Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1962

The Half-Million Dollar Decoy by C. S. Park

Decoys are of many kinds, human and inhuman, or perhaps I mean real and artificial, or live and dead? Suit yourself in classifying this one.

You don’t feel everything at once if you happen to be looking down on mangled flesh that a few minutes before had been warm and eager under your hands and lips. You can’t. You’re numb.

John Randolph could see her in the light of the flickering flames without bending, because the top of the big car had been peeled back like skin under a surgeon’s knife.

She had been wearing a light blue dress. It had been blown away. There was a kind of yellow tint to the part of her that was not bloodied or blackened. It was the same on the soft skin of her inner thighs as it was on that part of her face that had been left intact. Her shoes had been torn from her feet. Her feet pointed backward.

The big, heavy, expensive automobile that had been the very best in strength, beauty, and durability was now only twisted hot metal mingled with the once yearning flesh of a young and quick woman.

Reluctantly, John Randolph gave back before the heat of the flames that soon formed Henrietta Smetana’s unexpected funeral pyre...

Randolph knew he could never erase that scene from his mind. He stood now at the bar of the old Alhambra Hotel, just around the corner from the explosion site. The bar was drab and dingy and empty in this early evening. He held bourbon and branch. His hand shook. The odor of burning flesh seemed forever seared into his nostrils.

Beside him stood Vincente Gomez, chief of the Santo Tomas Police Department. Compared with big Randolph, he was a small, comic-opera figure in a fancy uniform.

He said, “This is a better place to talk than back there on that terrible dark street. The cries of the injured are distressing. You are lucky not to have been hurt.”

The liquor was doing its work on Randolph, loosening the tightness in his chest and stomach. Henrietta’s vibrant kiss had still been tingling on his lips when she had died. In shocked daze he had done what he could to help the stunned and bleeding residents of the street until more competent medical help had arrived. Now reaction was making him weak.

“I was with Henrietta, right here. I couldn’t have put a bomb in her car.”

“You might have kept her busy while someone else did the job.”

A year ago, Randolph had been stationed at the United States Customs House across the border from this tired Mexican village. From then, he knew that Gomez’ improbable uniforms covered a shrewd investigator and a very tough man.

“She was a lovely woman, Vincente,” he said. “Why would I want to kill her?”

Gomez nodded. “Why? Shall we start at the beginning?”

“I saw her the first day I arrived at the Project — Los Alamos. She was the wife of the most important scientist there: Baruch Smetana. Randolph finished his drink. She was very much interested in the Mexican border. Particularly Santo Tomas. That gave us something in common.”

Gomez said wryly, “You were seen embracing beside the car just before the explosion. Was that the atmosphere of romantic old Mexico, or an affair of long-standing?”

Stolidly, Randolph said, “She was never allowed to go anywhere without Smetana. He watched her all the time. He looks like a big fat toad with glasses. He is nothing but a big brain, with the rest of him completely out of touch with the world. He has no human feelings. He looks like the monsters he creates, and he used to beat Henrietta until she really hated him.”

Dryly, Gomez suggested, “A young, beautiful woman forced to live with a man like that. A perfect set-up for an eager young man. Why was she here?”

“Smetana and Henrietta left the Project on the same day I did. Everybody thought they were going to New York. But she was the first person I saw when I checked in at the La Osa guest ranch.”

“You didn’t know she had already been on the border for a week? You didn’t come to Santo Tomas to meet her?”

“I came to renew old acquaintances. Yours, for example.”

“I only brought you bad luck, John.”

He meant, Randolph knew, that although theirs had been a profitable association for Gomez, it had gotten Randolph into trouble. A year or so ago, acting upon information furnished by Gomez, Randolph had seized several thousand dollars worth of Swiss watch movements. Gomez had spent the informer’s fees to which he was entitled on himself and Randolph right here in the Alhambra’a tap room. The staid Bureau of Customs, learning about that, considered Randolph’s participation highly irregular. While they were debating what to do about it, Randolph quit. Subsequently, he went to work in the Security Division at Los Almos, instructing the guards in target-shooting.

Randolph said, “For some reason, she wanted me to meet her here at the Alhambra. It was her idea that we drive around in her car and talk afterward. Not mine.”

“But you were walking away from her car when the bomb went off. Why?”

“I was going to drive my car back to the Custom House and get it off your dark streets. She was going to pick me up there.”

“Why hadn’t you both come over in her car, or yours?”

“She said she had an errand to run and might be delayed.”

Gomez sucked the last drop of beer from his glass. “So here was the golden opportunity? Clandestine romance?”

“She seemed — well, excited.”

“And you think meeting you excited her?” Gomez shook his head slowly.

“Who else?”

Gomez said, “You know me, Juanito. If something doesn’t ring true, I investigate it. I was interested in Henrietta, but she was too busy to get acquainted. Busy at what? So I kept her under surveillance. I listened in on a call she placed to Los Alamos.”

“It would be natural that she place a call to there. She had friends and acquaintances there.”

“Is the Director of the Security Division her friend?”

“My boss.” Randolph hadn’t known they were acquainted.

“She told him,” Gomez said slowly, “that she knew where an atomic device was being introduced into the United States in the next twelve hours. For the full amount of the reward authorized by some Atomic Weapons Reward Act, she would tell when and where it was to cross the border. That, incidentally, was ten hours ago. There are about two left.”

“It was a shake-down,” Randolph said, but was disturbed, nevertheless. “A half-million dollar shakedown.”

“She told him to arrange to have one man, authorized to negotiate, s sent to Santo Tomas. Was she wrong in thinking that it was you?”

“So you disappointed Henrietta,” Gomez said. “You weren’t the man she thought you were.”

