Assignment Carlotta Cortez

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Nothing. They’re watching and waiting.”

  “But the eggs are there already”

  “Not all of them,” Barney said.

  Durell turned his head. “You’re sure?”

  “We checked back with the freight people after you told us how they arrived. Three crates—not big enough to hold them all, according to the cubage necessary. No mistake about that. Two of the eggs, at least, are still missing.”

  “Where could they be?” Durell asked.

  “That’s the hell of it. We don’t know. And until we know, Wittington says we don’t move. The Cortezes aren’t moving either, for some reason. So it’s a standoff.”

  The doctor was waiting in the bedroom. He used tape and antiseptic and considered Durell’s eyes suspiciously and ordered him to bed. Durell drank another bourbon and told the doctor to find a more cooperative patient. Barney Kels watched him dress, and when Durell had buttoned on a fresh white shirt under a dark brown tweed suit, Barney tossed a .38 on the bed.

  “Just to finish off your outfit,” Barney grinned. “To make you the well-dressed twentieth-century man.”

  “Thanks. I lost mine.”

  “You almost lost a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Is Pablo O’Brien around?” Durell asked. “I want to talk to him.”

  “He’s sticking like adhesive to Pleasure. He seems to have taken over the gal. She doesn’t mind, either. Shall I send him up?”

  “I’ll go down for the steak,” Durell decided. “Isn’t there any word on Professor Perez?”

  Barney was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “We blew that one, too, Sam. You know where he’s been? In a hospital, all this time. He got himself clipped by a truck on East Ninety-Sixth, and they took him down the F.D.R. Drive to Bellevue. He’s been there all this time.”

  Durell’s voice flattened. “But I gather he’s not there now.”

  “We missed him by twenty minutes. He just got up and walked out of there. No serious damage, according to the emergency room records.”

  “And he’s missing again?”

  “Yes.”

  “He hasn’t shown up across the street?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And the General? Carlotta? Justino?”

  “Still over in Jersey. We’ve got the area bottled up. Sixty men on it. We can’t draw it any tighter if we built a Chinese wall around the waterfront.”

  Durell put on a necktie and his coat and went downstairs to the kitchen. Wittington was waiting for him there. The tall, gaunt old man with the bald head and the beak of an eagle looked exhausted. He was on the telephone, leaning on his elbows on the kitchen table, and he looked up at Durell and nodded blankly and kept on listening to an authoritative voice that crackled orders to him.

  Pleasure and Pablo O’Brien were sharing kitchen duties. O’Brien looked fresh and handsome and delighted. Barney Kels had been right. O’Brien never got more than two paces from the girl as she took the steak from the broiler, heaped fried potatoes beside it on a plate, poured a glass of beer and brought Durell his food. Her smile was shy.

  “I’m so glad you got back all right, Mr. Sam. You saved my life.”

  Durell was hungry. He began on the steak, waved a fork at O’Brien. “Pablo had a big hand in it.”

  She looked fondly at O’Brien. “I know. He’s wonderful, ain’t he? I mean, isn’t he? But you stayed back there, Mr. Sam, and gave us time to get away.” She leaned over Durell and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were soft and warm, her kiss open-mouthed, like a child’s. O’Brien’s eyes darkened briefly, and his smile tightened. “That’s just for thanks, like,” Pleasure whispered.

  Wittington put down his telephone. His bald head shone under the glare of the kitchen light. He nodded to Durell. “So you got away from them.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “But you understood what I wanted while you were there. I was hoping you would see that I wanted a delay. I deliberately contacted Justino with a false offer.” He stood up. “Come with me, Durell.”

  Durell followed the old man into an adjacent room. Wittington looked haggard as, once in private, he spoke again. “We’re up a tree, Sam. We checked out your report about the bombs having been shipped by railroad express—in cases labeled machinery. It was all set up before Major Duncan sabotaged his plane at Piney Knob. We’ve looked at the consignment slips on the shipment. Not all the bombs are at Water Street, over in Jersey. Two are missing, according to our calculations.”

