“She can drop a running man at sixty yards,” he answered. “She has.” Then he slapped a gun into Davy’s free hand, took one himself, and was in the lead once more.
At a niche in the concrete sidewall there was a steel ladder going up; after the brief climb another door and they were inside a small garage. Without hesitation Davy opened the trunk of a common-place-appearing sedan and stepped onto a couch which had been prepared on the inside. Percival waved Hewlitt toward the rear seat as he shut the lid of Davy’s compartment. Obediently Hewlitt climbed in and was grateful when Barbara followed. Mary took the front seat as Percival slid behind the wheel. At the touch of a button on the dash the door began to lift open as Percival started the engine. Moments later the car came out into the sudden brightness of daylight, the door of the garage slowly closing automatically behind it. They came down a short driveway, turned into the thin traffic stream, and everything was suddenly commonplace.
Percival drove through the city with apparent unconcern. He held to a westerly direction until the last of the new housing developments finally had been passed and they were in the beginning of the open country. He turned once or twice onto semi-thoroughfares with the familiarity of a man driving from his office back to his own home and no one, so far as Hewlitt could tell, took the least notice of them. He looked up at the gas gauge and saw, as he had expected, that the tank was full. He sat back next to Barbara, holding the gun he had been given concealed inside his coat, and deliberately relaxed. When he had done that he said to Barbara, “I’m glad you’re here.”
She pressed his hand; it was eloquent enough for him and he was satisfied. They drove on, the car running smoothly, the day beautiful and clear. They continued for more than an hour and then at last Percival spoke. “We should be in the clear now,” he said. “We know all of their emergency roadblock locations and they’re behind us now as far as the city is concerned. They don’t have any description of this car and they’re still short of people; they can’t make an exhaustive search.”
Hewlitt swallowed. “What happens now?” he asked.
Percival kept his eyes on the road. “Things are all set up for us,” he answered. “If nothing goes wrong, in a day or two you’ll meet the First Team.”
As soon as the preliminary information was all in, Ed Higbee saw the admiral. He sat down and waved away the inevitable cup of coffee, refreshment was not on his mind at the moment. “Barney,” he began, “we’ve got a bear by the tail.”
“Let’s have it.”
“I’ll start with the good part first: Mark got there in time and pulled out four of our people who were in a critical position. It was touch and go, but they made it.”
“That includes Hewlitt, the interpreter.”
“Yes, sir, plus two of our best girls and the electronics man who was in charge of the safe house. The house is blown, but our people all have whole skins. Speaking of that, Hewlitt was called in to face Rostovitch and somehow he bluffed him out. God knows how he did it.”
“God knows, and I intend to find out. Go on.”
“Rostovitch is running the show, as we already knew, but there’s a new angle. He told Hewlitt that Magsaysay has been sunk. According to Hewlitt, whom Mark considers to be thoroughly creditable, he was almost triumphantly factual about it.”
Admiral Haymarket pursed his lips and leaned back in his chair to think that one over. The possibility of a bluff was immediately obvious to both men; so also was the fact that Rostovitch would be unlikely to volunteer a statement from which he might have to back down later on. Both men also knew that despite Canada’s official neutrality, the enemy had been conducting intensive search activities by air over much of the northern Arctic under the guise of weather reconnaissance. And there were remarkable detection devices still highly classified in what had been the American arsenal, devices which could well have been independently developed or, more likely, compromised by espionage.
The admiral sent for General Gifford, Colonel Prichard, and Major Pappas.
“We have a new can of worms,” he told them when they had assembled. He painted the picture exactly as Ed Higbee had given it to him. When he had done so, he turned to Pappas first. “When are we due for a communication from Commander Nakamura?” Pappas shook his head. “In order to insure minimum risk, sir, no contacts whatever are scheduled. But we can query.”
The general shook his head at that. “Precisely what they would like to have us do, I suspect,” he said. “That is, if Rostovitch is bluffing.”
The admiral passed a hand across his face, blinked his eyes to dispel his sustained fatigue, “Quote the odds,” he invited.
Pappas, the human calculator, was the one to answer that and he responded. “Sixty per cent bluff, forty per cent truth based on present data.”
“Hank?”
Colonel Prichard was ready. “I’ll concur with that for the time being. It’s close enough to an even split to cause us concern, that’s for sure.”
“Which opens the possibility that Hewlitt was fed the information and then allowed to break loose,” the admiral said. “That would explain his supposedly outmaneuvering Rostovitch. To the best of my knowledge Walt Wagner is the only man who has ever taken his measure before, and it wasn’t easy.”
“Make it sixty-five, thirty-five on the strength of that,” Pappas contributed. “I have one recommendation, sir. Whatever we do, no request for a report from Magsaysay. I’ll give you one hundred per cent that they’ve got every detection and listening device that they have trained continuously, waiting for her to break silence. And they’ll read her out, position and all.”
“Agreed,” the general added.
“Do we gamble?” the admiral asked.
When it was silent for a few moments Ed Higbee realized that the question was mainly for him. He had his answer ready. “If we don’t, we’re dead.”
“What about Counterweight?”
Higbee had to think before he was ready to commit himself on that. It took him a good fifteen seconds. “I think, Barney,” he said at last, “messy as it may be, we’ve got to do it. We’ve just landed a punch; it’s time for another.”
“How soon?”
“Right now. We’re still cocked?”
Admiral Haymarket smiled grimly. “We are. I concur. Pass the word to activate. How long will it take?”
Pappas, as usual, had the answer where scheduling was concerned. “It should be all over in two hours, sir.” The words were plain enough, but there was a grim decisiveness behind them.
The admiral drummed his fingers for two or three seconds on his desk. “Tell Colonel Durham,” he directed. “This is one time I want the chaplain in; we can use all of the help we can get.”
The man who called himself Carlo was blessed with his own form of protective coloration. He was short and dumpy. His face was undistinguished except for his eyes, which were small and hyperactive; he was always looking about him to detect what was going on, like an animal forced to exist in a hostile environment. Constant suspicion was part of his stock in trade; he could trust no one and by keeping that fact constantly in his mind he continued to survive. The only joy he found in life was in his work; he was a professional assassin and he liked to kill.
As he sat in his security office he waited, as he had waited more or less patiently for weeks, for his next assignment. The same lack of normal emotion which made him an efficient death machine kept him from being bored; he did what he was told and collected his pay — if he had any other concerns he kept them to himself. He had managed to make himself comfortable in the United States of America because his needs were few and public approbation was not one of them. He had enough men assigned to him to meet his requirements and, although he did not trust them, he knew that they were competent. He did not practice because his skills had long ago been developed to a very high point and they remained there. He would respond when called upon; until then he was content.