I sat down and picked up a few of the papers he hadn't reached yet. Some were in a foreign language, Turkish probably. A couple were in English, obviously multiple carbons of official UN business Bayak had attended to for his mission.
"We don't even know what we're looking for!" Erikson snorted as he winnowed through the stack.
I found myself looking at a sheet torn off from a desk calendar pad. There was a notation on it in bold printing: "Waybill No. 45603, carton marked AEC #3M45D, Hanford, Washington, shipping weight 12 pounds."
I read it again.
"Bayak said the package on the truck weighed twelve pounds," I said to Erikson.
"What was that?" he inquired absently as he continued to riffle through the loose stack of papers.
I repeated it, and this time it penetrated. Hands stilled, Erikson stared at me. I gave him the desk calendar sheet. "Hanford, Washington!" he exclaimed. "With an AEC number! That's an Atomic Energy Commission shipment!"
"You mean-"
"I mean it could be fissionable material, and with a knowledgeable physicist waiting for it in Damascus-" Erikson rose to his feet abruptly, the balance of the papers sliding to the floor. "This thing finally begins to make sense. I'll call Washington right now and verify what's in the shipment, but without a doubt this is what the Turk is after."
He strode to the telephone. "Any chance Bayak has his own line tapped?" I suggested.
Erikson froze in the act of reaching for the phone, then picked it up anyway. "Right now I'd settle for scaring him off this job," he said grimly. "Although I'd love to catch him at it."
"He won't be anywhere near the scene," I objected.
"Oh, yes, he will," Erikson predicted. "This is Big Casino on everything he's been attempting to do in this country." He removed a card from his wallet. "Operator, this is a priority call." He ratded off a string of numbers, meaningless to me. "I want to speak personally to the Secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C."
I carried the tool case to the elevator and discovered the doorman, whom I'd completely forgotten, flaked out in a chair, snoring. I restored the fuse I'd removed to the elevator's fuse box so we'd be ready to go. "Then I'll speak to his deputy!" Erikson's voice crackled from the living room. "All right, who's there who can answer a question about an AEC shipment? Then put him on."
He identified himself to the individual at the other end of the line. "This is an emergency," he continued rapidly. "I need to know the freight line and the route for an AEC shipment on Waybill number four-five-six-O-three, carton number three-M-four-five-D out of Hanford. I realize it will take time, but it had better not take too much. No, you can't call me back here." He recited another number. "That's the phone number in our communications car. Call through the mobile operator. And push this thing for all you're worth."
He hung up the phone, bounded up the steps from the sunken living room, and approached me at the elevator. I indicated the sleeping doorman, but Erikson paid no attention. "You're still the only link," he told me. "If we get the information in time, we can pull you back from the center of the action, but right now it's on to Bayonne." He stepped aboard the elevator.
"What happens in Bayonne?" I asked as we descended.
"If we get a call telling us where we can intercept the shipment, we'll divert the truck and you'll be out of it," Erikson said. He looked at his watch in what was becoming a ritual gesture.
"And if you don't?"
"I'm supplying you with a car with a transmitter we can home in on from the comcar. We'll be behind you."
Out on the sidewalk, McLaren and a man I didn't know were standing, watching the entrance to the building. "Get into the first car with McLaren and me, Wilson," Erikson ordered. "Drake will take yours."
McLaren handed me an object I recognized as one of the beepers I had seen in the equipment room. "If you have to change cars for any reason, take this with you and attach it to the other car, preferably on the outside. It has a magnetic plate so it will stick to any metal you can reach."
The second man, Wilson, brought a canvas sack from the first car which he handed to McLaren. "This is your acetylene torch and plastic," McLaren said, handing me the sack. "And here's the map."
He handed me a detailed drawing of a waterfront area. "Don't forget to detail a man to take Abdel into custody, Jock," Erikson said. He took the map from me and marked Pier Twenty-six with a star. "We'll lead the way to Bayonne, to this point." He placed a finger on the map. "Then we'll drop back behind you."
"Suppose you lose me?"
"We can't lose you as long as you have the beeper. If we don't flag you down in the meantime, when you make contact with these people, drag it out as much as you can so we can move in close. Now roll it."
Not for the first time in my association with him, I realized that Karl Erikson would use his own grandmother to get a necessary job done.
I made the gatehouse at Pier Twenty-six with sixteen minutes to spare, according to Bayak's timetable. I sat in the car for another seven minutes before anything happened. Then a glare of headlights swept over me in the driver's seat. A sedan pulled in alongside, so tightly I couldn't have opened the door on my side.
A man jumped out and approached my car on the passenger's side. He rapped on the window. I leaned across the seat to lower it with my left hand, keeping my right close to my.38. Even in partial shadow, I could make out dark features and an Arab cast of countenance. "You have identification?" the man asked when I had the window down.
I started to ask what he meant, and then I realized. I opened the canvas sack on the front seat and showed him the acetylene torch. He nodded. "Come with us," he said.
I brought the bag and the beeper with me. When my interrogator opened the door of the sedan, I handed him the canvas sack. He leaned into the car to put it into the back, and I slapped the miniature homing device under the skirt of the rear fender. The man motioned me into the back seat, and I found myself alongside another swarthy individual who was smoking a cigarette that gave off a bitter, disagreeable odor.
The man who had approached me got under the wheel, and the sedan left the dock area and rolled along for a dozen blocks through a warehouse district. The air polluter in the back seat with me had nothing to say. Then the car swung into an alley and stopped halfway through it. Another turn and the headlights were beamed upon a corrugated steel door. The driver beeped the horn three times.
The door clattered upward and we drove inside.
My heart sank when I saw that the building was a steel warehouse.
If I knew anything about electronics, the steel would form a shield cutting off the beeper signal as effectively as if I'd dropped it into the East River.
Erikson could never find me now.
I was committed to the hijack.
11
The interior of the warehouse looked as large as a football field. Powerful ceiling lights at ten-yard intervals gave plenty of illumination. Except for one corner where a green panel truck was parked alongside high-piled crates, the warehouse was empty.
A man approached our car. He was short, muscular, swarthy, and bold of eye. In appearance he could have been a younger brother of the deceased Hawk. The man listened with no expression on his hard-bitten features to our driver's rat-a-tat-tat explanation of what I took to be an affirmation of my credentials.
The muscular man nodded finally, threw away the stub of a cigar he'd been smoking, opened up the canvas sack to see for himself the torch and explosives that were my passport, and at last turned to me. "I'm Hassan," he said. "The others will be here shortly and you can conduct the briefing." His English was perfect.