“As you were probably told, I’m with the AEC. Most of our undercover work and investigations are handled by the FBI, but we do a few of the jobs ourselves. It was on one of those that I met Knox Warnow.
“Five years ago he had a very minor post at one of our power projects. He began to talk at cocktail parties and apparently expressed some strange political opinions. I was assigned to get as close as I could to him to sound him out. It wasn’t difficult. He was starved for someone to listen to his ideas. He had in his mind a process for making a nuclear explosive in plastic that could be molded into almost any shape. I asked him what the object of that would be, and his eyes really lit up. This stuff, he said, could be shaped into innocent looking objects, smuggled easily into any country in the world and planted in their cities. A demand could be made that the country surrender or the cities would be destroyed one by one.”
“Sure sounds like our Mumura people.”
“That’s what I thought He needed money to perfect his process, a lot of it He took his scheme to AEC officials and they practically threw him out of the office. Our emphasis is mostly on peaceful uses of atomic energy, and nobody even wants to talk about weapons.
“Naturally, Warnow was eased out of his Job with the commission. He was pretty bitter about it. Swore he’d get even with the whole rotten country for not supporting him. Soon after that he dropped out of sight, and we didn’t try too hard to locate him, since, frankly, we considered him a crackpot.”
“You did a good job on Warnow,” I said, Then to tease her a little, I added, “How close did you manage to get to him?”
She lowered her lids and peered at me with her deep blue gaze. “As a matter of fact, I never got that close. Warnow was so completely involved in his plastic process that he couldn’t get interested in… other things. I was a little relieved. He had an electronic pacemaker to regulate his heartbeat, and it would have been pretty embarassing to have it short circuit at an intimate moment. Tell me, Nick, you don’t use any artificial aids like that, do you?”
“Nope,” I grinned. “I’m still using all the original parts.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Would you like a cocktail?”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “Then I’ll call Hawk in Washington and pass on what you’ve told me. If we’re lucky, we might have the evening to ourselves.”
We walked together to the bright, compact kitchen at the rear of the cottage. I said, “This is quite an isolated place you have here.”
“Yes, I know. I like it this way. Crowds have never appealed to me much. That road outside dead-ends a couple of miles up the hill at a private estate, so there’s not much traffic past here.”
“If it weren’t for those motorcycles growling outside, you might be miles out in the country. Do they come around here much?” “No, this is the first time I’ve ever seen them. They seem to be waiting for something to happen. It’s a little creepy, but they haven’t approached the house.”
Alarm bells went off in my head loud and clear.
“Rona, that call you made to Hawk this morning — did you use the phone here?”
“Yes, I did. Why—?” She gasped as understanding came. “Do you think my line is bugged?”
“It’s safest to assume all lines are bugged until you prove otherwise. I don’t like that cycle gang out front Do you have a car?”
“Yes, it’s parked on the street pointing up the hill.”
“Throw a couple of things together and let’s get out of here.”
“But where will we go?”
“AXE keeps a beach house out at Malibu for agents to use when necessary. You’ll be much safer there.” I didn’t add, “If we get past the motorcycle crowd,” but that’s what I was thinking.
Four
We went out the back door and slipped through the shrubbery to the steep road where Rona’s car was parked.
“You’d better let me drive,” I told her. This may take some tricky maneuvering.”
She handed me the keys and moved quickly around to get in on the passenger’s side. I slid behind the wheel, noticing that the back seat was full of more of her guitar-making equipment — rosewood panels, spools of steel and nylon strings, and ebony fingerboards.
The motorcycle bunch hadn’t seen us yet, but they were milling restlessly around at the foot of the road. I kicked the engine to life and heard shouts behind us. I slammed the shift lever into low, and the car leaped up the hill. We squealed around an S-curve, momentarily out of sight, but I could hear their machines roaring up the hill after us.
We picked up speed on a short climbing straightaway, and I gave a silent thanks that Rona had herself a car with some muscle under the hood. The motorcycles came into sight in the rearview mirror, and I heard a popping sound that was not part of their exhausts. A slug whanged off the rear deck of the car and was followed by another, aimed low.
I jockeyed the machine around another curve and dug Wilhelmina out of the holster. I flicked off the safety and handed the Luger to Rona. I said, “I can’t slow down to give you a good shot at them, but keep firing and it’ll give them something to think about”
Rona leaned out the window and fired left-handed at the bikers. I was pleased to see that she knew how to handle a gun. Holding the car on the road kept me too busy to look around to see if she hit anything, but a change in the pitch of engine noise behind us told me she was at least slowing them down.
Just as I was getting a little breathing distance between us and the bikers, the sharp smell of gasoline told me they’d shot a hole in our tank. The needle of the fuel gage was already jiggling at E, so I knew we weren’t going a whole lot farther. I tramped the accelerator pedal to the floor and we swerved dangerously around two more curves.
The cycles were still roaring up the road behind us, but I had a couple of turns between us when the engine coughed and I knew we were down to the fumes. During the past thirty seconds I’d come up with a desperate plan to get us out of there alive. Rona had emptied the Luger, and there was no time to reload. The brush on both sides of the road was too thick for us to run far. There were only seconds to act before the pursuers were upon us, so my first try would be the only one we would get.
I slammed to a stop in the middle of the road, grabbed a spool of steel guitar string wire off the back seat, and sprinted to a utility pole at the side of the road. I looped the wire around the pole, double-twisting the end to make it secure. Running back to the car, I tossed the spool in through the rear window, jumped into the front seat and goosed the last ounce of power out of the machine to boost us up a small grade and out of sight behind a clump of chapparal on the other side of the road.
The thunder of the motorcycles was just one curve downhill from us when I leaned across the seat, at the same time telling Rona, “Get out and crouch down behind the car.”
“But, Nick, they’ll see us as soon as they get past the bushes here.”
“I think they’ll have something else to think about,” I said. “Now, do what I tell you.”
As Rona followed instructions, I grabbed the spool of guitar wire and yanked it taut. I opened the door, wound the wire about the window frame, and rolled up the window to hold it in place. Then I slammed the door. The bikes were roaring up the straightaway when I fell beside Rona, leaving the steel guitar string stretched across the road at a height of about four feet.
The two leaders of the motorcycle pack hit the wire almost simultaneously. It looked as though they had nodded together in agreement at something, but in the next instant the two heads stayed poised in air while the choppers roared out from under them. The helmeted heads hit the asphalt and bounced crazily along the road like grisly soccer balls. The cycles, handlebars still gripped by the headless riders, roared on up the Hill for several yards before one wobbled over to bump the other, sending them both into a spinning tangle of flesh and machinery.