Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 2, January 1973
The Spy Who Came Home
by Brett Halliday
(ghost written by Max Van Derveer)
Murder was the name of the game and you made your own rules, as Mike Shayne, marked for certain extermination, followed the lethal clue which the C.I.A. had labeled, “Death to the Finder!”
I
Bierny had a reputation. His place was clean, his beer was cold, and his pretzels were crisp. Bierny’s was a good place to hang a hat on a drizzly Miami Monday evening.
Unless you had a drunk balancing precariously on the stool next to you.
Michael Shayne cocked an eyebrow at the neat Bierny behind the bar and used a meaty shoulder to move the heavy back up on his stool. The heavy screwed his head around and eyed Shayne drunkenly. “You-all wanna play push, friend?”
Shayne had been warned when the guy had come into the bar. Instinct had told him to move, but he hadn’t stirred. Now he wished he had clomped his hat on his red-haired skull and left. He wasn’t in a mood to placate a drunk. He wanted to sit quietly, sip a couple of brandies, and he had thought that later in the evening he might phone Lucy Hamilton, his pert secretary, and go up to her place and listen to tapes.
“Hey!” The big man jolted the private detective with a palm. “I ast yuh somethun, friend. Yuh-all tryin’ to push me ’round?”
Bierny sighed and stepped into it. He snaked the half-filled drink from the man and dumped the content in a hidden sink behind the bar.
“Thanks for coming in, pal,” he said, “but you’ve had your quota for the night. Hit your sack, huh?”
The man ignored Bierny. He again banged Shayne with a palm. Then he straightened slightly and seemed to attempt to get the detective into focus.
“Hey,” he wheezed, “Yuh-all are Mike Shayne, that big, tough private eye, ain’tcha?”
Shayne finished his brandy and left the stool. He tossed Bierny a wave. “Some other night.”
“Mike, I’m sorry as hell.”
Shayne shrugged. “It happens.”
A sudden stiffarm jolt put him slightly off balance. He took a couple of steps and squared on the drunk. He looked for a shoulder rig under the guy’s coat, saw no foreign lumps.
“One more lick, buster,” he growled, “And you find deep sleep.”
“Yeah?” the drunk sneered.
The drunk looped a fist. It came from a mile away as he pitched from the stool. Shayne stepped inside the loop to slam a short jab into the man’s midsection. The man’s head came down, bounced off Shayne’s shoulder. Shayne slid to his right and hooked a left under the man’s rib cage. He moved back as the man gagged and stumbled. The man went down on his knees.
Suddenly hands captured Shayne. They came from behind him and they twisted his wrists up his spine. He went up on his tiptoes with an oath, but all he could do was dance.
The two uniformed cops hustled Shayne to the door where one took over, wrenching Shayne’s right hand far up his back while the other cop went back to capture the drunk. Shayne protested: “What gives? Where did you guys come from? How come—”
“Shut up,” snapped the cop. “You and your friend are goin’ downtown. Drunk and disorderly.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Let’s see if the desk sergeant thinks it’s a joke, huh?”
The desk sergeant was a fleshy man with a salmon-colored face who was Mr. Efficiency. He booked Shayne and pointed toward the cell area. Shayne wrestled two cops all the way back to the cell. He was put inside the cage. The door clanked home. He grasped the bars and yelled at the cops until they were out of sight.
Then a quiet voice behind him said, “Take it easy.”
He whirled. The man sat on the edge of the lower bunk of the cell. He looked forty, a thin man in a loose-fitting, cheap suit. Shayne immediately tagged him a ‘Yankee Snowbird’, a wino down from the north for the winter — until the man said: “It was a setup, Shayne. The drunk is one of my people. You and I are going to have a private chat. Sit.”
Shayne sucked a deep breath. “Who the hell are you?”
“You can call me Bell.”
II
Mike Shayne used the fingers of his right hand to yank his left earlobe, then lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke hungrily. He was wary. “What’s on your mind, Bell?”
The man produced credentials from an inner pocket of the cheap suit. Shayne grunted as he inventoried the plastic card. He asked, “You know a guy named Benjamin Hogan?”
Bell’s smile was tight. “Bernard Hogan.”
“He’s with the FBI.”
“No.” Bell shook his head. “He’s one of our people, CIA, one of our best people.” Bell took time to light a cigar. “You worked with Bernie about a year ago, Shayne. You helped him get a man down to Cuba. You boys had a rough crossing that night. Heavy seas. Bernie suffered a fractured arm when he was hit by a wave on deck. You were forty-two minutes late in landing, but you got our man ashore on the deserted beach at 4:52 o’clock in the morning. His code name was Saint.”
Shayne eyed the man on the bunk with fresh respect. He knew the man’s name was not Bell but he was satisfied the man was legitimate Washington. Bell waved the cigar to encompass the cell.
“It’s private here. No prying eyes, no electronic bugs, no interruptions. You ready to listen?”
“Uncle pays two hundred a day plus expenses,” said Shayne, “like anyone else.”
Bell looked at his cigar. “That right? Seems to me that’s a bit steep.”
“So are my taxes, but I pay ’em.”
Bell smoked. “There’s a man named Albert Haynes who resides here in Miami. He’s a computer expert, working for Interstate Computer Corporation. He also is a member of the Space Agency team. Haynes has developed a miniature computer that is vital to soft landings by space vehicles. We currently are using it in our manned flights to the moon. The Russians are after it.”
“So? I thought the U.S. and Russia are exchanging space information.”
“Not to that degree,” Bell said. “The Russians have tried a couple of earth landings, but they’ve been hard knocks. The last one killed some cosmonauts. The U.S. is about to try an earth landing, using Haynes’ computer. But the big thing, Shayne, is the military potential. When the space people get these soft landings down pat it’s going to be no trick sticking rockets aboard, missiles with N-warheads to be fired from a control center thousands of miles away. It shouldn’t be difficult to envision that kind of threat — send a fleet of space ships to some strategic corner of the world, put ’em down, fire your missiles.”
“Push button war, huh?” the redhead said.
“We’re near, Shayne. Maybe too damned near.”
Shayne drew hard on his cigarette. “Okay, let me guess. The Russians are after Haynes and you don’t want him hauled out of the country.”
“Not quite that crude,” Bell said, shaking his head. “The Russians want the computer, not Haynes the man. They would like to have Haynes deliver a computer to them — I said it is small, miniature — but he can’t, of course, because he doesn’t have one. All he has is a set of plans. The Russians want that set. They have experts who can innovate from there.”
“You say that as if Haynes has those plans in a shoe box in a closet somewhere.”
“In a wall safe in his home, I understand,” Bell said. “He’s a widower, lives alone. He often works on the plans in his home.”