Dave said, “If you’re satisfied, Grady’s authorized a bundle for him.”
“Let him have it then,” I told him.
“Make any sense?”
I stood up and reached for my hat. “It will. There’s a new dimension added now. I can think of only two reasons why they would want to make a buy as big as that and in so much of a hurry they’d have to take a chance and get it direct from an importer.”
“Oh?” Dave was looking at me quizzically.
“You figure it out,” I said. I started for the door.
Behind me Earl Mossky said, “What about my dough?”
Dave took a key out of his pocket and handed it to him. “In a locker at the bus terminal waiting for you. My advice to you is not to blow it around here or somebody else will be asking questions. Catch?”
“Buddy,” he nodded, fingering the key with a hungry look, “I lived a long time and I figure to live a little while longer. I know the answers.”
We waited until we got to the Times Square station before calling in our report to Newark Control. Virgil Adams was calling in another team to probe the area to see if any of the Salvi buy had been peddled off and putting through an overseas query to try and run down the reason for the direct contact. Dave Elroy was to stay on Don’s original assignment of backtracking Salvi, and if possible, to pick up his source of financing. The Soviet network was tight enough to make it a tough job, but someplace there was always a hole you could sneak through if you found it.
At ten o’clock I angled over to Ernie Bentley’s lab and went upstairs to where he was buried among his reports and poured myself a steaming mug of coffee. When I gave him the rundown he nodded as if I were reading off the ball scores and finished what he was doing before deciding to answer me.
“Got yourself a lot of pieces, haven’t you?”
“Too damn many.”
“Nothing leading to Louis Agrounsky?”
“No.”
“Maybe I got something,” he said. He walked to his desk, pawed through some mail and came up with a dye-smeared envelope and pulled out the letter inside. “One of the suppliers of sub-mini parts Agrounsky corresponded with. A few years ago he submitted several pieces for inspection and the manufacturer was pretty interested. Agrounsky came up with a few unheard of ideas that had a big potential. He wrote several times and got no answer until I contacted him. Right now he’s pretty interested in re-establishing contact himself. In view of the new space developments Agrounsky’s ideas can come in handy.”
“No address?” I asked him.
“Just his Eau Gallie house.”
“Damn!”
“But there’s a lead. He apparently wrote his last letter on his friend’s stationery. Guy named Vincent Small, address, 37 Meadow Lane, Eau Gallie, Florida.”
“We’re back to there again.”
“It started down there, didn’t it?” Ernie said simply.
“They’ve gone all over that route, Ernie. I.A.T.S., the other bureaus, our own teams. We have to pick it up closer than that.”
“But you haven’t, Tiger buddy,” he reminded me.
I looked across the room at him, sipping at the coffee.
“Okay,” I finally said, “it might be worth a try. I’ll clean up the loose ends here first and see what I can pick up in that section.”
“Then keep the plane up here. If you need special equipment I’ll send it down.”
“Keep your toys to yourself,” I said.
“They saved your tail a few times.”
“I don’t like the instability factors involved.”
“So we all make mistakes. Besides, those details have been smoothed over. I have a new gadget here...”
“Save it,” I grinned at him. “I’ll stick with the old fashioned way.”
“You and that damn gun,” he said.
At noon I met Charlie Corbinet at the Blue Ribbon, took a table upstairs and waited until our order was taken before I gave him the latest developments. Charlie let me finish and said, “I’ll get with the Treasury Department on that heroin buy this afternoon.”
“Lay off my sources.”
“Don’t sweat it. You know me better than that.”
“What did you hear from Washington?”
Charlie reached down and laid a manila envelope on the table between us. “There’s all the UR’s from the security department. Doug Hamilton turned in thirty-four and half of them checked out with unsatisfactory reports from prior investigations. Several were known or suspected Commie agents and the rest we’re working on.”
“Any description fit Agrounsky?”
“None. But then, we haven’t checked them all out yet. A batch are itinerant workers who showed up for simple laboring jobs, but their associations were listed as n.g., so they were disqualified. All this went through Belt-Aire Electronics before it was submitted to Washington anyway.”
“That’s what Camille Hunt told me.”
Our waiter came along then, laid the lunch down with a flourish and went to get coffee. Charlie watched me across his plate, his eyes bright. “You two got along pretty well, didn’t you?”
“Why not?”
“Hal Randolph dug into Belt-Aire pretty thoroughly.”
“So?”
“You know they have top priority in the new space project?”
“Uh-huh.”
“To what extent?”
“That’s Martin Grady’s business.”
“Then let me fill you in... What they’re proposing can put the balance of power on our side. Mention Belt-Aire in Washington and you’re in for a security check no matter who you are. They want nobody poking around. This is getting pretty damn touchy. Even we don’t know the full extent of the operation. That’s a highly sensitive area and if anything goes haywire there will be hell to pay.”
“It can’t be any worse than it is,” I said.
“No, but now everybody is running scared. We haven’t got much time to break something loose. I get the feeling the Reds are closer than we are and if they let the cat out of the bag this is going to be one shook up country.”
“I don’t need any reminding, Charlie. I was there at the beginning, remember?”
“Then keep your memory refreshed. What do you plan to do with this information?”
“Exactly the same as you — check it out step by step, only from a different direction. Can I have these names?”
“They’re yours... all copies of the original.”
I took the folder and put it beside me. “How does Hal Randolph like me being dead?”
“He’d like it better if it were true. My advice is to stay in touch, Tiger. Daily reports... the works. He’s scared stiff you might do something that will trigger the works and I can’t blame him. Right now we can’t take any chances.”
“The chance was taken when they hired Agrounsky,” I said. “If he decides to use that by-pass control then we’ve had it.”
“Hasn’t everybody?” Charlie told me softly.
When we left I gave him a five minute start before I cleared out through the bar entrance. On Sixth Avenue I picked up a cab that was discharging a passenger on the corner, had the driver let me off a block away from my quarters, and walked the rest of the way.
I gave the bell the V signal, did the same thing with a tap on the door and let Rondine throw off the locks. Even then she was being careful, the little automatic in her hand being on full cock until she was certain it was me.
She shut the door, locked it securely and followed me inside. “I was beginning to get worried,” she said.
I grinned and pushed a chair up for her at the table. “Don’t waste time doing that,” I told her. “It takes away from other things.”
“There was an item in TV about the incident at my place again. The police are supposedly still investigating.”