“I thought you might see things differently with your glasses, Sam.”
“Please, Miss Fleming—”
She left the edge of the bed and went to a dresser mirror.
“Don’t push me,” she snapped. “I’ve had a bad hour and it’s beginning to catch up with me.”
She inventoried her reflection. She had left the coat in the main room. Her short, black hair, normally worn unkempt, was a rat’s nest now, her gold-coated lips smeared. The knees and thighs of her Capri pants were wet and black with grime. She put her back to the mirror, looked over her shoulder. Same thing.
She glanced at her palms. They were gritty. One gold-coated fingernail had been broken. She wiped her palms on the Capri legs. The Capris were ruined anyway. Then Desiree took the tiny gun from the shoulder holster and hefted it at the scientist.
He popped up in the bed. The sheet was dropped and suddenly forgotten. He gaped.
“Shut up,” said Desiree, “or I may be forced to use this gun to drive some common sense into that egg head of yours, Sam.” She holstered the gun. “And that’s the way it’s going to be from now on, understand? Sam and Desiree. I’m tired of mouthing your last name. It’s too much handle. And I don’t like to be called Miss Fleming. It makes me sound as if I’m a debutante coming out. I’m not. I’m an agent for a bureau of the United States government. I’m the casual type. I’m uninhibited. I’m— Damnit, Sam, quit gawking at me as if you’ve never seen an angry female before!”
“Miss... Miss...”
“Desiree!”
“Desiree—” He gulped, stared, then he seemed to gather himself and he thundered, “Desiree, what the devil happened to you? Where have you been? You look as if you’ve been — been in a fight! You look as if—”
He left the bed, wrapped himself in the blue robe, belted it securely at his middle, slid his feet into the slippers.
“Thank God,” Desiree breathed. “Suddenly you’re human. Come on out here, Sam, and mix us a highball. And make it a decent highball this time. You aren’t going to like what I have to tell you, not one bit.”
She went into the main room. He trailed her. She shrugged out of the shoulder rig and took it and her coat into the other bedroom. When she returned, she watched him pour bourbon from a bottle into glasses without measuring. He dropped in ice cubes, poured water from a pitcher.
The drink he handed her was a brown color. She was satisfied. She dropped on a couch, kicked off a loafer and curled a leg under her. He sat on the edge of a deep chair opposite her.
“Now,” Desiree said, “I’m going to explain some facts of life, Sam, and I want you to listen.”
His immediate reaction to her recount of the last hour was, continued disbelief. He sat shaking his head, his eyes hung on some unseen object on the thick carpeting. Desiree kicked off the other loafer and wiggled toes with gold-painted nails as she drank appreciatively from the glass.
“What all this boils down to, Sam, is tomorrow afternoon’s meeting is off.”
He surprised her. He said softly, “Isn’t that exactly what someone wants, Miss... er, Desiree?”
She frowned.
“The way I see it,” he continued, “we play straight into the hands of these people, whoever they are, if I postpone tomorrow. You said it yourself: sprawled there on the sidewalk, you were a perfect close range target. You could have easily been killed, but you were not. Doesn’t that suggest that these people merely are trying to frighten us off?”
“It suggests I am living with a rabbit’s foot in my pocket and that someone was a darn poor shot.”
“Perhaps. But I’m not going to be swayed, Desiree. I think the intent was to frighten.”
“What if I’d gone out and not returned tonight?”
“Well, naturally I’d be disturbed.”
“Thanks a bushel,”
“What I mean, Miss Fleming, is, I’m not totally oblivious to the fact that you are a human being and, well, female.”
“Watch it, Sam. Something hidden in you is beginning to seep out.”
He said nothing. He drank.
Desiree pressed, “If I had disappeared wouldn’t that have told you and yours to vamoose, get out of town?”
“No.”
Desiree exploded, “Sam, the man on the phone wanted you! He wanted Doctor Samuel Herchenfelder! His only trouble was he didn’t know you! He didn’t know whether you were male or female! I admit that female bit threw him off stride, but he bought it! And, point, Sam — the man wanted to warn you about a plot against your life!”
“You said the man who shot at you was not the man who called. How do you explain that, young lady?”
“I suspicion that your friend was somehow discovered. I have a hunch he now is dead. I think a substitute was sent to Eighth and Crowly. I think the substitute was supposed to kill me.
“Sam, the hierarchy of our foe is not stupid. The hierarchy knows you, knows you are a man. Only the henchmen might be uninformed, might make the mistake your friend did. But not the hierarchy. And the hierarchy, in this case, attempted to make a good hand out of a bad hand. A card had been put face up on the table. They were forced to call the hand. They did. They sent someone else to meet me, knowing damned well who I am. If the gunman had been successful it would have left you a sitting duck.”
“Imaginative,” Sam breathed in wonder.
“Imaginative? The guy who shot at me wasn’t imaginary!”
“Miss Fleming,” he said, suddenly turning serious, “do you actually want me to believe that some unknown persons intend to kill me?”
“It’s exactly what I want you to believe!”
“Why now? Why has there never before been an attempt to—”
“Because,” she said, forcing patience, “these people probably just discovered what you and your pals are up to.”
“I can’t believe that. No one really knows what we have.”
“No one has to. All they have to know is that you do have something.”
He pushed at his glasses. “We weren’t sure ourselves until ten days ago.”
“Sam, the word gets around. Don’t be naive. Look at Holly, my boss. He doesn’t know what you have, yet he knows that you have something. He knows that it is a new weapon. He knows the name of the project is TX.”
“He was told.”
“All right. Look at me. See how much I know? See how much the other agents know? Two days ago we didn’t. Today we do. Because Holly passed the information along to us. The same information can get bandied around until it reaches other people, too.
“They don’t have to know anything. All they need is a hint that something big is in the wind. All they need is a name dropped here and there, a name of someone who is a part of this big something that could be disastrous to them.”
“But this is all very hush-hush.”
“Was,” Desiree corrected.
“Only fifteen, perhaps sixteen, people know anything! We who have worked on TX, the military, your man Holly, you agents, the Secretary of—”
“Enough,” said Desiree flatly. “Enough people to have the word get out. Sam, you’ve got to call this thing off. You and probably some of the others are in personal danger.”
“No,” he said bluntly.
Desiree stared at him. Suddenly she left the couch and went to the telephone. Sam was with her instantly. He clamped a firm hand on hers, forced the receiver back into the hook.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Holly has to know.”
“No.”
Again he surprised her. He took her shoulders and he sent her stumbling across the room. She swelled. “Sam, I’m warning you. I can take you so fast you’ll think you’ve been hit by an army.”
“If we don’t meet tomorrow, we will on a later day,” he said. “Where and when doesn’t matter. If our enemies know now, they’ll know then. We’re all here now. We’re assembled. The meeting is set. We can have it finished in an hour. That’s all, Miss Fleming. One hour.