Severed Key (21 page)

“Shoot now!” Sandovar challenged. “Shoot me and we’ll both die!”

Simon couldn’t find the gun. Cramped for space, the karate blow delivered to the back of Sandovar’s neck was far from lethal, but it did pull his hands from the steering wheel. Simon leaned forward and tried to steer the vehicle from the back seat. Sandovar didn’t move but his foot seemed to be caught on the accelerator because the car didn’t lose speed. Glimpsing a vacant lot just ahead, Simon spun the wheel and the car bounced over the low kerb and careened across the dry earth. The bounce dislodged Sandovar’s foot and the speedometer needle dropped sharply; but not soon enough to avoid the heavy woven wire fencing on the far side of the lot. Simon ducked behind the seat and braced himself for the crash. It came with a shower of windscreen glass as a hollow steel fence pole fell across the hood. The car stopped amid the ceaseless wailing of the horn.

Simon climbed out of the wreckage and began to run. The vacant lot ended at an alleyway. Reaching it he paused to look back and saw that Sandovar was out of the car and staggering towards the street. The horn was still wailing and would soon draw attention, so there was no going back. Simon ran on down the alleyway until it led to a street with some traffic and a few parked cars. He found the doorway of an abandoned store and ducked into it to catch his breath. While he waited, the street lights blinked on and a young man carrying a bag of groceries and a carton of beer approached one of the parked cars. Simon dug his wallet out of his coat pocket. By the time the man had unlocked the car Simon was at his shoulder with a twenty-dollar bill in his hand.

“My car broke down,” he said, “and I’ve got to meet somebody at the harbour. I can spare the twenty if you can spare the time.”

He found Jack Keith waiting in the parking lot where they had met hours earlier. Keith was in the Jaguar. The blue sedan was gone.

“You’re lucky to have a car,” he told Simon. “I traded my heap to the ‘copter pilot for the extra flight. He took his wife and nephews as passengers to make it look good.”

“It looked good,” Simon said. “Tell you about it sometime. I’ve got to call Hannah.”

He put in a call to Hannah’s room at the hotel and a man answered. “I want to speak to Hannah Lee,” Simon said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Lieutenant Howard, LAPD, and you can’t speak to Miss Lee.”

“Why not?” Simon demanded. “I’m her lawyer. Where is she?”

“Right here—eating caviar and drinking champagne. She says it revives her strength.” “Revives? From what?”

“From damn near skewering the waiter with her cane which happens to have a sword in it.”

“A sword? How did you get into the room?”

“Somebody named Chester called me. Now I’m trying to find out why Angelo Cerva’s son-in-law came in here pushing a tray with a loaded automatic under the napkin. Drake? You are Drake, aren’t you? Do you hear me? What do you know about this?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Simon said weakly. “And don’t let Hannah have too much champagne. She has a bad heart.”

“You,” Lieutenant Howard answered, “have got to be kidding.”

SIMON DIDN’T SEE Hannah for about eight hours. He had too much to do. He had to contact the AEC and reach their special investigator named Franklin, and he had to tell Franklin about his partner, Pridoux, and what was about to happen to a shipment of used uranium that was being trucked out of the San Marco generator station under cover of darkness. When he mentioned the shipment Franklin knew he wasn’t talking to a crank. He got in touch with the State Police and they waited for the trucks to roll—waited and let them roll because there was a chance that Sandovar hadn’t been able to call back the hijacker’s trucks and that they would drive right into a trap.

At a little past midnight, Simon drove the Jaguar into an all-night truck stop where the highway threaded across the wide silence of the desert and watched the big black sedan with DC plates slide behind the garage of the adjoining station house. Half a dozen diesels were already parked in the yard and along the shoulder, but there was plenty of room behind the coffee shop for the trucks from San Marco when they thundered in off the highway. Federal regulations would have called for armed guards on government-owned atomic materials, but this was shipment of property from private industry and there was nothing other than the similarity of the trailers to those Simon had seen at the Gerard Rentals garage to distinguish the trucks from any of the other commercial vehicles at the truck stop. The drivers alighted and went inside the coffee shop. Minutes later a pair of identical trucks entered the driveway and pulled alongside the San Marco trailers. Each truck carried three men. Two served as look-outs while the others set about methodically unhitching the trailers of both their own and the San Marco units and then switching diesels in an operation that, when completed, left the San Marco trucks looking exactly the way they had looked on arrival while the cargo moved slowly back to the highway attached to the diesels from Cerva’s garage.