  “And so is Perez,” Durell pointed out.

  “Yes. Perez. Circumstances have now made that man the key to everything.” Wittington sat down, all elbows and knees; his black suit looked funereal. There were violent-yellow pouches under his eyes. “We must assume that, as a safety precaution, to ensure their keeping some of the bombs, the Cortezes divided the shipment. It will take too long to check all the rail-freight terminals and shipments east in the last two days. We haven’t that much time. Time has already run out on us.”

  “What’s being done about Perez?”

  “In a moment.” Wittington waved a hand. “The Cortezes know that we will not permit them to leave the harbor with the bombs they now have. They must now suspect, of course, that we have no more knowledge of Perez’ whereabouts than they have. So the Cortezes will be counting on the professor to achieve their goal —to get just two of the tactical bombs away from us. That would be all they need—to drop one, when they attack, and use die second as a threat. It would be enough, of course. More than enough. Aside from the casualties, the world would be only too quick to assume we allowed it to happen.”

  “So we’ve got to find Perez,” Durell said grimly.

  Wittington looked defeated. His voice was a harsh, thin whisper. “But we don’t know where he is.”

  “We’ve got to try,” Durell said.

  The search began.

  Durell sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the telephone. Barney Kels gave him the name of the intern at Bellevue who had treated Juan Perez after the auto accident, and Durell called the hospital. The intern was off duty. There was some delay in searching the records for the intern’s home address. He lived in a small apartment on East Twenty-Third, with his wife. His name was David Andrews. When Durell finally wakened him, his questions were quick and succinct.

  “I want to know the exact condition of Juan Perez when he left the hospital,” Durell said. “Just what were his injuries in the auto accident that brought him to you?”

  Andrews had a thin, sleepy voice. “Nothing serious. Bruises, lacerations, a suspected concussion, but of low probability. The worst of it was his leg.”

  “Could he walk?”

  “Well, he walked out of the ward, but he had a badly sprained ankle, possibly some fracturing. It would have hurt like hell for him to go very far, but a determined man could do it, of course.”

  “But he could have walked a block or two?”

  “Yes, but no more than that.”

  Durell hung up. Barney Kels contacted friends in the Bellevue precinct squads. A search was made of the hack stands in a three-block area surrounding the hospital. It was possible that Perez had chanced to flag down a cruising cab, and if that were so, they would have reached a dead end at once, or at best an avenue that would require a long and arduous check of the records of every cab company in the area.

  They were lucky.

  The hack driver’s name was Hi Goldman. It took ten minutes for a prowl car to flag him down on West Eighty-Eighth, and another twenty minutes for the man to be escorted into Number 11 by the back way. Goldman was short and chunky, with aggressive blue eyes.

  “Sure, he was limping,” he told Durell. “I even mentioned it to him. He come from the direction of Bellevue, all right.”

  Identification was made positive by a photo Jensen had provided with the suspect’s dossier. While Goldman talked, he looked with speculative interest at the men crowded tensely into the kitchen of Number 11. He said
he had taken Perez on a long haul. He remembered it well because Perez had been in such a hurry.

  "Where did you go?” Durell rapped.

  “Over the Brooklyn Bridge. Then up along the waterfront.”

  “What time was that?”

  Goldman shrugged. “I picked him up about eleven-fifteen. I dropped him maybe forty minutes later.”

  Durell looked at the kitchen clock. It was five minutes after two in the morning. “Where did you drop him, exactly?”

  “At a bar in the Williamsburg section. Lousy neighborhood for a guy like him. Lucky if he don’t get mugged.”

  “The name of the bar?”

  Goldman looked uncertain. “Manny’s, or Manuel’s, or something like that.”

  “Aren’t you sure?”

  “No. But I logged the address.”

  “All right,” Durell said. “Give it to me.”

