Count Backwards to Zero

Chapter 16

Shayne thanked his hostess for the sip of coffee, and borrowed her car.

Less than ten minutes later, after a fast ride, he stalked into Police Headquarters on Northwest 11th Street. The downstairs rooms, the stairs, the hall outside Gentry’s office, and the office itself were crowded with people, most of them strangers to Shayne. Pat Crowley, the heavy, cold-faced Director of the FBI’s Southern District, was perched on the corner of Gentry’s desk. The police chief leaned back comfortably in his swivel chair, hands behind his head, an unlighted cigar in his mouth.

Crowley exploded off the desk at the sight of Shayne. “By God, Shayne! If I have anything to say about it, and I think I do, you’ll never be in a position to pull anything as raw as this again.”

Shayne said evenly, “Don’t distract me, Crowley. I’ve always wanted to see how you’d look with a broken jaw, but it has to wait. What happened at the airport, Will?”

“According to your scenario,” Gentry replied cheerfully. “Three shots fired, nobody hit. Then the floodlights came on and both sides were asked to drop their guns. Crowley’s lads managed to hold their fire. Six prisoners.”

“Did you find an automobile gas tank on the plane?”

“Heavy as lead — is that the one you’ve been looking for?”

“It ought to be heavy as lead. That’s what it’s lined with. Have somebody open it up — but carefully, Will. Let’s see what’s inside it. How about the other end of town?”

“Only three. A tall man with a bad gunshot wound, in the middle of the road, unconscious. The word is that he may not make it.”

“Anne Blagden better hope he does, because if he dies it’s second-degree murder. Only two others?”

“Tied up, a girl and a city sanitation driver. The girl’s in the next room if you want to talk to her.”

“Have you got the blackmail money?”

“Two hundred thousand even. They opened up a bank for us. The ship’s been evacuated. Crowley brought in an Atomic Energy Commission man — where is he?” He peered around the crowded room. “Manship?”

A rumpled gray-haired civilian came forward. “I’m Dr. Manship,” he said. “Can you tell us anything about the size of this purported bomb, Mr. Shayne?”

“Seventeen pounds of plutonium.”

“Seventeen pounds,” the man repeated.

“With a force of — what was it — twenty-five kilotons. Very dirty — I think that was the way he put it. And he said something about a three-switch triggering device. Do you go to conferences? Would you recognize the name Quentin Little?”

“Of Camberwell, of course.” He took off his glasses and polished them carefully. “And he wasn’t the strangest of the English, by any means. Not that all of the Americans are altogether normal. Droll sense of humor, Little.”

“Sense of humor!” Crowley cried. “We’re talking about an atomic alert, and that ain’t funny! Let’s get cracking. The man said one hour.”

“From the time he picks up the money,” Shayne said. “And he knows you won’t lay out two hundred grand unless I can persuade you there really is a bomb. We can take a couple of minutes to talk to the girl. Crowley, I think you’d better sit in on this. You too, Will.”

At the door Shayne stopped the FBI man and said quietly, “We’re going to do this my way, Crowley. Low key. She’s jumpy.”

Crowley shrugged angrily and followed him to the next room. Gentry told the matron to leave them alone. Shayne sat down across from Cecily, who was playing with a pack of cigarettes.

“Hello, Cecily. That didn’t work out too well, did it?”

“Hi, Mr. Shayne. Thanks to you, it didn’t work out too well.” She gestured around the bleak room. “The land of the free.”

“What’s the boy’s name?”

“Jack Lightfoot.”

“Did Dessau untie him?”

“That bastard Dessau was thinking of nobody but himself.” She jumped the cigarettes over a book of matches. “Jack cut himself loose on a can or something. He was bleeding, and he didn’t untie me, you’ll notice.”

“He’s got everybody on edge. He says he hid the bomb somewhere on the Queen, and he’ll set it off unless we pay him two hundred thousand dollars.”

That surprised her. She looked around at the others. Shayne told her who they were, and he repeated the message Jack Lightfoot had given the mayor.

