He filled and lighted a pipe while Shayne watched him.
“Ask him something,” Anne said nervously. “You feel the engine vibration. We’re not standing still, you know.”
“Do you have a contract with Amco?” Shayne said.
“A letter agreement. Would you like to see it?”
“Yeah. And get out the insurance policy while you’re at it.”
The Englishman flipped back the lid of the unlatched suitcase and drew out a manila envelope. The insurance policy, written by a London firm, contained a double-indemnity clause for accidental death and a two-year suicide exclusion. There were two beneficiaries, a wife and a daughter. The agreement with Amco, one of the big electronic and space conglomerates, was for eighteen months, with an option to renew for three years. It included a stock option arrangement that seemed very generous to Shayne, and an annual salary figure that made him raise his eyebrows.
“Anne tells me that you’re carrying a gun.”
Little sent a quizzical look at the girl. “Unloaded, actually. I’m not much of a gun man. It’s a sort of stage prop.”
“Let me see it.”
Little went to the bureau and returned with a Belgian .38 automatic, a Walther, the best of the small hand guns. The clip was empty.
“I have bullets,” Little said, “but I refrained from loading it, not wanting to run the risk of using it prematurely, in a moment of disgust.”
“Anne said it fell out of your pocket.”
“I’ve wondered about that,” Little said thoughtfully. “Did I do it deliberately, to attract her attention to a desperate, doomed figure? Perhaps subconsciously. With the conscious part of my mind, I was frightened of her from the beginning. I was afraid she would reawaken something, would make me regret—”
Anne moved impatiently. “All he wants is facts, Quentin. Tell him about the money.”
Little gave a sardonic chuckle. “Half a million American dollars. A substantial sum.”
Shayne’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”
“It’s a reward, you see, for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of any un-American scoundrel who commits the folly of attempting to bring a nuclear weapon into the United States.”
Shayne’s internal Geiger counter, which woke up whenever it heard a con artist go into his pitch, went into sudden action. He broke out his cigarettes.
“How official is it?”
“Very. Authorized by a special act of the United States Congress. Few people will remember. It was an obscure action, taken at a time that now seems a part of some long-ago geologic period. The date was 1949, May 17.”
“Go on.”
“The United States was then the only atomic power. I understand there was considerable xenophobia in your country. The nature of the fission process was imperfectly understood, a spy fever was raging. People were preoccupied with two aspects of the atomic weapon — first, its enormous power; second, its relatively small size. The explosive portion, even now, as you probably know, is really astonishingly small. Am I giving him too much detail?” he asked Anne.
“He needs the background, I guess. But talk a little faster.”
“When I talk fast I stutter. The question of bulk, of size, Mr. Shayne — to a nervous country that was the crux of the matter. The United States had a 100-percent monopoly on production, with a system of strategic bases and great fleets of aircraft that could reach every inhabited point on the globe. I can’t imagine why Americans should have been so frightened, but they were, they definitely were. It was known, of course, that the secret of the bomb was not really that much of a secret. Sooner or later you would no longer have your monopoly. And then some miserable fifth-rate power, or even an individual or a mad committee, would put together an elementary nuclear device and carry it to its target in America in an ordinary suitcase. The suitcase bomb — from all accounts I have read — was one of the scares of the period. No one seems to talk about it now, and I am at a loss to know why.”
“It’s still possible?” Shayne said.
“More so than ever. As the yield has gone up, the bulk has gone down. So you spend your fifty-odd billions a year on aircraft and missiles and antimissiles and anti-antimissiles, but how do you protect against the single madman with his suitcase? Back in 1949 some clever civil servant had an idea, and persuaded your Congress to post this reward of half a million dollars. Money was worth more then than it is now. It must have seemed to your lawmakers that such a munificent sum would set up an intolerable pressure inside even the tiniest conspiracy. Given a choice between a half million dollars and loyalty to a country or an ideal, there would always be one weak and pragmatic person who would choose the half million. A typically American notion. Free of taxes — that was part of the arrangement.”
“Have you seen a copy of this act?” Shayne said.
“I have seen a newspaper cutting, taken from The Washington Star. Yellow and crumbling, undoubtedly genuine. Do you doubt that such a reward was posted?”
“I doubt the whole goddamn thing,” Shayne said roughly. “Somebody’s giving somebody a fast-shuffle here.”
“Did you bring the clipping?” Anne said. “That would prove part of it.”
“No, certainly not. If they found it in my pocket, it would give away the whole scheme. I assure you it happened. Public Law No. 1063. Passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. That can be checked, surely.”
“But not from here,” Shayne said. “Who’s planning to collect the reward?”
Little sucked at his pipe, which had gone out. He put it down and began cracking his knuckles.
“This skeptical spirit is contagious. I suddenly wonder... he could have set the type for the newspaper article, but how could he age the paper convincingly? No,” he decided, “the cutting was genuine; the reward is genuine. It’s inherently probable. It fits the historical facts. It demands to be believed.”
He leaned forward. “Pierre Dessau, an Englishman in spite of the French name. The scheme is his. He is a man with quite a good untrained intelligence and a quick tongue. I have caught him out in three or four unimportant lies or exaggerations, but it never occurred to me to doubt the veracity of his newspaper cutting. If that was bogus in any way I am really in need of your services.”
“Quent, for God’s sake,” Anne said, “will you tell him how it happened? You met him in a pub. He said, you said. When we get that out of the way we can move on.”
“Yes, the pub would be a logical place to start. The Three Heads of the Well. I’ve been in fairly regular attendance for the past several years. The conception of conviviality draws me. After a certain few gins, we find out small facts about one another: that so-and-so had enjoyed unnatural connection with so-and-so’s wife, that Dr. Quentin Little, from the Facility, who is at ease among subatomic particles, has no hope for animate matter and doesn’t give two farthings if the sun comes up tomorrow morning or not. I’ve made a substantial mess of things, Shayne. I have a wife who despises me. The feeling is mutual. I have two children who consider me a traitor to humanity for doing weapons research. I have been working on the definitive bomb, the really definitive bomb, and the work, I must say, is well advanced. I am also seriously in the hole financially, to the tune of upward of ten thousand quid. My wife’s family, her brother, her father, are disaster-prone, and each new catastrophe seems to cost me money. Sexually I have been impotent, really bang-out impotent. Nothing, regardless of with whom.”
His knuckles cracked.