  Barney Kels was already on a telephone, sending a local squad car to Manuel’s Bar. They had to wait then, while the hands of the clock moved inexorably around toward three in the morning. Durell used an open line to get Fritsch, over in Jersey. Nothing had happened there. The Coast Guard was patrolling the Narrows, but a fog had moved in, and the yacht named El Triunfo had not yet been spotted. Ware’s Hotel, the place where Durell had been held prisoner, looked as usual. The Cortezes were still there. Fritsch wanted to move in and recover at least the partial shipment of bombs. Wittington shook his head at the decision, decided negatively.

  “Washington thinks that might be just what they want us to do.” He sounded discouraged, burdened by a weight of responsibility and argument he did not agree with. “It could be a decoy move, while Perez gets away with the other two. We’re ordered to sit tight.”

  Durell drank another cup of coffee, smoked two cigarettes, got up and walked to the front of the house and back again. He felt as if his nerves were ready to fly apart. He knew he should have gone to bed, slept for twenty-four hours. He couldn’t sit still. He wanted to do something, anything, rather than stay here and wait for the telephone to ring. He wanted to go out to Brooklyn on the trail of Perez himself, but he knew that would be useless; it would take too long, and Barney’s men could do the job faster and probably better.

  He watched Pleasure. She sat next to O’Brien, and they held hands. O’Brien was trying to teach her a few phrases in Spanish.

  The phone rang.

  Manuel Silva, the proprietor of Manuel’s Bar, had been picked up by the detectives sent there in a prowl car. Silva remembered Perez because Perez had acted a little crazy, he said, looking for a man named Harvey Shane. Shane operated a small, independent trucking company. Shane had been in the bar when Perez showed up, and the two of them held a hurried conversation and then went out.

  “Do you know where they went?” Durell demanded.

  The detective’s voice was laconic. “Shane had one of his livery trucks parked near the bar. Manuel says they got into it and drove away. He doesn’t know where.

  Dead end. Durell hung up. Perez was in a truck somewhere. A truck, for a very good reason—to pick up the two missing tactical A-bombs. But where?

  Barney Kels issued a general alarm for any of the Shane vehicles spotted on the streets. Another squad car was dispatched to Shane’s garage and office. Fifteen minutes later, the offices were reported dark and locked. The garage where Shane’s fleet of trucks was parked was closed, with only a watchman on duty. One of the trucks was missing. A general alarm went out all though Brooklyn to search for the truck, using the description given by the garage watchman.

  Three o’clock came.

  Durell suddenly swung to Barney Kels. “Warehouses, freight terminals. They’d all be closed to business at this hour. If Perez is trying to pick up the bombs with Shane, he’d have to break into a freight terminal somewhere. If there’s been a theft, would Robbery have a report on it?”

  Barney Kels reached for a telephone again.

  Durell smoked another cigarette. Wittington called

  Washington once more, and Durell, impatience roweling him, walked to the front of the house and stood in the darkness, staring out at the dark street. The fog that had been reported in New York harbor was now evident as a light mist that made aureoles of colored light around the street lamps. He felt as if the fog had crept into his brain. He was bone-tired, and Justino had left his mark on him. He ached in every muscle, every nerve.

  Wittington came up behind him. The old man’s face was like a death’s-head.

  “I’ve been arguing with Washington,” he said. “I don’t know what’s really happening down there. They’re a pack of idiots.”

  Durell looked inquiring. “I thought your Special Bureau had a free hand, ultimate powers. ’

  “Not quite. Only up to a point, Sam.” The old man sounded defeated. “We can stretch that point just so far, but then you run into the fatheads who classify everything Top Secret and hug their precious little secrets to their panicky hearts as if it were the Word of God. There’s a silent terror in Washington, a fear of saying and doing the wrong thing. Anything except break security! I’ve been trying for three hours, ever since you got back safely, to move in and pick up those bombs the Cortezes have.”

  “I thought it was your decision not to move yet.”

