“Call me as soon as they report in. Please tell Mr. Slocum to ready Baroda for me. I’ll be up in a minute.”
“Will do.”
Miss Follet stepped to the rear of her office. Here, wide purple drapes, a pattern of Paisley, closed off the wall. She swept them aside, revealing a steel door. She stepped into this and within seconds was in another section of the vast warehouse complex. An elevator car carried her up one flight. She left the car, leaving the door open and entered a long gloomy passageway whose steel sides and tiled floor was illuminated by fluorescent lighting under normal circumstances. Miss Follet stopped before a low door whose single opening was a grilled aperture. She opened this door too and stepped inside.
The cell was square, without furnishings of any kind. A short, fattish man with a mop of dark, curly hair stood in the center of the room. His hands were manacled behind him. His clothes were a mere short-sleeved white shirt, plain trousers and a belt. He wore no shoes. He had obviously chosen to pace the floor of the cell, rather than subside to the bare floor and give in to despair. When he saw Miss Follet, his face lit up and he smiled bleakly. He looked Russian but in truth, Paul Baroda was a citizen of the world, despite his Hungarian lineage.
“Ah,” he said thickly, his accent slurred. “The Queen Bee herself.”
“Have you changed your mind, Mr. Baroda?” Samantha Follet stood but five paces away, arms folded, regarding him in her cool, detached manner.
Baroda wagged his head.
“No, of course not. Pay me a million dollars and you can have the microfilm. Failing that, I’m a sphinx. Rules of the game, my dear.”
“I’m glad you talk of rules, Mr. Baroda. That will help you understand why you will get nothing. Why we can’t bargain. I’m afraid you leave me an uncomfortable alternative.”
Baroda scowled at her. “What, then? More needles and pins? More drugs? You know how they have failed. I was well prepared for my assignment. I was instructed to memorize nonsense should you once again put me under, as the saying goes. Don’t be a fool, Miss Follet. Pay the money — I give you the film.”
“How can you do that when you don’t have it on your person?”
“But I know where it is. You see — what you Americans call the big difference.”
“Quite so.” Miss Follet smiled. A beautiful smile. “At 503 Fifth Avenue, in the office of the Editor of the Saint Magazine.”
Baroda blanched. His small eyes were a dead giveaway. He shook his head. “If you say so — but you are wrong — I know of no such place — you bluff—”
“No, I do not. So you see I do know where the microfilm is and there is no further need for keeping you alive.”
Baroda blinked. His tongue stalled in his mouth; the little eyes widened. These sort of things just didn’t happen — when one fell into the hands of the Americans—
But they did.
Miss Follet produced a small, nickle-plated automatic from somewhere about her person and leveled it at Paul Baroda.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baroda,” she said softly, a curious glint in her darkish eyes. “I’m truly sorry.”
Her finger tightened on the trigger and Paul Baroda screamed.
Like a woman.
“Closed,” David Seven said. “How do you like those apples?”
Miles Running Bear Farmer squinted at the glass door on the fourth floor of the building numbered 503. The time was now verging on one o’clock. David Seven wasn’t making jokes. The elevator man had just told them that Santesson was up in Massachusetts, speaking at some college there.
“Saved by the bell, Dave. If we can’t get in, then our friend who doped the coffee couldn’t either.” Farmer tried the door, his strong hands grappling with the knob. “Stuck. Good and stuck. Door feels like it hasn’t been opened in years.”
Seven stared down the corridor. Other offices and other doors indicated forms of life and activity going on all about them. Seven rubbed his jaw, thoughtfully.
“Time,” he said. “Let’s put our heads together.”
“Right here in public? We’d look silly.”
“Then let’s think out loud a little.”
“Check.”
“Okay.” Seven looked towards the elevator around the bend. It was creaking upward, past their floor. His manner was off-hand but Farmer wasn’t fooled. The old legal mind was flying like ninety.
“We followed your hunch. Baroda dropped the microfilm where you said. He can’t come for it himself because he’s currently under lock and key. So you call me, I meet you and we stop for coffee and making plans. We are overheard.”
“Or seen,” Farmer sighed. “We aren’t exactly non-descript. I may have my skin painted white like the rest of you good Americans.”
“Shut up. Our coffee is doped — not poisoned — for which I give thanks — by who and why?”
“Am I permitted to guess?”
“Be my guest.” The light easy bantering exchange concealed a multitude of doubts and fears, and had the unusual nature of making both agents better performers. Their rapport and the results it had achieved, was the envy of all the two-man teams of INTREX.
Farmer held up two fingers. “The waitress could be in on it. But I scratch her. After all, she was working there. Nobody could know we were going to the Mayflower for java. So — I pick the lonely beer drinker at the bar. He could have done it a lot of ways. When the waitress comes to us, she had to pass him. It’s either him or someone in the kitchen but I scratch that idea too. No, we were shadowed into the Mayflower.”
“I go along with that. Now the why of it.”
“Too easy. Our man wanted to beat us here. He did. We were out better than forty five minutes and spent twenty more explaining to that cop why we passed out. So I say he came, saw this sign and couldn’t get in. Not in broad daylight anyway. I say he’s making some plans for later. Or else he took a wax impression and went and had himself a key made.”
Seven smiled. “Is that what you’d do?”
“Uh huh.”
“You win. So would I. What do you suggest we do now?”
“One of us should keep this door in sight. The other should go call Sam. Just in case our man gets anxious and won’t wait until tonight. Leastways, I think I was right about one thing.”
“Like what?”
“Like Baroda finding a new use for boxes on the sidewalk. Great drop for hot microfilm, huh?”
“Peachy,” Seven agreed. “Okay. You stay put. I’ll go talk to Sam. You know how I love to hear her dulcet tones.”
“I sure do. And Cathy Darrow’s and all the living dolls in the universe. Why don’t you get married, Dave, and get out of this business” You’re too much of a lover to be a good spy.”
“Thanks, Tonto. I’ll put in a good word for you too, someday.”
Miles Running Bear Farmer laughed and took up a position in the hallway. David Seven took the elevator down to the street level and hunted up a telephone.
Miles had the right idea.
It was time to send up some smoke signals.
Whatever happened, all joking to one side, the microfilm had to be recovered. It was a damn important strip of film. Explosive enough to give the Chinese Reds a big march on missiles.
Lucky break about the magazine guy taking off like that. Thanks to this, their boo-boo in the coffee shop, would not cost INTREX a thing. You weren’t granted too many reprieves in the espionage racket. So you had to take what came.
With a jaundiced eye, of course.
He found a phone booth in the open air, one of two side by side on the very corner of Fifth and Forty Second. The weather was bright and warm.
Maybe they could wrap the case up early and he could still wangle a dinner date for himself with Cathy Darrow. The beautiful blonde was back from her Miami vacation and he hadn’t even had a chance to say hello yet.