“They wouldn’t send a security guard on a mission like that,” Randolph said. “I imagine the Director contacted the Atomic Energy Commission for instructions. It’s a cinch you couldn’t simply call up, like Henrietta did, and expect someone to show up with a half-million dollars, a few hours later. There would be at least an elementary investigation. One could be going on right now. Probably is.”

Gomez didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, he was on another subject. “I didn’t consider you seriously as a suspect in the explosion, John. But I’m thinking you might be marked down as another victim of the bomber.”

Randolph felt quick, driving anger. “I’d like to get my hands on—”

“So would I,” Gomez cut in. “My prime suspect is a man named Conrado Suarez. They call him El Cubano. A skinny man, a machinist by trade, with radical ideas about government and who has a police record. He operates the machine shop right across from where Henrietta was killed.”

“Henrietta had been observed going into his shop often. There could be a jealousy motive. The bomb in her car could have been aimed at the two of you. I believe they were old friends. But on the other hand, why would he kill her if jealousy was not the prime mover? Maybe they did make an atom bomb, and Suarez might have wanted the full half-million dollars for himself, or sole possession of the bomb. Would you know such a device if you saw one? I don’t know if I would.”

“I might.”

“Then,” said Gomez, “let’s go see if we can find one and blow my jealousy theory apart.”

A white wrecker was at work on the demolished automobile. An ambulance had carted away the dead and the suffering. All that remained to show there had been tragedy on the street was the debris of the car.

Gomez called for light and a policeman with a battery-powered flash trotted from the fringes of darkness. He said, “The building is locked against us. We have not located Suarez.”

Gomez led them through those curious ones who lingered on the death scene and talked in muted tones. He stopped beneath the gloomy facade of the tall old machine shop. Under the huge weathered doors ran railroad tracks, a short branch of the ice plant spur.

“Those doors lock from inside,” the policeman said. “There is another door at the rear.”

Gomez tapped the bone grips of the automatic at his belt. “We’ll use my search warrant and my key.”

Randolph walked gingerly in the darkest shadows, aware of danger. He did not intend to set himself up as a possible target. From somewhere close at hand, a radio blared a lively tune more suited to a gay cantina than to this dark place which death had visited so recently and so violently. A dirge would have been more fitting, Randolph thought.

Here behind the machine shop, the looming tall doors were secured with only a flimsy house door lock. Gomez shattered it with a bullet from his gun.

Flattened lead screamed off over the cluster of mud huts, getting lost among the returning echoes of the shot. A woman shrilled a worried question. A man supplied a shouted answer. A child’s sleepy voice lifted in sudden startled inquiry, a lost sound that tugged strongly at Randolph’s heart.

He stepped to one side to be out of the way of any stray bullet suddenly pumped through the door from inside. But none came, and he followed Gomez into the building.

The spotlight shifted through the dim interior. Huge lathes, long twisted endless belts, presses, and other heavy machine tools loomed, gleaming dully, like metallic monsters. The floor was of dirt, except for the concrete slabs under the larger tools. The odor of cutting oils made Randolph uneasy. He felt as though he was standing in a long dark tunnel that might explode with a careless spark.

Rails ran the length of the building. Heavy materials could be unloaded from flat cars with the powerful overhead crane. The doors at either end were high enough to accommodate a box car. Or a locomotive.

“A man who knew how could build a cannon with this equipment,” Randolph said.

“Or an atomic device?”

“Provided he had the materials.”

Gomez said, “Then we’ve got to find Suarez. We’ve got to know if he really built one, and where it is now.”

Randolph, watching the spotlight dart about and touch here and there, saw nothing in its beam that wouldn’t fit into any machine shop anywhere.

Gomez located a master switch. Dim lights sprang glowing in the cavernous shop. They searched for half an hour and found nothing, except the place where Suarez apparently slept — a greasy pad in a corner.

Randolph said, “If Suarez built a bomb here, I don’t have the training to spot the tracks. And if he did build one and it’s not here, where is it? And what is he going to do with it?”

“When we find him,” Gomez said, “we’ll find the answers.”

He switched off the master switch and they walked the darkness, following the spotlight beam. As they passed a giant lathe, a sudden odor of hot metal stopped Randolph. Gomez also stopped.

The spotlight’s beam came quickly back. The concrete slab under the lathe was conspicuously clean compared with the rest of the shop.

Standing there in the windy vastness of this machine shop-isolated in the middle of a great desert country, an ominous feeling chilled Randolph. In his mind’s eye appeared the sinister shape of the mushroom cloud.

For out of his memory had emerged one relative, pertinent fact: bits of uranium, laid across or against each other, create heat. If left alone long enough, they glow.

And just before the light had touched that concrete slab, Randolph had seen a tiny red spot!

Soberly, they walked outsider

The street was quiet. It was about as it had been when he handed Henrietta into her car, Randolph thought. Except that now the wind was dying. And a full moon, yellow as butter and big as a balloon, was slowly rising.

A policeman lingered under the cottonwood tree. He was Gomez’ driver.

Gomez, said, “Suarez is our man. He killed Henrietta because he wants the bomb all to himself.”

Randolph listened to him spout orders over his car radio. Finished, Gomez said, “My men will have him by dawn.”

“He could have gone north.”

“Not legally. He has been refused border-crossing privileges by your country.”

“A man with an atom bomb would hardly be liable to cross the border in the regular manner,” Randolph said. And then, “Well, my vacation is shot, anyway. I’ll have to call the Project.”

“You said they were probably investigating already.”

“An investigation will be, made. But it might not be given the top priority that the discovery of the uranium scraps now demands. Henrietta’s telephone call might have been dismissed as the call of some kind of a nut.”

“Use our telephone,” Gomez suggested, inviting Randolph into his car. “We’ll drive you there.”

“The phone in the United States Customs House will be more direct,” Randolph said, and thanked him. From past experience, he knew that connections between the two countries were often unreliable.

