Assignment Carlotta Cortez

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Well, I came in the back way. I see no harm in telling you.”

  “You couldn’t have.”

  “Not only that, señor. I have a bomb.”

  Durell saw Wittington, listening on the other telephone, flinch as if he had been struck in the stomach. His own mouth felt dry.

  “I don’t believe you, professor,” he said. “You couldn’t have gone in there, carrying a bomb, and not be observed.”

  “But I am here. And I have the bomb. I have already phoned to the General. You know where he is. And now he knows where I am, too. Your men will please stay exactly where they are until I have finished speaking, do you understand? No one is to approach this house where I am, or Ward’s Hotel, where the General is at the moment. No one! That is an order.”

  The man’s voice was thin and high-pitched, drawn as tight as a violin string; yet it was off-key, as if hysteria had stretched the man’s nerves almost to the breaking point.

  Durell said quietly, “No one is moving, professor.”

  “Make sure of that.”

  “You still have not explained how you got in there.”

  “You had men watching?"

  “Of course.”

  Perez chuckled again. “The bomb is really not very heavy. I was able to carry it.”

  “You’d still have been seen.”

  “I am sure I was. But your man saw only an old woman pushing a cart up the alley. The bomb was in the cart. I took it in through the garage. It was awkward, wearing woman’s clothing, but I had planned all this from the start, you see. One must anticipate difficulties, and assume the worst will happen. And I did.”

  “Will you wait one moment, Perez?” Durell asked. “I want to verify this, if I can.”

  “Very well. But make no move. I warn you.”

  Durell covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and looked at Barney Kels. Kels looked ill. His mouth was twisted out of shape with white anger. “Well?”

  Barney nodded. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “He’s telling the truth. He got in there, disguised as a woman.”

  “Your man was watching the alley. He was supposed to report everyone moving in or out of the area,” Durell said harshly.

  Barney' Kels looked at his hands. He had spread them flat on the plastic-topped table. They were trembling violently. “It was Werdon. He’s a good man, Sam. He saw the woman and he saw the cart. He tried to call here, but the line was busy.”

  Wittington said, “I was talking to Washington a few minutes ago.”

  “There’s more than one phone,” Durell objected.

  “But only one line to the room overlooking the alley,” Kels said. “It’s been this way all along. As if fate, or something, was conspiring to beat us. Before the line was cleared, Fritsch called him. It happened the minute Mr. Wittington hung up. Fritsch was trying to get us, too. He’s coming in from Jersey.”

  “Any reason?”

  “He just wants to move in on the Cortezes. He can’t see standing around out there and waiting.” Wittington said hollowly, “Too late now.”

  Durell looked at him. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Ask Perez,” Wittington said.

  Durell turned back to the telephone.

  It occurred to him that he had never actually met or seen Juan Perez. Yet he knew about the man; he had studied photographs and dossiers in the hours spent here at Number 11. He knew about Perez’ childhood on the Cortez ranch, the way the General’s wealthy parents had educated the talented peon boy, sending him to Europe, to America to M-I-T. He knew all about Perez’ complete and fanatical devotion to General Cortez—a devotion that blindly overlooked the General’s cruelties, lusts, deviations, and misuse of dictatorial power. None of that had ever mattered to Juan Perez.

  The man’s voice had tightened ominously. “You took a long time, Mr. Policeman.”

  “My name is Durell.”

  “Your name is not important to me,” Perez said, “as long as you are in authority.”

  “I am,” Durell said.

  “Then listen with care. I shall tell you my terms, and you will agree, I am sure. First, you must realize that the bomb I have is now armed. The mechanism for its discharge is hooked up, and a flick of a switch will cause a nuclear explosion in this house that will wipe out thousands upon thousands of innocent people in the neighborhood.”

  “Including yourself,” Durell pointed out.

  “I do not matter. I am ready to die.”

  “I believe you,” Durell said.

