Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

“Duff!” she cried.

He muttered.

“Duff! I’ll get help! Can you hang on?”

His blood-streaked face looked up. His eyes showed now as slits. His teeth bared. His lips worked. “Scream,” he finally enunciated. “And look behind you.”

She swung around — and saw no one. But she screamed.

Emery McIntosh, chief of the Miami office of the FBI, listened to Higgins without interrupting. He was a medium-sized man of about fifty with a bald spot on the top of his head, nattily dressed in tropical-worsted suit, silk socks, black, highly polished shoes and a white shirt with a stiff collar. When he did speak, there was little in his accent to suggest his Scottish descent. But the ways and even the looks of his ancestors might have been read into the crisp mustache which matched his sandy hair, the blue glint of his eyes, the extraordinary firmness of his mouth and the deep, rather melancholy timbre of his voice. McIntosh looked, Higgins reflected, like a Presbyterian deacon dressed for taking up a Sunday collection—

which he was and had been about to do when the younger agent had telephoned.

“And the lad’s coming along all right?” McIntosh finally asked.

Higgins nodded. “Hardly a lad. Twenty-four.”

“But still in college,” the G-man sighed. “That keeps ’em young. One minute they can act like wise old professors. The next, fall apart like adolescents.”

Higgins’ grin was quick. “Well, Bogan is different. And he’s all right. They had him in a hospital soon after midnight. Eleven stitches.”

“Any tree bark in the wound?”

“Several bits, the surgeon said.”

“I see.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Higgins answered stubbornly. “The poor guy was clunked more than once. He could have been blackjacked. And then that limb could have been hauled down from the tree. And after that he could have been pounded a couple with it. I think they thought he was dead.”

“If there was a human agent — any ‘they’ at all! A big if.” Higgins shrugged in a swift, shadowy way. “All right. I couldn’t find tracks on the lawn or in the shrubbery. Hasn’t rained lately, so why should I? Nobody in the family heard or saw anybody. He must have made a big splash, going in, but the house is fairly distant. Ellings’ room’s on the other side. The mother and the girl were asleep. The boy’s room is on the back.”

“Ground wet around the pool? That box — if it existed — would have come out dripping.”

“The ground was wet, all right. But it would have been soaked by the splash of the man and the limb anyhow. There might once have been an impress of the box on the grass—

it would have been heavy. But the police were there first and they had it fairly well trampled.”

McIntosh sank lower in his swivel chair. “Tree?”

“I gave it a going-over. You could see where the limb had been jammed. Rubbed the bark of a sound branch. You could see that it hadn’t been attached by much. A few slivers of wood and bark. It weighed around a hundred and fifty pounds. It could, so far as signs show, simply have come loose while he crouched there, and dropped on him and conked him, turned as it hit the pool, and swatted him again. It could, for all I can surely prove.”

McIntosh looked at his watch. On its chain was a Phi Beta Kappa key. “You say the lilies were in wooden boxes. Could one of them have changed position so he mistook it, at night, in a flashlight beam, for what he imagined was related to his other — discovery?”

“How can anybody answer that except Bogan himself? He said he saw the box plainly. Said he saw brass screw heads. No screws in his lily boxes. And it’s hardly anything he’d dream up. Besides, the lily boxes have no tops. They’re filled with compost, and that’s covered with white sand.”

“One might turn turtle.”

“Yes. Except that it would haul under water a conspicuous bouquet of lily pads and buds and flowers.”

“You believe there was a box and Bogan got slugged and the box was taken away while he was unconscious?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe”—McIntosh took time to make himself say it—“that there was uranium in the box?”

“Or some other part of an A-bomb.”

“I don’t.”

Higgins started to say something argumentative, changed his mind, and smiled. “I don’t blame you.”

“Not one tangible piece of evidence! Bogan once had what he called a sample, a few particles he filed off, and he claims he analyzed them — which is difficult even for a specialist, and he wasn’t that. But he lost what was left of his sample before we could work on it. Ellings did have a hunk of platinum on hand, and that’s peculiar, but it’s not uranium.

Ellings met a man we’re supposed to believe was seven feet tall. Phooey! Ellings doubtless met a man. He may even be busy with some deal — a little smuggling or the passing of stolen goods. But do you realize what you’re saying when you talk about A-bombs?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it. You’re saying, man, that whole cities are being prepared for slaughter without warning! And you’re saying this is being done by people we have no whisper of, line on, word about — not a notion of, a smell, scent, track, trail or even hunch about!”

“Exactly.”

“Frankly, I think that’s impossible.”

“You can’t say it’s impossible, Mac.”

The Scotsman shrugged. “Very well. As unlikely as flying saucers. Put it that way.

On the other hand, grant, for a second, it’s true. What then?”

“That’s what I’d really like to discuss.” McIntosh put away his key and folded his hands across his chest. “All right. We’ll discuss it. I will. In the first place, any such an underground outfit actually doing any such thing wouldn’t hesitate for a second to murder this Bogan lad, or the whole Yates family, or any hundred other people.”

“Obviously.”

“Second, such an outfit actually might use the Yates house. It’s off the beaten track.

No other houses near. Rundown. Surrounded by big trees. Not conspicuous. And protected.

Those Yateses would be about the last persons anyone would suspect of doing anything criminal or haboring criminals. Mother a cripple. Beautiful young daughter — Orange Bowl Queen. Normal Americans. Two boarders. And a man like Ellings, if he were an enemy agent, would be ideal because he’s got such a long, hardworking, churchgoing, commonplace history.”

“Check.”

“Third, the whole routine you’re trying to sell me would therefore have worked — except this Bogan lad had a lot of cockeyed hobbies. Like picking locks. Like housework.

And he’s a physics graduate student, so when he sees metal, he’s curious. He has, besides, a hobby of raising tropical fish and water lilies. When he can’t get a satisfactory answer from us, he takes on another hobby.”

“Yeah,” said Higgins dryly. “The hobby of danger!”

McIntosh sniffed. “Nosing! He gets nosy. He gets the girl nosing, even. And he gets bopped on the bean by a branch — and lucky his brains weren’t knocked out.” McIntosh unlocked his hands and flattened them on his desk. “Not a sign that anything happened but a branch fell! Ellings, the logical one to hit Bogan if all this wonder dust is real, was in bed.

Mrs. Yates saw him come downstairs. So who hit him? Presumably, somebody coming for or standing guard over the alleged box in the lily pool. So now what? Four-five days, Bogan’s out of the hospital. Ready to nose some more!”

“We could tell him to quit. Tell him the bureau was taking over from here on in.”

The Scotsman scowled. “Which is exactly what we don’t want anybody to know!”