But not before the girl had unfastened Lafaro’s dog tags from around his neck.
“Even then, I believe she knew,” Littleton said in wonder. He lifted the cat from his lap and sat it gently on the bed, positioning its crippled hind legs for comfort. “I believe she knew,” he repeated.
Blood-soaked sand, empty cartridges and other evidence were dropped down the same drill hole before Bunker Crawford switched on the radio transmitter, identified himself as Lafaro and called the gate to announce that he would be leaving the test site to retrieve some missing equipment from Mercury.
The girl dressed herself in Lafaro’s army fatigues, pulling his slouch hat low over her eyes. She tied Littleton and Crawford securely back to back in their tent and kissed them each, promising to meet Crawford at an abandoned ranch near Beatty, at the last private land site before Death Valley.
“I could feel Bunkie’s pulse jump when he thought about it,” Littleton said. “The girl, McGuire. The girl was a wonder.”
Then, seizing the keys to the truck, she drove away through the darkness.
“We screamed and shouted after her,” Littleton said, “when we realized she had taken the wrong truck.”
“You hadn’t unloaded the bomb,” McGuire said.
“It was in the truck she took. Not the supply truck, as we had agreed.”
“She drove off the site with the bomb in the back? Just like that?”
“Routine it was, McGuire. To have trucks leave and arrive. At three in the morning on a lazy night in the desert, even the most vigilant become slipshod, lethargic. She drove straight through the first gate as we told her to do. As Lafaro would have done after having alerted the guards. There was, after all, little interest in who was leaving the site. The emphasis was on who entered.”
Littleton smiled at the memory. “Colonel Amos and his entourage arrived precisely on time at dawn, in a flying flotilla of helicopters. You have never in your life, McGuire, seen a persona as spectacular in its quivering fear as a colonel who has mislaid a nuclear device. All else pales, all routines collapse, within the controlled panic of such a discovery.”
Crawford and Littleton were restricted to barracks, questioned together, questioned separately, awakened in the middle of the night, deprived of food, and observed through cameras and peepholes for the next two days. But their story held: disarmed by Lafaro, who had drunk himself into a frenzy in the privacy of his tent—the evidence of an empty vodka bottle coated with his fingerprints was clear and convincing—they had been tied together by him before he roared away into the night.
“Close it was, McGuire,” Littleton admitted. “They knew we could not have tied ourselves in such a manner without a third party. And there was no evidence of such. Yet suspicion reigned until two things happened. One was a result of the stupidity and paranoia of the military mind. The other was the unforeseen cunning of an underestimated and over-endowed girl.”
The army, fearful of the story of a stolen nuclear device becoming public and anxious to squelch rumours about Lafaro going AWOL with unauthorized army property, quickly scheduled a test on the same site two days later. For the records, it was identified as the same nuclear device, fired according to the same test number, delayed by two days due to technical adjustments.
“A hundred feet from Lafaro’s bones,” Littleton sniggered. “Vaporized him, McGuire. Nothing left to prove he ever stalked the earth. And all for the sake of business as usual.”
One week later, the test director at Mercury received a package containing an unsigned typewritten note and Lafaro’s dog tags. The note announced that Lafaro had constructed a trigger mechanism for the device and would fire it at an undisclosed location unless a ransom was paid. Details were to follow later.
“They bought that?” McGuire asked.
“Right up to the gills. Lafaro would know how to construct a makeshift trigger using dynamite, some copper piping, a few odds and ends. Elegant it wouldn’t be, McGuire. And totally unsuitable for battlefield conditions. But effective, yes.”
“But the girl wouldn’t know how to make one.”
Littleton laughed. His hand stroked his eyebrows, his beard, his small pointed nose. “Immaterial, McGuire. Knowing how is immaterial. The threat is the thing. Or are you that unfamiliar with Cold War history?”
Since Crawford and Littleton had been under heavy guard all the time, they were not implicated. And while tests revealed no fingerprints on the letter—thus, there was no assurance that Lafaro had not written it—the presence of his dog tags and the absence of any record of a fourth person’s involvement quickly shifted the investigation to the missing master sergeant.
