Atom Bomb Angel

23

The train’s horn blasted twice, and we flashed through a tiny station. Short Richard’s offspring divides nation with friendly underground railroad. I looked at the clue for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours since I had boarded the train at Winnipeg. It was 6.45 p.m., Thursday, New Year’s Eve, and Operation Angel was due to start in five days’ time. The ground outside now was thick with snow, and the sky, which had been dark grey all day, was now black.

In a first-class compartment two carriages down, with drawn curtains and a locked door, Douglas Yeodal, the nuclear energy expert, ace lecturer and pacifier of the press, from Huntspill Head, was quietly dismantling and examining a nuclear fuel bundle with the letter B clearly stamped after the third digit of its serial number. The bundle had been obtained by Harvey Sparrow after a lengthy search, not a little bribery, and not a lot of burglary, from the storage depot of American Fossilized’s Seattle plant.

I lifted my eyes from the baffling clue to fourteen across of the New York Sunday Times crossword and rested my gaze on Harvey Sparrow, who sat opposite me, finger working away at a bogey, with a generally indifferent expression on his face to his surroundings, his task, and probably to his life. He was under instructions that we did not know each other, had never met before, and were not to speak one word to each other, except for necessary courtesies, throughout the journey. To his credit, he had been professional enough not to have disobeyed my instructions, even though he must have discovered by now that at some point, in between his arriving at Winnipeg station and his ordering of a beer in the buffet car an hour after boarding the train, an unseen hand had removed his wallet from his breast pocket and replaced it with my own.

Between Sparrow and the window sat a man who constantly ran a hand across his face, as if checking his stubble. If he was worried about his appearance, he needn’t have bothered; none of us looked too hot after a night of sleeping in our seats. There were beds in first class, but except for the one compartment I had been able to get for Yeodal, all the accommodation on the train with beds had been taken, and so we were slumming it.

The other person who didn’t appear to be slumming it was Sleder. He wasn’t in any of the open carriages, so if he was on the train, and I was damned sure he was, then he must have been behind one of the curtained windows of the first-class bedroom compartments. It hadn’t taken me long to get put through to him on the telephone on Tuesday. The girl on the switchboard had answered on the first ring, and used the current jargon popular with the switchboard operators of all go-ahead New York corporations.

‘Good morning, AtomSled, how can I help you?’

‘By putting me through to Deke Sleder, please.’

‘Just one moment. May I say who’s calling, please?’

‘My name is Max Flynn.’

‘One moment, Mr Flynn, I’ll see if he’s in.’

Click.

‘Mr Sleder’s office,’ said a new girl.

‘I’d like to speak to Mr Sleder.’

‘Oh I am sorry, Mr Sleder’s in a meeting all day. Can anyone else help you?’

‘No, this is very important. I’d like you to give him a message; I’ll hold because I think he’ll want to reply.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir — he is not to be interrupted.’

‘You’ll have to interrupt him, this is an emergency. Will you please tell him that there is a problem with his B-grade fuel.’

She sounded dubious. ‘Well, I’ll try. Will you hold the line, please, Mr Flynn.’

Inside of thirty seconds, an American drawl with a heavy German accent came down the telephone. ‘This is Sleder. Who are you? I don’t know you, Mr Flynn.’

‘If you want to find out, I’m going to be boarding the Rail Canada Vancouver to Montreal express, eastbound, in Winnipeg, at 6.00 p.m. tomorrow evening.’

‘Is this a joke? You want me to travel across Canada? On a train?’

‘I have a fuel element, manufactured by your firm. I am being met in Montreal by a senior representative of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. I intend to give him your fuel bundle. Its serial number is 546B/98066/31. If you don’t believe I have it, go and check North American Fossilized’s store room.’

‘So that makes you a thief.’

‘Call it what you like, Sleder.’

‘Do you want money?’

‘I don’t want money, Sleder. I want a fuel bundle that isn’t faulty. I’ve promised to give one to the Canadians, and I’d hate to give them a dud one. Why don’t you bring a nice one, in perfect order, and we can make a little swap?’

‘I’m not sure that I understand you, Mr Flynn.’