  “True, I didn’t want to while you were there. It would have finished you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was simply a matter of probabilities. The minute I heard you got away, I called the AEC. They turned thumbs down on any move these men you have here might make. They weren’t cleared for the job! It took an hour even to get anyone to admit that the bombs were missing—can you believe that?” Wittington’s face twisted with rage.

  “Yes, I believe it,” Durell said heavily.

  “Then they insisted they had to send up one of their special decontamination squads, or teams, for the bombs. I got a flat order—no move until they arrive.”

  “Well, where are they?” Durell asked.

  “Now they’re held up by this fog. They’ve landed in Philadelphia.” Wittington’s face was gray. His hands moved restlessly, bony fingers snapping. “They won’t be here for another half hour. I can’t wait that long. I told them what the situation was here. I explained it in every possible detail. But when it comes to A-bombs loose among the general populace—well, nobody down there can think straight. It’s been their one big nightmare from the very beginning, and it’s frozen and addled the brains of every man I could contact. Not that I could get to the top. Everyone who could really cut through the red tape happens to be away on some other secret project—probably out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

  “We can’t let it go on like this,” Durell said.

  “No. I’ll have to take it on my own shoulders. They’ll cut my throat for it, probably.”

  Durell said: “But suppose Washington is right? Suppose something goes wrong?”

  Wittington looked haunted. “You mean, if the Cortezes know how to trigger the bombs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they talk as if they knew how?”

  “It wasn’t discussed.”

  “Then we’ve got to take the chance that they’re as frightened of the bombs, without Perez to handle them, as we are.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  Wittington said flatly, “The waterfront might go up.”

  “And a hundred thousand people could be killed— and a few million more infected with radiation,” Durell said.

  “Why do you think I haven’t moved in?” Wittington snarled. “I keep thinking about just that. Maybe those idiots in Washington are right—maybe they do know best. All I can see is a stand-off. Yet I’ve got a feeling in my bones that we ought to get those bombs away from the Cortezes now, without delay, without waiting for the AEC team to show up.” Wittington paused and drew a deep, uncertain breath. He had suddenly made a decision. “I’ll call Fritsch and tell him to move

  At that moment, two telephones ran
g at once in the kitchen.

  Barney Kels took the first call. It was from Robbery Detail. A small freight terminal of the N.Y. Central had been broken into an hour earlier. The burglary alarm had given warning, but when the squads got there, it was too late. A consignment, consisting of a small wooden crate addressed to J. Perez, was missing.

  The second telephone still clamored while Barney Kels talked to his men. Durell picked it up.

  The voice in the receiver said, “This is Professor Perez.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Barney Kels hung up slowly. His call was no longer important when he heard Durell repeat Perez’ name. He saw Durell flick a hand toward an extension phone on the kitchen table, but Wittington snatched it up before Kels could reach it.

  The voice said, “This is Perez. Do you hear me?”

  I hear you,” Durell answered. His voice was calm and flat. “Where are you, professor?”

  “Ah. You have been looking for me, have you not?”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “I assumed the telephone here would be tapped. I am simply speaking into it, you understand. I first spoke to your man on the monitor telephone. I knew he was there. He would not believe me at first, when I asked to speak to his superior. The fool pretended he was not there. But finally he connected me. It was really simple, after all. When he would not answer, I persisted, and convinced him I knew he was there.”

  “Wait a minute,” Durell said. “Where are you calling from?”

  “The General’s house, of course.”

  Durell saw Wittington’s head jerk up. The old man’s eyes stared at him blindly, incredulous. Barney Kels got up and walked out of the kitchen toward the front of the house, where he could look at the street and the Cortez doorway. He came back in a moment, nodding; his small face was twisted wryly. “Lights on the top floor,” he said. “I’ll kill the stupid bastard who missed him going in.”

  Durell’s face was expressionless. He spoke into the phone. “How did you get into that house, professor?” Perez chuckled. “You were watching for me?”

  “Yes, we were.”