“Cognitive dissonance, McGuire,” Littleton explained. “When the evidence conflicts with reality, you shift your perception of reality. You believe what you want to believe. Standard psychology texts. Which, along with other intellectual pursuits, have occupied my mind since that night in the desert. When the army wanted to believe Lafaro had truly escaped with the device and was a clever madman, they searched for evidence to support it. Lafaro’s files were scanned and the tough independence of a man who once had been exalted by his superiors as the epitome of a fighting GI was now submitted as evidence of an unstable personality. Men appeared to claim Lafaro had always sought great wealth, as though it were not the normal quest of all middle-class America. His letter was thrust into our sight with demands to assess the syntax and vocabulary as Lafaro’s, and of course we agreed that it was. And of course the investigators accepted that agreement. Because they wanted to believe.”
Littleton stood and paced the room, stroking the sleeping cat periodically as he passed the bed. “So we were discharged. Separately. With rich army pensions. And warned never to congregate, Bunkie and I. And never to reveal any details of Lafaro and his prank, or we would be subject to immediate arrest as co-conspirators. And lose our army pensions, of course. Substantial too, they were, McGuire. Bunkie and me, we were bought off for life. Or so they thought.”
The rest of the story had been assembled by Littleton and Crawford over the years, through rumours and carefully worded letters sent through friends.
At his insistence, Colonel Amos was appointed project investigator, seeking redemption for the sins of his crew by devoting whatever portion of his military career would be needed to track down both Lafaro and nuclear device number 68-139. He was attached to the Secret Service and given virtually unlimited powers and a small, dedicated crew sworn to the secrecy of their mission.
The burnt-out shell of the army truck taken from the test site was located several weeks later in a dry gully near Tonopa, Nevada, all fingerprints and other evidence destroyed. The nuclear device, of course, was missing.
“Then came months when nothing was heard,” Littleton said. “I settled in Las Vegas. Dealing blackjack. Driving cabs. Flipping burgers. Waiting for Act Two and playing innocent. Now and then a team would swoop down on me, cart me off for questioning. Same thing with Bunkie, who’d gone back to Boston. Ruined our lives, McGuire. We became Pavlovian psychotics. The very sight of a military man would rattle my knees like castanets. But they found nothing. Because we knew nothing.”
Several months after Lafaro’s disappearance, the second note arrived by mail, addressed to Colonel Ross Amos at Mercury, Nevada. The message demanded a three-million-dollar ransom to be paid in used and unmarked twenty-and fifty-dollar bills. The money was to be placed in an oversized briefcase carried by a man in military uniform. He was to hitchhike along an open stretch of highway near Mesquite on the Nevada-Arizona border the following day. The officer was to stand at a remote location on the south side of the highway, facing traffic leaving Nevada, between noon and one o’clock in the afternoon. If a car stopped for him, he was to ask if they were going to Las Vegas; since all traffic on that side of the road was heading away from the city, no one would pick him up except the designated car.
The most chilling line was the P.S., added almost as an afterthought. It warned that any attempt to stop the vehicle or apprehend the driver would result in a nuclear explosion and major death and destruction.
The note was unsigned; the initials “R.S.L.” were typed at the bottom.
At his insistence, Colonel Ross Amos himself was selected to handle the transfer. He wore a small body-pack with a tracking transmitter under his full military uniform, and positioned himself as instructed. A squadron of helicopters hovered just beyond the horizon.
It was almost one o’clock when a dark sedan pulled to the shoulder of the road. Amos, as he had done several times in the last hour, leaned through the open window to ask if the driver was going to Las Vegas. This time he had difficulty finishing the question.
“It was the girl driving,” Sam Littleton said. “Short skirt, open blouse, big smile. She said yes, she was going to Las Vegas. Amos swallowed hard and climbed in. He didn’t know where to look. At that body of hers, or at the pistol she held in her right hand, pointed at him.”
They crossed the border into Arizona, helicopters and chase vehicles remaining just out of sight behind the car, a five-year-old Buick.
