“Not your fault,” he said, twisting cords around Parry’s wrists. “It was planned from the beginning. Parry would have managed something — he and his comrade in the cage.”
“Ah! The watchtower cage,” said Valentina, realization dawning. “So there was another one. But this one — this one, of course, was the one I recognized.” Her pudgy hands stroked over Parry’s face, roved over his eyebrows and underneath his beard. “Of course, I was not sure at first,” she said. “But here are scars. Do you see them? This man’s face was once a little different. Not too very different, of course, or they would not have chosen him, nor would I have known him. But I very much suspect that the real J. Baldwin Parry was killed some months ago. This man is Chang Ching-Lung — who left Moscow about a year ago.”
“Is that so?” Nick said softly. His fingers poked around in Parry’s slack-jawed mouth for the escape pill he suspected might be there, but there was nothing. “Well, he brought a friend with him, scarred in much the same way. But he’s no longer with us.” He told her, briefly, about the man called Hughes while he searched through Parry’s pockets, about the decoy helicopter flight and about the gassing. “So I was pretty sure,” he went on, “that you had been brought down, not up. And after the business of the power failure I was almost positive. Parry, I figured, was the only man who could have slugged me with that spanner. Easy enough for him to lie down and pretend he had been hit, just the. way he pretended he’d been gassed. The way I saw it, you’d been dumped in here and hidden away somehow, then gotten free to throw the switches.”
Valentina grinned. “So you got my signal. I thought that you would understand. I was only afraid that you might not still be in the plant, that you had perhaps taken off on some wild-duck chase…
“Goose chase,” Nick corrected automatically, staring at the small rectangle of stiff paper in his hand.-
“So, goose chase. But anyway you were still here. Next thing, though, Chang-Parry bursts into the power room and I am still so groggy from his dope, also partly tied, that I cannot fight back in my usual style. We fall together against the switches and some of them I bend. Then comes his hypodermic needle and — whoof! Out I go again, and I suppose he drops me down those stairs just before you got here. So that part is over now. But tell me, Nickska — why were you so sure that I did not take off in the helicopter?”
Nick chuckled softly. “Valentina, honey, I saw its twin and I just had to know. I don’t know what power in the world could have squeezed you into that little spotter craft through its regular man-sized hatchway. It was too small for you, that’s all.”
“Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!” Valentina slapped her thigh delightedly. “But what is that little paper you have there in your hand?”
“Airline ticket,” Nick said slowly. “Yesterday’s date. Montreal to Buffalo.”
“Yesterday,” Valentina rumbled. “Montreal. Yes, that is quite interesting…. Someone comes?”
“I come,” said Julia from the dimness of the dirt passage. She moved into the light and beamed at Valentina. “Greetings, Comrade,” she said warmly, “I’ll tell you later how very glad I am to see you. But in the meantime, Carter, we have a minor crisis on our hands. People are milling about in the control room demanding to come down here. Shall I hold them off with my trusty derringer, or should I let them in? There’s half a dozen guards, all brandishing their guns; there’s Weston, Pauling and our own Charley Hammond. All looking very grim and white around the gills.”
“For God’s sake, not all of them,” Nick said, rising from Parry’s prone body. “Weston, Hammond, and one of the guards. There’s no room for any more. And have someone rouse the medic, while you’re at it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Julia smartly, and vanished down the corridor.
Parry’s body suddenly jerked to life. His head darted sideways and his mouth opened wide in a biting movement.
Nick whirled and kicked out savagely at Parry’s head.
But Parry’s teeth were already clamped on one corner of his shirt collar and they fastened there with the bite of a mad dog. Nick fell on him and wrenched with desperate strength. The collar tore in Parry’s teeth, the corner came off in his mouth. Nick’s fist slammed hard against his cheek and the jaw opened fractionally; and as it did, Nick fastened one hand tight around the man’s throat and thrust his other roughly between the clamping teeth.
There was a little gurgle from Parry as a tiny crunching sound came from inside his mouth.
His voice was muffled, but the words were clear enough.
Too late, too late,” he mumbled thickly, and threw his head back galvanically with Nick’s hands still clawing at him. His face twisted hideously; he jerked, and then he slumped back, dead.
Nick pulled himself away and his arms dropped to his sides. There was no point in saying anything, but his face mirrored his despair and self-contempt.
Valentina sighed with gigantic disappointment, but the look she turned on Nick was one of sympathy and affection. “It is a loss in one way,” she said softly. “But still we have gained much. Think — two down, and only seven to go.”
“Only seven,” Nick said bitterly. “And he could have told us where to find them.”
“I think he would not have,” said Valentina gently.
Feet clumped down the passageway and three men looked in on them. The chatty guard, Plant Manager Weston, and AXE’s Charley Hammond.
“For the love of Christ, what’ve you done to Parry?” Weston cried.
“It’s not Parry,” said Nick. “I’ll explain later. At least we have Madam Sichikova back with us. Charley — you have news?”
For he had not posted his men at the exits as he had said he would; instead he had issued quiet instructions that they search the plant with Weston only as their guide. Even if Weston could not be trusted, either, he would have to show them everything they asked to see.
Charley Hammond nodded. “News, all right,” he said tightly. “Bad news. Weston can tell you better than I how much is missing, but this much I can say — there’s enough uranium and plutonium missing to blow up the entire world a dozen times and take the moon with it. If it’s ever used that way. If not — there’s helluva lot of radioactive material on the loose somewhere.”
“It’s disastrous, unthinkable!” Weston burst out, and the guard looked on open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “Someone must have been systematically stealing it in special.containers. We didn’t notice it before — we keep it in that row of steel and concrete chambers that I showed you earlier, and we don’t use them all at once. Chambers A and B are the ones we’ve been using for the last few months. But C and D and E we haven’t touched; we haven’t needed to. They should be full — but they’re practically empty! But how — why — who? I don’t understand. The thing’s impossible!”
“With a couple of traitors in your midst, and maybe more than a couple,” Nick said grimly, “and a pair of helicopter! on the roof, and the phony Parry with all the freedom in the world to come and go, I don’t think it’s so impossible. You’ve told the president?”
“Yes. God, he’s running round in circles,” Weston said feverishly. “Calling New York, Washington, his wife, the bloody lot.”
“That’s got to be stopped at once,” Nick said sharply. “There’ll be a national panic before he’s through. Let’s get the hell out of this dungeon and knock some sense into his head. Hammond — you stay down here with Julia and search around to see if there aren’t any other hidden doors or stolen supplies of God knows what. And I want to impress on the lot of you — each and every one of you, in this room and anywhere else in the plant — that not a word of what’s happened here must be permitted to leak out. Not a word. Least of all, about the missing material. Get me? Okay, let’s go up and’ make sure the president understands that too… and makes it an order. Nobody, nobody, is going to talk.”