“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.”