“There’s nothing in the car,” one of his subordinates called out.
“Just get the plate number down — we’ll check it when we get back. No, you might as well go back now.” When was he going to get radios in his cars? “No, wait,” he said. Christ, he hated being called out in the middle of the night. His brain refused to function. “Let me think. Check the plate, that’s the first thing. Then check the area for strangers — the hotels, realtors, everything. Huntsville and Scottsboro first, then spread out.”
Was there anything else? No. Whoever they were, they’d done a first-class job of covering their tracks. No witnesses left alive, telephone wires out, just like a military operation. But why had they left the car? Tried to turn it and overshot, he supposed. And they hadn’t stripped off the license plates. Clumsy. It didn’t fit in with the rest.
He realized the sergeant was still waiting. “Okay, that’s it… Oh, hold on.” Another car was coming up the valley. “The cavalry,” he murmured to himself. How in the hell was the sergeant going to get his car out? What a goddamn mess. He rubbed his eyes and waited.
It was George Walsh, who was quite human for a Fed. They’d worked together against the moonshiners, with a little hindrance from the Treasury men, a few years back.
The two exchanged greetings and Allman showed Walsh around the exhibits. The FBI man whistled under his breath, chomped his gum, and scratched his ear. “Well,” Allman said at last, “what was in the goddamn train?”
Walsh looked, if possible, even less willing to talk. “Crates,” he finally said, making the most of the word’s consonants.
“Crates containing what?”
“Army people wouldn’t tell me. I pointed out that it sometimes helps to know what you’re looking for, and they gave me this.” He showed Allman a diagram. “That’s the marking on them. It must be some military secret — probably supplies of krypton. They’re flying two men down from Washington now. I’m just here to keep you company until they get here.”
“Thanks. How many crates? How big?”
“Ten. Three foot by two foot by two.”
“A truck for certain, then.”
“Has to be. No tracks I suppose?”
“Ground’s too dry. We might find something when it’s light, but I wouldn’t bet my pension on it. This was a real peach of a professional job.”
The streets of Birmingham were bathed in the light of half-dawn and virtually empty. A few trucks making deliveries, the occasional paperboy on his bicycle, and one police car parked near City Hall. Its occupants, as Gerd drove the camper past, were deeply involved in a conversation with Paul, all three men being bent over a map spread out on the vehicle’s hood. Ten minutes later Paul overtook them again and resumed his position a quarter of a mile ahead.
They drove southwestward now, through the heart of an industrial area that seemed to Gerd more like a stretch of the Ruhr than Alabama. There were more people on the streets, most of them in blue overalls. The road passed under a series of railway bridges, then rose sharply to display a line of huge blast furnaces silhouetted against the rising sun.
“I never realized it was a place,” Gerd said to himself.
“Where?” Amy asked through a yawn.
“Bessemer. We just passed the sign. It’s a steelmaking process, but I never knew it was a place where they made steel.”
“Oh.”
He laughed. “I was a teacher once.”
“Teaching what?”
“Science.”
She pulled herself upright in the seat and gazed out at more factories, their tall brick chimneys standing out against the blue line of distant hills. “Did you like teaching?” she asked.
“Some of the time.” He lit another cigarette. “But in the end there’s only one thing science teaches you — that all truths are relative.”
She glanced sideways at him. “And isn’t that a useful thing to learn?”
“Not in a world run by believers.”
In Huntsville, Jeremiah Allman put the phone down when Walsh got back from the airport with the two men from Washington.
“Sam Benton,” the taller one introduced himself. “And this is Don Mitchell. Any developments?”
“Would you like to fill me in first?” Allman asked.
It was Mitchell who answered. “There’s a distinct possibility that foreign nationals are involved. In other words, enemy action, Japs or Germans.”
“Japs would be rather noticeable around here.”
“Yeah, probably Germans.”
“And are we going to be told what’s in the crates?” Allman asked.
“I’m sorry, but no. Not without Roosevelt’s say-so, anyhow. But it would be hard to exaggerate how important it is we get them back.”
“Fair enough,” Allman said. “Here’s where we’re up to. The hunting lodge on McCoy Mountain — that’s about ten miles from where the train was stopped — was hired out last Saturday to a guy named Joe Markham. The realtor in Scottsboro said he had a woman with him when he picked up the key, and she was also there earlier when they first looked it over. Some business associates were going to join them later. Markham had a Tennessee accent, about five foot nine, a hundred and fifty pounds, dark hair, brown eyes — do you want all this now?”
“No, just get it out,” Benton said. “The woman?”
“He didn’t see her clearly either time; she stayed in the car. Black Buick, by the way. She had dark hair, sunglasses — that’s all he saw. Could have been just a hooker for Markham’s friends.”
“They’re checking the lodge now?”
“Yeah, and we’re still waiting for Washington to come through on the car plates.”
A sergeant arrived with coffee and a sheet of paper. “The lodge is empty,” Allman read out. “Clean as a whistle.”
The telephone rang. Walsh listened, made notes, and put the receiver down with a grim expression. “You’d better get a forensic team up to the lodge,” he told Allman. “They’ve traced the car,” he explained to the others. “It was hired by a man in Washington two weeks ago. He doesn’t fit Markham’s description — he was a big man with a Midwest accent. But he did give a German name — Doesburg. Address in New York.”
“Give that here,” Mitchell said. He was already asking the operator for the FBI’s New York Central office.
Walsh and Allman looked at each other. “Now if you were a German commando team humping a truckload of crates containing krypton, where would you be heading?” Walsh asked.
“Germany.”
“Right. The quickest way home would be through Georgia or South Carolina.”
“How long would it take?” Benton asked, standing up to examine the map behind Allman’s desk.
“Twelve hours minimum.”
“So they haven’t got there yet, and they’re not going to risk a pickup in daylight—”
“They could be going south to the Gulf,” Mitchell said, joining him.
“Why would they do that? It would add about a thousand miles to the sea journey.”
“Yeah, but they’d know that we’d know—”
“Yeah, yeah, there’s no end to that.”
“I don’t think we’re dealing with people who are relying on luck to get away,” Mitchell insisted.
“Jesus, German commandos in Jackson County,” Allman muttered to himself.
“That’s not for publication, Lieutenant,” Benton told him. “Okay, Don, they could have gone south. Walsh, work out how far they could have gotten by midday in any seaward direction and then start phoning around. Get Birmingham, Atlanta, and Columbia to put blocks on all the major roads. Tell them what we’re looking for, not what’s in the crates.”