I remembered.
“But that’s not building a bomb,” I said. “That’s just knowing how. To build one, you’d need fissionable material of a certain grade.”
“Right! And that’s always been the argument. That no one could get hold of the stuff. Trouble is, that whole line of reasoning turns out to be absolute, demonstrable bullshit.”
“Who says?”
“Interpol, for one. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for another. The NRC’s own records show that more than two thousand units of fissionable material—enriched uranium and plutonium, just what your Junior Achievement A-bomb factory ordered—is officially missing. Some of it is just bad bookkeeping, sure. And some of is just pure, ordinary human stupidity and incompetence. But some of it is really gone, stolen and for sale on the open market. And, old friend, it only takes about fifteen units to make an A-bomb.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay,” I said. “All right, then. So someone could build one. But that doesn’t mean it would be portable enough to move around, even in a truck. You could set it up somewhere, maybe, and threaten to touch it off. But it wouldn’t be too useful for some tenth-rate Arab army junta. And that isn’t what you were talking about anyhow. You didn’t say Sam made a bomb or found someone who could make one.”
“I said he got one. And that’s what he did. A real honest-to-Einstein military weapon.”
I was ready to shake my head again, but I didn’t do it. Corner Pocket and I play word games with each other sometimes; it beats staring at the middle distance. But I was finally beginning to realize that this wasn’t one of those times. I sat still and waited for him to go on.
“The French government, back when that big-nosed general was running the show, pulled out of NATO and began testing its own homegrown atomic weapons in the South Pacific. Everybody screamed bloody murder, but the general didn’t give a damn. He went right ahead, and the governments they’ve had since then have done the same thing.”
He paused to see if I was with him. I nodded.
“The peace-movement people still try to sail ships into the French test area in the Pacific,” I said. “And there was some trouble a while back when a couple of French spooks sank one of the peace-movement ships at a dock in New Zealand or somewhere.”
“Right. But meanwhile the French have been hard at work making a whole arsenal of their very own homegrown bombs, and the intermediate-range systems to deliver them—and now one of those bombs is missing.”
I thought it over, still looking for an out.
“No way,” I said finally. “For one thing, if someone actually stole a military atom bomb the various news media would have set up a howl you could hear all the way to the moon.”
It was a feeble effort, and I knew it and so did Corner Pocket.
“When you read the newspaper stories about what happened this morning up there in the penthouse,” he said, “how many reporters do you think are going to have been in the room and how many of the other details do you think you are going to recognize?”
I didn’t argue the point. It wasn’t worthwhile, and besides he was right.
“I got all this from Interpol as soon as they found out Sam Goines was going to be in my town,” he went on. “And my reaction was enough like yours that I got some State Department people out of bed back in D.C. to confirm the story and flesh it out for me before I could make myself believe it, and I still feel like I’m a couple of minutes into a really bad dream. But I’m not, and what they told me makes sense.”
My mouth was suddenly very dry and I think his was, too, because we both looked around for the bartender. But he was busy answering a phone at the other end of the catwalk. Corner Pocket continued.
“Without going into too many details,” he said, “an atom bomb isn’t something you can just bolt onto the front end of a missile and let it go at that. The damn things are as delicate as a firefly’s fanny. There’s a lot of sophisticated circuitry in there to go bad. So you have to set up a maintenance routine, a servicing system like the one for a car or an airplane.
“But you don’t just leave the delivery system there without a warhead while the bomb’s in the shop. What they do is rotate the damn things the way you do bulbs on a string of Christmas tree lights when one goes bad: The first warhead comes off and is replaced by one that’s just been serviced. Then it goes to the shop, and when it comes back you put it in place of the next one on the route. And so on.”
I could see where this was going now, and there was suddenly a cold spot in the very middle of by stomach. The same one I remembered being there the first time anyone ever shot at me in earnest. And all the times since.
“So all you’d have to do,” I said, “would be to substitute a dummy somewhere along the chain—”
“And it wouldn’t be spotted until the next round of servicing, which could be almost a year later. But it was spotted, because the officer who’d been bribed to make the switch was even more gutless than anybody thought, and the day after he handed the package over to Goines or whoever was running the errand for him, he turned right around and went home and swallowed his gun—after writing out a suicide note in neatly phrased schoolboy French.”
“But by that time—”
“But by that time, Goines was out of the country and in deep cover in some part of South or Central America where someone owed him a favor, and when he popped up again in Monaco he was as clean as a nun’s confession.”
I grinned at him.
“Not the happiest choice of simile, old friend,” I said.
“You go to hell, Preacher,” he said, and we sat for a while listening to the rhythms of the casino while we worried the corners of logic still hanging loose.
“He stole it for the Arabs,” I began finally. “But the guy who made the deal with him got turned into lamb patties.”
“At just the wrong moment,” Corner Pocket agreed. “I never knew Goines. But nothing I’ve heard of him in the last few hours would make me think he’s some kind of idiot, so I’d assume he meant to go through with the deal one way or another and only began after the fact to think about what a dandy little toy he had found.”