The driver ordered Amos to open the briefcase, and after a quick glance at the money, she told him to close it and set it between them. “Now open the glove compartment,” she instructed. Inside, Amos found a cheap Geiger counter, the kind that are sold like portable radios to amateur uranium prospectors. “Turn it on,” she said, “and point it at the trunk.”
Amos did as he was told. The instrument’s meter leaped to life; the needle jerked back and forth across the gauge and the counter began clicking.
“It’s in the trunk,” the girl said calmly. “Armed and timed. We have twenty minutes.”
By this time, they had cut across the north-west corner of Arizona and entered Utah. She turned off the main highway toward Zion National Park while Amos tried to remain calm.
“Take off your pants,” she said. “And your boots. Underwear and all.”
Amos obeyed. Each time he tried to speak, she silenced him with an abrupt word and a gesture from the gun.
Ahead of them loomed the mouth of the Zion Tunnel, a mile-long passage carved through a Utah mountain. “Don’t try to disarm the thing yourself,” the girl said calmly. “It’s wired to fire as soon as the trunk is opened, unless you throw a bank of switches on a panel of wood in the correct sequence.”
“How will I know the sequence?” Amos asked nervously.
“They’re on a sheet of paper tacked to the twenty-third utility pole beyond the far end of the tunnel, on this side of the road. Give me your pants and boots.”
Amos handed her the clothing; they had just entered the tunnel.
A hundred yards into the darkness, she suddenly pulled the car to the side of the road, grabbed the briefcase and his clothing and leaped out. “You’ve got three minutes,” she shouted. And was gone.
Amos slid across the seat frantically, dropped the car into gear and screamed out of the tunnel. Spotters in helicopters several hundred feet above saw the Buick emerge into the sunlight, unaware that Amos was now alone in the vehicle. Half a mile beyond the tunnel exit, both the watchers and passing tourists were astounded to see a man in full military dress, minus any clothing below the waist, leap from the car, run to a utility pole, snatch a piece of paper from its surface and race gasping back to the trunk of the car, where he gingerly tripped a bank of cheap switches fastened to an unpainted piece of wood.
By this time, pursuit helicopters had landed near him and civilian cars had pulled to a halt, but Amos waved them away hysterically until he slowly raised the lid of the trunk and looked carefully inside.
“Had a buddy on the chase team,” Littleton recalled. He returned to the bed and began stroking the cat again. “Damnedest sight it must have been, McGuire. Colonel Ross Amos, bare-assed and bending over, suddenly straightens up with a string of curses that would make a sailor blush and slams the trunk closed. He is so upset he can’t speak for a moment or two. Finally he screams for the team to chase her, goddamn it! She’s back in the tunnel. Difficult it is, McGuire, for a military officer to command respect when his manhood is dangling in the sunshine like walnuts on a dead tree. Difficult indeed. Of course, she was long gone. Vehicle heading the other way picked her up in the tunnel. Timed it was; no one else remembered seeing anything unusual. Roadblocks were set up for miles around but there was too much traffic, too many turn-offs. They found nothing but Colonel Amos’s Jockeys, trousers and boots by the side of the road.
“Meanwhile, my buddy stayed with the car. Not knowing, of course, what the hell it was all about. Had no clue either when they opened the trunk again and all he saw was a couple of concrete cinder blocks and a dozen or so glow-in-the-dark clock faces bundled together. Tipped from a bunch of Woolworth alarm clocks. Just enough radium on them to tick over a Geiger counter’s conscience. All it took. Traced the car and found it had been stolen from a Las Vegas parking lot weeks before. No prints. No clues. Not even a gum wrapper. Just a bit of old Amos’s saliva on the dashboard, generated by an excess of testosterone at the sight of the girl.”
While Littleton paused, McGuire walked to the window. The sun had set long ago. Traffic on the interstate was sparse; only the sound of heavy diesel trucks smoking their way to or from the coast penetrated the motel walls.
“They questioned us again, Bunkie and me,” Littleton said. “But we knew nothing. We had been under surveillance all the while. We became more innocent than ever. But I remembered the girl’s promise to meet Bunkie at the ranch near Beatty.”
