Assassination Brigade

Fourteen

As soon as I reached the cafe on Place St. Michel and went upstairs to the AXE office, I could feel the tension and gloom that permeated the whole place. Outside the sun was shining and there was a false spring in die air, but whatever cheer the weather contained vanished at the walls of the building.

Hawk was there, looking more haggard than he had looked the night before, and so were the four Chinese, along with several dozen AXE agents and security men. All of us had arrived too early, and our impatience grew as the long hours dragged by. It wasn’t until noon that we finally received the message we had been waiting for. And, of course, it came in a roundabout way.

We received a phone call from Interpol’s Paris office, saying that they had received a package from a messenger for their local chief. When he had opened the package, he had found a sealed box and a typewritten note, which said that the box should be delivered to the Chinese Embassy at once. Since the chief of Interpol had been informed of the crisis, he had immediately called Hawk and had then sped to the AXE office. Meanwhile Interpol agents had picked lip the messenger, who was authentic, and when they had questioned him about the man who had given him the package for delivery, he had given a description that could have fit ten thousand Frenchmen.

The box contained a recording tape. We crowded around while Hawk threaded the tape into an office machine. As the tape rolled, a voice said, “This is Alexander. I have received your message and now give you the following instructions. Late this afternoon, the thirtieth, a ship flying a white flag with a red dragon imprinted on it will appear in the Adriatic Sea and enter the harbor at Split, Yugoslavia. This ship will have the Chinese nuclear missile on its deck. One of your vessels may approach it with the two million dollars. Once the money has been placed in the hands of the men aboard, the missile will be returned. If any attempt is made to recover the missile without paying the money, it will be exploded.”

The words on the tape told us nothing of the person who had spoken them — or, rather, persons, for every other sentence had been spoken by a different voice, and their accents had ranged from British to German to Brooklyn. The brains behind the plot had remained invisible.

After the tape had been transcribed and copies had been made, hurried phone calls were placed to secure a plane to fly us to the Adriatic coast and to have a large, fast ship waiting for us near Split, Yugoslavia. Even while these arrangements were being made, Hawk was busy making plans for die time when the missile had been recovered.

Not much later, Hawk, the Chinese representatives with ransom money, several AXE agents, and I drove to Orly and flew by jet to die Adriatic. The Yugoslavian Government had been contacted through diplomatic channels and had a sleek, swift ship waiting for us when we arrived.

There was a cold, bitter wind blowing off the sea as we approached the harbor and dropped anchor near the shore at Split. No other vessels were in sight. As we paced the deck, Hawk began to mutter, “I hope this isn’t a trick, Nick.”

After another couple of hours had passed and the day had started to fade into twilight, I was beginning to think that Hawk might have been right. But then, quite suddenly, a large white ship appeared at the mouth to the harbor, and it was flying a white flag with a red dragon emblazoned on it. It dropped anchor off the starboard bow of our vessel, and a man in a captain’s uniform stepped to the rail, raised a bullhorn, and shouted, “Ahoy, I bring you greetings from Alexander. Do you have die money?”

Hawk handed me a similar bullhorn. “It’s your show,” he said.

“We have die money,” I replied through the bullhorn. “We are ready to complete the transaction.”

“You may come aboard,” the captain shouted back.

A couple of the crewmen aboard our ship lowered a small motorboat over the side. Two of the Chinese, one of them carrying the satchel with the money, and I crossed to the other ship. We were assisted to the deck by the captain and several of his crew. There was a huge object covered by lashed-down canvas on the forward deck. It must have been the missile, but I was still wary. Several other men were on deck, but the only one I recognized was Tregor, the Belgian.

The captain was cordial, and he led us to a large stateroom on the main deck where chilled champagne was waiting.

“You have the money?” he asked.

I nodded to the Chinese, who handed over the satchel.

“You have no objection to letting us count it before we turn the missile over to you, do you?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Please, gentlemen, do have some champagne while you’re waiting,” the captain offered as he left the room with the money.

Neither of the Chinese would accept a glass of champagne from die steward, but I did. It was good vintage wine and perfectly chilled. I had two glasses while the Chinese fidgeted uncomfortably in their chairs. When the captain returned he was smiling and nodding his head.