As soon as the second truck had pulled out of the driveway, Simon got out of his car and walked to the back of the station where Franklin was waiting in the sedan. Franklin was talking on the telephone when Simon opened the door and got in beside him. He completed the conversation and switched on the ignition and the lights. The sedan moved slowly out to the driveway and then on to the highway.

“By this time, Drake, you must understand why no effort was made to stop the hijackers while they were switching cargoes. We have a man in the coffee shop who was detailed to keep the San Marco drivers’ attention if they finished too soon.”

“They should have left somebody with the trucks,” Simon said.

“I doubt if that would have made any difference. This is a well organized job. Six men against two gives a definite advantage to the mob. Now they think they’re in the clear. If the trucks had headed back towards the city we could just about guess they were going back to the truckyard at Gerard Rentals. Instead, they’re going farther out into the desert. I was studying that map in the console beside you while we waited. There’s a pencil flashlight with it. See what you think.”

Simon picked up the map and the flashlight. The map was folded to the area they were traversing and Franklin had circled the site of a small airport about thirty miles away.

“You figure they’re going to fly the stuff out,” Simon said.

“It looks that way. Of course, they may have a warehouse somewhere that we know nothing about and intend to store it for a time. They wouldn’t have to hurry. If their scheme had worked, the drivers of the San Marco shipment wouldn’t know they had been robbed until the trucks reached the depot in southern Illinois where it was to be reprocessed. Nobody checks that kind of cargo on the way. When it’s sealed, it stays sealed.”

Lights were flashing in Franklin’s rear-view mirror. He pulled sharply to the right and a huge rig thundered by. Somebody stuck a flashlight out of the cab and signalled as it passed and Simon could see Franklin’s big square face screw almost into a smile.

“Federals,” he said. “You didn’t give us much warning, but we were ready. There have been other heists like this—on a smaller scale. We knew it took organization, and when Angie Cerva suddenly moved out of his territory and went west it seemed like a good idea to keep a check on him. Then we saw him with this fellow who called himself Johnny Sands. The talk was that Sands wanted to buy a piece of Las Vegas and that seemed to explain the move.”

“I suppose Pridoux advanced that theory.”

Franklin was silent for a few moments. “I liked the man,” he said. “It hurts to have something like that hit so close. Why the hell does medical treatment have to cost so damn much? Why does it have to cost anything? It should be something anybody can have when it’s needed. Hell, some rich old guy who’s three-quarters senile can be kept alive for years if he wants to live and some young person without the scratch has to die when the bank account goes dry. Where’s the democracy in that?”

“Be careful,” Simon said. “Somebody may think you’re a socialist and go for your job.”

“To hell with that! People can think. They may get confused but sooner or later they start thinking. When they think long enough they do something about it. The Declaration of Independence says something about ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ doesn’t it? Well, you can’t have much liberty or happiness if you can’t afford to stay alive. Speaking of money—the police haven’t found that suitcase yet. They found Sandovar’s car cracked up in that vacant lot where you said it would be, but he was gone and so was the suitcase. How much was there in that bag?”

“I didn’t count it,” Simon said. “There might have been as much as a million.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. There were plenty of wheels to be greased: Pridoux’s cut, six muscles on the trucks, the set-up at the garage and the transportation out of the country. Hey, look. The trucks are turning off to the left. It must be the airport all right.”

“And it’s being covered, I suppose.”

“Like a floral wreath over a casket. Stay in the car when we get there. Somebody’s liable to get hurt.”

It was an old airport that had been built for some war or other and then left to the desert winds until a land developer decided to restore it for commuter use. The restoration hadn’t progressed far—a tight money casualty. There were two hangars, one of which was open and lighted, and a Cessna Fairlane that had apparently just landed was being taxied off the main runway when the first of the trucks rolled through the gates. For the last mile Franklin had driven without lights. The truck that passed them on the highway had turned off on a narrow road that skirted the airport and approached from the other side. Both hijacking trucks were on the field before the truck carrying the officers switched on its lights and poked a merciless spot directly into the first cab. Simon never saw where the other officers came from because one of Cerva’s muscles immediately shot out the light and Franklin steered the big sedan away from the ensuing barrage. Parking alongside the first hangar, he opened the door and ran off in the direction of the gunfire. Unarmed, Simon had no place to go until he saw a big man carrying a suitcase run out of the shelter of the hangar towards the open door of the cabin of the small plane. He tossed the suitcase into the cabin and climbed inside as the engine switched on. Simon glanced at the dashboard of the sedan. The keys were in the ignition. He slid across the console, started the engine and moved the sedan out of the shadows.

