Jerri sat and wiped a smear of blood from her naked body with a comer of sheet while she gazed at me with an expression I could not accurately define. Except to say that it was possibly a mixture of admiration, disbelief at the close reality of savage death, and a tinge of loathing. Loathing for me, the blood, or the corpse, I could not tell.
“Yes,” I said, as if in answer to an unspoken question, “this is how it is. And if I don’t hurry, millions of others, far more innocent, will die.”
Then I left her, and after a glance up and down the passageway, bolted toward that great steel door, behind which, Warnow, and the apparatus of remote-control destruction, awaited the hour.
A couple of anxious, sweating minutes passed. And then I heard the snick of a latch and the door opened just a fraction. It began to swing toward me but I caught it and squeezed in, just in time to catch a glimpse of Tern’s naked back as it winked out of sight behind a closing door.
I closed the door quietly and swallowed the entire room in one gulp of the eyes. As described by Jerri, it contained a desk with phone, file cabinets, a large framed map of the U.S. and a portion of Central America she had failed to mention. I made a pass at the desk drawers, but they were locked. I made another pass at the file cabinets, same result.
I studied the map. Rings drawn with a red felt-tipped pen circled seven U.S. cities and the Panama Canal. The targets for destruction. One of the cities was Cleveland, but we could disregard that one since the bomb intended to erase it was intercepted by Customs. On the map the cities were numbered and, excluding Cleveland, they were, in order of elimination: New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
I observed that the capital had been saved until last, doubtless to give our government the chance to negotiate right up to the final hour.
The map was suspended with wire from a substantial brass hook. I lifted it from the hook with the certainty that, as Terri said, I would find a gaping hole or cache in which secret papers were hidden. But there was no such depository, the wall beneath the map was smooth as an infant’s behind.
It had occurred to me that a mere hole in the wall behind a map was not very imaginative for a scientist of Warnow’s caliber. And so now I began to experiment with the brass hook, twisting it this way and that but finding it solidly anchored and immovable. But not entirely immovable. Because when I pulled the hook toward me, it gave slightly with a tiny, oiled click. And immediately a square portion of the wall slid back soundlessly to expose a receptacle containing a small, leather-covered notebook and a series of numbered blueprints, each bearing a red, circled skull which obviously, to me at least, indicated the location of the planted suitcase bombs.
They indicated the locations, that is, if you had the related explanation of which building was in what city. For without some text or other guide, the prints were meaningless.
Though it seemed an age in those tight, nerve-wrenching circumstances, a glance at my watch told me that barely two minutes had passed. And since I figured that Wamow could survive another ten minutes or more with Terri alerted to my need for time, I sat down behind the desk and began a rapid examination of the pocket-sized leatherbound book.
At first the letters and numbers it contained were about as intelligible as a Chinese crossword puzzle is to most people. But I’m used to puzzles of all sorts, and there are few agents in the world so well versed on the art of unraveling codes. I soon recognized this one as an American code in use by scientists of Warnow’s era. And, though the code was basically simple enough if one were given the marvellously cunning mathematical formula to decipher it, to my knowledge it had never been broken by an enemy inside or outside of the U.S.
I thumbed back through my memory, and the principle of the code flashed into mind almost at once. I found a pen in a holder on the desk beside a scratch pad and made quick shorthand notes as I decoded and condensed just the bare fundamentals of the text and numbers, an outline of the death’s-head conspiracy. It included the secrets of Warnow’s bomb-triggering device, activated by a self-powered stylus. Microelectronics had been designed into the dollar sized, skin-flap disc to make it capable of transmitting a powerful high-frequency signal to vast distances — an attachment somewhat like the heart pacemaker, but infinitely more complex, exploded all bombs in unison, seconds after the last beat of Warnow’s heart.
This intricate, incredibly small remote-control device was labeled Passkey on the opening page. And on the closing page under the heading: DISARM, there were a series of five numbers which, as the text explained, were the key to disabling the bombs even after they had been signaled to explode. This emergency safeguard would circumvent the pacemaker attachment to Warnow’s heart.
But there was a catch. Once the delayed-action signal triggering the bombs had been sent, there were only thirty seconds in which to cancel the explosions.
I quickly made a mental photograph of the numbers and projected the image of them on the front wall of my mind. I have a nearly infallible memory and to recall a dozen numbers would have been no real problem. Nevertheless, I wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper which I folded and put in my pocket.
For another minute I studied the diagrams of the stylus and disc, then I wrote down the locations of the suitcase bombs in the various cities.
This done, I placed the little book and the notes decoding its essentials in another pocket. I had gambled about five minutes to scribble down the decoded facts because I had to have an immediate working knowledge of the device if I was to abort Warnow’s deadly plan. And I had found that I could remember almost anything if I put the details in writing first. Anyway, once you understood the device, operating it was about as simple as touching a pencil to various points of a compass.
Now I shoved the blueprints, too bulky to carry, into the wall receptacle, thumbed the brass hook to close the opening, and hung the map in place.
I softly entered the connecting bathroom and crossed to the other door. Pressing against it, I heard what I figured was Warnow’s voice, and the answering voice of Terri. I paid small attention to the conversation as I eased the Luger from its holster and grasped the door knob. But the gist of it was Warnow apologizing for haste due to “urgent experiments which must be prepared at once,” and Terri pleading to be allowed just a few more minutes with the charming professor who was so much man that he had left her gasping for more of the same.
As I inched the door open and peered into the room, Knox Warnow, white lab jacket over slacks, stood in profile to me, hands resting on Tern’s shoulder as she, clad in her boudoir attire, gazed up into his eyes with a pretense of adoration.
Warnow’s abundance of hair was black, heavily seasoned with gray. He had small undistinguished features and a slender body that seemed almost frail. Until I got a look at his intense green eyes which were chillingly vacant of emotion though as hard and brilliant as emeralds, he appeared an unlikely threat to the survival of the world’s most powerful nation. And hardly a man who could go a single round with Terri or her twin.
“This evening I will send for both you and your sister,” he was saying now. “There will be much to celebrate with vintage champagne and a special dinner. Then well share a long exotic night of pleasure together.”
“I doubt that very much, Warnow,” I told him as I stepped into the room behind the Luger. “This evening I expect that you’ll be on your way back to the United States as my prisoner.”
His face dropped with surprise as his head snapped toward me. While he groped for words, I said, “Terri, go back to your room. I want you and your sister to be dressed and waiting when I come for you.”