‘Well, you’ve got plenty of time to think about it. The train leaves shortly after eighteen hundred hours, Winnipeg time. Maybe I’ll see you on it.’

‘One moment, I want to know—’

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, because I hung up.

To my right in the carriage was a man who had spent the whole of the last twenty-four hours — except for some times during the night when he tried to sleep — with his head buried in a succession of intellectual magazines, with the occasional incursion into James Gavel’s Tai Pan; he was reading Tai Pan at the moment, and was making slow progress. In the last hour and a half he had read only nine pages.

To the left of Sparrow was a human gorilla. He was about thirty, with straight greasy hair brushed forward, and traces of sideburns running straight down both cheeks. He had several large and raw-looking spots on his face, a yellowy complexion, and a set of teeth that looked like the door sill of an abandoned car. He belched frequently and privately, and sniffed loudly and not so privately, occasionally wiping drips from his nose on his dirty tweed sleeve. He wasn’t the sort of person it would be wise to sit next to if you had an open wound.

He spent the time either sleeping, with his mouth opening and shutting, or awake, playing solitaire on a small plastic travelling board he kept in his jacket pocket. When he slept, his head did not tilt forward but lay back against the cushion behind his head. Sometimes he did genuinely seem to be asleep, but most of the time I had the feeling he was watching the compartment through tiny gaps in his eyelids.

I pointed the tip of my ball-point pen back up towards the Gucci briefcase, and once more the digits on the tiny dial in the barrel began to rotate crazily. Whilst the pen was actually capable of writing, its primary function was not the business of writing at all. It was a Geiger counter that could detect radiation within a radius of several hundred yards. Right now, it detected a lot of radiation in the Gucci briefcase. It would have been stretching the laws of coincidence too far to have considered that the content of that briefcase might be anything other than an AtomSled-manufactured fuel bundle.

For twenty-four hours, none of the three men. other than Harvey Sparrow, with whom I wasn’t concerned, had lifted a finger towards their briefcases. In my phone call to Martha of yesterday, she had warned me that whilst Sleder was arranging to take a fuel bundle on the train, his main intention was to have me bumped off long before we got to Montreal.

The best way to thwart this not particularly pleasant plan, I had decided in the short while it took me to figure out, was to kill his hit man before his hit man killed me. But to do that, I had to find him first. As neither the hit man nor I had met each other before, we both had the initial problem of identification.

In case he thought of the bright idea of taking a look at his travelling companions’ wallets, I had switched mine with Sparrow’s. I had a feeling Sleder would use the hit man as his bag man, and all I had to do was fit the face to the bag to be in a definite position of one-upmanship. But the three did not make life easy for me; none of them would open his bloody briefcase. My arrangement with Sparrow was that one of us would be in the carriage at all times, and by facial signals he would indicate to me if I had missed the opening of a briefcase while I was out. In theory it was a simple process of elimination: the man who had the fuel bundle would not be opening his briefcase at all.

I decided to give it a break and go and see how Doug Yeodal was getting on. A lot hung on his findings, and I was pretty certain he was going to find something. If Sleder had nothing to hide, he wouldn’t have got so bothered as he evidently had. I got up and walked down the aisle and through into the next coach, a first-class sleeper. I stopped outside a compartment where the blinds were drawn; it was in this compartment that I was sure I had seen a girl I recognized. I wondered whether to knock, and then decided against it. She had had as clear a look at me as I’d had at her. She had changed the colour of her hair, and now wore glasses; I hadn’t changed at all. If it was the same girl, she would have recognized me without doubt, and if she was interested in seeing me again, she would have come and found me. She hadn’t come. I turned and walked on down the corridor, into the next coach, and up to Doug Yeodal’s compartment. The blinds were down, and I knew the door would be locked; I opened it with the key I had and went in.

‘Hallo, Doug,’ I said, and then I found I was talking to an empty compartment, and I turned very, very cold. There was nothing: no suitcases full of instruments and chemicals, no nuclear fuel bundle, and no Doug Yeodal. I checked the compartment number and the coach number. There was no mistake; he had gone, lock, stock and bundle.