Gomez lifted his hand in acknowledgement and got into his car. Randolph walked back around the corner to his own vehicle. Driving north to the border, he had an opportunity to think.

When he had first seen Henrietta at the, La Osa, he had been surprised. Pleasantly so. A week on the border with her seemed like the stuff of a young bachelor’s dreams. But it had turned out to be a nightmare.

Putting those thoughts from his mind he dragged out the others. Where would Suarez have hidden the atomic device? Why had Henrietta chosen Santo Tomas and Suarez? Was it something that Randolph himself had told her about in their conversation regarding the border? Remembering that Suarez had not been here during his own sojourn in Santo Tomas with Customs, he wondered if Henrietta had contacted him, and if he had activated the machine shop for the sole purpose of making an atomic device. And where had Henrietta known him before? What was their common background?

These led to other questions for which he could not readily find answers and his approach to the border brought speculation to a stop. A dim light beamed over the doorway of the Mexican guardhouse. A single inspector dozed in a chair leaned against the adobe wall. His pants were too short, and Randolph could see that he wore no socks.

He had not forgotten Randolph. “Anda tarde, Juanito,” he said. “Like old times.”

“But out late tonight on a more serious matter than those that kept me from my bed, before.”

“I heard. The shock shook this building. A sad thing. The woman was beautiful. Her car was very pretty.”

“Tell me a thing. Was she always alone when she crossed here?”

“Except for the first time.”

“Who rode with her then?”

“A toad. With a big bald head, pop-eyes behind spectacles that were so thick they could have been of bullet-proof glass.”

He was describing Smetana. Randolph felt like a man standing upon the brink of some great and important discovery.

Now it could have been the fat scientist who had created and planted the bomb which had destroyed Henrietta and might have killed Randolph. He felt it was the kind of thing Baruch Smetana would be capable of, and had to admit he also had reason. Jealousy.

Perhaps it was not Henrietta at all who was behind the construction of the presumed device and the shake-down. Then it would have to be the great, mean-tempered, invulnerable scientist who was detested, and respected.

“Would any of your other inspectors have observed him returning to the United States?” Randolph asked.

“I was interested in her, and him. I have asked. No one has seen him.”

“Then he is still in Santo Tomas.”

The inspector shrugged.

As he drove across the border, Randolph was thinking with a new seriousness: better to walk even more softly and look over your shoulder frequently. For it was already clearly possible that the life or death of one John Randolph could actually hinge upon the whereabouts of Baruch Smetana.

Randolph felt immediately safer across the border. The small United States Customs House was much like its Mexican counterpart, except that the inspection area was strongly lighted, making a bright hole in the vast darkness that extended well out over the bare ground. An inspector in a blue uniform, looking incongrously formal in this setting, lounged on a bench against the wall. His name was Haynes. He had close-set blue eyes and a tremendous chin. He was sandy-haired and had a slight speech impediment. When Randolph stopped under the canopy in front of the building and got out, Haynes said, “I hear you jumped right into the middle of big trouble over there.”

“Can I use your ’phone?”

“Help yourself. If I had to bet, I’d guess it was that ugly old man she was with the first time she crossed here that did it.”

“I thought of that.” Randolph moved out of the bright lights which made everything under them a conspicuous target for anyone in the darkness beyond. He stood in the doorway, looking at Haynes, who was now doing the work that Randolph had been doing a year ago. About to turn and go inside, he noticed lights in the north, out on the wide empty desert that stretched endlessly.

The steady beam, Randolph recognized as the headlight on old 1098, the locomotive that shuttled between the border and the main line of the SP a hundred ninety miles away.

It was the twin headlights that held his attention. And Haynes said, “Who in the devil would be driving our road at night as though they were in a cross-country race?”

Randolph had an idea. It was confirmed in a matter of minutes when two vehicles soared over a rise a hundred yards north and slid to a stop.

Eight men with a mission poured out of them. They moved forward into the lighted area together, a phalanx of dedicated FBI officers led by Stan Burkett, agent in charge of the region.

Randolph’s greeting died on his lips, for there was no friendliness in Burkett’s manner. He was a serious young man with a square chin, a crooked nose, very light blue eyes, and a lot of scar tissue built up on his brows. Roughly, he shoved Randolph toward the door.

Crouching to preserve balance, ready to do battle, Randolph heard Burkett through the deafness of his surprised anger: “You can make it easy or tough on yourself. Take your choice.”

There was really no alternative. Randolph made no sudden moves. A thinking man seldom does — not when he’s surrounded by revolvers and riot guns held in the steady hands of determined men.

They didn’t tell him anything. They didn’t even talk among themselves. They ignored his request to be allowed to use the phone to call the Project. They held him in the Custom House until Burkett, who had gone out, had returned. Vincente Gomez was with him.

Randolph was sitting at the desk In the office. The large men who crowded into the room made it seem smaller. The air was thick and blue with their cigarette smoke.

Burkett leaned against the desk. His pointing finger was almost as lethal as the shotgun held loosely in the hands of the nearest agent. Both were aimed right at Randolph.

“You left here under suspicion a year ago,” Burkett began. “You’ve come back under a cloud. I don’t like shifty characters.”

You stand just so much kicking around, so much abuse, so much injustice, and then you have to retaliate. The agents’ guns were suddenly toys in the perspective of Randolph’s risen anger. He felt ten feet tall. He jumped up and his chair crashed over.

Then the shotgun nudged his short ribs roughly, and he got himself under control. He said, “Now I think much less of you, too.”

“Then we understand each other. We have enough on you already to put you away for life. Just as a starter, Baruch and Henrietta Smetana left the Project on the same day you did. They eluded agents assigned to them for security reasons. You were known to be friendly with Henrietta. You may have fooled Smetana, but he had other worries on his mind. Anyway, you don’t have to love a woman, to conspire with her against your own government.”