The Cessna was taxi-ing back on to the runway under cover of the gun battle and there was only one way to stop the take-off. Simon swung the sedan in a wide arc and gathered speed. Circling the field ahead of the plane, he turned sharply and bore down on the oncoming craft. It had no time to get off the ground. Moments before certain collision the plane swerved off course and bounced crazily towards the trucks, stopping, finally, in a blaze of crossed headlights. The cabin door opened and the big man leapt to the ground. He still carried the suitcase in one hand but the other held a gun that exploded in the direction of the first moving object he saw. The object fired back and the man fell forward on his face. He was crawling through a river of his own blood when Simon reached him. Franklin approached, gun in hand.

“He’s dying,” Simon said, “but he’s still hanging on to that bag of money.”

“Who is he?” Franklin asked.

Simon knelt beside the wounded man and turned his face into the light. Only then did he realize that all of the shooting had stopped. It was as silent as death.

“Sandovar called him Luis,” Simon said.

Luis was DOA at the nearest general hospital and there was no way of knowing if he was Cerva’s pay-off man, Sandovar’s agent or if he had gone in for last-minute free-lancing. The suitcase containing what was left of the money was taken back to Los Angeles where, in due time, the police lab reported that only the dead man’s fingerprints were identifiable from the many obscure prints on the suitcase. By that time the FBI had identified the dead man’s prints as those of Luis Morengo, alias Lou Martin, alias Manuel Lopez, and tagged him as a minor member of the syndicate working out of Cleveland. The muscle on the trucks, with one exception, were free-lancers, and that exception was from Cerva’s organization. Cerva couldn’t be reached. Tomas Sandovar’s yacht was sighted cruising southward well beyond the legal limit, and it was assumed that he was aboard.

Back in the city, Vincent Florentine was booked on the suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon after being apprehended in the hotel room of a woman registered as Sigrid Thorsen. This disclosure brought the press in droves and gave Hannah Lee her finest hour in decades. Photographed in the blonde wig and flourishing the sword cane with which she had almost severed Florentine’s right hand, she would appear in the morning editions throughout the area with full copy on her bizarre ruse. Florentine, it transpired, was the big blond who had attacked Simon in the hotel garage. In spite of his insistence that he was Angelo Cerva’s son-in-law, the legal arm of the syndicate made no effort to provide bail or counsel.

Lieutenant Howard showed no surprise.

“On the basis of what we’ve been able to piece together from Miss Lee’s story and from yours,” he told Simon, “it seems that Vincent got greedy. Cerva was going to wait for another shipment of cash—cash needed to pay off Pridoux and the muscle on the trucks, hire the trucks themselves as well as the transport planes they were expecting at the airstrip to fly the highjacked material south. Even the Cessna that took Luis to the rendezvous was hired. More cash, I imagine, was needed to provide similar services at the point of delivery. Unfortunately we don’t know where that is, but the federal investigation will continue. In any event, it had to be cash and a lot of it. But Vincent and his partner, a man we picked up in the parking lot behind the hotel where he was waiting for Vincent, heard about the luggage you fished out of the sea and decided to gamble on a search for the money bag. They hit your boat at the marina and then lost track of you. They didn’t know your name but they knew Lundberg’s because it was in all the newspapers. The ashes found on the floor of Lundberg’s apartment were important. We checked on Lundberg’s medical record. He had a mild case of emphysema and quit smoking several months ago. The ashes were from a special blend of tobacco—strong, Turkish. Not one of the standard brands. That wasn’t much help until we picked up Florentine and found a box of this special blend of cigarettes in his pocket. Oh yes, that pillow case you were so concerned about was in the boot of the Mustang Jackson was driving. Naturally each man accuses the other of the murder.”