When he had been appointed head of the secret police he had made results his one objective; the methods of obtaining them were evaluated by him from a practical standpoint and no other. Scott, the American, had been a good case in point. He had first appeared in a certain vital location in Europe at a time when the plans for the overthrow of the United States were well advanced. Not even the premier knew as much about them as did Colonel Rostovitch, who was himself their principal author. There were certain things, the colonel had decided, that the premier would be better off not knowing. The premier had continued with his playacting while the colonel had done the hard core work. One minor piece of information which he desired and did not have was known to Lieutenant Scott; he therefore set out to get it.
Scott had been probed to find out where his weakness lay. It lay in immaturity and the earnest desire to love someone and to be loved in return. That called for a woman of singular talents, of which the colonel had a number available. He made a shrewd choice and then waited for the inevitable results; every man had his price, despite the fact that he might not know it himself.
Scott had been completely determined to be loyal to his country and to his military obligations, but he had been broken down with ruthless efficiency. Misleading information had been fed to him and then what had appeared to be supporting evidence. Convinced that his superiors had already openly discussed certain information which had been entrusted to them, and by then almost blindly in love with the highly skilled and extraordinarily lovely young woman who had been assigned to the job, he had unknowingly yielded to the expert questioning which had been concealed in her apparently idle, devoted conversation.
Just before the matter was to have been concluded, the lieutenant had been promoted and assigned to an even more sensitive area. The colonel had changed the instructions immediately and ordered him kept on the string. During the next few months he had been so carefully manipulated that he had gradually become truly convinced that the best hope for humanity, including that segment of it in his own country, lay in overcoming the aggressive lust and ruthless demand for profits that motivated the capitalistic system. His reward for this eventual conversion had been a physical and emotional ecstasy beyond anything he had conceived of as possible.
When it had been at its apex it had been snatched from him by the inhuman action of a high military superior, or so he had been made to believe. Rage had destroyed his reason and he had crossed over the line. He had been kept there by a firm promise — that the girl around whom the earth and all of the other planets now revolved would in one way or another be found and restored to him.
Scott had rationalized, as many other men had done before him, that he was fighting for the woman who was to be his wife and for the right to live with her in a finer and better world. On his own he had done his utmost, looking for her whenever and wherever he could, but he had been many thousands of miles removed from the Hong Kong dance hall which had been the scene of her next assignment.
The colonel was furious because Scott, whose unexpected position right in the White House had already been highly useful, had been shot dead literally on his own doorstep. One of his secret operating bases would now have to be abandoned; but that was nothing compared to the intolerable fact that his enemy had scored a decisive, if small, victory over him. Not since he had lost the most ruthless and efficient agent he had ever had in an alley in Port Said had he known a similar frustration. Scott had represented a heavy investment, and a successful one. Furthermore, he had been bearing some kind of important information or he would never have risked coming to the place he had at that hour of the night.
Also extremely aggravating to the colonel was the lack of any clue to the identity of the person or persons who had scored on him. His people had located the place from which the shot had come, but a thorough shakedown of the premises a few minutes after Scott had died had turned up nothing.
His instructions, which had been relayed to Scott, had been merely to probe the translator Hewlitt for a possible lead into the underground. The fact that he had come down to report in person clearly indicated that Scott had discovered something of real importance. In that deduction the colonel was correct; his agent had discovered that Raleigh Hewlitt, who worked in Zalinsky’s own immediate proximity, was himself a member of the underground organization and had tried to feed him a preposterous story during the tete-a-tete in the bar. That piece of information had died with the man who had detected it — as it had been intended to do. The cock and bull story about the Baltimore Bay Tunnel would never have brought him to the house at any such hour, but the knowledge that Zalinsky was being directly observed by an underground agent would. Scott had been, for the most part, highly intelligent as well as sensitive, and it had been his undoing.
Certain facts revealed by Scott’s death caused the colonel to do some hard thinking. First, the shot had been fired by an expert marksman, not by an amateur, and with sophisticated equipment. Casual assassins do not have sniperscopes available. Secondly, it had taken some competent work to uncover the carefully concealed intelligence center and it had been done so well that the colonel had had no inkling that his private location had been blown until the news had been delivered by the cadaver on his doorstep. Thirdly, and most significant of all, he had been challenged. Challenged by a totally invisible adversary who obviously knew what he was doing.
The colonel smashed one mauled fist against the top of his desk: he would answer that challenge and he would answer it in language that would bring his opposition to its knees in short order! He had plenty of people and more were coming; he would stop the general surveillance and similar activities in order to direct all of his resources squarely against whatever underground there was that had flung this defiance into his face. Every person on his staff had been hand-picked and then toughened to be a totally relentless, utterly effective weapon. They had done little so far in the United States except for those who had been operating in the theater for some time; now they would do a great deal. A very great deal.
The colonel slammed his other fist down. It was total war and in that heartless game he was the deadliest player there was. At that moment he dedicated himself to total success and nothing else. He knew that he was to be the next premier of his country, but his ambition did not stop at that. The biggest obstacle was all but out of the way now — one more victory over what had to be a puny opponent and then…
He blocked the rest of it out of his mind. He did not want to dwell on it — he had other things to do first.
At her berth in the San Pedro harbor the fishing vessel Dolly was being prepared for sea. She had a new crew and a new skipper this time, which was not unusual. She was, if anything, too large for her job, and as a result the cost of operating her had discouraged several previous owners. In addition, her speed was a knot or two less than it would have been if her lines had been a little more skillfully laid out. She was sturdy, there was no denying that, and she could withstand the roughest weather she was likely ever to see, but her efficiency as a working vessel was a few notches lower than most of the other craft engaged in the same line of activity.
It did not take the experienced Japanese-American fishermen who were berthed next to her very long to size up the man who proposed to take her to sea this time. He was experienced around the waterfront, that was clear; he had a fair knowledge of commercial fishing operations, and he was obviously determined to do his best. If he did very well, and if luck was with him and his crew, it was quite possible that he might have a profitable first voyage. But it was quite clear that he had never been at sea before in command of a vessel such as the Dolly; it was a new venture for him — possibly his effort to establish himself independently so that he could be his own boss henceforth. He was a nice guy and the crew of the neighboring vessel wished him good luck.