“What?”

“You left a trail as obvious as elephant spoor. You all showed up here at Santo Tomas. It all boils down to an attempt to extort a half-million bucks from the United States, using the Atomic Weapons Reward Act. You and Henrietta and Suarez and Smetana were all in it together.”

“Stupidity,” Randolph said slowly, “must be one of the requirements for your job. As a Federal officer, I couldn’t sell the government that kind of information for anykind of money — it’s written into the law.”

“You found a way to get your share. We know that a man telephoned the Project with the same information that Henrietta had one hour after she called. That was you.”

“I wasn’t here then. That should indicate to even a feeble mind that I wasn’t involved in her plan.”

“It doesn’t really matter, I guess,” Burkett said heavily. “You already have a record of connivance — with Gomez here. You left Customs under a cloud. You’ve proven you can’t be trusted — not even with another man’s wife. Your kind will do anything for money. You were trying to cross up all your partners and collect it all for yourself. So why not confess?”

Randolph only stared at him. Then he shook his head in disgust at the utter wrongness of Burkett’s reasoning.

Into the silence that fell after Burkett’s question there came a growing rumble. The building shook and a little plaster fell. There was a hiss of escaping air, the crash of couplers. Old engine 1098 had arrived on the passing track beside the main line, directly in back of the Customs House. The old engine idled softly.

And with that overgrown truck engine sound in their ears, it formed a background for Vincente Gomez’ voice when he said:

“Gentlemen, Randolph may know something about this plot, but I think only I know the present location of the bomb.”

Burkett glared at Gomez. “Where the hell is it?”

“There is every reason to believe there is a plan to explode it in Phoenix. In a very few hours.”

He said it as calmly as though he was standing before a class of his policemen, giving them a problem in procedure. He couldn’t have been more coolly at ease.

Here in this century-old thick-walled building that had never had to stand up to a shock greater than that of an occasional stray .44 calibre bullet, it wasn’t easy to visualize the explosion Gomez so casually mentioned, an explosion that could reduce a city to rubble.

But it was getting slowly through to the men in the room. They moved uneasily. They stared at Gomez as though he was some kind of evil genie suddenly popped out of a bottle of smoke. Nobody said anything.

Then Burkett proved that at least others, didn’t share Randolph’s opinion of his intelligence. He said, “I am authorized to receive the kind of information you offer. I have come prepared to deal. With cash, up to a point.”

As if he had known it all the time, Gomez nodded. “Clear the room so we can talk.”

Burkett said, “All except. Randolph — leave.”

The office which, had seemed so crowded a moment before seemed almost empty when the others left it. Randolph said, “Why me?”

“You and Gomez are old friends. You might help us to reach a quick agreement.”

Randolph studied Gomez. Had Gomez been playing him for the sucker all along? Had he known where the bomb was all the time?

Subjugating these more personal questions to the greater need to locate the device, Randolph said, “There is only one quick way. How much do you want, jefe?”

Gomez said, “You were always abrupt.”

Burkett came away from the wall. “How much?” he asked.

Gomez stared thoughtfully out the window. Looking past his padded shoulders and sleek cap, Randolph could see a tall trainman made taller by the striped cap he wore as he walked into the lighted inspection area. He carried a lantern on his arm, a clip board in his hand.

Randolph knew the customs procedure. The trainman was calling for the customs releases and manifests for the train that had been made up in Mexico and pushed across earlier. The releases lay on the desk, tucked under a corner of the blotter holder. When Haynes pushed open the door, Randolph had them ready in his hand. Taking them, Haynes said, “You haven’t forgotten,” but wasn’t very friendly. His eyes told that much as he looked at these men who had usurped his office. He handed Randolph a switch list. “See if you remember where this goes,” he said, and walked out, his back very stiff.

Burkett exploded. “There isn’t a nickel’s worth of business done at this border station all day long, but the minute we have something like this, it’s like the Rose Bowl field after the game.”

Randolph placed the switch list in the top desk drawer with the rest of the day’s small business. Reflecting that men came and went but customs procedures rarely changed without an act of Congress, he came back around.

And now Gomez was ready to negotiate. He said, “It will be no holdup. I feel a moral obligation to tell all that I know.” He paused there, head to one side, eyes alert on Burkett.

“Then talk,” Burkett prodded.

“On the other hand,” Gomez said, “Why should I pass up a chance at a little money?”

“How much?” Burkett asked again.

“Nothing at all like the half-million the woman wanted.”

“Tell the man.” Randolph’s own patience was wearing thin.

“Say ten percent of the five thousand.”

Burkett stared at Randolph. “I misjudged you. I apologize.”

“Don’t do it,” Randolph said. “I’ll have to take back all the ugly things I’ve thought about you.”

“You wouldn’t settle for so little. Fifty-thousand bucks is the figure named by a man who called the Project an hour after Henrietta did.”

Gomez said, “I called.”

“Well,” Burkett said, “pending the arrival of a representative of the Atomic Energy Commission, I have the power to negotiate.”

“Inside one hour,” Gomez said, “the bomb will probably be on its way. Inside five or six more, it will be in position. Only Suarez and I know where it is now, or where it will be then.”

“Let’s get on with it.”

Gomez turned to the door and they went outside in that order: Gomez first, then Burkett, then Randolph. The engine of the locomotive behind the customs house idled noisily, ready to pull out with the string of dark cars behind it. Five, Randolph noted, plus the caboose, which was backed up against the international gate.

He was thinking that in the ordinary manner, it would take weeks of waiting for a sum of money with which to pay an informer’s fee. He wondered if Burkett actually had money, or was he bluffing?

