Deep Cover

“Buried them out back of the barn here.” Culver lowered the sprayer and stood back to shine the torch along the truck and study his handiwork. “Let that dry overnight it ought to look fine. I’ll get those plates now.”

Belsky waited while Culver screwed the Air Force plates onto the truck’s license-plate brackets. Afterward Culver straightened up and said, “That first ten thousand was real sweet, Mr. Beldon. I hope you got the other ten thou with you.”

“Right here, Tim. You’ve done a fine job.” Belsky took an envelope from his pocket and when Culver came to take it from him, Belsky’s single blow to the throat crushed Culver’s windpipe.

He carried the body to the car and got the pint of whiskey from the dashboard glovebox. He poured the whiskey over the corpse, draped a canvas tarp over the passenger seat of the car, and then lifted Culver into the seat. He drove out to the canyon highway, turned left toward the mountains, accelerated the car to high speed and on a leftward curve threw Culver’s body out. It was no easy maneuver but it was not the first time Belsky had performed it. The body bounced off the road and crashed into scrub brush. Leaning far over in the seat, Belsky pulled the passenger door shut and slowed before he reached the canyon park gate; he made a sedate U-turn and went back the way he had come. He noticed when he went by that the body was not visible from the road. That was all right. He returned to the farm, opened the barn door, drove the truck out and put the car inside the barn. He took the transceiver over to the truck and placed it on the seat, closed the loading doors and started the engine. He drove very slowly until he reached the paved highway because he didn’t want to kick up dust that would adhere to the wet paint. Going into Tucson he bounced along high up in the cab, maneuvering the truck with professional ease.

He had obtained Culver’s name from the Los Angeles rezidentsia—the name of a habitual criminal willing to do anything for pay. But he couldn’t have let Culver run around loose afterward with the knowledge of what had happened to the truckload of GB3X nerve gas he had hijacked from the Army Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca.

The gas was colorless, odorless, designed to kill within seconds.

Belsky drove through Tucson on Wilmot Road and Fifth Street and Alvernon Way—main arteries—because he would attract less attention than by driving through back streets. When he reached Twenty-second Street he turned right and made all the green lights in the two-mile stretch to the railroad overpass. He turned right into the warehouse district that lined the Southern Pacific yards and drove the truck easily through the narrow clearance of the open doors of the corrugated-metal storage building Hathaway had rented two days before in the name of the Ta

He switched off the headlights and closed the building’s overhead door before he climbed into the back of the truck with the flashlight and the can of aluminum spray paint and carefully obliterated the warnings and descriptive stencils on each of the twenty-four canisters. He was nearing the last of them when the blinker on the transceiver began to flash.

The apparatus was programmed to tape-record the incoming message automatically and so he took the time to finish spraying paint on the canisters before he opened the transceiver case and rewound the tape to play it back and write out the message. It took two or three minutes to decode and when he was done he had filled a notebook page in his crabbed hand.

PRIORITY UTMOST

DANGERFIELD TUC 6 APR

VIA NUCSUB 4

KGB 1

CIPHER 1548 SG

SENT 0527 GMT D ACKNOWLEDGMENT UNNECESSARY MESSAGE BEGINS X PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS CONFIRMED X EXECUTE PLAN B3 1830 7 APR CONFIRMED X HENCEFORTH BE ALERT FOR COUNTERFEIT INSTRUCTIONS THIS FREQUENCY X EXAMINE CIPHER REFERENCES WITH UTMOST CAUTION X HENCEFORTH ALL LEGITIMATE INSTRUCTIONS FROM VR WILL CONTAIN PHRASE FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X REPEAT X FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X RELY ON YOU X VR X MESSAGE ENDS 17661 42 6474

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Hathaway arrived at the warehouse. He said, “I got a million things to do. I hope this ain’t going to take long.”

“Not long at all,” Belsky assured him.

“Where’d you get that truck?”

“Have you got time to waste asking pointless questions?”

“Sorry.” Hathaway’s uniform was rumpled. He glanced into the truckbed.

Belsky said, “It’s a nonlethal gas. I want you to have your men secrete some of these canisters in the ventilation and circulation systems to cover all occupied rooms of the launch complex. You’re to rig the valves with electrical switches so that they can be opened by remote control from the exit you plan to use when you evacuate our people after the missiles have been fired. Do you understand?”

“I know what you’re telling me but I don’t get the point.”

“When you and the others leave the launch complex we don’t want you followed and we don’t want people buttonholing any of you and asking hysterical questions. If you trigger these canisters when you leave, the gas will render everyone unconscious in the launch complex. They won’t regain consciousness for at least two hours and that will give us ample time to get everyone into the aircraft and be on our way.”

It was an expedient lie. Hathaway and his men had had twenty years to make friends with Air Force enlisted men, some of whom would be in the launch complex. There wasn’t any point in burdening Hathaway’s conscience with the knowledge he was going to murder them.

Belsky climbed into the back of the truck and carefully lifted four of the canisters out and left them on the floor of the warehouse. “I’ll need these for another location,” he said. “You may take the rest.”

“Truck and all?”

“Of course. How else did you expect to smuggle them into an Air Force base?” Belsky picked up the transceiver and turned toward the door. “I’ll use your car. I’ll be at Ludlum’s.”

“What happened to the car we gave you?”

“It got mislaid,” Belsky said, and went outside.

Chapter Seventeen

It was four o’clock in the morning before Fred Winslow found a moment to make his way to the coin-operated public phone in one of the underground day rooms. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t tapped but he took the chance. He put through the call to Celia and exactly half an hour later he made a vague excuse and slipped up to the surface. She was waiting outside the fence and he eeled into the car past her. “I haven’t got very long.”

In the starlight the boniness of her face was accentuated; her eyes looked very large; her smile was fixed and meaningless. Winslow said, “They’ve put a tail on Alec.”

“Well, we thought they might.” She looked preternaturally tired—too tired to care about anything at all.

He said, “Tomorrow night. They’ve ordered us to shoot the missiles tomorrow night. Half-past six.”

“Dear God,” she whispered.

“At China. All the targets are in China.” He had been doing that for hours—saying things twice. He shook his head violently, trying to clear it. “Dangerfield says the strike will wipe out most of China’s retaliatory missiles and the Russians won’t come into it at all unless the Americans start shooting at Russia first. He said they’d allowed him to tell us that much because they want to reassure us that our children have a good chance to escape being caught under an atomic blast.”

“He’d have said that whether it was true or not.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. But it could be true, couldn’t it?”

“Because you want it to be true? How can we believe anything that man says? Truth means nothing to them—why should it? They tell us what they want us to know.”