  “Good. Then we can proceed. I intend to stay here for twenty-four hours, awake, in these attic rooms. And you will remain where you are, too. For twenty-four hours, you are not to interfere with the General or his daughter or his yacht. Is that clear?”

  “Clear enough. It’s blackmail.”

  “Much more than ordinary blackmail, señor. The lives of thousands of your people, and the destruction and contamination of a huge area in the heart of your city, and all the subsequent psychological and political consequences that will arise after a nuclear explosion in New York City. Do you see the potential results?”

  Durell was sweating. “All too clearly.”

  “So you agree.” It was a flat, confident statement, but the voice in the telephone at Durell’s ear seemed unreal.

  Durell said, “Then you want twenty-four hours of freedom for the Cortezes to take the rest of the bombs out of the country.”

  “Precisely.”

  “If not, you will detonate the bomb.”

  “At the first hostile move against me. I can do it, I assure you.”

  “How will you know that the General and Carlotta are safely away? You wouldn’t take our word for it, Perez.”

  “I have a ship-to-shore radio here. I will be notified.”

  “You understand what will happen to you afterward?”

  “My life is of no importance. You have my terms. You will obey them.”

  The telephone, clicked and suddenly went dead.

  It was quiet in the kitchen. Somebody sighed. Then Pleasure got up from her seat beside O’Brien and went to the stove and calmly turned on the gas heat under the coffee pot. The ordinary, quiet action of the girl released an enormous tension in Durell.

  He turned to Wittington. “Well, you heard. Can he do it?”

  “He can and he will,” Wittington whispered.

  “Do you agree to his terms?”

  “We have no choice.”

  “About the bomb—I understood there were routine safeguards about arming A-bombs. Can Perez explode it the way it is?”

  “Ask Kels here,” Wittington said. “He knows how they work.”

  Durell turned in some surprise to the small, darkhaired man. Kels chewed his lip and nodded. His voice was loud and harsh. “It’s no secret how the tacticals, or even the bigger ones, work. Even if the bomb weren’t much bigger than a grapefruit, he could turn Greenwich Village into nothing but a contaminated hole in the ground.”

  “I want every detail,” Durell insisted.

  Kels chewed his lip. His face glistened with sweat. “You have two kinds of explosions in an A-bomb, really. Let’s say you have a critical mass of plutonium or uranium-235. Given a certain mass of non-critical density, nothing could make it into an atomic explosion. But if that mass is squeezed by pressure equally distributed over its surface, so that its size, say, is reduced by half and its density correspondingly increased, then you have reached the critical point and you get an atomic blast.

  “The bombs are actually fired by conventional explosives, such as TNT, packed in wedges within a casing and surrounding the U-235. Electrical contacts go into the TNT with detonators. The nuclear material is only a small sphere in the center of the bomb, surrounded by TNT, and all of it inside this tough casing. Close the circuit, and get an implosion, a bursting inward, of the conventional explosive. This compacts the sphere of nuclear material to the point where its density changes from a subcritical quantity to a critica
l mass that explodes in a millionth of a second. Of course, we’ve added tampers to contain the fission explosion momentarily, but that’s not vital here. What counts is the fact that these bombs are always transported without the electrical mechanism to detonate the TNT, which in turn causes the atomic blast.”

  “Then Perez has wired it up again, is that it?” Durell asked.

  Barney Kels nodded slowly. His face was gray. “All Perez has to do now is push a button. Without the electrical hookup, the bomb is absolutely harmless. With it—well, Perez wasn’t kidding. We’re in the soup. You don’t dare touch him. The smart thing to do is for all of us to get the hell out of here as fast as we can.”

  The sense of defeat in the house at Number 11 was almost tangible enough to touch and taste. Durell went upstairs and looked across the street at the Cortez house. Incredible danger was over there. In the sleeping city, among the hundreds of buildings and thousands of homes and apartments in the neighborhood, people slept and dreamed and made love and listened in their subconscious to the whir or tick of their alarm clocks. A false move here, a wrong decision made, and they would never wake up to see the new day.

