Алистер Маклин - Goodbye California

‘No more than that?’

‘Of course not.’

Ryder stepped forward and showed LeWinter the photograph he’d collected from the Examiner office. LeWinter stared at it as if hypnotized, then got back to his lip-licking.

‘A nice kid.’ Ryder was being conversational. ‘Blackmail, of course. She’s told us. Not with this end in view – this is just a spin-off. Principally, as we know, she came in handy for the translation of phony Russian documents.’

‘Phony?’

‘Ah! So the documents do exist. I wonder why Morro wanted you to provide him with the names of engineers, drillers, oil-rig men. Even more, I wonder why twenty-six of them are missing.’

‘God knows what you’re talking about.’

‘And you. Watch TV this morning?’ LeWinter shook his head in a dazed and uncomprehending manner. ‘So perhaps you don’t know he’s detonating a hydrogen bomb in Santa Monica Bay or thereabouts at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’ LeWinter made no reply and registered no expression, no doubt because he’d no expressions left to register. ‘For an eminent judge you do keep odd company, LeWinter.’

It was a measure of LeWinter’s mental distress that comprehension came so slowly. He said in a dull voice: ‘You were the man who was here last night?’

‘Yes.’ Ryder nodded to Jeff. ‘And this is Perkins. Remember Perkins? Patrolman Ryder. My son. Unless you’re blind and deaf you must know that your friend Morro holds two of our family captive. One of them, my daughter – my son’s sister – has been wounded. We feel kindly disposed to you. Well, LeWinter, apart from being as corrupt as all hell, a lecherous old goat, a traitor and accessory to murder, you’re also a patsy, a sucker, a fall-guy, a scape-goat – call it what you will. You were conned, LeWinter, just as you thought you were conning Donahure and Miss Ivanov and Hartman. Used as a red herring to set up a non-existent Russian connection.

‘Only two things I want to know: who gave you something and to whom did you give something? Who gave you the money, the code-book, the instructions to hire Miss Ivanov and to obtain the names and addresses of the now-missing twenty-six men – and to whom did you give the names and addresses?’

LeWinter eventually registered an expression: he clamped his lips shut. Jeff winced as his father stepped forward, his expression, or lack of it, not changing, a gun swinging in his hand. LeWinter shut his eyes, flung up a protective forearm, stepped quickly back, caught his heel in a throw rug and fell heavily, striking the back of his head against a chair. He lay on the floor for ten seconds, perhaps longer, then slowly sat up. He looked dazed, as if having difficulty in relating himself to the circumstances in which he found himself – and he was clearly not acting.

He said in a croaking voice: ‘I’ve got a bad heart.’ Looking at and listening to him it was impossible to doubt it.

‘I’ll cry tomorrow. Meantime, you think your heart will last out long enough to let you get to your feet?’ Slowly, shaking, using both a chair and a table, LeWinter got to his unsteady feet. He still had to hang on to the table for support. Ryder remained unmoved. He said: ‘The man who gave you all those things. The man to whom you gave the names. Was it the same man?’

‘Call my doctor.’ LeWinter was clutching his chest. ‘God’s sake, I’ve already had two heart attacks.’ His face was registering an expression now. It was contorted in fear and pain. He clearly felt – and was probably right – that his life was in mortal danger, and was begging to have it saved. Ryder regarded him with the dispassionate eye of a medieval headsman.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Jeff looked at him in something close to horror but Ryder had eyes only for LeWinter. ‘Then I’ll have nothing on my conscience if you die and there won’t be a mark on you when the mortuary wagon comes to collect you. Was it the same man?’

‘Yes.’ A barely audible whisper.

‘The same man as called from Bakersfield?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ryder half-lifted his gun. LeWinter looked at him in defeat and despair and repeated: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

Jeff spoke for the first time and his voice was urgent. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘I believe him.’ Ryder hadn’t looked away from LeWinter. ‘Describe this man.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Or won’t?’

‘He wore a hood. Before God, he wore a hood.’

‘If Donahure got ten thousand dollars, then you got a lot more. Probably a great deal more. Give him a receipt?’

‘No.’ LeWinter shuddered. ‘Just said if I would break my word he would break my back. He could have done it too. Biggest man I ever saw.’

‘Ah!’ Ryder paused, seemed to relax, smiled briefly and went on, far from encouragingly: ‘He could still come and do it. Look at all the trouble it would save the law and the prison hospital.’ He produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them round LeWinter’s wrists.

The judge’s voice was weak and lacked conviction. ‘You have no arrest warrant.’

‘Don’t be simple-minded and don’t make me laugh. I don’t want any vertebrae snapping. I don’t want you getting on the wrong phone. I don’t want any escape attempt. And I don’t want any suicide.’ He looked at the photograph he still held. I’ll be a long time forgetting. I want to see you rot in San Quentin.’ He led him towards the door, stopped and looked at Parker and Jeff. ‘Observe, if you will. I never laid a finger on him.’

Jeff said: ‘Major Dunne will never believe it. Neither do I.’

‘You used us!’ Burnett’s face was white and bitter and he was shaking with such uncontrollable anger that his Glenfiddich was slopping over on to the floor of Morro’s study, a shocking waste of which he was uncharacteristically oblivious. ‘You double-crossed us. You evil, wicked bastard! A beautiful job, wasn’t it, the way you spliced together our recordings and your own recording?’

Morro raised an admonitory finger. ‘Come now, Professor. This helps no one. You really must learn to control yourself.’

‘Why the hell should he?’ Schmidt’s fury was as great as Burnett’s, but he had it under better control. All five physicists were there, together with Morro, Dubois and two guards. ‘We’re not thinking just about our good names, our reputations. We’re thinking about lives, maybe thousands of them, and if those lives are lost we’re going to be held responsible. Morally at least. Every viewer, every listener, every reader in the State is going to be convinced that the hydrogen device you left off the coast is in the one-and-a-half range. We know damn well it’s in the three-and-a-half. But because people will believe – they can’t help believing – that it was all part of the same recording they’re going to imagine that what you said was said with our tacit approval. You – you monster! Why did you do it?’

‘Effect.’ Morro was unruffled. ‘Very elementary psychology. The detonation of this three-and-a-half megaton device is going to have rather spectacular consequences, and I want people to say to themselves: if this is the effect of a mere one-and-a-half megaton what in the name of heaven will the cataclysmic effects of thirty-five megatons be like? It will lend persuasive weights to my demands, don’t you think? In the climate of terror all things are possible.’

‘I can believe anything of you,’ Burnett said. He looked at the shattered wreck of what had once been Willi Aachen. ‘Anything. Even that you are prepared to put thousands of lives at risk in order to achieve a psychological effect. You can have no idea what this tsunami will be like, what height it will reach, whether or not the Newport-Inglewood Fault will trigger an earthquake. And you don’t care. The effect is all.’