The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Loring and his gang gave us quite a run for our money, by the way. They got through the tightest police cordon we ever set up, and we didn’t get them until they were almost aboard a flying-boat, which got away, incidentally. We managed to salvage the PERISCOPE equipment all right.”

  Miles said: “How did you finally trace them?”

  “Well, that was quite a twist,” said Frean. “One of your distinguished peers did a good job on that. (Apparently Cummings had approached him on his arrival in New York.) He put a private dick on to a man who had been watching his apartment on Fifth Avenue — quite a game of tag, in fact! Anyway, this dick followed the getaway car that they had sent up to a location outside Pittsburgh, near the railroad. Then this guy followed the car all the way up to Cape Cod! The trouble was, the police pulled him in for speeding, and they simply wouldn’t believe he was following the very people they were supposed to be pulling in! Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But then we’re in a crazy business!”

  “Who,” demanded Miles, “was the distinguished peer?”

  “A guy by the name of Robdale — David Robdale.”

  “Good God! But I thought he was ... oh well, skip it! As you say, this is a crazy business. I’ll see you here in London, Frean. And I’ll get hold of a menu ... You’ll get a signal when we pull in Fenton.”

  “Well, you better let loose a few peers and they’ll do it for you, Miles! So long, you greedy old bastard!”

  Miles hung up, and crossed the room to where Harford was studying a map.

  “I’ve told Frean that we’re going to find this chap Fenton,” he said. “Do you think we will?”

  “Sure we will,” said Cy. “He’s left a trail wider than Broadway. But we got to get him fast — before he has a chance to do anything about the Rimsworth works. We know he’s got hold of quite a lot of secret stuff; we must catch him before he makes contact.” He peered at Miles through those thick-rimmed spectacles. “Otherwise it’s curtains for any improvement in security treaties with the States.”

  “I know. By the way, your recall has come through, Cy. You’re to go back to your Military Attaché, as soon as you’ve wound things up here.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I’ll get some leave now. Maybe. Denise is getting restless; I think she wants to try out her English accent on her friends in New York.”

  “How is she making out?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Brother! It’s so New Jersey that when she says ‘petrol’ the only way you can spell it is g-a-s! Will you take a look at this map? I’ve been talking to Scotland Yard and they gave me their plan of action. They’ve got patrol cars stationedhere, andhere ...”

  *

  You can guess what panic-stricken thoughts must have been going through Adrian Fenton’s mind that evening. That last brief message from Stutyen — the message that spelled utter disaster — was hardly designed as a tranquillizer:

  ‘Be at normal embarkation point 10 p.m. tomorrow with all available information. L and S apprehended and you are in imminent danger. If impossible escape send documentsnormal postto my Paris address. Do not post them in Rimsworth. If you fail to be at therendezvous on time cannot make further attempt to pick you up.

  S.’

  Knowing that there must be a full-scale police search organized in his honour, he was under no illusion that to reach arendezvous on the Bristol Channel by the following evening was going to be any easy matter. But the alternative was infinitely worse — for all his adeptness at disguises he did not savour the idea of trying to lie low indefinitely as a wanted man. Therefore he knew he must sacrifice everything for speed ...

  The toupée was by now too obvious a disguise; but, thinking it might possibly come in useful later, he stuffed it in his pocket. All he could really do to avoid recognition locally was to change his personality. He therefore changed into some jeans and a rather Bohemian-looking yellow sweater, with a broad blue streak dripping from the shoulders. In these clothes, and carrying his favourite cigarette-holder, he certainly did not greatly resemble the man who had taken a job at the plutonium factory ...

  He reached the main road without seeing anyone, and standing in the shadow of a tree, he looked both ways along the wide arterial road before venturing into it.

  The illuminated globes of the petrol pumps, in the garage two hundred yards down the road ... , and just beyond that, where the road began to curve round, the all-night cofFee house. Even from where he was standing Fenton could hear the disharmonious racket of the juke box, echoing confusedly down the street until it sounded, if possible, even more nonsensical than within the café itself, where the needle was scraping the noise agonizingly from the surface of the record.

  There was no other sound, and Fenton’s footsteps seemed deafening to him as he approached the garage at a brisk walk.

  A pause in the music as the record was changed; then the shrill, neurotic shriek of a crooner fighting for his life against a sixty-piece orchestra. It was difficult to tell who was winning. But Fenton was not paying much attention to it as he turned into the garage and approached the man on duty.

  There was no time for any embellishment on this occasion. Fenton’s requirements were simple, and so was his way of going about the job of getting them.

  A slight smell of petrol about ... the hum of a battery charger ...

  ‘I-f ye-ou lo-ove me li-ike ye-ou say ye-ou do

  I swear I’ll lo-ove ye-ou to-oo!