The compartment was neat and tidy, there was no sign that there had been a struggle; and yet, the blinds were drawn and the door was locked. It didn’t make any sense. There was no way Doug would have left of his own accord, no way at all. Something had happened. I didn’t yet know what, but I didn’t like it.

I walked up the rest of the train, and then back down, peering in every compartment that didn’t have its blinds down, and I saw no sign of either Doug Yeodal or his suitcases. Unless what had been in that bundle had vapourized Yeodal, his baggage and itself, someone had come and taken him and his apparatus clean away.

I returned to my carriage. Harvey Sparrow wasn’t in his seat and I wasn’t very pleased; I assumed he’d gone either to the lavatory or to get a drink, which was bloody stupid of him; he knew his instructions were not to be out of the carriage if I was.

After an hour, Sparrow had still not reappeared, and I was not liking it one bit. I went to look for him, but the conjurer had been at work again. He’d gone. Two grown men had now vanished into thin air — and neither grown men nor anyone else vanish into thin air. An hour and a half ago, Sparrow had been sitting opposite me, picking his nose for all he was worth; now he wasn’t on this train, or if he was, he was damn well hidden.

If Sleder was picking off my team one by one, he was doing an efficient job; there was only me to go. However, short of barricading myself in the guard’s van for the rest of the journey, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, and barricading myself away wouldn’t get me very far, except, perhaps, to keep me alive, which ought to have been enough, but I didn’t see it that way. I took the safety catch off my gun and returned to my seat.

The man opposite me continued to check his stubble and look out of the window. The reader on my right had somehow read one hundred and nine pages of Tai Pan in my absence, and the gorilla was busy moving solitaire pegs into new slots, and discarding taken ones into the plastic lid, with a rhythmic click, tap, click, tap, click, tap.

Suddenly I saw that the man who was reading Tai Pan wasn’t reading it any more: his eyes were looking at me. He lifted his copy of the novel to reveal that he was holding an object which looked to me, at first glance, remarkably like a .44 calibre Luger; it required only the most cursory of second glances with my trained eye to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that it was indeed a .44 calibre Luger, with a device attached over the barrel that bore more than a passing resemblance to a silencer. I didn’t require a third glance to see who the gun was pointed at. I looked over at the man with the stubble, and then at the gorilla; both of them had succeeded in producing Lugers out of thin air. Right now, I wished I could have done the same.

The gorilla stood up, followed by Stubble, and between them they blocked off the aisle in both directions. The intellectual indicated to me, with a remarkable economy of words, that I should stand up between the two. ‘Up,’ was all he said. It was enough. I stood up and stepped into the aisle. Then, sandwiched between the gorilla and Stubble, with a sharp object pushing into the small of my back, we shuffled in and out of step into the next coach, a first-class bedroom coach, and stopped outside a door with drawn curtains.

The gorilla slid open the door, and I was pushed in. The compartment was large — in fact two compartments turned into one. There was a man sitting in a lounging position, reading a document; he looked up as I and the three musketeers came in. I had never met this man before, but I had little difficulty in recognizing him from the newspaper photographs. It was Deke Sleder, and he didn’t bother with any introductions.

‘Perhaps you would care to tell me the meaning of this charade you have organized — but first, perhaps you would be kind enough to place your hands on your head, my acquaintances appear to have overlooked something.’

I didn’t have much option, and Sleder reached across inside my jacket and pulled out my Beretta.

‘How very observant of you, Sleder. That probably explains why you’re a millionaire and they’re just humble thugs.’

Sleder smiled, a short, dry smile. His blue eyes looked cold, cold as swimming pools in winter. ‘We’ll keep the jokes to a minimum, Mr Flynn. Now, please talk — you have the floor.’

‘I don’t talk to loaded guns,’ I said, and sat down and stared at him. For some reason, it upset him quite a lot; he stood up and smashed me with the palm of his hand, and then sat down again. If he hadn’t shown his colours before, he’d certainly done so now.

‘Where are Douglas Yeodal and Harvey Sparrow?’

