Assignment to Disaster (19 page)

"Professor Padgett," Durell said.

"Are you surprised, sir?"

"Not really."

"Do you know who that man is?" The heavy stick gestured toward Weederman, dead in his chair.

"I know something about him. He killed your brother."

Padgett smiled, but the smile was different now. "Yes, he did. Life has a way of leveling us all, has it not? Even a man as strong as you, Mr. Durell. As you can see. I am sorry I cannot ask you to be seated. This house is only the ghost of the place it once was. Once it was happy, filled with joy and pleasant people. And this, too, has been leveled."

"Did you kill Weederman?"

"Let us not be foolish."

"You killed him," Durell said. His voice lifted. "You're the one who was double-crossing him. You're the one who gimmicked the brain for Cyclops, who framed Calvin into a strait jacket. In a way, you killed your own brother."

The smile again. The hunched shoulders. The darkly brooding eyes. A sense of physical impairment hiding tremendous power.

"The score has been evened," Padgett said.

"By killing Weederman?"

John Padgett leaned on his cane. "I will not be charged with this matter. Even if I were, it would be considered a patriotic duty to destroy that man. But you, Mr. Durell, are more resourceful than Larabee gave you credit for. No one expected you to come this far. You have traveled a long way. And, of course, you must know that this is the end of the road."

"Not quite," Durell said. "Are you alone here?"

"I have help." Padgett smiled. "Where is my sister?"

"I don't know."

"Deirdre came East with you, did she not?"

"To hell with you," Durell said.

The gaunt, beaked face hardened. "Mr. Durell, there is not much time. I must find Deirdre. And you will tell me where she is."

"No."

Padgett turned slightly. "Franz!"

Franz came into the room, hulking, enormous, his shaved head gleaming in the moonlight that shone through the tall dusty windows. Durell looked at the giant and felt a trembling of hatred go through him. He took a step forward, saw the gun in Franz's hand, and halted.

"Mr. Durell will come with us," Padgett told Franz.

"No," Durell said. But even in his ears, his voice lacked conviction. He had no gun. He was trapped. This was the end of it all. Yet when he looked at the dead man, Weederman, he knew there were some questions still unanswered. And he wanted the answers. He saw that if he fought back now, Franz would kill him. Franz would think no more about it than he would of swatting a fly.

Franz gestured with the gun and Durell walked out of the bare room ahead of them. The wind hissed in the tall weeds of the yard. John Padgett moved along with a clumsy, hitching gait, having trouble even with his heavy cane. They went to the carriage shed and Durell was motioned into the front seat of the car. John Padgett drove. Franz sat in the back with the muzzle of his gun against Durell's neck.

It was only a mile along the dirt lane to the little fishing village of Prince John. Nobody spoke. The gray-shingled houses looked silvery in the moonlight. There were a few darkened stores, a yellow blinker flashing silently at the intersection, a wharf with oyster boats tied up in a row. There were no lights anywhere. There was no other traffic.

Padgett's knobby stick leaned against the front seat between them. Durell drew a deep breath. He kept his hands in his lap. They were following the bay shore, going north on a rough and bumpy dirt road.

Durell said, "Franz, I thought you worked for Weederman."

Franz laughed softly. "So I did."

"And for the cause."

"I worked for the money. It was Weederman who had a cause."

"So you don't care that he's dead?"

"I will not lose sleep over him," Franz rumbled.

"So you don't care that John killed him?"

"Why should I?"

"Maybe the professor will kill you, too."

Franz laughed again. "You talk too much."

"If John doesn't kill you, I will. Do you know that?"

Franz said, "Mister, you are now a dead man."

They went another mile in silence.

Then Durell said, "Professor, do you plan to hold me until Cyclops is launched, at four o'clock this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"Then you think your sabotage effort will succeed?"

"When I am sure of my sister. And when I get Calvin's papers."

Durell said, "You will never see either of them again."