Gomez said, “This is no different than before, Juanito. I gave you information, and you gave me money for it. You might say that you showed me how to do it.”

Randolph couldn’t keep some of the tough hardness he felt out of his voice. “What the hell was all that other routine? The questions at the Alhambra? The search in the machine shop?”

Gomez was standing directly under one of the overhead lights. A film of sweat showed on his face, attesting to strain upon him. Light picked out glints of gold from his polished insignia.

“Like Henrietta, I had to find out if you were sent to interview her. I had to find out what she had told you. But until you saw the uranium scraps, I wasn’t even sure a bomb had actually been made. Now I am. Now I think I know where Suarez is.”

“You must have known Suarez killed Henrietta. How much more do you know? You must have been closer to him or her than you’ve led me to believe.”

Gomez shrugged. “Who knows for sure, what goes on in the mind of a madman? He wants to go down in history, maybe. These Cuban communistas are all mad. Or maybe this is a part of some great plan. Who knows?”

“And you know where El Cubano is now?” Burkett asked.

“With the bomb.”

“Well, where is it?”

Gomez turned slowly, raising his arm to point. Almost as though it was a signal, the tram began to move. Slack came crashing up between the couplers. Randolph hunched his shoulders against the startling clamor.

Gomez suddenly stepped against Burkett, who staggered under the impact. Gomez fell at Burkett’s feet.

Burkett and Randolph stared down at him. There was blood on the front of Burkett’s suit; there was blood spreading away from Gomez’ body.

When you’ve seen death a few times in its various forms; when you’ve seen the sudden pallor, the half-closed eyes, the silent, jointless form, you don’t need to feel a pulse or listen for a heartbeat to know.

And Randolph knew that in that brief moment of looking at and pointing to the noisy train, Vincent Gomez had been shot.

The winking lights on the caboose were growing smaller. The sound of the engine was fading, and the blast of the farewell whistle was ragged on the breeze.

Burkett said, “That shot came from the train.” His voice was as steady as though dead men at his feet were an every day occurrence.

Randolph had another thought which he did not want to put into words. Gomez had been standing between him and the train. Could the bullet that killed Gomez have been meant for him?

Burkett said, “When Gomez was hit and stumbled against me, his mouth was close to my ear. He said something that started out with a sibilant sound and ended with something that sounded like siete.”

“Seven. Could it have been part of a car number?” Randolph asked.

“Could have been.”

Somewhere close at hand a motor started and gears ground as an early trucker prepared to hit the road. The cool breeze seemed suddenly icy to Randolph, who started to trot back to the customs office.

Burkett was right behind him as he stepped through the doorway into the office. Randolph jerked open the top desk drawer, pulled out the switch list, and scanned it.

Haynes, coming in, protested. “There were only five cars. Cantaloupes. Me and the agriculture inspector looked at them early today.”

Randolph showed the list to Burkett. His thumb was under a car number. “Could that have been it?”

Burkett said, “Yes. What’s it’s place in the train?”

“Just ahead of the caboose.”

“It would have been located about right.” Randolph looked at Haynes. “Did you look into the ice bunkers?”

“Sure, nothing in them but ice.”

Burkett looked slightly puzzled. Randolph explained: “At each end of the car is a compartment into which ice is loaded through hatches in the roof. Fans blow from the ice into the body of the car and cool the load.”

Burkett put the question: “Did you look under the ice, Haynes?”

“No. Why should I?”

Randolph picked up the phone, and after a short delay, got the Mexican freight depot on the line. He asked the sleepy agent: “Have you moved a PFE 72127 out of the Taller Mecanico in the last few days?”

The answer came abruptly. “In and out. Iced this afternoon. Crossed it this evening. Who’s calling?”

Randolph hung up gently. “That car was in Suarez’ shop for awhile.”

“Let’s go,” said Burkett, “and let’s go carefully. The man who shot Gomez is dangerous.”

Haynes complained bitterly that he would be missing the excitement because duty kept him at the custom house. But there was nothing to hold Randolph.

Burkett chose to ride with him. “You don’t have to get involved any deeper in this.”

Randolph said, “I just want to show you how wrong you are, thinking that I’m mixed up in it any way.”

“Lots of things pointed at you. For instance, uranium was missing from the Project. Some day we’ll learn how it was smuggled out. The loss was discovered almost immediately. Two things helped us: it had vanished apparently the same day you, Smetana, and Henrietta left. They never got to New York where they were due. Nobody knew where you were until I saw you here, but you were high on the suspect list. We had to work fast. There was no time, for investigation. So don’t blame me too much for jumping you.”

Randolph said, “Forget it,” watching the yellow strip of dusty road reel up under the wheels of his hurrying vehicle. “The immediate question is — where to stop the train?”

“On the road to the Papago village that lies out there along the border?” Burkett waved his hand toward the east.

“Yes. We race the train to the crossing. We park on the track and hope it stops in time.”

“They’ll stop,” Burkett promised, “if I have to blow the engineer off his seat with a shotgun.”

That kind of action was not necessary. The train was crawling at a bare five miles per hour as it approached the crossing.

Burkett, with Randolph, questioned the crew while the other men went over the train from head to rear end, with ready guns and strong flashlights. They found no one.

“If the assassin was on this train,” Burkett finally concluded, “He got off. And for all we know he could be out there in the brush with us in his sights right now.”

He looked at Randolph.

It gave Randolph a creepy feeling. Of them all, he probably had the greatest reason to believe the gun sights might be trained on him. He was conscious of his vulnerability when he joined the agents as they swarmed all over car PFE 72127 like harvester ants in an ant hill.

They tossed chunks of ice from the bunkers to the ground in complete disregard for the preservation of Crown Produce Distributor’s valuable load of sweet-smelling cantaloupes.

They found no atom bomb. They found nothing that remotely resembled one.

