Shaw said, “All right, Bum. Just keep very, very quiet and you won’t get hurt.” He pushed the door to behind him. “First, though, lock this door again — and put the bolts on as well.”
“What you want?” Bum asked, shaking badly as he obeyed orders. “We had word you was dead,” he added in an awestruck voice.
“Well, I’m not, as you can see. What I want is something you keep down in that private morgue. I’m going down and you’re coming with me. Is there anyone down there at the moment?”
Bum shook his head. “No,” he muttered, eyes flickering around. “Ain’t no one, only the stiffs.” The door locked and bolted, he moved away from it into the office.
“Where’s the Chinese who usually keeps an eye on you, and the other Puerto Rican beside Vilera?”
“They’re away in Pittsburgh. Ain’t nobody down there.”
“I hope you’re right,” Shaw said, “because you’re going down just in front of me and if there is anyone down there, I’ll blow your backside right through your guts, Bum. If you want to alter your statement, now’s the time to do it.”
Walley repeated, “Ain’t nobody down there. Do I have to go on repeatin’ that? This place is closin’ down.”
“That makes sense all right,” Shaw murmured. “But I’m only taking your word about the cellar’s emptiness because I have to. I hope you’re going to live, Bum.”
Walley nodded his agreement; and then asked anxiously, “What happens after that, then?” He licked his lips, eyes darting still.
“Once I’ve done what I’ve come here to do,” Shaw told him, “you come with me to police headquarters. There’ll be somebody there who wants a word with you, and if you co-operate nicely, and sing all they want, I doubt if they’ll send you to the chair. So it’s well worth trying to stay alive till then. You agree?”
“Sure,” Bum said uneasily, “sure…”
“Good! And now — the morgue.”
Bum nodded and turned away for the door into the passage. Evidently he wasn’t always as slow as he looked for, as he turned, he slewed past an open drawer in the steel filing cabinet and the next time Shaw sighted his hand it held a gun. This was no time to take chances and Shaw was faster than Walley anyway. He squeezed the trigger of the Webley and the gun jerked out of Bum’s grip and Shaw’s bullet went on, having been slightly deflected off course, to enter Bum’s stomach. Bum sagged to the floor and gave a brief, rattling cough, and then there was a gush of blood and Bum died.
Shaw murmured, “Sorry, Bum, but that was a trifle silly of you.” He stepped over the corpse and made for the passage and the recess behind the stairs at the end. For the best part of ten minutes he groped around on the wall, then at last he found the section which, when pressed, moved fractionally inward. He pressed hard for fifteen seconds, there was the inward movement, followed by a loud click, and the stone stairway was wide open.
Carefully he moved in.
It was anybody’s guess whether or not Walley had spoken the truth when he said there was no one in the cellar. Shaw went down quickly, with the Webley ready to shoot. But Bum had been genuine; only Osterman and his grand-daughter remained, waiting still to catch that boat for Peking. Good evidence, those corpses… Shaw looked around; the central tables were bare of bottles. He went across to the oven stowage and drew from inside his trousers a thick steel spike. He inserted this in the ring of the padlock and put all his weight on it. It took a while but in the end it gave. The ring-end broke free of its moorings and Shaw, breathing hard, pulled the whole padlock away and put it in his pocket. Then he opened the oven door and poked around inside. He brought out the aerosol container that Doc had used to prepare the Osterman bodies for their long sea voyage.
He shoved this into his jacket pocket, pulled out the fresh padlock that Kirkham had got for him, and snapped it into place through the hasp. He took one more quick look around; he had left no traces of his visit. Only Walley, so very dead in the office above. It was unlikely Spice or Vilera or anybody else would check the contents of the oven — unless they had another body for dispatch, and presumably, if this place was due for closure, they wouldn’t have. Even if the container was found to be missing, its disappearance certainly wouldn’t be connected with a man lying dead at the bottom of earthquake-riven ground in Kansas state. And as for Walley, his demise could be covered easily enough.
Shaw snapped off the light and went on up the steps.
At the top he closed the masonry noiselessly, sealing off the morgue. With his gun still ready to shoot, he went back along the passage and kicked open the office door. The room was still empty, except for Bum Walley lying in his thickening pool of blood.
Shaw got to work on the office.
He pulled out all the drawers of the filing cabinet and the desk and then, after sifting quickly through their contents and finding nothing of any interest — Spice would be too fly for that — he scattered papers everywhere. There was a tin box of cash, probably a petty cash till, lying unlocked in one of the desk drawers. Shaw took possession of sixty-odd dollars and some loose change, pushing the lot into a pocket. Then he unlocked and unbolted the outer door and looked down briefly at Bum. This, when Spice and Vilera returned, should look like a clear case of robbery — with murder in the course of it. Incredibly, Bum Walley would have died in the execution of his duty, protecting the boss’s interests. At any rate, Shaw still wouldn’t come into the picture. Shaw was still as dead as Walley.…
Shaw walked away from the Hound-Tucson pier and picked up a cab. He told the driver to take him across to Grand Central. When he reached the station a bunch of sailors were coming off a train from Eastville — sailors from the threatened fleet in Norfolk, Virginia. Leave was being given as usual. No outward signs… Shaw hoped those sailors would be able to rejoin their ships and find each of them in one unatomized, workable piece.
He caught a train through to Washington. Until tomorrow there was nothing more he could do, but as the train rattled on through the night to the capital he had plenty on his mind… including what would be happening to Flame. In the early hours he reached the room allotted to him, for security reasons, inside the Pentagon itself; and when he found a message telling him to call Kirkham’s office urgently, he had a nasty feeling that something, somewhere, had come unstuck.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kirkham said, “We believe there’s been a leak.” His face was strained, shadowed with fatigue and a gnawing anxiety; his responsibilities were frightening at this time. “If so, it’s not entirely surprising. I’m not passing any bucks anywhere at all, but I do have to say that no security service in this world could clamp down a totally effective screen around the size of preparations we in the Pentagon have had to make.”
“What’s the evidence of the leak, General?”
Kirkham pushed things around on his desk. “Around midnight,” he said, “two quite separate, unidentified radio broadcasts were picked up, one of them on short wave. Each was a message in code — and each originated in Kansas.”
“I see!” Shaw’s lips tightened. “D’you think these messages were going out to Peking?”
“Could be the short-wave one was,” Kirkham said. “Wherever they were addressed, we can’t crack the code — and we’ve had experts working on that, I needn’t tell you. Now, shortly after those messages went out, our monitoring equipment picked up a number of other messages on different wavebands, all coming from different locations around the States, about the same length but in a different and equally uncrackable code. And this I do not like at all.”