They were passing through another small town. The streets were dark and empty. But there were people nearby — asleep, perhaps, but they could be wakened. Durell put his hand on Padgett's cane and lifted it suddenly, smashing at the man's hands on the wheel; at the same time he reached for the door handle and pushed it down and threw his body to the right.

The door started to open and Padgett lost control of the car as he involuntarily jerked his crushed hand from the wheel. Franz yelled. The door was only partly open; the latch had caught. The car left the road and bounced up on the sidewalk. Franz leaned over Durell and grabbed at the wheel. Durell tried to twist his gun away. It was like trying to twist a bar of steel. He threw himself at the balky door and felt it open and the car careened back onto the street again and he felt himself falling out. Something caught his coat and from the corner of his eye he saw Franz looming enormously over him from the back seat. Moonlight glinted on his gun. It came down and pain exploded in him and he continued to fall into a sea of silent darkness.

Early-morning sunlight struck painfully at his eyes, and Durell blinked and quickly shut them again. Fragments of memory drifted in his mind: the rocking, speeding car, Franz's big knees pressing on him as he lay on the back floor of the sedan, a lurching as they took a curve — and then he had blacked out again.

His head ached. His stomach jumped with nausea. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He opened his eyes slightly until he could endure the brilliant light that shone in them. There was a strong, salty smell in the air, an odor of old timbers and decaying vegetation. Durell started to drift back into sleep, then forced himself up with a jolt as the full significance of the sunlight reached him. It was morning of the Fourth of July. He forced his eyes fully open and ignored the stabs of pain as he sat up.

At once a voice said. "Awake, Mr. Durell?"

John Padgett sat in a chair across the room. He was in a small chamber with a rough pine floor and a single window, through which the rays of the rising sun glared. There was an unpainted table, a kerosene stove, and a lamp hanging from a nail driven into the plank wall. Durell lay on a rough cot that smelled of age. When he sat up, nausea filled his mouth with saliva. Through the dirty window he glimpsed a beach overgrown with weeds, a few pilings in the muddy water, and a small white crab boat moored to a rickety plank dock.

"How do you feel, Mr. Durell?"

"Not good. Where is this place?"

"We are near Annapolis. You are tougher than I thought."

Durell swung his legs off the cot and sat up. It was warm in the barren room. Wasps hummed and bumped against the slanted ceiling. Slowly his stomach settled and the pulse of pain in his head became tolerable. He said, "Where do we go from here?"

"Nowhere. We stay here."

"Do you know what you're doing, Padgett?"

"I am quite aware of everything."

"Then I don't understand why you're doing it."

"I suggested to you before that all matters are eventually leveled. Many things tip the scale so far in one direction that redress seems impossible. But only death is absolute, from which there can be no recall. In all other matters, one must strive, and sometimes one may succeed."

"Are you talking about your parents?"

Padgett nodded. "And my leg."

"You hold all that against society?"

"If I say yes, you will think me unbalanced. I am not mad. I know what I am doing. And I will be paid for my trouble, in money and security, in the pleasures of this one life we are all awarded, but in different measure."

"You don't care what happens when Cyclops comes down?"

"I need no lecture in humanitarianism. At the moment, I need information. Time is running out, Mr. Durell. Where are the papers you took from Calvin in Las Tiengas?"

Durell laughed. "I gave them to General McFee."

"You are lying," Padgett said quietly.

"Call him and see."

Padgett's face was gray. There were bandages on his right hand; he held his stick between his knees. In the silence, Durell heard the humming of the wasps and the lapping of the tide under the shack. The full orb of the sun was above the edge of the water now, dazzling, glaring, intolerably bright. Padgett spoke thoughtfully.

"McFee is convinced you are not to be trusted. I saw to that. And Swayney has no further use for you. Your bureau is convinced that my sister is a poor security risk and that you were influenced by her to betray your trust. What chance do you have, Durell? At four o'clock this afternoon, Cyclops goes up and comes down. If you survive the holocaust, will your vindication matter then?"

"What do you suggest?"