“He’s got money on the brain,” she said.

“How well do you know him, Cecily?”

“Old Jack? Too well.”

“Do you think he’ll do it if we don’t pay him?”

She sniffed nervously and shook out a cigarette. “I guess so. How much is that in English money?”

Shayne told her. She lit her cigarette.

“Which wouldn’t go too far the way prices are today, would it?”

“Did you collect anything from Dessau?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Say, what did you do, Mr. Shayne, follow us from the motel?”

“Right behind you, all the way. I didn’t see any money passed. I don’t think you ended up with a cent.”

“Too true, too true.” She looked at the other faces again and sat up straighter. “Mr. Shayne, I’d better give you my side of it, I guess. When Dessau called me up — and that’s another rat, incidentally, a real rat — and told me my Dad had smuggled in an atom bomb, I nearly swallowed my tongue. I was so surprised. It just isn’t Dad’s style.” Her face clouded. “I mean wasn’t, don’t I?”

“Who told you he was dead?”

“Pierre. He said you stabbed him in a fight, but why would you do that?”

“So you didn’t know a bomb was involved until today?”

“I certainly did not. I wouldn’t have let Dad do it. And then that Jack. I don’t know all the ins and outs, but he got his hands on it, somehow, took it out of Dad’s Bentley,”

She checked the effect of her story on the three men around her, but they had all listened to too many stories. Their faces were equally cold, equally impassive.

She continued, “And Dessau wanted to know what I thought we should do about it. I told him, and I told Jack the same, that the first thing to do was get it off the ship, and then either turn it in or bury it. And the solution we came up with, finally, was to put it in the garbage and let it get burned. I know you can’t burn plutonium, but whatever was left would be dumped at sea.”

“You didn’t think of selling it?” Shayne said.

Her eyes were wide. “You can’t put an advert in the paper — ‘One used atom bomb, good condition, best offer accepted’ — can you? And I wouldn’t, anyway. Dessau did suggest it, and I told him flatly, ‘What do you think I am, Pierre, a reactionary?’”

“Where does Jack stand politically, does he agree with you?”

“Even more so! He’s against everything! On top of that, he has about as much loyalty as a stick of wood.”

There was a light knock on the door and Dr. Manship stepped in. “You wanted to know what was inside that gas tank.”

“Yeah,” Shayne said.

“The lid has been cut off twice. The second time it was stuck on with a few spot welds. It won’t hold gasoline. There are two inches of lead sheathing inside, but that’s all.”

“The rat,” Cecily said. “Typical.”

“Meaning that that definitely is an atom bomb on the Queen Elizabeth,” Crowley snapped. “So what are we waiting for?”

“What’s the effective range of a bomb that size?” Shayne asked.

“A quarter of a mile, perhaps, if it’s exploded on deck. In the interior of the ship, much less.”

“Can I ask a question?” Cecily said, half rising. “I didn’t pay any attention. How far away are we from there?”

“About an eighth of a mile,” Shayne said. The distance was actually a mile and a half, but he was counting on her unfamiliarity with Miami. “Don’t get excited. We haven’t paid him the money yet.”

“Yes, but listen—”

Crowley made a decisive movement. “Shayne, there’s something wrong with your sense of priorities. An hour doesn’t give us much time to evacuate everybody inside a quarter-mile radius. We’ll need every available man and vehicle. Gentry! I want you to make the radio announcement. Calmness. Firmness. Our real enemy here is panic.”

Gentry was watching Shayne. “What do you think, Mike?”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Shayne said carelessly. “But Cecily and I are going to stay here and talk.”

“Let’s go a quarter of a mile away and talk,” she said. One of Gentry’s division chiefs appeared in the doorway. “There’s another call coming in to the mayor, Chief. We’ve got it on the amplifier.”

Gentry and Crowley went to the other office to listen, leaving the door open.

Cecily said in a scared voice, “What do you want to talk about?”

“What it was like at home. Your father gave me one version, but I don’t know how much of it to believe.”

“What difference does it make?”