“Very good, gentlemen,” he said. “All seems to be in order. If you’ll accompany me to the deck, we can conclude our business.”

I wasn’t greatly surprised when we were topside again to see that the crewmen had removed the canvas from the object on the forward deck. It was a nuclear missile already fitted into a hoist.

The two Chinese checked die missile suspiciously before they were satisfied that all was in good order. They nodded to me gravely, and I nodded to the captain.

He seemed pleased as he picked up the bullhorn again and called to the waiting Yugoslavian ship, telling it to come in close so that the missile could be lowered to its decks. The two Chinese and I remained aboard while the crew worked the hoist, swinging the giant missile up into the air and then down to the deck of our ship where we had already prepared a cradle to hold it. I could see the expression of relief on Hawk’s face when he saw the missile standing on the deck, safely aboard at last.

After die captain of the white ship and I had exchanged brief handshakes, I returned to our vessel with the Chinese.

“No trouble?” Hawk asked me at once.

“None,” I said.

“If I know you, though,” Hawk said, looking at me closely, “something’s bothering you.”

“It was all too simple.” I replied. “They must know that since we’ve got the missile back safely, we aren’t just going to sit here and let them sail away with the two million dollars.”

“Perhaps they haven’t thought of the plan we would use,” Hawk said.

“I doubt that.”

“Well, at any rate, they’re pulling up anchor to leave,” Hawk observed, pointing to the ship that was turning in the harbor. “I’m putting our plan into effect.” He was holding a radio transmitter in his hand, and he began to speak into it rapidly, alerting all the vessels waiting just outside the harbor — Italian vessels, Greek ships, Yugoslavian, even some Russian cruisers — all those that had been sent in to apprehend our enemy.

As the white ship steamed toward the harbor mouth, we began to trail it at some distance. Just before it reached open sea, our armada of ships appeared. They were still distant, and Hawk hadn’t yet ordered them to close in. The white ship suddenly came to a stop in the center of the mouth of the harbor. Hawk started to speak into the transmitter again, but I stopped him.

“Hold it, just for a moment,” I suggested.

“Why? What is it?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know how to answer him, but I felt something was wrong. Several minutes passed, and nothing happened. Hawk and I both had binoculars trained on the deck of the ship — it was deserted. Hawk still had the radio transmitter in his hand and was growing impatient. I was beginning to doubt my intuition and was about to tell him to give the order to close in when it happened.

We suddenly saw a brilliant burst of orange flame coming from the white ship. It was followed by a deafening explosion. The sleek white vessel blew apart in the sea. It literally disintegrated in a second into a few floating planks. The explosion had been so unexpected and so shocking that almost all of us were briefly frozen into immobility.

Hawk recovered quickly, however, and went into action, shouting orders over the radio transmitter for all the waiting ships to come in and try to pick up possible survivors. At the same time, our launch was bearing down swiftly on the spot where the ship had sunk. But when we and the other ships converged on the area, there was no sign of survivors. In fact, there was nothing at all remaining except for a few charred planks and oil streaks. Still, die search went on well into night, with the waters lit by giant searchlights from the decks of all the vessels. We found nothing.

“It’s a mystery to me,” Hawk said slowly when the search was finally abandoned and the other ships were waiting for further instructions from him. “Why would they go to all that trouble to collect the two million dollars and then blow up themselves — and the money?”

“That’s just it,” I said suddenly as I got the idea. “They didn’t blow up the money!”

“Didn’t blow up the money?” Hawk demanded. “Then where is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it didn’t go down with die ship. Somehow they managed to get it off before the explosion.”

“How? How?” Hawk asked impatiently. “We had it under constant surveillance from the time we first saw it. How could it have been removed?”

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “But they did it. They had always planned to do it this way. They figured that we would have a trap for them after the missile had been returned, but it didn’t matter. The money was all that mattered. The rest, the ship, the crew, were to be sacrificed.”

“But that’s insane,” Hawk protested.

“Of course,” I told him, “and so is everything else so far.”