But after they had removed the ice from the head-end bunker, they did find something not normally kept in such a place.

They found Smetana’s body.

All of his fingers had been broken. His toes were flattened as though they had been beaten and smashed with a hammer. There was a small blue hole in the middle of his ice-cold forehead. The back of his head was a mass of hair and clotted frozen blood.

“He didn’t give away any secrets voluntarily,” Burkett said.

Randolph could also acknowledge that. He could also remember what he knew and what he had heard of the beatings, humiliations, and mental tortures to which Smetana had subjected Henrietta during their married life.

They wrapped Smetana in a blanket from the caboose, laid him on the ice in which he had been entombed. He was frozen so stiff that it indicated he had been that way for some little time.

“He was an unpleasant man,” Randolph said. “We had standing orders never to speak to him, when he came into any of the areas we guarded. His mind was always ’way out. He would have any man fired who disturbed his calculations.”

He wished he knew more about what had transpired after Smetana had entered Santo Tomas. He wished Gomez had lived to tell. Now they might never know who shot the scientist.

Burkett dispatched an agent into San Manuel for a driver and a pickup to transport Smetana’s body back to Santo Tomas. Burkett signed a release for the conductor, warning the crew to remain available for questioning. Then the late train moved out fast to meet its schedule.

In the gray light of that quiet day’s dawn they unloaded the entire car of its cargo. Clear to the duckboards on the floor. Long before they had lifted out and examined the last crate, Randolph had given in to a growing despair.

But Burkett put it into words. “Somewhere we have misread our leads. We’re off on a side trail into a box canyon.”

They were standing, dirty, damp, and disheveled, beside the track. There was suddenly nothing more to be done. Burkett was gloomy. His investigation was collapsing around him.

“Here we stand,” he said, “in the middle of the great Indian reservation, with our fingers up our noses and somewhere a madman has control of a blast maybe big enough to hoist a hundred and fifty thousand people into outer space.”

“There is radio,” Randolph said. “Pass the word. A massive net could be thrown around Phoenix with Army and Air Force personnel. A search could be made of every conveyance from a baby carriage to a Diesel tanker.”

“And aircraft?”

“Those, too.” Randolph studied the railroad car. “And this. Those are thick walls. There could be spaces hollowed out between them in the insulation.” He looked down at the heavy tracks. “It may be possible for a clever machinist to design a device that would look like a part of the rolling gear. Have them leave the car here, Burkett, and ask for someone with detection instruments to go over it.”

“I’m away ahead of you there,” Burkett said. “I radioed a request when we were at Santo Tomas. Technicians are on the way.”

There was nothing more for them here. They loaded Smetana into a pickup truck that the agent had commandeered. A shiny-faced fat Papago driver had no words and no interest in the blanket-wrapped body. He took off toward Santo Tomas. The pickup clattered tinnily over the washboard road with its tailgate chains rattling loudly in this quiet desert dawn.

An early trucker, wheeling a tarpaulin-covered one-and-a-half ton stake truck, thumped slowly over the railroad crossing in the pickup’s dust. The discouraged men standing by the unloaded car could hear both vehicles for a long time.

Now the agents could load themselves into vehicles and depart. For Randolph, again alone with Burkett, there was a vision of a long cold shower and twelve hours of sleep.

“Somebody is going to be unhappy about those cantaloupes,” he said.

“Don’t bother me with details,” Burkett said. “They are the least of my worries.”

Randolph had an idea of the way Burkett felt. This just wasn’t the kind of job you worked at for eight hours and then walked off and forgot.

The early morning sun was laying its orange paint and blue shadows across the land. The smell of stirred dust along with the background odors of mesquite and creosote bush came through the open window. Randolph drove around a long bend in the road. Ahead was the big tarpaulined stake body truck, using all of the road. It pulled slowly over at the command of Randolph’s horn.

Yellow dust coated the russet tarp and lay deep in its folds. And Randolph, as automatically as any law enforcement officer, noticed the, license plate as they drove by, and was more interested in it.

Once ahead, he found himself still thinking about that license plate. For one thing, it was a Sonora plate. For another, its numbers were S 6-65-67. He said them to himself again, in Spanish, In either language, they were a mouthful of sibilants. Ending in seven.

He was abruptly wide awake. He sat up straighter, startling Burkett, who was dozing. Burkett said, “Bee sting?”

“We’ve got to stop that truck.”

“What for?”

“Did you see the license?”

“With my eyes closed?” Randolph repeated it slowly. Burkett looked at him sharply.

Randolph said, “We assumed Gomez was shot from the train. We overlooked the fact that the train was backed up to the fence. The shot could have come from Mexico. I heard a truck starting up immediately after the sound of the shot. It could have been this one—”

“How?”

“It could have rolled east out of Santo Tomas along the fence. Then there is a locked gate south of San Manuel, but the Border Patrol is always finding the lock cut. The Papagos don’t like to have to come clear to Santo Tomas to cross the border if they happen to want to go south in a hurry.”

Randolph’s eagerness reached Burkett. He said, “To any sane man, it sounds like a straw. But at this point I’m grasping for them. We can try.”

So Randolph chose a site a hundred yards from the Santo Tomas junction to set up his road block. It was on a little knoll. They got out, two determined men, and waited for the oncoming truck in the freshness of this quiet morning.

Their shadows lay long in the dust behind them. Here in the road, Randolph thought, may lie the destiny of a city. Of a country. Or of the world.

The roaring sound of the truck’s exhaust preceded it. As it lurched through chuckholes like an awkward elephant, great gouts of yellow dust were splashed up and over it. It came on and on, and when it stopped, the radiator was right up against Randolph’s vehicle.

The only occupant of the cab was a skinny man with an olive complexion and shiny black hair and busy dark eyes. He wore black coveralls, and resembled a ghoul in work clothes.