In the other room, an amplified voice said, “For the sake of your pretty little city, Mr. Mayor, I hope you have the money ready.”

A voice answered, “It’s almost all counted. Give us another five minutes.”

“Five more minutes, okey-do. I’ll start timing it now. Check. While we’re waiting, I’ll tell you the way this is going to be. I promised I’d do that.”

“I’m listening.”

“Pass it on to the interested parties. The bomb has been booby-trapped. One small misstep, and boom. But not to worry. I have a gun. I’ll repeat that. I have a gun. If anybody at all approaches me while I’m picking up the money I will shoot myself between the eyes. I hope that’s clear. I’m not too enchanted with this world. It will be the easiest thing I’ve done in weeks.”

“That’s clear.”

“And after I blow out what we laughingly call my brains, you will have to fumble around the ship searching for the bomb, hoping you can make it harmless before it goes off. On the other hand, if you act intelligently, if no one takes a shot at me or follows my car, I will place that telephone call in exactly one hour, and tell you how to proceed. Two hundred thousand is cheap! The ship alone is worth fifty times that. The Cunard Line will reimburse you. Shall I go over any of this again, or do you have it?”

“No one will shoot at you,” the mayor said. “Just pick up the money and get going.”

There was an outbreak of excited voices in the other room as the conversation ended.

“Then why don’t we—” Cecily said, beginning to get up.

“Not yet,” Shayne told her.

He continued to question her while she became more and more agitated. Sirens were sounding all over the city. “Mr. Shayne, I can’t keep my mind on this. Please?” Standing up, Shayne told her to come with him. Downstairs, he took her thin arm and they went out through the same section of the revolving door.

He put her into the front seat of his borrowed car and got in beside her. Buildings were emptying all around them. Loud-speaker cars cruised slowly along the street warning all occupants to leave their homes immediately and move back from the bayfront.

Shayne’s was the only car attempting to drive east. At one point he had to detour through Lummus Park, around the courthouse and back to 5th Street. Cecily shivered beside him, hugging herself. Her generation had never known any other age than the atomic, and she knew what had happened to the Japanese cities.

The streets were emptier the further they went. The official party had gathered around several parked cars at the corner of 5th and Biscayne. They were now the only people in sight. The MacArthur Causeway had been closed. Power boats from the yacht basin were hurrying down the bay.

Shayne joined the others, still holding Cecily’s elbow. On the steps of the auditorium, across the boulevard, he saw a conspicuous suitcase, standing alone.

“Another thirty seconds and his five minutes are up,” Gentry said.

Crowley, at his elbow, growled, “The son of a bitch is bluffing. I know it. But we can’t take a chance. All right, he wins this trick. But we’ll get him, I promise you that. We’ll nail his hide to the door.” He looked at Cecily. “What do we need her here for?”

“She knows Lightfoot. We may want to ask her some questions.”

“In one way I know him,” she said.

A solitary car appeared on the boulevard, traveling south. It passed them, came about in a wide turn and drew up at the foot of the auditorium steps. The boy came into the light, seeming even paler than when Shayne had last seen him. He had a pistol in one hand, a bullhorn in the other.

He raised the bullhorn.

“To everybody within range of my voice,” he said slowly and distinctly. “I will shoot myself if approached. Do not attempt to follow me. Wait one hour. A small price to pay to avoid enormous destruction and loss of life.”

“I’d like to pick the bastard off where he stands,” Crowley said. “I could do it, too.”

“Does that sound like the sort of thing Jack would say?” Shayne asked Cecily. “‘Enormous destruction and loss of life’?”

“I guess so, but it’s a bit phoney.”

One of the FBI men was watching the youth through field glasses. Shayne took the glasses out of his hands, tightened the knob and focussed on Jack as he approached the suitcase. The boy walked slowly, scuffing his heels. The wrist of the hand holding the gun was clumsily bandaged. The bandage was red.

Jack lifted the suitcase and went back to his car, one shoulder dragged down by the weight of all the paper money. His car didn’t start at once. A long moment passed before it moved off with a jerk.

