"Open it, please, and check the coat pockets. My damnable memory may have done us a favor for once."
There ensued a long pause, then a faint raucous chuckle. Clearly, then: "Jesus Christ, man, there's twelve hundred dollars here!"
"Two hundred more than we bargained for. It is yours, Mr. McEvoy, if you will allow me to pick up cartridges of exposed film on Friday. Will you be going today?"
"Don't see how. It'd be dark before I could get over to Lake Chautauqua. Would tomorrow be good enough?"
It was perfect. He let McEvoy twit him about leaving hard cash lying around in unlocked luggage, then mentioned being late for an appointment.
He stepped from the booth, checked the time, and walked to the bus depot where he took his attaché case from a storage locker. He found a restaurant with two entrances, expecting no surveillance but taking the usual precautions, and ordered filet of sole. Awaiting his early lunch, he pondered the likelihood that Ian McEvoy was working with Canadian authorities by now. Yet it took time to check the location of a telephone; still more time to secure a large apartment building. It was unlikely that police would cut power to the apartment, or to the telephone. But it was possible.
At the moment when the little man started toward the pay telephone in the restaurant, Pelletier was scanning a collection of photographs maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Pelletier drew a blank with the Quebecois, another with known elements of Meyer Cohane's people in the Jewish Defense League. He had basked in virtue when complimented on his ability to remember a telephone number; Pelletier would have been unwise to admit indiscriminate bugging of a client's calls because police saw such criminal activity as their own particular vice.
RCMP plainclothesmen had already checked on Ian. McEvoy. He had no previous record and eked out a precarious presence by flying sportsmen into wilderness lakes. To a business-suited gentleman of endless curiosity he said yes, the Seabee was for hire but he was already booked for the following day. Yep, he had plenty of hull storage, even for a moose head. Tomorrow? Oh, just a photorecon job for some movie people. Nope, he would be carrying no passengers.
The RCMP left a staff sergeant in plain clothes with field glasses in an unmarked car, unwilling to confide in McEvoy. Their job might have been simpler had they simply asked him about his client. But McEvoy was under suspicion.
While Pelletier's eyes grew red-rimmed in his search for a make on Mr. Trnka, the little man in Victoria reached his Toronto number. With a casual glance around him, he brought the HP from his pocket, punched an instruction into it, then let his machines confer. A poignant three-second tone from the HP was identified in the sink of the Toronto apartment and its instruction executed. The little man fidgeted for another fifteen seconds before the line went dead. He nodded to himself, replaced the receiver, and ambled back to his table.
In the Toronto apartment, beads of light had grown in the clay pot over the sink as the squibs energized pyrotechnic igniters. The beads began to sink from sight into the silvery mixture before, reluctantly, the thermite caught fire and prospered.
Thermite is a simple composition of great utility when it becomes necessary to weld, say, the frames of locomotives. Because one of its combustion products is pure liquid iron. The other product is aluminum oxide, also common in solid rocket exhaust.
A tiny ravening sun radiated from the top of the clay pot as its temperature rose to approximately twenty-five hundred degrees celsius. Since thermite is hot enough to melt concrete there was a considerable quantity of smoke, which boiled above the starlike glare and crawled across the ceiling.
An observer with protective goggles might have seen the thin trickle of brilliant yellow-white molten iron that began to drip through the hole in the pot. It instantly destroyed the microprocessor, consumed the circuit board, and proceeded to fry the answering device into bubbling junk while smoke thickened in the two-room apartment. Tiny particles of aluminum oxide began to fall as snow on the carpet while the sink enamel pinged and spat under incandescent metal soup. The stream of iron dwindled, slag already congealing as the clay pot disintegrated to add its thermal content to the mass in the sink. The cast-iron sink began to char the wooden counter at its lip, then slowly cooled. At that point, tendrils of smoke found their way through ceiling moldings into the apartment above.
In Victoria, the little man dallied at his lunch, which was evidently filet of shoe sole, but abandoned it after a few minutes. He walked to his own hotel, tossed a pillow on the floor of his room, and lay with his bare feet touching the locked door. He would need sleep now, to assure alertness that night.
While the sleeper husbanded his strength, an apartment dweller in Toronto arrived to find her smoke alarm whining in panic. Fire marshals traced the problem, took one look through the door they forced in the apartment below, and radioed the Toronto Metropolitan Police. Within an hour they had conferred with the RCMP which, unlike the generally similar Federal Bureau of Investigation to the south, has more sweeping powers in domestic matters.
A thorough description of the apartment's contents reached Ottawa early in the evening, and shortly afterward Ottawa sent five new photographs by wire to Toronto. None of the new pictures were from passports or mug shots; all were of a special category of people whose expertise in communication devices fitted the Toronto pattern. Neither the three men nor the two women were thought to be in Canada—until now. Pelletier took the group of new photofaxes, spread them irritably—and howled with delight.
Pelletier brandished a `known photograph,' distinguished neither by clarity nor recency, and handed it to the RCMP sergeant, who flinched. It was `Trnka,' beyond any shred of doubt. At that moment, there were five men on the case. A few minutes later, after RCMP/Ottawa contacted FBI/Washington, there were over thirty.
The HP tintinnabulated in the sleeper's ear at ten o'clock, Pacific Standard Time. Presently the little man strolled from the hotel to a dust-covered Pontiac off Wharf Street, and then moved on to the Inner Harbour. He watched a tall figure move across the lights from the cabin of an Islander Thirty-Four, continued his walk, and stopped again as the lights went out. He cursed softly, realizing that Graham intended to sleep aboard the damned boat. He found a coffee shop, wasted an hour, then returned to the Pontiac.
He dressed inside the car, beginning with the wetsuit, struggling into the zippered black turtleneck and charcoal denims more by feel than by sight. The deck shoes were new, stiff, and uncomfortable. He stuck the Llama automatic into his waistband and locked the car, taking one of his three B-four bags with him from the trunk. He sank the bag in shallows, two moorages from the Islander, and brought the other bags.
The water was cold only on his hands and feet, but he had trouble with the microbubbler in the darkness. Exhalations from SCUBA gear had been a clear signature of manfish since the early Cousteau aqualungs, and a trained ear could identify this signature through a fiberglass hull. The microbubbler changed both pitch and rhythm of exhalations. It was an absolute necessity for the job.
He adjusted flotation on a B-four bag, tugged on his flippers, carefully made his way under two hulls by touch and emerged silently at the third hull. A quick surveillance assured him that he had the right boat; then he submerged again in the friendly blackness. His flashlight played across the great weighted keel and, seeing rings set into the keel, he let fate smile for him. It would be necessary to bond only one ring to have a triangulated lashing. The work went quickly. To be on the safe side he emplaced a second ring with the thermoset adhesive. He did not risk testing the rings too much, but lashed the sodden bag in place and took his bearing again before dousing the flashlight. Then he returned for the second bag.