"You could come to South America with me. Co-operate now, relieve my mind of this last anxiety concerning Calvin's papers and my sister, and I will share the money involved. I know enough to build another Cyclops. There are international buyers for the plans I have."

Durell saw that Padgett was in sober earnest. But there was a dark, uneasy tension in the man as he sat there. Durell limped painfully to the window. The dawn sky looked daubed with blood. The window was nailed shut, but if he were alone, he could break the glass and escape that way. He looked at a hawk perched in a dead pine at the water's edge, and he looked at the molten sunlight on the bay. It all seemed strange and yet familiar, as if he saw it now for the first and the last time.

"You cannot escape," Padgett said quietly. "Franz is in the other room, and he will need little excuse to kill you. Where are Calvin's papers?"

"I told you. McFee has them."

"And Deirdre?"

"I won't tell you anything about her," Durell said.

Padgett took a small gun from his pocket and weighed it in his hand and looked at it. "Do you think anyone will miss you, Durell?"

"I don't matter very much," Durell said.

"You carry more weight than you think. But no one will find you in this Chesapeake mud, will they?"

Durell's head throbbed. "If you plan to shoot me, get it over with."

"Aren't you afraid to die?"

Durell was silent. Padgett sighed. He called for Franz, and when the big man appeared, Padgett limped across the room to Durell, and when he was within reach he suddenly slashed with the gun at Durell's face. Durell ducked and tried to reach for him, but Padgett swung and hit him in the face with the gun and Durell went down on hands and knees on the rough pine floor. When he shook his head, drops of bright blood spattered the dirty planks. His mind blurred. He started up and Franz kicked him in the ribs and he fell over.

Franz kicked him again. "Will you answer the questions?"

Durell got to his knees and lunged at Padgett, but Franz threw him back against the wall, caught a handful of his hair, and twisted his head cruelly to one side in a judo grip.

"Where is Deirdre?" Padgett shouted. "I must know!"

His voice seemed to come from a vast echoing distance above Durell's head. Franz hit him again and the question was repeated. Durell told himself to gel up and try for the door. He started to crawl for the" doorway into the next room, and each move was a separate agony, and when he was almost there Franz quietly shut the door in his face.

"Where were you going to meet Deirdre?" Padgett yelled.

Durell rose swaying to his feet. He breathed pain. The room slipped out of focus. His pain lived in him and possessed him. He drew another breath and with his last strength threw a long right at Franz's face. He landed squarely. Franz crashed backward over a chair and slammed into the wall. Durell started to follow and saw Padgett lift his cane and chop down at his neck and he pitched forward into darkness again…

He was on the same cot, in the same room. He absorbed pain with the darkness, his mind fleeing in confusion. His watch was real. The identity of the numbers on the dial was tangible. Eight o'clock. Morning or night?

Blindness. Was he blind?

Panic came with screaming mouth on the wings of a hurricane. He sat up and through the darkness he saw a faint slit of yellow where the door did not quite meet the sill. The cot squealed when he stood up.

He groped along the wall until he felt the casement of the window. His legs trembled; he was bathed in sweat. It was several more moments before he could go on, and while he rested he heard faint sounds from the other room and he felt reassured by the reality of those sounds. Somebody was there. He heard the muffled lapping of the tide around the pilings outside. The tide? Flooding or ebbing?

His fingers moved over the rough window frame and slid over the cool smoothness of glass. He could see nothing through it. Only total darkness.

Carefully he removed one of his shoes. Each gesture brought a new sea of pain that threatened to drown him. The effort to control his moves and maintain silence brought new outpourings of sweat. Then when he got the shoe off it fell from his fingers and thumped loudly on the floor.

He could have wept.

For an unendurable moment, nothing happened. He watched the slit of light under the doorway, and listened. No one came. He bent and picked up the shoe again and swung it hard against the window. The glass shattered with an ear-splitting noise. Glass showered at him, slashing hands and arms as he reached for the window ledge. Franz yelled in the other room. But he had the catch now, and he swung the casement inward, then heaved himself up to go through.