Shayne looked at the sidewalk where he had stopped to deliver his warning through the bullhorn.

“Let’s take a look, Will.”

He pulled Cecily across with him, feeling her resistance increase as they came closer to the great passenger ship, looming up over the piers to the left. There was a small pool of new blood on the sidewalk where the boy had stood, and a double trail of drops leading to the steps.

“At this rate he won’t have much left in an hour,” Shayne said.

Cecily said in a voice that she tried to keep from breaking, “Mr. Shayne, why don’t we join everybody somewhere else?”

“It’s less noisy here. What do you think of Jack’s credentials as a booby-trap artist?”

“To tell you the truth, I never thought of him that way. He can change a light bulb, and that’s about it.”

“I’ve seen a sample of his work with a welding torch. I doubt if the kid ever took a shop course. I don’t think he could put together a booby-trap that would really go off. I’m tempted to go aboard and find out.”

“You go aboard,” she said. “I’ll join the others.”

He looked at his watch. “Fifty-eight more minutes. Plenty of time.”

She kept pulling at him. “See, he’s kind of demented, Mr. Shayne. He’d like to be famous. What a thing if you could blow up the Queen Elizabeth! You know what it stands for. The monarchy! Money and luxury! And if you included Miami Beach at the same time — it’s a bomber’s dream! Everybody’d hear the name Jack Lightfoot.”

“I take it you’ve talked to him about this.”

“All right! We did have this sneaking suspicion that Dad might be bringing out a bomb, and we kicked the subject around — but it was just talk! I didn’t give him a bit of encouragement. Once he got that notion in his mind, you couldn’t buy it out with a million pounds. You think he’s going to telephone anybody in an hour? You don’t know Jack Lightfoot. He’ll be off somewhere looking at the telly, chuckling like a damn ghoul. If he hasn’t bled to death by that time!”

“You’ve talked me into it,” Shayne said. “The safest and best thing would be to go aboard now. Manship, you’d better come with us.”

“I expect you’re right,” Manship said calmly. “I’ve got some protective suits in the car.”

“Bring three,” Shayne told him.

Manship crossed the boulevard to his car, returning a moment later with several bulky coveralls and two portable Geiger counters. Shayne held out one of the suits to Cecily. She shrank back.

“No!”

“If it goes off, it won’t make any difference if you’re there or out here.”

In the end he needed the help of two cops to get her dressed and zipped up.

Shayne borrowed a pair of handcuffs and chained their wrists together. She had to be dragged all the way. The noises she was making were muffled by the tightly sealed hood, but through the plastic face mask he saw a face contorted with terror. She shrieked, reaching the bottom of the gangplank, and fainted. He carried her up, unlocked the handcuffs on his own wrist and cuffed her to the rail.

They found the bomb within minutes of coming aboard.

It was on the bridge, in the most obvious place, lying at the foot of the great wheel. Wires were strewn about. The bomb was in a rectangular metal box about eighteen inches long and four inches high. A separate box, much smaller, was wired to the main one, and also attached to an ordinary drugstore alarm clock. The alarm was set for the half hour, well in advance of Jack’s announced sixty-minute deadline.

Manship’s Geiger counters had so far given no sign of alarm. He put them down and studied the setup. Looking at Shayne, he shrugged and took out a pair of needle-nosed pliers and an ordinary screwdriver. He waved Shayne off the bridge.

From the glassed-in deck, Shayne could see the knot of officials around the cars on the other side of the boulevard. Cecily, at the rail two decks down, was thrashing around trying to free herself.

Five minutes went by. Shayne began to itch inside the protective clothes.

There was a sound behind him and Dr. Manship came out. He had unzipped his hood and thrown it back. Shayne pulled his own zipper.

“I always did think Little was a bit of a nut,” Manship said. “There’s nothing inside but dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Not plutonium. Ordinary garden dirt.”

Shayne unlocked Cecily’s cuffs and took her down the gangplank. The others ran toward them.

The two groups met at the mouth of the pier. Shayne stepped out of his spaceman’s costume and left it on the sidewalk, reaching for a cigarette.