“Yes,” Hawk agreed, speaking slowly, “you’re probably right. But how, how, did they manage to remove the money?”

“I don’t know yet,” I answered again, “but I in-tend to find out. The answer must be somewhere here along the coast of die Adriatic Sea. I want us to search it, inch by inch, until we find some evidence that there was a survivor, or survivors, who got away with the cash.”

Hawk still doubted my opinion, but he agreed to ask die ships standing by to cooperate in helping me look for the evidence. They all offered assistance. Hawk left me at Split because he had to return to die United States to report back to the President personally.

It took us two more days and nights of searching the Adriatic coast before we found the evidence I was sure would be there somewhere. I was notified when a Greek cruiser found it, and rushed to the spot, a lonely stretch of barren land north of Split.

There, washed up on the shore and partly sub-merged in the sea, was a small, one-man submarine that had been abandoned. But I had my answer of how the two million dollars had been removed from the ship. Probably, soon after we had taken the money aboard in exchange for the missile, it had been turned over to the submariner, and the one-man craft had been dropped from the hold of die ship.

It had been easy for the tiny submarine to sneak out of the harbor, make its way along the coast, and to land. Later, perhaps that same night, or even on one of the following days or nights, the man had probably been picked up by a plane or another boat and had disappeared with the $2,000,000. As soon as I was able to make arrangements over the ship’s radio, I put through a call to Hawk, who was back in New York by then. I told him what we had discovered, in code. He took the news more cheerfully than I had expected and instructed me to return to Paris and call him from the AXE office there because he might have some news for me of a new development.

Later that day in Paris, I stopped by the hotel to check in with Elsa before going to the AXE office.

She grabbed me before I got into the door, covered my face with kisses, and said worriedly, “I didn’t know what had happened to you, Dumplink. I was about ready to report you to the police as a missing person.”

“Business, again,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t leave a message. And I have to go out once more. But this time I will be back soon, and maybe we can have some time together.”

At the AXE office, Bonaparte put me through to Hawk on a scrambled wire.

“We’ve got a new lead,” Hawk said. “It may be the best one we’ve had so far. Our research people, who have been running a continuing check on the participants in this case, have finally turned up a definite connection among several of them. You’ll remember I mentioned earlier that several of the people had had weight problems. Well, now we’ve discovered that at least four of them were patients at the same weight-reducing spa in Switzerland.”

“That would have to be more than a coincidence,” I mused.

“We think so, too,” Hawk said. “The place’s just outside Berne in the mountains. It’s called the Rejuvenation Health Spa and is run by a doctor named Frederick Bosch. What do you think?”

“I think I’d better fly to Switzerland,” I said, “and take a look around.”

“Yes, I agree,” Hawk said. “What will you tell that Von Alder woman, Elsa?”

“I’ll tell her I have business in Berne and suggest that she fly back to the States.”

“Yes, well,” Hawk said, “I have other men watching the rest of the Von Alders. If she comes back, I’ll put a man on her, too. I’ll be in touch with you when you reach Switzerland.”

When I returned to the hotel and knocked on the door of Elsa’s suite, I found her having her hair done by the hotel hairdresser.

“I don’t like you to see me while I’m trying to get beautiful,” she said, frowning from under the hair dryer.

“I had to talk to you,” I told her. “I’m going to have to leave today for Berne. My office called, and there’s some business there I have to look into.”

“Berne!” she exclaimed happily, “but Dumplink, that’s marvelous. I’ll go with you. There’s a simply wonderful health spa outside Berne where Ursie, my sisters, and I often go. We’ll fly there in the jet, and I can relax in the spa while you attend to your business.”

“What” I asked, “is the name of this spa?”

“It’s called the Rejuvenation Health Spa,” she answered, as I guess I knew she would. And there, once more, was another link between the Von Alders and the case. I saw no reason why Elsa shouldn’t accompany me to Berne, since it might strengthen the link, so I agreed.

After I had phoned Hawk again from my suite and told him that Elsa was going to Berne with me, we checked out of the George V. Then we drove to Orly and boarded the jet, which was still piloted by the two men supplied by the Paris AXE office, for the flight to Switzerland.