“Suarez?” Randolph said. The man fit Gomez’ description.

Burkett acted as though he knew exactly what he was going to do. He jerked open the truck door and covered the driver with his shiny, short-barrelled revolver.

The only thing was — the driver knew what he was going to do, too. He held in his hand the kind of push-button used by bed patients in hospitals. Two thin wires extended from it back into the truck.

He spoke English, not so poorly that he couldn’t be clearly understood.

“I am Suarez,” he said proudly.

“Put the gun at my feet.”

When Burkett hesitated, he lifted his hand high, so they could see his thumb quivering a fraction of an inch above the push button.

“Now!” he commanded.

There on the yellow ribbon of San Manuel road through the green mesquite country, all time stood still.

To Randolph, who was eight feet behind and to the left of Burkett, unarmed, came the sound of the slow wind sobbing through the trees, carrying up from Mexico the warmth and perfume of hundreds of miles of sun-soaked earth, oak knolls, and pine canyons. The whirling columns of dust devils danced sedately in the blue distances.

From the Santo Tomas road there came the faint sound of a passing automobile engine. It was only a whimper, but it served to remind Randolph that he and Burkett were not alone with this madman.

A world full of people could feel, in one way or another, the result of whatever action took place here on this lonesome southern desert. A global war could conceivably be started. Or stopped.

A sense of destiny welled strongly in Randolph. So must it have been with Burkett.

The burning question in Burkett was whether to call this man’s bluff, gambling that he would not commit suicide in order to kill them; whether to shoot him, gambling that the bullet would reach him before he could energize the bomb; or whether, by capitulating, to gamble that greater forces could surround and stop the truck before it left this vast, sparsely populated, desert country where it could do little damage even if it did explode.

Burkett took the last alternative. Even as he bent to lay the gun at Suarez’ feet, Randolph’s lips were forming the words for a great shout: “Shoot him Burkett!”

For by Randolph’s calculations, only Burkett, Randolph, and Suarez knew that the bomb actually existed in this truck. Therefore it was mandatory for Suarez to eliminate them.

In the space of time that it took Burkett to realize his mistake and belatedly reach for the gun, Suarez scooped it up and shot him. Burkett fell against the truck and then slumped, into the dust.

Randolph had begun his move even when Burkett was reaching for the gun. The revolver blasted its bits of blinding, burning powder into his face. The bullet struck into the top of his shoulder, emerged under the scapula, and hammered him to the ground.

Falling partly across Burkett, shocked and numb, he lay wholly still. Blood streamed warm into his clothes, dripped into the yellow dust to mingle with Burkett’s. Faintly, as through deafness, he heard the sound of his car’s engine. It labored, and its wheels spun deeper in sand as it was driven off the road and out of sight, no doubt, and finally the engine died altogether. Then there was a long time of nothing, then he sensed that Suarez was studying him, and he held his breath.

Then strong wiry hands grasped his wrists and pulled him through the dust, to be unceremoniously dumped at the base of a mesquite beyond the edge of the road. These things seemed to be happening to someone else, while he himself huddled in a dingy corner and nursed his pain. Instinctively, he did nothing to show the hurrying Suarez that he still lived. His breathing slowed and almost stopped.

A heavy weight held him pinned. The truck’s idling engine roared. Randolph heard the crunching if its heavy wheels in the road, the open-mouthed bark of its exhaust. He got hands under his chest and pushed mightily, the pain in his shoulder like a streak of fire. Strength within him surprised him; he was also surprised that the weight on him had been Burkett’s body, which now slid off and lay limp, mouth and eyes half-opened.

A few yards away, glimpsed through the close leaves of the mesquites, the truck moved slowly on as it passed through the low range of gears.

Randolph took a few stumbling steps forward. In motion, despite the pain in his shoulder, he could feel better. And he could run.

He could not see well. He set a dogged course through the mesquite. It took him along the base of a triangle formed by the two roads. His vision, impaired by powder burns, was not adequate to show him the catclaw and prickly pear through which he was running. Cactus speared him, forming a diversionary pain for that which already seared his shoulder.

He ran, head down and panting, falling and getting up again, as he had never run before. He felt his compressed lungs reach for air, but they did it without his volition. He knew vaguely that if he could keep going, could move fast enough, he could reach the Santo Tomas road when the truck was making the angle of the triangle.

It was the longest football field he had ever had to run. It was like running its full length through all eleven men of the opposition, plus at least half of the substitutes from the bench. And the roaring in his ears became the cheering of the crowd, on its feet now and urging him on as the white H of the goal posts loomed before him.

Then abruptly it wasn’t the football field, not the tackling players, not even the goal posts. It was a dust-filled road, it was a stinking roaring exhaust, it was the square rear of a waddling, tarp-covered truck moving just beyond the reach of his finger tips, and the H was formed by the white cotton rope that held the trap from being blown off in the wind of the truck’s own making.

Somehow he got his fingers under the rope. Someway he got another hand up higher, taking giant strides as the truck pulled him along. With a great reserve of strength he pulled himself up, got a foot on the edge of the bed of the truck, laid his arms on the canvas top, and hoisted himself to it.

The touchdown had been made.

The roaring crowds were there again, heard dimly as he gasped for breath, and each breath a searing pain in his chest. His team mates were jumping up and down around him gleefully, big thunderous men whose weight moved and stirred the hot earth under him.

Dust was in his nostrils...

Then there was no dust. Only heat.

The earth had stopped rocking.

He was aware that there had been noise. Now there was quiet. The sky above was an empty blue void except for the burning pinpoint that was the sun.

Into his awareness crept a swishing sound, growing in volume until it seemed that hell had broken violently loose directly over him. Then, so close he could almost touch it, a T33 jet trainer blurred across his vision. On one wing he read dimly: “USAF.” As the sound of its passage diminished, he heard a wild cursing below him. In Spanish.