‘Dead, Mr Flynn, as you will be in a few minutes too. Your technician man was removed from the train during the night — as was his luggage — through the window of his compartment. But do not worry — we are not litter louts — we arranged for everything to be collected. If you wish to see your friend Mr Sparrow, then it will give me great pleasure to show him to you. He did very kindly point out to us that he was Harvey Sparrow and not Max Flynn, but all the same, we felt it might not be wise to keep him alive.’

Sleder stood up, peeled back the carpeting from the floor, to reveal a hatch. He lifted up the hatch, and there was a very dead-looking Sparrow, his neck twisted horribly, lying in a large metal container attached to the underside of the compartment floor.

‘Very ingenious,’ I said.

‘You may not know, or you may know but have forgotten, that my company has very extensive links with the railroad. I can get small favours done.’

‘How very convenient,’ I said, ‘I have problems even getting a housekeeper.’

I was trying to figure out my next move and I wasn’t getting very far.

‘I am sorry to hear of your problems,’ he said. ‘In a few moments, you will be able to discuss them quietly with Mr Sparrow.’

‘Tell me, Sleder, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing all this for? What’s so damned special about your B-marked fuel?’

‘That is my business and it is going to remain my business.’

‘I’ve beaten you to it, Sleder.’

He pulled a sheet of folded paper from his inside pocket, and handed it to me. It was a telex; the one I had told Martha to send to AtomSled.

‘The telex in that office does not connect with the telex network. It connects only with a second machine that is rather well concealed. This second machine prints out the message and holds it until a code is punched into the machine; only I know the code. You have held up nothing; the fuel shipments have been made already. You have achieved nothing except to waste a great deal of my time. I would like to know who you are, and what your purpose in doing all this has been?’

Three automatic Lugers pointed at me: one on my right, one diagonally opposite and to my right, the third diagonally opposite and to my left. My own gun was in Sleder’s pocket. It wasn’t hard to think of occasions, in life, when things had looked brighter. I was going to have to pull off something damn smart to get out of this one, and at this particular moment, no damn smart idea presented itself. The important thing was to keep talking, for as long as I kept talking, I was still alive, and as long as I was alive, I was in with a chance.

‘It’s been rumoured,’ I said, ‘that someone’s trying to do a lot of damage to a lot of power stations. I’m trying to stop that happening. Does that answer your question?’

‘About five per cent of it.’

‘What’s the big deal with the B-marked fuel?’

‘I thought you already knew, Mr Flynn.’

‘My guess is that it contains nuclear explosives.’

Sleder’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not interested in your guesswork, Mr Flynn.’

‘But am I right?’

‘I would not give you the satisfaction of telling you.’

‘If you’re going to kill me anyway, I don’t see what harm it would do?’

‘I’m sure you don’t. That’s why I am going to remain rich and alive, and you are about to become poor and dead.’ He smiled, pleased at having turned my phrase. He nodded at Stubble, who reached up and brought down a small leather suitcase, also genuine Gucci, from the luggage rack, opened it up, and removed a syringe and a bottle. He eyed me the way a hungry man in a lousy restaurant would eye a shrivelled lamb chop that had turned up on his plate when he’d ordered a sixteen-ounce T-Bone; he thrust the needle of the syringe through the top of the bottle, pressed the plunger all the way in, pulled it out again slowly, as it pulled the pale yellow fluid up with it.

Sleder looked at me with more than a trace of satisfaction on his face. ‘Judging from the pin-pricks on Ogomo’s arm, you know quite a lot about the use of this drug, Mr Flynn.’

I didn’t reply. I was busy thinking, and I didn’t want to lose my concentration and, as a result, my timing. The intellectual on my right was holding his gun over my arm. His eye was on the syringe. The gorilla by the door was also looking more at the syringe than at me. Sleder did not have a gun out and Dr Kildare alias Stubble, had his hands full.

I brought my right arm up sharply, smashing my knuckles into Intellectual’s elbow, and the Luger flew across the compartment; I grabbed his arm with my left hand, pulled it down so hard over the arm of the seat that it snapped in two with a crack that sounded like a shot; he howled and half-stood up in his seat, which gave me enough leverage in my right arm to insert it under his shoulder and hurl him across into Stubble. I dived headlong for the gorilla in the corner, clamped my hand around his gun wrist, and rammed my left hand as hard as I could into his crutch, grabbing for his balls. For one glorious moment I had the Luger all to myself, then I felt an arm clamp on mine, there was a jarring thump and then everything went black.