Everybody wanted to talk at once. Manship’s news passed quickly to those in the rear.

Crowley was scowling. “By God, there better be some good explanation of this. We evacuated half the city of Miami!”

Shayne had released Cecily, but she stayed where she was, shaking. One of the cops peeled off her bulky uniform. She emerged gasping for breath and looked around. As soon as she understood where she was she screamed wordlessly, clutching her forehead with both hands.

“You really did think there was a bomb,” Shayne said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought the reason you killed your father was to keep him from giving the trick away before you could make some money out of it.”

She shuddered helplessly, pulling her hair.

Gentry said quietly, “Explain that for me, Mike.”

“Everybody else was busy somewhere else when Little was killed. Cecily was the only one who could have squeezed it in. But it had nothing to do with the bomb, apparently. It was strictly a family matter.”

He took a small sheaf of papers out of his inside pocket and sorted out Little’s letter to his insurance company, cutting Shayne in for a third of the death benefit. He made the shuddering girl look at it. When she realized what it was she screamed again.

“Are you sure about this, Mike?” Gentry said.

“She was the big thing in Little’s life. Drunk or not, if he’d expected her to be meeting him, he would have said something about it. It was a big surprise when she got in his car after he came through the Customs. She told him she’d run away from England and he had to take care of her. He’d arranged with me to crack up the Bentley to get the search out of the way, but he couldn’t do that while Cecily was with him. He drove her to a room she said she’d rented. He didn’t know Miami, but even so, he wouldn’t have gone in that Brownsville building with anybody but his daughter. She put a knife in him and went out the back way. I think she had a rented car waiting. Then she came back to the pier and pretended to be looking for him. She could say anything she liked about the arrangements. He was dead, and couldn’t contradict her.”

“What’s this about a family matter?” Gentry pursued.

“She knew about the insurance — she and her brother were down for fifty thousand apiece. But she couldn’t know he’d set that up expecting to be killed. I think she saw Anne Blagden kissing him when they separated on the pier. Or she thought he’d be arrested for smuggling and the insurance would be canceled. Or he’d be fired for drinking and couldn’t keep up with the premiums. Too many things could go wrong. And Cecily’s a girl who doesn’t like to wait.”

She looked at him wonderingly. “I think I’m going out of my mind. Something bad’s going to happen.”

“I agree with you,” Shayne said, “but you can use your share of the insurance to pay the lawyers.”

Gentry ground a cigarette under his heel. “An insurance murder, quite a comedown. Don’t answer this if you don’t feel like it. When you put on that fancy suit did you know it wasn’t a real bomb?”

Shayne grinned ruefully. “The odds were against it, but I would have looked pretty stupid if I’d been wrong.”

“Along with looking pretty dead.”

“I spent three or four hours with Little,” Shayne said. “They were concentrated hours. I’ve been talking to people about him ever since. He had a sense of humor, everybody tells me, and I saw signs of it when he could hardly stand up, and fully expected to be shot to death the next day. Very bright — everybody agrees on that point. Look at the deal from his point of view. He’d attempted suicide once. Dessau and Diamond offered to arrange it for him on a higher political level, so his death would mean something, and threw in a big insurance settlement for his loving daughter. For Little’s purposes, dirt was as good as plutonium, so why take a chance on smuggling the real stuff out of the laboratory? And what a joke on Dessau, a man I’m sure he couldn’t have liked. But two hard-headed intelligence agents, Diamond and Anne Blagden, were sure it was a real bomb, so the rest of us acted accordingly. And it was just too big. Too much money seemed to be involved. People began going off on tangents, first Dessau, then Lightfoot.”

Crowley had been prowling around behind Gentry trying to keep from interrupting.

“What’s this about intelligence agents?” he demanded. “You’ll have to start at the beginning, Shayne, and take me through it step by step.”

Shayne looked at him wearily.

“That’s the way it usually happens. Call off the emergency. I’ll meet you at Gentry’s office in two hours. Right now I’ve got to return a borrowed car.”