  I said I swear I’ll lo-ove ye-ou to-oo!

  I said I swear I’ll lo-ove ye-ou to-oo!’

  yelled the crooner. He was winning hands down over the orchestra now, but at some point in the course of the immortal lyric being roared with the aid of microphones, echo chambers, wild bleats from the trumpets and crashes from the percussion, the song abruptly ceased so far as the mechanic on duty was concerned. At one moment he could hear it; the next he could not. And he owed this release to the spanner with which Fenton struck him on the head from behind. The mechanic wouldn’t hear music for quite a while. Anyway, not that kind ...

  With the second car that Fenton tried he struck lucky. The ignition key was in place and there was a full tank. It was a formidable Jaguar which no doubt Fenton’s colleague, Abe Shapello, would dearly have loved to possess. But Shapello was now behind bars in a State prison, about to face a murder charge.

  Fenton let in the clutch and roared away towards London. He knew that that city would be his safest haven for a while.

  He was even smiling to himself upon the success of the first part of his plan. By the time the mechanic came round, he would have abandoned the car. And Fenton, who liked music — if not of the brand that came from the all-night coffee house — switched on the short-wave radio and tuned in to a foreign station. He was in luck; from somewhere far away on the Continent came the strains of a symphony orchestra — Mozart was Fenton’s favourite composer. He settled down to an enjoyable ride, failing to notice that a car without lights was close behind him now.

  He noticed a car, however, which was coming towards him; and it seemed to be behaving in rather an odd manner; in fact it was on the wrong side of the road, zig-zagging in a way that made it impossible to pass.

  And when it was far too late, Fenton at last saw the car behind, which was rapidly drawing up on his off side.

  Even then, Fenton must have known he was doomed. But there was one possible way of escape, for he was now dead opposite the main gates of the factory.

  He jammed the brakes hard on, allowing the car that was now abreast of him to get ahead. There was just room to swing to the right and crash the gates before the approaching car could ram him. Only just ... the car caught his near-side rear wing with a tearing crash, just before the impact of his collision with the gates.

  The powerful Jaguar blustered its way through the wreckage of the gateway, and Fenton drove flat out up the lane towards the factory. In the driving mirror he could

  see that one of the pursuing cars was now turning into the lane itself.r />
  The radio was still quietly playing Mozart. But Fenton heard nothing now except the shrill note of terror in his ears. Neurotic as he was, the mere thought of jail was even worse to him than to most of the others who risked its beckoning. It would be worse than death ... yet death was the most fearful thing in the world, surely? What happened when you died? What lay beyond that terrifying oblivion? No, he must not die either ...

  There was no possibility of escape, though! He was being forced into an enclosed area, instead of away from it. Yet all around was a high wire fence, topped with barbed-wire coils. What chance was there of getting out? The only chance lay within. And he knew a way in ... But he had to cheat the now alerted security guards, who were swarming towards the road, waving torches.

  He took the car as far as possible, and jumped it while it was still moving. He hardly heard the crash as it ran, head on, into the reinforced-concrete wall of the building. With any luck the guards might think he was still inside the wrecked vehicle.

  Panting for breath, he ran round the corner and along the gravel path that skirted the building. One hundred yards. He managed to turn the far corner before the police came in sight behind him.

  Now he was only ten seconds’ distance from the lavatory window; the window he had forced on other occasions.

  The hissing sound of running water. He was in. But for what?

  He had no plan; only panic in his heart. But it seemed to him that anything was better than standing still.

  He ran out of the washroom and into the corridor. There was no one in sight.

  Alarm bells clanging somewhere in the distance.

  Then the other sound he knew well; the hum of electricity in the power control-room. Here the main hall; and in front of him, under the brilliant fluorescent lighting, was the outer shielding of the atomic pile. Inside this great cylinder, which rose a hundred feet right up to the roof of the shed, was the pile itself — deadly, throbbing, charged with nuclear force.

  And controlling this lethal chamber of flying neutrons was the automatic equipment he had been sent to study — for Rimsworth Works was the most advanced factory in operation for the production of plutonium ...

  There was a shout from high above him; but it was impossible to hear what was said because the walls echoed and re-echoed the voice that had rapped a staccato warning from the control tower. All that could be heard was a metallic, garbled distortion of jumbled sounds.

  But now there was the clatter of footsteps from the far end of the hall. Figures appeared by the steel railings — dark, indeterminate figures moving against the concrete of a platform thirty feet above the ground. Still Fenton sought escape — the escape he must surely have known simply didn’t exist.

  One of the police officers had a loud-hailer. The amplified voice boomed across at him. This time he could hear it quite clearly.

  “Give yourself up,Fenton!You haven’t a chance!Give yourself up,Fenton ...”