  He did not try to blame their defeat on any one thing or any one man. No one was to blame. Yet everything had worked to bring this about, even the forces of nature with its sleet storm of yesterday, its fog tonight that had delayed the AEC’s team of experts. Wittington hadn’t dared move in on the Cortezes to retrieve the other bombs. Was he right in that decision, or wrong? Barney Kels’ man hadn’t been alarmed enough about the presence of an old lady pushing a cart in the alley over there, hadn’t taken emergency measures to halt the suspect. Right or wrong? And Durell, himself— he had missed Johnny Duncan, and he was dead. Maybe something more could have been done to reach Johnny and get the bombs first. Right or wrong? He wondered if he should have foreseen this situation now, this standoff that, in retrospect, seemed to have been inevitable from the start.

  He looked at the lighted windows of Perez’ attic apartment. The slanting panes of studio skylights were yellow through the thin mists moving down the street. There was no traffic. In the kitchen, Barney Kels was contacting Centre Street, trying to reroute vehicular traffic in the neighborhood. But it was a useless gesture. You couldn’t go around at three o’clock in the morning and push ten thousand people out of bed. Not even air raid sirens would do anything to empty a whole section of Manhattan. The panic alone might do incalculable damage. And over there, behind that slant of yellow glass, a devoted and misguided man sat with his fingers on a switch, a small shining metal egg close at hand. And he fondled death.

  Down in the kitchen headquarters below, a telephone rang, and then another. No word of the true situation was being given out because of the panic Durell visualized. Above all, the street had to appear normal if Perez looked out. There must be nothing to alarm the man, to trigger his near-hysteria into an act that would be irrevocable.

  Durell tried to forget the time he had witnessed the test explosion of a nuclear weapon. He never wanted to see another again.

  O’Brien came into the shadowed room. Pleasure was with him. The girl looked subdued, although it was doubtful if she understood what was happening. O’Brien spoke his name quietly, and Durell turned to the red-haired man.

  “So we just wait, amigo?” O’Brien said softly. “There is nothing we can do.”

  “If I had known before what they had stolen—”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. The cards just didn’t come into our hands.”

  O’Brien said quietly, “I understand you were once a good gambler, señor.”

  “I still am. But he holds all the aces over there.” Durell nodded toward the house across the street. “How well do you know this Juan Perez, Pablo?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Will he carry out his threat?”

  “Yes. He will do it.”

  “Knowing he will die, too?”

  “For a man like Juan Perez, dying in loyalty would be an ecstasy. He is a little mad, by normal standards. He will die. He wants to. No matter what you do, he will die.”

  Durell’s head came around. In the shadowed room, O’Brien’s lean face was grave. Behind him, Pleasure sat quietly with folded hands, her eyes on O’Brien only. “You have something on your mind,” Durell said.

  “It is about Perez. He will not keep his word, you know.”

  “In what way?”

  “He will keep you off for twenty-four hours. Until the Cortezes are safe. And then he will explode the bomb anyway.”

  Durell stared. "Why should he?” he asked sharply.

  “As a gesture. In the belief that he fulfills his destiny. Because life in prison here, away from the Cortezes, would be a most meaningless life for him.”

  "But he wouldn’t kill thousands of innocent—”

  “Other people do not exist for him, you see.”

  "Then he’ll trigger the bomb in twenty-four hours?”

  “For Juan Perez, it would be a glorious end.”

  Durell wondered. He tasted acid in his throat, a sickness at the fulfillment of a nightmare. How many times had men shuddered at the danger of infinite destruction in the hands of a madman? Listening to O’Brien, he knew that the man's estimate of the situation could be correct. If so, then waiting would buy them nothing. Waiting only increased the danger of instability in the man, sitting there with the power of life and death over the innocent.

  He stared across the street at the lighted attic windows. Below, moving slowly through the fog, a taxi came around the comer and kept moving and then turned out of sight at the next intersection. He heard Fritsch’s voice suddenly, deep and argumentative, from down in the kitchen.