There was more, I think, but I never got to hear it. The bartender finished his phone conversation and picked the instrument up and brought it to where we were sitting, then handed the receiver to Corner Pocket.
“For you,” he said.
Corner Pocket wasn’t surprised and neither was I. No one is really hard to find by telephone in Las Vegas.
He put the receiver to his ear, identified himself, and listened for about thirty seconds, nodding absently from time to time.
“Okay,” he said when the caller was done speaking his piece. “We’ll be there.”
He hung up, set the telephone down, and looked at me. “You got wheels?”
“Rented.”
“Outside? Now?”
“Unless they’ve been stolen.”
“We’ll use them. I came with a guy from my office and he’ll still be busy.”
I dropped a five dollar toke on the bar and stood up, feeling twice my age.
“Do forgive me,” I said, “if I seem to come on all curious, but do I get to know where we’re going or does it have to stay secret until we get there?”
The words were snottier than I wanted them to be, but Corner Pocket didn’t seem to mind. Or even notice.
“That,” he said, “was my man at the hospital. The doctors think your buddy, Goines, is going to be conscious again before long. And maybe able to talk...”
It was, indeed, turning into a long time between naps. But suddenly I wasn’t as tired as I had been.
Three minutes later, by the mental clock, we were out of the parking lot and into a side-road shortcut that would miss early morning traffic.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
We know of power because we possess it, because we are the first generation of humankind bor
n with power in hand to destroy not only ourselves but all life. To wipe it forever from the face of the earth...
EIGHT
En route to the hospital, I did my lying best to convince Corner Pocket that the revised version of events I had told him was the only one I knew.
He listened in silence, but I could see he wasn’t buying.
Considered from the standpoint of cold logic—and that was the only angle I could expect—the story had more holes than an ant farm. No one in his right mind would believe that a man who made his living playing poker and who had come to Las Vegas by invitation for the specific purpose of playing seven card stud with six other men, also present by invitation, would be there unless he knew all about them and all about his host. If some thing more than a poker game was involved, and Corner Pocket seemed convinced that something was, he would be sure to know about that, too. Unless he was a damn fool.
And I had an extra handicap.
While laboring righteously to make Corner Pocket understand that I was, indeed, the damn fool who had done all that, I was also trying to edit everything I said in order to keep from admitting to the single black lie that was mixed in with all the truth.
I had told him I didn’t know the man who had fallen from the penthouse balcony after being killed by the door gunner on the Huey. And I intended to go right on telling the story that way until I could get the whole thing straightened out and making sense in my own head.
Uphill work. But poker is a number one school for dissemblers, and I thought I might be making some kind of progress until we turned off Paradise Road into the unusually wide side street that leads to Mount Etna Hospital-Medical Center.
Then he sat up and shook his head and grinned at me.
“You’re good, Preacher,” he said. “Real good. I’ll say that for you. No wonder that flock of yours buys the bullshit you feed them about where the money comes from. Those Sunday sermons of yours must be a pistol. But no, not this time. No way! The more you rev the engines on this one, the less it wants to fly”
I sighed.
“Well, hell, then,” I said, not bothering to argue the point. “I’m doing my best. How about a little help?”
“Okay. Try this...”
I pulled the rented car into the hospital parking lot and found an empty slot and filled it and set the brake and turned off the engine and swiveled around to listen.
“For openers,” he said, “nothing you said or can say is going to convince me or anyone else that a poker hand composed of three eights and two aces landed on a dead man’s chest by accident. I don’t mind an occasional coincidence, friend, but give me a little running room. Even Bill Bowers gagged a little, and he is a man who has learned to swallow elephants on demand.”
He paused to let me think it over, and I did and I had to admit he was right. Even having seen it firsthand, I was beginning to have my doubts.
“But the really bad part,” he went on, “was the helicopter.”
One of the worst insults you can offer any confirmed liar is to doubt him when he is telling the unvarnished truth, and I was on the point of indignant—and, for once, pure-hearted—interjection when he held up a warning hand.
“Let’s don’t get all hot and bothered here,” he said. “I can go along with the part about how the other gunsel got away. You say he went to the roof and was picked up by a chopper there, and I believe it because it is just about the only way he could have gone and because if I was planning a hit like that one, it is the escape route I would have picked and because a hell of a lot of other people heard the noise of a whirlybird coming in close at about the same time all the shooting was going down.”
“Then, what—”
“I said the others heard the chopper. I didn’t say they saw it. Still real dark out, remember, and even the way you were telling the story the chopper was running around up there without lights.”
“Of course.”
“Of course. So, Preacher, all the other people in the tower suite with you had their heads down, hoping to stay alive, and everyone else who had a window that could have showed them anything seemed to have something else to do, and no one in the parking lot below saw anything until the body in the jumpsuit came flapping down out of the sky. You are the only one who claims to have seen the helicopter itself.”
“So? If other people heard it and you say yourself it had to have been there...”
