“Our organization is already set up to handle troublesome administrative details, thus taking them off your hands. Naturally both the Center and the League can disband all agent organizations. I promise complete capitulation.”
The Chief gave him an ironic smile. “You will not disband your agent organizations only to start newer more secret ones?”
“Why, of course not!” said Dolpha.
“And you will not set up any experiment to develop a mode of egress to the twin world?”
Dolpha gave a slight bow. “The League will have enough to do handling routine administrative work. Science is the province of the Center. Now let us arrange your passage back to your own headquarters so that you can deactivate that timing device. The thought of it ticking on and on makes me very nervous.”
“You trust me, eh?” the Chief asked.
“Of course... of course. There seems to be one hour and sixteen minutes left. Transportation has been arranged for you. You will arrive safely at your headquarters when there is exactly fifty-nine minutes left. It should not take you over thirty minutes to establish your correct identity and five minutes to reach the device. We shall expect that as soon as you have deactivated it you will communicate with us through official channels advising us of that fast.
“If we do not hear from you and have not heard from you exactly five minutes before the time you stated we shall launch our own attack on all Center installations. And should you attack first, please understand that your attack, even if all League installations are destroyed, will do nothing to diminish the force of our retaliation.”
“I understand.”
“Then go through the door on your left. It is now unlocked. Follow the guard detail.”
The Chief arrived, as Dolpha had said, when there were but fifty-nine minutes left of the entirely imaginary period. As the substitute had been detected and killed minutes after the duplicate craft had landed identification took but ten minutes.
He brushed off any attempt at questioning and went immediately to his headquarters. He had been able to act assured because the timing device was there and had been there for over two years. But it had never been connected.
He proceeded to connect it. It was dizzying to think of the multiplicity of automatic weapons of death and destruction which lay, brooding and silent, waiting for the tiny impulse. With the most infinite care he set it to coincide with the exact minute at which Dolpha had promised, if word didn’t come, to unleash the equally potent hell that the League had labored so long to perfect. And then he prayed to the rumored gods of the long-forgotten golden age of the Stradai.
Chapter VIII
Explosion
The convertible went slowly through the outskirts of Harlingen, the government sedan a half block behind it, Jack close behind the government sedan.
They had confided their plan to Jake and he was faintly and uncomfortably skeptical about it. The only advantage it had was its quality of innocuousness. If there was nothing at all peculiar about the trio, two supposed field men from the Bureau of Internal Revenue asking questions about the whereabouts of Quinn French would not alarm them. But the uneasiness within Jake persisted. The flaw in the idea was to his way of thinking the lack of a second line of defense. He vowed that he would stay close, but not too close.
The convertible turned right near the hotel, paused for the light while the government sedan idled along in its wake. A half block beyond the light it pulled in to the curb where diagonal parking was permitted. The government sedan picked a neighboring empty slot. Jake found a hole five or six cars away and was out as soon as he had cut the motor, not very comforted by the weight of the.38 special.
The Raymonds and the Kaynan girl got out of the convertible. Jake saw that the Kaynan girl looked sick and dizzy. Henry and Will moved in casually and the trio became a quintet, a casual conversation group on the sun-hot sidewalk of the small Texas city.
It was all so casual and so ordinary that Jake slowly relaxed the muscles of his right arm, ready to take his sweaty palm from the revolver grip.
Then Henry turned visibly pale and took two wooden steps backward. At the same moment Martha Kaynan, half crouching as though expecting a blow from behind, scuttled down the sidewalk toward where Jake stood, half concealed by the parked cars.
Jake was indecisive but then he saw the naked terror on the Kaynan girl’s face. It was as though for one moment he had been permitted to look down into a hell of fear so vast as to be barely comprehended. And the result was to immediately inflame him with a hate and detestation of those two who stood facing down the two FBI agents.
The woman turned and Jake saw the fury on her face, the narrowed blazing eyes as she stared after Martha. Martha fell and rolled on the sidewalk, scraping her knees and elbows, her head hitting with a small dismal thud.
Jake felt an arrow of pain sizzling behind the sturdy bone of his forehead and he crouched, pulling the special clear of the holster. He saw Will, falling backward, his face still contorted, rip out his own gun, aim it with a wavering hand.
Mr. Raymond reached inside the sport shirt and his hand reappeared. In it he held a small powder blue tube, as ridiculous as a child’s beanshooter. Jake clamped his teeth hard on the pain and took careful aim for a shoulder of Mr. Raymond. Raymond fired first. Jake only knew that he fired by the effect on Will.
There was no sound of explosion, no visible flash. A ragged hole the size of a basketball appeared in the center of Will’s chest and, as he slid over backward Jake, for an incredulous fraction of a second could see through Will, could see the pale stone wall beyond him.
He squeezed down on the trigger, knowing as the shot kicked off that he was a tiny bit high for a shoulder shot. But he was unprepared for the result. Jake had been Navy. The nearest thing to it in his experience was a forty millimeter H.E. The top half of Mr. Raymond detonated with a crack-thoom that shook the street.
After it came the drip and tinkle of broken glass, the distant plaintive cries of frightened women, the bellows of alarmed men, the scream and crash of nearby traffic accidents.
The sound of Henry’s shot was feeble by comparison, a flat empty snap that sounded like a cap pistol, but the woman staggered and fell with a spreading redness on the hem of her blue skirt.
Just as Jake began to feel that maybe it was ended, just as he began to suck in the deep breath of relief, the writhing woman on the sidewalk began to scream in a strange tongue. And an enormous invisible whiplash flailed the air. It whined without sound, criss-crossing, flicking, stinging. It cracked against Jake’s mind and he bounced off the fender of his own car as he fell.
People a half block away dropped to their knees and hugged their heads and moaned. A car ran up over the sidewalk on the other side of the street and smashed through the plate glass window of a supermarket. Jake lay panting for a moment and started to struggle up. The impact against his mind smashed him flat again and he gagged.
He rolled onto his stomach and, looking under the car, he saw the woman slowly crawling toward the convertible. Beyond her Henry lay helpless, blood on his chin from his chewed lip. Those who had come running to the source of the explosion lay on the sidewalk, moving weakly, trying to stand, then dropping again as the whistling lash of power hit them.
The woman had stopped screaming in her peculiar language. Martha lay huddled and silent.
Jake Ingram was a stubborn man with an exceptional capacity for anger. Five times he tried to center his sights on her and each time the enervating blast thudded the gun back against the asphalt. But the sixth time he was given a fractional part of a second and he pulled the trigger before the mind-whip was due to return. He could drive a nail at thirty paces. She was ten paces away and a woman’s head is considerably larger than a nail.