When I came to, I couldn’t move. I was lying lengthways across the seat, my hands and feet bound so tightly they were hurting, and I was conscious that the shirt sleeve of my left arm was rolled up. I opened my eyes and saw Sleder’s face staring at me. His lips parted slightly, and at the same time I felt a tiny prick in my arm; I began, right away, to feel very good.

It’s a drug, I told myself, Fight. You don’t feel good, it’s an illusion. I started to fight it. Fighting it felt good. I could see kindness in Sleder’s face; it was full of kindness. Resist. Fight. Why? He’s a nice man, they’re all nice men; they’re kind and they want to help me. Let them help. Answer their questions; if you answer them it will enable them to help you. There was a terrific, wonderful feeling from the centre of my body, which radiated outwards, basking every inch of me in happiness. I loved these people.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Max Flynn. It’s Maximilian, actually, Max for short.’

‘How old are you, Max?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘Who do you work for?’

Resist. Must resist. Drugged. Fight. But they’re so nice. Everything is so nice. Trap. ‘I work for Noddy.’

‘Do you, Max? What do you do for Noddy?’

‘I don’t, I don’t really work for Noddy. I lied.’

‘We didn’t think you did, Max.’

‘I didn’t mean to lie. Actually I—’ Resist. Fight. Don’t talk about work. Tell a story. Can’t. Got to. Make it plausible. ‘I’m a journalist.’

‘Are you, Max?’

Sleder’s face started jerking up and down. I closed my eyes and opened them. He was sticking his tongue out at me. I stuck mine out back, but he didn’t laugh; in fact, he didn’t move at all. I heard a little girl’s voice. Sleder leaned forward, close to me, and then he disappeared from my line of vision. Something strange was going on, but I couldn’t figure out quite what. That good feeling was going fast; I was coming back into reality and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to — not until I saw her face staring at me. The final drops of the Pentothal drained from my bloodstream, and I found I was in a railway compartment with four dead men and a stunning red-head with a Smith and Wesson automatic in her hand.

She stood, frozen to the spot, her face sheet-white, and her gun-hand shaking.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

She shook her head, and looked nervously around. She looked like she was going to burst into tears. ‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ she said.

‘You should take it up professionally — you’d make a fortune.’

She looked at me, and some of the shock went from her face. She grinned. I had last seen her a shade over two years ago, as she had walked into the departure lounge at Kennedy Airport, and disappeared from my life. She hadn’t been very pleased with me on that occasion, after I had caused her treasured Jensen to be riddled with bullet holes and badly bashed, but from the expression on her face, and her actions of the last couple of minutes, it appeared she wasn’t still quite so upset about it.

‘You look terrific, Sumpy.’

‘You look like a chicken,’ she said; ‘I’ll untruss you. Have you been reading your manual upside down?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You got it all wrong: they should have been tied up and you should have had the gun.’

‘It’s funny you should mention it — I had a feeling something was wrong.’

She untied my hands and started working on the cord around my legs. Her name was Mary-Ellen Joffe, but I called her Sumpy on account of a passion she had for making love whilst soused from head to foot in Johnson’s Baby Oil, her name being taken, in the nicest possible way, from the oil sump of a motor car. My legs came free, and I sat up. I sent Sumpy back to her compartment, and told her to order a stiff drink for each of us.

I set about trying to clean up the compartment. I rolled back the carpet and lifted up the hatch to where Sparrow lay. The accommodation hadn’t been designed for five, but none of them were in any shape to do any complaining. I washed the bloodstains off the carpet and seats with the towels, and threw them out of the window. Then I went along to Sumpy’s compartment.

She had drunk both the drinks, and two more were on their way. A bit of colour had come back to her face. The steward delivered two double Scotches. I picked up one glass. ‘To the human atom bomb!’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Angel,’ she said, ‘your little guardian angel.’