“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.