He shook his head. “I said a helicopter had to be there, and I think one was,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I believe what you told me. Look—I spend a lot of time on the job, but you know what I do for kicks in my off time?”
I shrugged; the conversation was getting a little weird around the edges. “Chase girls?” I suggested, just to make noise.
It earned me a sour snort. “In this town,” he said, “who would have to chase?”
Good point.
“No, Preacher, I don’t chase girls—though sometimes I think my wife would take it kindly if I did—and I don’t gamble and I don’t play golf or pan for gold or take part in amateur theatricals. What I do is, I play soldier.”
That was news to me. Somehow, Corner Pocket just didn’t seem the type for peacetime war games. But I still couldn’t see what it had to do with the helicopter.
“I flew Thunderthuds—F-105s—in ’Nam,” he said, “and when I got home and tried flying as a civilian, the kind of airplanes I could afford just didn’t thrill me.”
I could understand that. “So you stayed in the reserve?”
“Sort of. I’m a bird colonel in the Nevada Air National Guard.”
He let the words sit there in the air between us, as though I ought to be able to fill in the next sentence or two for myself, but it was a lousy interrogation technique from my point of view because I still couldn’t see the point, unless it was pure resentment at my saying that one of his outfit’s choppers was involved in the hit. And he had never seemed the type.
“What I saw,” I said, letting the words out slowly and distinctly, “was a Huey. A Bell UH-1A. It was painted military olive drab. With the letters NANG on the side and bottom.”
His face didn’t change. It was still arranged in lines of disbelief.
“NANG,” he repeated. “You’re sure there were four letters, not three? Not just NNG?”
Weirder and weirder.
“Four letters,” I said, seeing them again in memory. “Big ones on the bottom with a serial number, smaller, below them. The bird went through an amber light, one of the decorative spots on the side of the building, just before it was out of sight. I had a clear view. And I’m not mistaken.”
He paused again, as if to let me change my mind. But I didn’t and finally he nodded and unlocked the car door and got out.
“Okay,” he said, slamming the door behind him and turning toward the visitors’ entrance. “We’ll leave it there for a while and I will even admit that I believe you—or, anyway, I believe that you think you saw those letters.”
“Thanks a group.”
“Don’t mention it. But I think I also ought to tell you I still don’t believe it was an Air Guard copter that made the pickup.”
“But—”
“The Nevada National Guard—NNG—has a few Hueys,” he said, cutting me off. “And the regular army even loans them a few from time to time, though those would have camouflage paint instead of olive drab. But I can tell you, from personal knowledge, that the Nevada Air National Guard does not have a single Huey—not on active duty or even sitting around being cannibalized for parts.
“The order that got rid of the last of them was issued three whole years ago, Preacher. And the name on the bottom was mine.”
Mount Etna Hospital-Medical Center is a pint-sized medical-surgical showcase, built two decades ago with mob money carefully filtered through a couple of union pension funds and dedicated to the proposition that criminals are as much entitled to first-rate medical care as anyone else.
The problem was of l
ong standing. Individuals on the wrong side of the law had always been forced to make do with the questionable efforts of those sundry quacks, alcoholics, misfits, and convicted malpractitioners whose incompetence and/or character defects had brought them at last to the very lowest reaches of the medical hierarchy. In retrospect, it is probably wonderful that anyone survived.
The emergence of Las Vegas as a kind of town-sized neutral zone, a place where any criminal family recognized by the national commission might peacefully establish a hotel and casino fiefdom without regard to territoriality, led to speculation over other possible benefits. A tame legislature and biddable judiciary made the whole state a favored place of quiet and almost extradition-proof exile for those whose activities elsewhere had drawn unwanted attention from various law-enforcement agencies.
Mount Etna Hospital was the next logical step.
Over the years, a shooting gallery of hoodlums ranging in magnitude from a couple of crime syndicate members (suffering, respectively, from prostatic cancer and multiple bullet holes) to a fleeing ward heeler (in desperate need of plastic surgery), have benefited from the farsighted benevolence of those gangster forefathers whose orders brought it into being. Nowadays the goombas can’t see how they ever got along without it.
And best of all, the hospital’s records are stored in a computer, which makes total secrecy—and instant forgetfulness—a routine part of the service.
Patients check in quietly under whatever names they fancy (so long as proper financial arrangements have been made) with the assurance of such total privacy that neither their presence nor their medical records will ever become a matter of public record—subpoenas and federal grand jury orders notwithstanding. Some of the world’s leading investigators and computer experts have, from time to time, attempted to retrieve restricted information from Mount Etna’s special security files. All have failed, for the simple reason that those records were entered through a system devised by slightly more skillful, and more expensive, experts who countered every move in advance. Yet those elusive records, complete with true names neatly bracketed and cross-filed with the pseudonym under which the patient was treated at Mount Etna Umanita, pop up at the touch of a computer key for those who know the routine, while the wastelands of southern Nevada are the final home to more than one initiate whose loyalty came somehow into question.
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