I handed the sheets back to the mild little man who took them impassively and stored them back in the drawer. When he shut it he looked at me quizzically and asked, “Is that all?”
“That’s all,” I told him.
“Come off it, Tiger,” Randolph said. “Don’t hide one damn thing. This isn’t a schoolyard.” His face was tight and somehow his eyes seemed buried in the flesh around them. I think for the first time I liked the guy. He was big, mean and nasty, but he was being pushed and knew what it felt like to have a rock hanging over his head. “What are you looking for?”
I shoved my hat back and got up off the edge of the desk where I was sitting. “Evidence of narcotics addiction.”
“Why?”
“To see whether a guy who could torture three people to death was doing it for a reason or because it was part of his makeup.”
“He didn’t use the stuff.”
“Now I know.”
The one leaning up against the cabinets said too casually, “You get off the hook too easily, Tiger.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“Not with us.”
“You too. Let’s just say I’m exploring every possibility.”
“We thought of it too. Earlier than you did. The question is why you came up with it now.”
I shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it and looked across the room at him. “Because drugs are a big item of trade, buddy. The carriers sometimes become the victims and we’re all looking for something to start with. I didn’t think it possible, but I wanted to be sure. Now... if you’re not satisfied with my explanation you can stuff it. I don’t like being run down like a two-bit private op every time I get a thought. Let me remind you that at your instigation I’m back with an official status, cooperating fully with one of your representatives, and try this stunt again and I’ll go it cold and anything I get finds its way to the papers first and you second.”
“Don’t try it, Mann,” Randolph warned.
“Mister,” I reminded him, “I did it before and I’ll do it again. Quit crowding and don’t pull any court-martial crap on me or I’ll jam it up your tail.”
It sat that way for a good ten seconds, the slight movements of their eyes recording their impressions. I let them sweat it long enough, then I said, “Shove a probe down the toilet of Salvi’s bathroom and see what you find. Don’t bother pushing on the deal because you had all the time in the world to come up with it. I would have told you only you didn’t ask politely.”
Randolph’s face started to blossom into the familiar florid hue and I grinned at him. He said, “You bastard.”
“Any number of people could have told you that.”
There wasn’t anything more to say. I knew what I wanted to know and walked out. From the corner I watched the three of them scramble into a black sedan and take off out of there in a hurry. Somebody on that Salvi searching party was going to catch hell pretty shortly.
I found a phone booth in a drugstore to call Charlie Corbinet. He still had his fingers on enough direct contacts through the local police and the Treasury Department to come up with some possible new leads in the narcotics situation and I wasn’t betting on full cooperation from Hal Randolph at all. He’d play it his own way as long as he could and would call me in only when it was expedient. That was a chance I couldn’t take.
Charlie mulled the information over, said he’d get right on it, then added, “I sent over those photographs of Louis Agrounsky to your hotel an hour ago.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“He was a rarely photographed person so there isn’t much to go by. One set is the official pictures used on his project admittance badge and the other lifted from a motion picture film the government authorized for a news broadcast when the last space shot was made. It wasn’t our policy to let these men be well known and they preferred the anonymity anyway, so it was the best I could do. A detailed physical description is there too in case you need it.”
“Good. I’ll pick them up right now,” I said. “Heard anything on the hot-line circuits yet?”
“Tiger, we have every available technician checking out the entire system, but it’s so damn complex it will take a long time to locate the by-pass. One team is concentrating on how it could have been done to start with. There were supposed to be a dozen positive locks that would eliminate any possibility of accidental or deliberate firing except from the final control but there are still ways it could have been done by a man like Agrounsky as long as he was in charge of the system’s installation. It’s a pretty shaky deal, friend.”
“It could be worse.”
“Another note’s been added.”
I waited, saying nothing.
Charlie said, “One of the few people close to Agrounsky told us he had a peculiar off-duty hobby he had been working on for years — miniaturization of electronic components that would make transistors as out of date as a vacuum tube. He had a sub-mini circuit no bigger than a dime that could run a twenty-one-inch TV set an hour before it blew. He never explained his experiments and if he recorded his experiments, we haven’t been able to find any notes on it.”
“Damn!” I said.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking of,” Charlie told me quietly. “A remote control system that can activate a unit so completely hidden it will be impossible to find.”
“The entire hot line will have to be totally disassembled.”
“Tiger, we can’t afford it. Agrounsky must be found.”
“I know. Who was the friend who knew about his hobby?”
“Claude Boster, a technician still assigned to the Cape. He lives in Eau Gallie, Florida, but he has nothing more to say than what I’ve told you. We’ll still look for Agrounsky’s notes, but he probably took them with him.”
“Okay, Charlie, thanks, I’ll keep in touch.”
Twenty minutes later I was at the hotel, picked up the envelope he had delivered and took my first look at Louis Agrounsky. He was a harried little man crowding fifty, thin, partly bald with an intense look to his eyes and a tight, withdrawn set to his mouth. I stuck the photos in my pocket and walked out of the building.
When I spotted the first cruising cab I flagged it down and gave the driver the address of the Belt-Aire Electronics Corporation and settled back to watch the city go by on the way out over the Triborough Bridge.
One man, I thought, one little man who held the world in his hands. Louis Agrounsky. A loner, dedicated. He had worked himself into a nervous breakdown when he was a student and those things always left scars. A genius with scars. Then one of those scars developed adhesions and while he was involved with the mechanical solutions of world problems he took exception to the belief that control of world stability should be in any single person’s hands whether it was the President’s or the head of NATO. What did they call the hot-line system? Yeah... the permissive action link. Nuclear weaponry, whether aggressive or retaliatory, was locked tight under the control system, totally impotent until the safety factors were rendered impotent, until an electronic message communicated by the President, who holds the coded electronic key to the weapons in his sole possession, was delivered by the right push of the right button.
But Agrounsky didn’t favor ultimate control. He wanted a say in the matter and that’s what comes of being a genius. He could force the matter himself. He installed the system, but gimmicked it quietly, and in the labyrinth of electronics who could say how or where? A reinstallation of the entire system would take years, and to nullify the present system would leave us immediately helpless. And all this while one man was sitting there trying to make up his mind.
Where, damn it, where!