Another swishing roar began. He propped up on his elbows, conscious of coming up out of a tremendous bed of pain, and saw another T33 beginning its run.

Memory flooded back. He knew now that he was on a dusty trap over a stake truck, and that the stake truck contained a cargo of wholesale death. Further than that, he saw the truck was on that part of the Santo Tomas road north which passed through a diabolical upthrust black mass of burnt jagged rock in which lay a small valley the Air Force used as a gunnery range.

He knew that the jets passing over weren’t making runs on the truck, but on the range three miles beyond.

When the next jet swished across with its spine-shivering sound, Randolph hitched himself to the edge of the truck and looked over. Suarez was squatted on the ground below him, his head turning to follow the jet’s path. The cursing was coming from him.

He wasn’t a large man. He was thin to the point of emaciation. He wouldn’t weigh a hundred thirty-five, Randolph judged.

Suarez had the push button in his hand. What, Randolph wondered, was he going to do with it? Bomb a jet?

He hitched himself closer to the edge of the truck. He went over the side in a tight ball, oblivious to pain, oblivious to everything but the necessity to flatten this dangerous subvert who so obviously thought that the swooping jets were directing their efforts at him and the truck.

Primary in Randolph’s reasoning, what there was of it, was the fact that he himself was lying right on top of the impending explosion. Suarez, turning on his heels, was calculating the approach of the next jet with his thumb white-knuckled on the push-button. His wild startled upturned look found Randolph as the big man left the solidity of the truck for the infirmity of the air, dropping down like the two-hundred-pound weight that he was.

He felt the give of Suarez’ squatted, doubled-up thin body under him. He heard his wild scream. He felt the terrible shock of the landing, and then he was blasted on a wave of excruciating pain back into the unconsciousness from whence he had come...

He fought the hands on him until the sound of soothing voices got through to him. He saw a familiar face and found a name to put to it: Haynes.

Haynes said, “They won’t be letting anybody talk to you for awhile, so listen good. A helicopter is setting down over there—” he gestured with his chin “—to take you to the base hospital.”

Then that was the noise he heard — like the beating of a buzzard’s wings, heard from afar in a still place. Except that this was amplified a thousand times.

There were others near, but it hurt him to move even his eyeballs. He concentrated on Haynes.

Somebody threw back the tarp on the truck, and dust fell on his face. Haynes said, “Watch what you’re doing up there!” and gently brushed the dust away while a voice floated down from above, “Sorry.”

Then Haynes said, “When the FBI boys pulled in at the customs house and you and Burkett didn’t show up right away, I went along to see what was keeping you. I saw the blood on the side of the road, and we found Burkett’s body. I read the marks, followed your bloodtrail and footprints, guessed a lot, and we started north. We got here a few minutes after a truckload of technicians. They’re having a field day with the bomb. They had been so close that they saw you take your plunge off the truck onto Suarez. And Suarez talked. He’s over there, with his back broken and his chest caved in. He won’t live.”

A tall man in Air Force uniform was approaching, carrying a black kit. His cool fingers went gently to work on Randolph, who never felt the hypo through his other pains.

Haynes said, “Suarez is afraid that history may never know what he tried to do. So he talked. He had known Henrietta in Havana. There he had been one of Castro’s early underground aides. She was an AEC secretary, on vacation. When she came back to the United States she wrote to him with her scheme to make a fortune. He met her once in Juarez, again in Nogales. Then she married Smetana.”

And the overall plan, Randolph saw now, was what had made her stay with Smetana, no matter what he did to her.

Haynes continued. “Finally, she got him down to Santo Tomas, where Suarez was waiting. But Smetana wouldn’t cooperate. Except that she knew what to do. How she must have hated him! She tortured him until he told them how to build the bomb. After it was built, she shot him. She threatened Suarez, too, who had been waiting until the bomb was finished to tell her he wanted to use it in what he termed a try for world peace. He was fox-crazy. She saw that. She needed help. Gomez was the man to give it to her. Suarez, suspecting she would try to cross him, unloaded the bomb from the railroad car and put it in the truck. He planted Smetana’s body in the ice bunker and called the railroad company and told them to come and get the car. Then a chance to get rid of Henrietta came along. He had already planned to bomb her.

All he had to do was plant some dynamite last night when she was with you. When she stepped on the starter, she blew herself up. Knowing that Gomez would take over her scheme, Suarez drove the truck to an isolated garage. It was bad luck for him that as he later approached the border gate en route to the road that follows the fence down to San Manuel gate, he saw Gomez. He couldn’t be sure Gomez hadn’t seen him, and if he had, Gomez would figure the bomb might be in the truck. So Suarez parked near the railroad track and got out and moved up along the train — he was skinny enough to slide under the gate — and tried to get in close enough to where he could hear what was being said. When Gomez came out and pointed at the train, Suarez thought if they didn’t find anything on the train, Gomez would remember the truck. So he gambled and shot when the train moved out, using the gun Henrietta had used on Smetana. He dropped it and lost it in the darkness. Then he went on to the San Manuel gate, crossed into the United States, and the rest you know.”

The doctor finished, waved in two men with a stretcher, and they loaded Randolph on it. The hypo was taking effect now, making him hazy. He had a thought, even a pitying one, for doomed Suarez, to whom a human life was nothing.

The doctor said, “Only a few people will ever know what happened here until some time later. Even the knowledge of what happened might start the war the world is trying to avoid. And the world,” he added thoughtfully, “will go on owing Randolph an awful lot it can never repay.”

Before he drifted off into the haziness, Randolph heard Haynes say, “Take care of him, Doc. He’s on the way to becoming a national hero of some sort. See to it that he lives to enjoy it.”