  He felt the sensation that he simply couldn’t believe what was happening to him. Somehow, he had always believed that he was immune from defeat and capture, that he was too clever. In a minute he would wake up and find it was all some terrible, unspeakable nightmare. But equally, he knew it was not.

  “Give yourself up,Fenton!” The voice seemed to come from every part of the building now, bouncing back from the steel girders, concrete roof, and the enormous tower that dwarfed all before him.

  He broke into a run, down towards the base of the tower, from where a long platform, flanked with metal railings, led, he knew, to an emergency exit. His footsteps clanked and clattered around the hall as he slithered and stumbled towards his goal. But now two policemen had appeared near its end. He was cut off.

  “Give yourself up,Fenton!”

  His brain was no longer operating as a brain. It was a network of electric cells which panic had converted into useless, jammed-up relays, refusing to engage the correct circuits.

  It must have been some fearful, self-induced madness that led him to the appalling death that was to follow.

  Somehow, he made his way down to the tower, to the steel bulkhead at its base. As he pressed the button of the automatic door some part of his demented mind must have registered the message that was inscribed in two-inch red letters across the door:

  DANGER! HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE! UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY THIS DOOR BE OPENED, UNLESS SO ORDERED IN THE EVENT OF PILE FAILURE.

  Fenton must have known that no human being, even when clad in special protective clothing, could stay inside the main outer-shielding for more than two minutes at a time without risking a fatal dose of radiation poisoning.

  But he hesitated for only a moment before going inside the tower, where he would be separated from the pile itself only by the inner concrete lining. Somewhere in that tower, wherein all organic matter must eventually disintegrate, he knew there was a ladder running vertically the full height of the cylinder; and his plan must have been to reach the roof through the steel-and-lead doors at the top.

  As he made his way, fumbling for every step, round the narrow channel between the two concentric cylinders, he could still hear the voice of the policeman below.

  “If you stay in there two minutes you’re a dead man ...

  He found the bottom of the ladder, and dragged himself up, step by step. And every second his tissues were being bombarded by nuclear particles at the rate of millions per second — each one a killer.

  Still he climbed, though the sweat had made his hands so slippery that it was difficult to get a grip on the rungs. Sheer panic drove him upwards long after his true strength had failed him.

  The officer with the loud-hailer equipment was now calling him from inside the tower, taking a perilous risk himself in an attempt to save Fenton from his own terrible destruction.

  “Do you know what it is to die from the sort of dose you are getting of that stuff?If you come down there may still be time to save you,Fen ton!”

  The demented man was nearly at the top now; six more rungs to go. If he could only find the hatch ...

  Then he heard the voice again. “We are opening the escape hatch at the top,Fenton!Get out as fast as you can!Every second will make a difference!”

  Inside his body, the tissue was already fatally attacked — the atomic structure of his very blood cells was being changed into a different substance. The white cells were already starting to die ...

  And he climbed on, seeing, now, the gaping hole above him that gave access, too late, to the uncontaminated air beyond.

  Perhaps he didn’t know of the existence of the other hatch — the one giving access to the very heart of the pile; or maybe in his unhinged state he had overlooked it. Whichever it was, his flailing hands found the button that controlled it — the switch that left a gaping hole where suddenly an incredible heat belted out at him.

  And then his foot slipped.

  He did not scream as he fell into the bowels of the pile, down, down on to the thrumming mass of untold horrors below ...

  But next day they found the toupée — caught in the steel catch of the inspection panel.

  *

  We were held up at Gander with electrical trouble on the flight back from New York; and since I had only one thing on my mind at this time I put through a long-distance call to Jill.

  Five minutes before the call was due to come through they told us to get aboard the plane again, so I hung up violently on the wretched operator and obeyed the metallic command of the loudspeaker system.

  Is this the age of high speed? Not if you judge it by the length of that flight — at any rate as it appeared to me. I swear that was the slowest aircraft that ever left the ground.

  We made London Airport six hours behind schedule, where we were greeted by a horrible, clinging fog. The pilot made a commendable blind landing at the second attempt.

  Next thing we had finished taxi-ing in the dark, white desert of Heathrow mist, and pulled up with a squeak on the tarmac. The engines gave a fina
l hacking cough, and we were told to leave the aircraft.

  We had arrived.

  I was dimly aware that there were rather a lot of newspaper men, who seemed to be interested in me.

  “How does it feel to be wanted by the F.B.L?”

  “What do you think of the American song-writing industry ... ?”

  “Are you going to become an American citizen?”

  I tried to answer their questions until I saw a small figure standing at the door of the waiting-room.

  I don’t know what I told the Press after that — probably something pretty startling. But when I finally reached the small figure they had to stand at a discreet distance for rather a long time.

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