given strict orders to both LeWinter and Donahure that if anyone got a line on Hartman, the only man who had a line to him, then Hartman was to be eliminated. It’s really all so simple, isn’t it?’ He looked consideringly at LeWinter, then back at Dunne. ‘Remove that pillar of justice, will you? He makes me sick.’

When he’d gone, Dunne said: ‘A fair morning’s work. I under-estimated you, Sergeant Ryder. Not breaking his neck, I mean. I’m beginning to wonder if I could have done the same.’

‘You’re either born with a heart of gold or you aren’t. Any word from the boss-man – Barrow, isn’t it? – about what kind of bombs this Professor Aachen was designing when Morro snatched him?’

‘I phoned him. He said he’d contact the AEC and call back. He’s not a man to waste time. No reply from him yet. He was curious why we wanted to find out.’

‘Don’t rightly know myself. I said I thought Morro was trying to mislead us, that’s all. What you call an outside chance of nothing. And speaking of Morro – there wouldn’t be any word from Manila?’

Dunne looked at his watch, then in a quietly exasperated patience at Ryder. ‘You’ve been gone exactly one hour and five minutes. Manila, I would remind you, is not just a couple of blocks down the road. Would there be anything else?’

‘Well, as you’re offering.’ Dunne momentarily closed his eyes. ‘Carlton’s friend back in Illinois mentioned a very big man in the group of weirdos Carlton was flirting with. LeWinter has just mentioned, in a very scared voice, a similar person who’s threatened to break his back. Could be one and the same man. There can’t be many eighty-inchers around.’

‘Eighty-inchers?’

‘Six foot eight. That’s what Carlton’s pal said. Shouldn’t be difficult to check whether anyone of that size has been charged or convicted at some time in this State. Nor should it be very difficult to find if such a character is a member of any of the oddball organisations in California. You can’t
hide
a man that size, and apparently this person doesn’t go to much trouble to keep hidden. And then there’s the question of helicopters.’

‘Ah.’

‘Not just any helicopter. A special helicopter. It would be nice if you could trace it.’

‘A trifle.’ Dunne was being heavily sarcastic. ‘First, there are more helicopters in this State than there are in any comparable region on earth. Second, the FBI is stretched to its limits –’

‘Stretched to its limits! Look, Major, I’m in no mood for light humour this morning. Eight thousand agents stretched to their limits and what have they achieved? Zero. I could even ask what they are doing and the answer could be the same. When I said a special helicopter I meant a very, very special helicopter. The one that delivered this atom bomb to Yucca Flat. Or have your eight thousand agents already got that little matter in hand?’

‘Explain.’

Ryder turned to his son. ‘Jeff, you’ve said you know that area. Yucca and Frenchman Flats.’

‘I’ve been there.’

‘Would a vehicle leave tracks up there?’

‘Sure. Not everywhere. There’s a lot of rock. But there’s also shingle and rubble and sand. Chances are good, yes.’

‘Now then, Major. Would any of the eight thousand have been checking on tracks – trucks, cars, dune buggies – in the area of the crater: those, that is, that they didn’t obliterate in their mad dash to the scene of the crime?’

‘I wasn’t there myself. Delage?’ Delage picked up a phone. ‘Helicopters? An interesting speculation?’

‘I think so. And I also think that that, if I were Morro, is the way I’d have dumped that hydrogen
bomb in the Pacific. Cuts out all this tricky – and maybe attention-catching – business of trucking the bomb to the coast and then transferring it to a boat.’

Dunne was doubtful. ‘There’s still an awful lot of helicopters in the State.’

‘Let’s limit it to the communes, the oddballs, the disenchanted.’

‘With a road transport system like we’ve got, who would want –’

‘Let’s limit it to the mountains. Remember, we’d more or less decided that Morro and his friends have sought out high ground.’

‘Well, the more extreme the group the higher they tend to go. I suppose some would require a chopper to get any place. But helicopters come expensive. They’d be hired on an hourly basis, and you could hardly persuade a hired pilot to carry a hydrogen bomb –’

‘Maybe the pilot isn’t hired. Nor the helicopter. Then there’s the matter of a truck. Trucks. For the transport of weapons-grade material – the stuff taken from San Ruffino.’

Dunne said: ‘You have that, Leroy?’ Leroy nodded and, like Delage, reached for a telephone.

‘Thanks.’ Ryder pondered briefly. ‘That’s all. See you around – some time this afternoon.’

Jeff looked at his watch. ‘Don’t forget. Forty-five minutes. Morro will be on the air with his terms or demands or blackmail or whatever.’

‘Probably not worth listening to. Anyway, you can tell me all about it.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Public library. The study of contemporary history. I’ve fallen way behind in my reading.’

‘I see.’ Jeff watched the door swing to behind Ryder, then looked at Dunne. ‘I don’t see. He’s all right?’

Dunne was thoughtful. ‘If he isn’t, what do you make of us?’

Ryder arrived home some ninety minutes later to find Jeff and Parker drinking beer in front of the television. Ryder seemed in remarkably good spirits. He wasn’t smiling broadly, far less laughing, nor was he cracking any jokes, for that was not his way. But for a man with two of his family held hostage and the threat of being drowned and vaporized far from being an impossibility, he was composed and relaxed. He looked at the TV screen where literally hundreds of small craft, some with sails raised, were milling about in hopeless confusion, apparently travelling at random and ramming each other with a frequency that was matched only by a blind determination. It was an enclosed harbour with half a dozen quays thrusting out towards a central channel: the room to manoeuvre was minimal, the chaos absolute.

‘My word,’ Ryder said. ‘This is something. Just, I imagine, like Trafalgar or Jutland. Those were very confused sea battles too.’

‘Dad.’ Jeff was heroically patient. ‘That’s Marina del Rey in Los Angeles. The yachtsmen are trying to leave.’

‘I know the place. The lads of the California Yacht Club and the Del Rey Yacht Club displaying their usual nautical composure, not to say stoicism. At this rate they’ll take a week to sort themselves out. What’s the great rush? Incidentally this will pose a problem for Morro. This must be happening at every harbour in Los Angeles. He said any vessel moving into the area between Santa Cruz Island and Santa Catalina would result in the detonation of the bomb. A couple of hours and there will be a couple of thousand craft in those waters. Careless of Morro. Anybody could have foreseen this.’

Parker said: ‘According to the announcer, nobody intends to go anywhere near there. They’re going to use the Santa Barbara and San Pedro Channels and go as far north and south up the coast as possible.’

‘Lemmings. Even a small boat can ride out a tidal wave at sea. Not much more than a fast-travelling ripple, really. It’s only when it reaches shallow water or estuaries that it starts to pile up into what people regard as a tidal wave. Why all this confusion, anyway?’

‘Panic,’ Parker said. ‘The owners of smaller craft are trying to lift them out of the water and trail them away but there are facilities available for only a few per cent at a time, and those are so
overloaded that they keep breaking down. Diesel and petrol supplies are almost exhausted, and those that have been fuelled are so hemmed in by craft looking for fuel that they can’t get out. And then, of course, there are craft taking off under full power with their mooring ropes still attached.’ Parker shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t think urban Californians are really a sea-going race.’