Ten minutes after that phone call Shaw left his flat in a hired car. Under his left armpit the Webley .38 nestled in its shoulder-holster and he was fully on the alert.
All the same, he missed the black Mercedes.
The black Mercedes, parked around the corner in Gunterstone Road, waited until a man who had been walking a dog at the corner came back quickly towards it, and got in. Then, at this man’s snapped order, it nosed out into Gliddon Road and drove along in time to see Shaw’s car turn into the Hammersmith Road.
There was a high whine of jets and a rush of wind as the 707 went down the runway and became airborne. From the ground the man who had been walking the dog at the corner of Gunterstone Road, and who had tailed Shaw into the airport building, looked upward as the great aircraft roared off into the sky, on its course for Boston. He waited for a while, a smile twisting up a full, coarse mouth. Then he turned on his heel and walked across to the Mercedes. He was driven fast into London, stopping once at a call-box on the outskirts of Hounslow. Going inside, he dialled a number in the City and, when he’d got his man, he said in a cultured voice, ‘New York, flight number BA 511 via Boston. That’s right. Yes, you’d better call New York at once.’
Chapter Six
At Idlewild it was cold, with New York in the grip of an unusually early winter. Shaw caught the first available plane out again — south for Washington.
Within a few minutes of his arrival in the capital he was on his way to his appointment in a fast Cadillac laid on by Admiral Pullman, threading through lines of automobiles which seemed to fill the traffic lanes to bursting-point, all hurrying to get somewhere — or nowhere — fast. In no time at all, it seemed, he was approaching, for the first time in his life, that vast and almost incredible, fantastic hive of industry, the Pentagon — the enormous edifice from which all the U.S Armed Forces were administered, the very home of United States defence direction.
Shaw fumed at the interminable security checks, felt he would never get through before the place went to bed for the night; but at last he got his clearance and was on his way up in an elevator and then walking along a corridor behind a messenger, one of many persons — clerks, typists, high civil servants and Service personnel of all ranks — moving ant-like about the Pentagon.
Admiral Clifford Pullman was a spare, thin man of jerky movements and with thick grey eyebrows, overhanging eyebrows that twitched. He had a lined, sallow face — a shrivelled face, the kind of skin that had spent many years under Eastern suns. He had in fact, as he told Shaw while each was summing up the other and talking generally, spent much of his service in the Philippines, some of it under the legendary Supremo, General Douglas MacArthur. Pullman had a thin slit of a mouth, like a rat-trap, and very shrewd eyes. He looked a hard man but he also looked competent and alert, though there was a reserve about him which Shaw felt would take a lot of penetrating; he guessed that if Pullman didn’t like a man, then that man would get just nowhere at all with him. Yet Shaw felt instinctively that in his case the American admiral would prove friendly and helpful.
When the preliminaries were over Pullman said with abrupt directness and a flick of his eyebrows. ‘Seems you know Steve Geisler.’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Your chief told me, on the line from London.’ Pullman had a voice that fitted his appearance — a hard, grating voice. ‘Then I checked over the files. Seems you did a good job on that Bluebolt assignment. Helped us quite a bit. We appreciated that, so the record says.’ The Admiral paused, regarding Shaw keenly through half-shut, speculative eyes, the mouth more of a rat-trap than ever. ‘There’s something else arising out of that.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘It showed,’ Pullman said deliberately and precisely, resting his chin on his clasped hands, ‘that you can work with us. That isn’t exactly automatic with all the British Navy, let me tell you.’
‘As if I didn’t know, sir.’ Shaw smiled, crinkling up his eyes. ‘I hate to say it, but there’s a number of people around who can’t take it that we’re no longer the first sea power in the world. I don’t pretend to like it myself, but it happens to be a fact. That’s all.’
Pullman returned the smile, though thinly. He said, ‘You’re dead right there, Commander. But don’t get me wrong — we have a whole lot of respect for your service. It still figures, and come to that we have our diehards too. I guess all you need to do is to thin out a few of your admirals — they’re just a little thick on the ground these days, and they’re not cheap to maintain while they’re gumming up the works. However,’ he added with that sudden touch of abruptness again, ‘that isn’t what you flew over to listen to. Now — what’s all the panic at your end?’
‘Didn’t my chief tell you, sir?’
‘Of course he did.’ Pullman seemed to snap his teeth. ‘I want to hear it from you, right from the source. You went aboard the goddam dock, your chief didn’t. Eye-witness accounts are what I like, son. And I want the lot. No holding back.’
‘Very well, sir.’ Shaw gave him the whole story in detail, including his visit to Stephen Geisler. He stressed that Geisler had refused absolutely to tell him anything whatever about the background story.
Pullman nodded. He said harshly, ‘I should hope not. Steve knows the security grading on all this. Twenty-five years up the river’d be about the least anyone’d get for talking out of turn.’
‘He did mention the hot seat,’ Shaw murmured. ‘But I—’
‘And that might turn out to be no exaggeration at all, Commander. Anyone who opens his mouth on this will be called before a Senate Investigating Committee in closed session, and the public’ll never know a thing about it. I tell you, it’s that hot.’ Pullman gave him a hard look. ‘Now, have you any good reason to give me why we should let you in on anything, Commander Shaw?’
Shaw said, ‘Yes, sir, I think I have. The dock happened to cause damage to a British vessel and loss of British lives. It’s now within our jurisdiction—’
‘That’s a debatable point.’ Pullman interrupted raspingly. ‘You’d need to argue that with an international lawyer.’
‘I dare say that’s being done right now, sir, but the plain fact remains that no international lawyer in this world can move it by a legal decision, not unless that decision carries a built-in salvage unit—’
‘I see Latymer’s hand in that,’ Pullman said dryly.
Shaw smiled. ‘Maybe you do, sir. I can’t say—’
‘Okay, okay, go on. Continue the reasoning process. I’m interested.’
‘Right, sir. Well, next point: I found Dolly Gray — and of course we’ve got her too, poor kid. Both her death and the dock itself raise questions to which we’re bound to look for answers. It’s doubtful, to say the least, if we can go on holding off the Press or the police entirely, and we ought to have our answers ready by the time the hounds pick up the scent. In the long run, that’s in the interests of security. I believe we can help if we’re given the background as far as you know it. Until we know more about Dolly Gray there’s not much we can do.’ He paused. ‘I don’t want to sound pompous or anything like that, sir, but it seems to me that there’s no reason why the two biggest members of NATO shouldn’t get together on this.’
Pullman asked slyly, ‘This — and other things?’
‘Possibly, sir, yes.’ Shaw hesitated. ‘We haven’t collaborated so badly in the past, after all, and Britain’s not right up the creek yet.’