  Something stirred in the back of his mind.

  He tried to remember.

  Last night he had been in that studio attic across the street, behind those slanting yellow panes of glass. He tried to put a telephone in those disheveled, slovenly rooms. He couldn’t find it. He searched his memory with increasing concentration. Perez had just spoken to him by telephone. Had he called from one of the lower floors of the Cortez house? No. Everything the man said had implied his presence up there, in those unkempt attic chambers. Then where was the phone? He remembered the thin slice of light that his pocket torch had made when he had scanned the place. An unmade bed, with antique brass head and foot boards. An old Morris chair, the leather cracked, the stuffing coming out of a seam in the cushion. A long pine table, cluttered with papers, ashtrays, newspapers and half-eaten sandwiches. The telephone? Not there. But it had to be there. He couldn’t have missed it.

  It was suddenly important to remember it exactly.

  He remembered the table again. He tried to visualize it. Perhaps fifteen feet from the door at the head of the back service stairs going up to the attic floor. The bomb sat on the table. The litter of newspapers, sandwiches, ashtrays would all be swept to the floor. There was the bomb, yes. The shining metal egg, ready to spawn its hell. There would be electrical equipment, too, connected to the detonators. A switch, on the table.

  And the telephone?

  He saw it suddenly. A wall instrument, across the room from the table, near the bed. But fastened to the wall. The sort of telephone installed for the use of servants, or kitchen utility. His flashlight last night had touched it and swept on again.

  Was he sure?

  Yes.

  O’Brien spoke to him quietly, “What is it, amigo? You look strange.”

  Durell looked at the red-haired man. A decision had been made. He was afraid of it, but he saw nothing else to do. The risk was enormous, incomprehensible. If he thought too much about it, he knew he wouldn’t act on the decision. No man had the right to take on such a responsibility. But he knew he was going to do it, anyway.

  “What are you thinking of?” O’Brien asked.

  Durell looked at the house across the street.

  “I’m going over there. I’m going to take that bomb away from h
im.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Garby Fritsch was still arguing in anger down in the kitchen. Durell turned and left O’Brien holding hands again with Pleasure, and went downstairs. Jensen had just reported from the Jersey waterfront. There was some activity at Ward’s Hotel again. A launch had gone into the slip and the truck Durell had seen there had backed out onto the pier. The Coast Guard cutter, acting on emergency orders, had not interfered.

  Durell drew Barney Kels to one side and explained briefly what he wanted to do. Barney bit his lip, his eyes sliding sidewise, then staring at a point above Durell’s shoulder. He looked like a man studying eternity.

  “I don’t know, Sam. It’s too risky.”

  “Somebody has got to do it.”

  “It doesn’t matter who does it,” Kels objected. “If you slip, if you fail, it won’t be just your neck, Sam. You won’t be the only one to die.”

  “But if we don’t do anything,” Durell argued, “he may send up the balloon, anyway. Can we take the chance?”

  “No. I don’t know. Don’t ask me to decide.”

  “And if we kick up a storm in the neighborhood by evacuating people, he may still trigger the egg; he’d be afraid his victims were escaping.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Sam.”

  “Just make sure your watch is synchronized with mine,” Durell said. They compared the dials, and Barney made a minute adjustment on his. Durell spoke quietly, “Give me exactly twenty minutes to get there. I don’t want to hurry. I want to be all set at the foot of those stairs.”

  “What about the servants? There’s a man and woman, Carlos and Muro, still inside the house.”

  Durell nodded. “Perez didn’t mention them. Two things can happen: either he’s put the man and woman on watch on the ground floor, in which case we’ll be warned fast enough to get out of there. Or else they’re asleep at this hour and don’t even know Perez is back. If they’re asleep, we’ll just have to make sure they stay that way and don’t interfere.”

  Kels thought about it and looked pale. “Twenty minutes from the time you leave—then I call Perez. Why?”

  “Just to get him to the telephone.”