“You no look Chinese.”
“I don’t think it would matter to him if I did.”
“Maybe not. Get any signs?”
I opened the back door and hauled out a metal frame with a rectangular sign that said men working. “The best I could do,” I said. “How did you do?”
“Pretty good.” He hoisted his sign, carried it over to the Chrysler. He opened the trunk, and I looked at two small sawhorses and a couple of detour signs. There were several little black smudge pots, too. “I had to get rid of the spare and the jack to make room,” he said. “Left them both on the side of the road, and all I could think of was what would I do if I had a flat. The answer was I would stop the next car and shoot somebody, but at this hour on these roads you can wait for hours for the next car.” He took out his pills and swallowed two of them. He offered them to me but I shook my head.
“You’ve got to stay alert,” he said.
“I’m all right. You’re eating those like candy.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“You can get excessively hopped up on those, can’t you? I mean to the point where they get in your way.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve used them before, I know how they work.”
“All right.”
“They beat falling asleep, I’ll tell you that.”
“All right.”
Maybe the reason I didn’t want the benzedrine was that I felt as though I was already on it. There was the same utter absence of fatigue, the same ability to concentrate intensely upon one thing at a time, the same jittery feeling that was not so much nervousness as the sensation of moving at a faster speed than the rest of the world. This was probably caused by a number of things, adrenalin not the least of them, but the effect was the same as if one of my endocrine glands was secreting amphetamines into my bloodstream. My last night’s sleep had been brief, and too many hours had passed since then, but even so nothing like fatigue ever hit me. Even on the endless ride back from Sioux Falls I had stayed on top of things.
There was one bad time, not exhaustion but a sort of misdirection of attention. It came along between the time when George drove away in the Chrysler and my own departure for the base. For a few minutes I had little to think about and less to do, and I made the mistake of letting my mind wander.
This had one good effect — I thought of a possible future hangup and figured out how to handle it if it came up — but it also eventually led me away from the entire operation. I started thinking about the future, not the future of the job but the future future.
I thought about my island. I should have known right away that something was wrong, because the island and the job had nothing to do with each other and didn’t belong in the same day’s thinking. And I thought about certain things I might do with my million dollars. I would have to buy the island, of course, and I would have to set up some sort of system to pay the taxes on it through a third party. And I might want to make certain improvements on the island. Water, for example. Maybe there was a way I could pipe in fresh water without drastically altering the present arrangement.
There was also the hurricane threat. The hurricane season wasn’t far off, and the Keys were usually hit hard, and any strong wind would tear the living hell out of my shack. If I could put up the same sort of structure with concrete block instead of timber, it might make the difference between living through a hurricane or getting spattered all over the Gulf of Mexico. Of course concrete block would be a radical departure, but maybe the improvement in safety justified it.
Things like that.
And then, before I knew it, I was thinking about Sharon. My first reaction was one of surprise that I had thought about her at all, and after that I tried to remember how long it had been since I had last thought about her. A long time, I decided, and I let that play around in my mind, and I worked variations on the idea of Sharon combining with the idea of my island, and I began having imaginary conversations with her, and—
And I just caught myself in time.
I started the engine and got the hell out of the motel lot. It was too early to go to the base, but I had to be somewhere doing something or I was in all sorts of trouble. I had to stop thinking of Sharon, or of anything else not related to what was happening at the moment. The future had a million million unknowns, some about which I might speculate and others which could never be foreguessed, and there were things I knew I would do and things I knew I would not do and things I had as yet no inkling of, and they could all get together in the gray limbo of tomorrow. I had enough worries handling today.
The night sentry knew me. I had gone to my office once before in the middle of a sleepless night, largely to determine what the drill was in the off hours but also to let the night man familiarize himself with me. I was lucky. He didn’t get many visitors at that hour, and he remembered me, so I got in now without the static that had attended my earlier night visit. I parked my car and looked around to see if Bourke and O’Gara were on the job. Their car wasn’t around. I showed myself to the guard at my building. He was new, and didn’t know me, but neither did he challenge me. I went to my office and gave it a quick sweep for prints, then went outside and did the same for the car on the chance that I wouldn’t use it again. It wasn’t much of a chance, but I did seem to have time on my hands.
Back in the office, I dug the Walker paraphernalia from my money belt and emptied the rest of the Walker garbage from my wallet. I had the feeling that I might be burning a bridge, but I also had a hunch that this was my last shot at this particular bridge, so I started a fire in a green metal wastebasket and fed Major John NMI Walker to it a scrap at a time. I saved Walker’s driver’s license because Lynch didn’t have one.
I looked at my watch. It said it was 4:55. I picked up my phone and got the operator and asked what time it was and was told it was 4:59. I corrected my watch and started wiping the surfaces I had touched since my last print-sweeping job.
D-Day, 5 A.M. H-Hour less ninety minutes.
No. H-Hour less, say, somewhere between one hundred ten and one hundred fifty minutes. The trucks might not roll on the dot at 6:30, and it would take them at least twenty minutes to reach the ambush location.
H-Hour less two hours, roughly.
In two hours George Dattner and I would have to stop four armored trucks and a two-door Ford sedan. We would have to do something about four drivers armed with handguns, four front-seat passengers armed with automatic rifles, four guards in the Amarillo truck toting M-14s, and two MI majors armed with God knew what.
I left my office and headed across to the warehouse. It was snowing again, coming down fairly hard. It seemed as though this ought to be either good or bad for our side, but I couldn’t figure out which, so I stopped thinking about it.
Bourke and O’Gara were already on the job. They didn’t seem to be doing anything vital. Bourke was watching a supply sergeant issue ammunition to a group of enlisted men, while O’Gara was putting up a fair show of overseeing things in general.
It was O’Gara who noticed me. “What do you know? We didn’t expect you for at least an hour. Wear that uniform long enough and you’ll start acting like a soldier.”
“And lie in bed all day waiting for reveille?” I shook my head. “I’m only awake because I never got to bed. I spent the whole night running around like some kind of a nut.”
“They finally reached you?”
“They finally reached me. They decided telegrams were unsafe and they sent some idiot in a private plane. He had to land in Sioux Falls and called me from there.”