More than a year after the successful ransom, Littleton drove to the ranch site. It was a sad and unpromising layout. The frame residence was toppling, the animal pens had all collapsed, and the land itself looked unpromising.
But in the root cellar of the old building, the ground had been disturbed. And when Littleton returned with a Geiger counter, he knew.
“It was there,” he said. “Suspended in an old cistern. Shiny and new, McGuire. Winking at me. And I knew what I had to do. I had to own that godforsaken homestead and its basement treasure. I had to see if I could be as clever someday as a teenage girl.”
“So you bought the place,” McGuire offered.
“For a song.”
“And you put a new building over it.”
“A Nevada villa. Arrived on two trucks. Bolted together in a day. Desert version of a chateau. Cost me less than twenty thousand dollars. Like living in a tuna can, McGuire. With the fires of hell stoked in the cellar.”
“But the bomb was unarmed.”
Littleton grinned. “Not for long. A purchase here, an acquisition there, and within a year I was sleeping above the damn thing, armed and waiting it was, its neutrons buzzing in the night like a hive of wasps in heat.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Littleton grinned. “Why, McGuire? For power, of course. Not the power you pull from a holster. Or political power, the silly machinations of party brokers in a smoke-filled room. But the power of the mind! The sense of what you control, and all that you can achieve, have you both the will and the opportunity.” His smile widened. “As I finally had today, McGuire. As I had today. You saw it. You, me, Lafaro here, we saw it. Didn’t we?”
“And Crawford?”
“Going quietly mad in Boston. Not just the girl. Or the money. Although the army, in its infernal wisdom, cut our fat pensions to the bone a few years ago, thinking we had a cache somewhere, driving us to it maybe. Colonel Amos and his people, they would do things. Like enter Bunkie’s apartment in the day, leaving not a trace of their presence except for one inexplicable clue. An inverted glass. A newspaper dated the day of Lafaro’s disappearance. The madness of a thousand absurdities, McGuire. That’s what they drove him to. And so, when Amos arrived on his doorstep with a
verbal harangue, poor Bunkie snapped.”
“And you?”
A raucous laugh. “Me, McGuire? They couldn’t drive me to madness. They were convinced I had already arrived. Living in empty space with a crippled cat and my philosophy texts. Writing letters to the editor of the Death Valley News describing encounters with extraterrestrial beings. Walking the sad streets of Beatty, grinning at the foolishness around me, confident of the powers I controlled.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Listen to me, McGuire. Listen: reject greasepaint, costumes and other disguises of the physical. The cleverest disguise of all is madness. Because it can never be fully penetrated, McGuire. There are no masks to be removed from the mind of a crazy man.”
“What happened last month? Why did Amos decide to appear on Bunker Crawford’s doorstep after all these years?”
Littleton replaced his glasses carefully on his nose. His eyes were red and moist. “Because of what I saw,” Littleton said. He walked to a plastic-covered chair and sat down heavily. “Because I told Bunker what I saw. And they knew.”
“Who?”
“Amos. Peppler. Marlowe. They knew we had been in contact, Bunker and me. But they didn’t know what we said.”
“What had you told him?”
“That I saw her. After more than twenty years, I saw her again. She was back.”
“The girl in the desert.”
“Yes. Yes, but now a woman. A wealthy woman. A widow whose striking visage appeared in a copy of a Palm Springs magazine discarded in a bar just down the road. Picture it, McGuire. Me reclining in a bar in this dusty sunbaked burg. Defending myself against the fervour of the desert heat with cold beer. Knowing that each being around me is a watcher for Amos and his army. And being correct, of course. Is paranoia really paranoia when it’s true? Think on it, McGuire. And there, discarded by some anonymous Las Vegas-bound tourist, is a magazine dedicated to overindulgence in Palm Springs. I open it. I scan the fashion advertisements. I assess the restaurant reviews. I turn the page. And those eyes, in a face atop a figure now mature and still alluring, McGuire, stare back at me, startled, from the steps of the Desert Museum.”
Whisper Death Page 21