Della said, ‘I don’t trust him. My reason says he’s probably on the level, but my instinct says beware.’
Ed squeezed her hand. ‘Well, I’ve always been the kind of person to follow my instinct. Let’s give them a test. Remember the old cowboy films?’
He handed her the gun to hold, and then, twisting on the needly floor of the woods, he tugged his red sweatshirt off.
‘Striptease, at a time like this?’ she asked him.
‘Just give me the gun,’ he told her.
Quickly, he wrapped the sweatshirt around the barrel of the rifle. Then, hesitantly and jerkily, he raised it up above the protective fender of the Lincoln, as if it was someone coming out of cover.
‘There!’ said Peter.
The silence of the woods was cracked by three pistol shots in rapid succession. Ed’s sweatshirt was flapped up into the air by one bullet, and they felt the wind of a second as it passed narrowly overhead. The third pinged off the Lincoln’s trunk.
Ed snatched down the rifle, rolled around to the slope which he had chosen as his firing position, snuggled the butt against his cheek and looked for Peter and Muldoon.
Muldoon, crouched as low as an arm-swinging baboon, was only a few feet away, running in fast to finish off the red sweatshirt. Peter was already round the other side of the limousine – presumably intent on rescuing Shearson. Della was right behind Ed, her head buried beside his thigh.
Muldoon didn’t have a chance. He was so close that Ed shouted, ‘Muldoon! Drop it!’ just to give the man a break. But Muldoon made a dive for the ground, and fired off another thunderous shot from his .45, and Ed squeezed the trigger without allowing himself to think anything else but kill him.
The shot echoed and echoed, and then there was silence again. Ed cautiously rose to his feet, and walked around the Lincoln with the pump-gun held up and his eyes alert.
Muldoon was lying on his back on the stony ground, his eyes wide open, his automatic thrown aside, his plaid cowboy shirt dark with blood.
Peter appeared, holding a revolver, but Ed swung the rifle towards him and said, ‘Drop it,’ and he did.
‘You’ve killed him,’ said Peter, in a shaky voice.
Ed nodded. ‘I didn’t want to. Believe me. But it was him or us.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Peter. ‘Are you going to shoot the rest of us, too? Or what? One way or another, we’re going to have to report this to the police.’
‘The police already know,’ said Ed, quietly. ‘At least, the federal authorities do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Della works for the FBI. The reason we broke into your office was to find evidence of what you’ve been doing with this Blight Crisis Appeal to take you to court.’
‘You’re joking. Are you joking?’
‘You think I go around shooting people for fun? I never hurt anybody in my life before, until tonight,’ Ed snapped at him. He was shaking, and if he could have done, he would have slung the pump-gun right off into the trees.
Shearson Jones pushed open the passenger door of the wrecked Lincoln. ‘Would someone help me out of here?’ he demanded. ‘And would someone tell me what the devil’s going on?’
Della came up, brushing pine needles from her robe. ‘We’re getting out of here, that’s what,’ she said, in a clear voice. ‘We’re going to leave Muldoon here for the moment, and we’re going to drive into Wichita and turn in these papers to the FBI. And if you’re innocent enough to think that we’re in trouble, Mr Kaiser, just think what kind of trouble you’re in. Fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, carrying unlicensed firearms, attempted murder of a federal agent. You’ll be lucky if they let you out to see the turn of the century.’
‘Is there room in that wagon for all of us?’ wheezed Shearson, plodding up the hill towards them.
‘There should be, with Muldoon gone,’ said Peter. ‘I have Karen with me, too, though.’
‘You brought Karen? Why?’
Peter Kaiser looked embarrassed. ‘Kind of insurance. In case we had to do a trade – her freedom for Shearson’s.’
‘My, my,’ said Della, shaking her head. ‘You do get your money’s worth out of your girlfriends, don’t you?’
With Ed staying a little way behind to keep Peter covered, they slowly made their way up to the road again. Karen was standing by the wagon in bare feet, jeans, and the white puffy-sleeved shirt she usually wore in bed. When she saw them coming – Peter and Della, Shearson and Ed, she couldn’t work out what had happened at first – who had captured whom. But when Ed said, ‘It’s okay, Karen. Everything’s fine,’ she came walking across the blacktop bare-footed with tears running down her cheeks.
‘Oh, God, I was frightened,’ she said, holding Ed’s arm. ‘Oh, God, I can’t tell you how frightened I was.’
Ed put his arm around her and held her close. Della, beside the wagon, gave him a mocking little raise of her eyebrows, and a smile that could have meant anything at all.
Seven
During the weekend, an intensive search by fifteen volunteers from the St Louis Fire Department had revealed five radioactive isotopes in grain elevators along the waterfront, and ‘perceptible’ radioactivity in almost every grain and flour store within a six-mile radius of the city. The isotopes had been taken to the National Nuclear Research station in Kokomo, Indiana, where tests showed by late Monday afternoon that each of them contained over 4000 curies of radioactive cobalt-60.
At 11.43 p.m. on Monday night, the President was informed of the discovery, and he issued immediate instructions for the contaminated cereals to be destroyed. They were to be taken out to sea and jettisoned in deep water off Miami, under the supervision of experts from the Navy, the Bureau of Atomic Energy, and the FBI. The President emphasised that it was ‘essential, at this time of threatened shortage, not to let these radioactive foodstuffs go astray, or to fall into the hands of those who might not be so scrupulous about where they go to.’
Geiger-counter searches of grain elevators and flour warehouses all over the country were put into motion a few minutes after midnight, and by seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, officials had discovered isotopes in Chicago, Duluth, Milwaukee, and Seattle. Whoever had planted the isotopes had shown no discrimination. They were found in grain stores at breweries, amongst oats and bran in animal-feed factories, and in flour warehouses at kosher bakers. The nuclear laboratories were unable to tell where the isotopes had come from, since their casings bore no serial numbers or manufacturer’s marks, but three out of the seven analysts working on them expressed an opinion that the cobalt was of European origin.
‘We are being attacked from without, rather than within,’ said the Director of the FBI, Charles Kurnik. ‘I don’t think we need more than three guesses to answer the question by whom?’
With instructions from the President to use the utmost diplomatic discretion, the Secretary of State began to put out feelers in Japan, in China, in Soviet Russia, in Iran, in Germany, and in Britain. Without revealing the seriousness of the isotope crisis, he was supposed to vibrate the web of international diplomacy, and see if he could detect in which corner the spider was sitting.
By noon on Tuesday, the President and his cabinet were faced with the question of what to do about the billions of bushels of highly radioactive grain still stored in elevators all around the country – grain which was still being happily used to bake bread, brew beer, feed animals, fill out hamburgers, and to make anything and everything from children’s cereals to bourbon whisky.