Delta Factor, The Read online

  I could feel their eyes on me. They weren’t looking ... they were watching. Not one of them felt differently from Woolart and the expectation was there, clear and strong, that my answer would be negative. Anything else would be one of stupidity and they weren’t giving me credit for that.

  “Say it,” I told him.

  He shuffled the papers a moment, then looked up at me. “It regards the value you put on your life. Whether you prefer to spend it inside a prison until there’s nothing left of you except the remnants of a man or take a chance on losing it altogether with the possible alternative of only spending a portion of your sentence behind bars with at least a few years of active, enjoyable life left to you.” He stopped and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “It isn’t very much of a choice, is it?”

  “You haven’t spelled it all the way out either, Mr. Woolart.”

  “Since you’ll never be in a position to transmit any of this information ... even if it is speculative ... to anyone else, I’ll go a little further, but let me put it in hypothetical fashion at any rate.”

  I waved my hand disgustedly. I didn’t like it at all. “Be my guest.”

  “There is a certain country,” he said, “neighboring ... apparently friendly as long as they receive our largesse, but in reality, closer politically to those we consider an enemy of this country. In their prison they have a person our scientific circles need desperately in order to ... ah ... over come certain ... ah ... enemy advancements.

  “We can not go in and liberate this person Again, frankly, we have tried and failed. In this age of propaganda and internal unrest, the United States cannot put itself in an unfavorable position. This one country is using this person as a pawn, ready to move in either direction, looking for favors from both sides. The unfortunate part is, that the person involved is of advanced age and not expected to live too much longer. It is imperative that we have the information he can give us before it is too late. One aspect is this: if he is already dead, this other country can conceal that fact and still extract ... well, tribute, from our government for any length of time.”

  This time Gavin Woolart stopped his incessant handling of the papers and looked directly at me. “We need two things,” he said. “One, if he is dead, knowledge of the fact.”

  “And?” I put in.

  “The second ... if he is alive, we need him. And that, Mr. Morgan, is where your potential comes in.”

  I knew what he was going to say. I could almost smell it.

  “This is the proposition ... that you go into that country, commit a crime of our specifications that will get you sentenced to that prison, then effect an escape with either the information of his death or the person himself. For this action the government will take into consideration our recommendation of a reduced sentence for your prior, ah, activities and it will be acted upon.”

  “All this in writing, I suppose,” I grinned.

  “Nothing in writing.” He didn’t grin at all.

  “Come on, buddy. I made deals like that during the war. Give me a witness that will stay alive, at least.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Balls,” I said. “You’re like the insurance companies these days. You get paid for taking chances, but you sure don’t want to take any.” I leaned back in my chair. “Little man, I’d sooner take my chances on getting out of your damn pen. That I can do and the odds are even better.”

  Gavin Woolart’s face flushed a deep red with controlled anger. His smile was friendly, but his lips were almost bloodless. “No other deal,” he grimaced.

  I never expected it, but it happened anyway. That deep, resonant voice of Inspector Doherty’s cut through the room like a knife through toilet paper and he said, “I witnessed it, Morgan. Do what you want.”

  Two of them came out of their chairs like they had been shot. Carter swung around, anger contorting his face. “Listen, Inspector...”

  Jack Doherty had been around just a little too long. Nobody impressed him any more. He had pounded too many beats, seen too much action, worked with too many administrations to get cut off by somebody outside his own domain. He was totally impassive, sitting there like a fight-scarred tiger, too lazy and too competent to be bothered wasting his talents on the young bucks looking for a slice of his harem when all he had to do was growl to buzz them off. He said, “I don’t give a damn for this bum one way or another. I’ve made deals with bums and politicians alike and stuck with them, but never one that was raw. This one stinks. So you’re in a bind and now it’s your turn. It’s still my territory and keep it in your heads. All you have to do is nod and he goes back in, but don’t play around with his life. He didn’t knock anybody off you know of. I’ll be a witness to this deal whether you like it or not.”

  “Thanks, Inspector,” I told him.

  “Don’t thank me, Morgan. Either way, you’re still a loser in my book.”

  Carter and Woolart sat down slowly. “You haven’t heard the last of this, Doherty,” Carter told him.

  The big cop made a gesture with his shoulders. “So sue me,” he said and took a drag on his cigar.

  Woolart looked at me. “Well?”

  “Supposing I get to this hypothetical country and decide to cut out?”

  Bluntly, Woolart said, “An agent will accompany you. Others will be on hand. In that event you will be eliminated. This is one of the simpler phases of the operation.”

  “Uh-huh.” I folded my hands and studied him again. “You’re appealing to something, Woolart.”

  No mister this time.

  “It can’t be to my consideration of a shorter term behind bars,” I said. “Funny enough, life in any state is better than none at all. It can’t be to what you consider my sense of adventure because the reward factor is too small. So what is it?”

  “Neither, Morgan.” And he didn’t say mister either. “I have no consideration in the matter at all. I told you it came from higher up. Maybe it’s an appeal to your patriotism.”

  “Then they’ll have to do better than that.”

  All the eyes made the rounds of the other eyes at the table again. This time it was Carter who said, “What are you thinking of, Mr. Morgan?”

  At least he kept the mister in.

  “Maybe they don’t want the forty million back,” I said.

  Seconds pass slowly when nobody wants to commit themselves. Only Doherty was grinning because he liked binds himself and he didn’t have anything outside a professional affection for the rest.

  “We’re not at liberty to decide on that matter,” Woolart said quietly.

  I had them then. “Like hell you’re not. This was dropped in your laps and you were told to handle it. You were told to make the deal and if you come back empty-handed somebody will drop a hot potato in them. Buddies, you done bought the farm. Now I’ll lay it out. If I pull it off, you knock off fifteen years, all sentences to run concurrently, and nobody touches that loot. Plain enough?”

  “No.” Gavin Woolart’s tone was adamant.

  “Is your boy worth forty million, Mr. Woolart? Can you do the job yourself?”

  And from the rear Carter said, “Let it stand, Gavin. It’s the only deal we can make.”

  For a few long seconds Woolart just stared at me. It was his kind of game, this mental cat-and-mouse bit, and he had been at it a long time where all the participants were experts. Now he was calling on all his resources to catalog me properly. Then, very quietly, he said, “No.”

  “Why, Gavin?” Carter asked him. The rest of the room was very quiet.

  I said, “He’s considering a possibility, Mr. Carter. A forty-million-dollar possibility. He hates to see that kind of money cut from the budget. Now let me inject another possibility ... that I didn’t take it. Oh, sure, it was proven in court through circumstantial evidence, but more than one innocent person went that route before me. The cute little possibility he’s considering is that if you guarantee I can keep the forty big ones ... and I didn’t heist i
t to begin with ... but manage to get my hands on it in the meantime, you people are up the creek. Make it a public issue and some of our more progressive papers will take you apart ... not to say what will happen politically. Right, Woolart?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  I said, “He knows I might pull it off, too.” I let a grin crease my face and relaxed in the chair. “It’s an interesting challenge.”

  Gavin Woolart’s face was drawn into a tight mask. “There’s no doubt about your having that money, Morgan.”

  “Or that I might get it,” I added.

  He shrugged, not changing his expression. “Either way, the answer is still No.”

  “You authorized to make the decision or does it go through channels, Mr. Woolart?”

  He didn’t have to give me the answer. I saw the sudden narrowing of his eyes. “For your own satisfaction, you’ll get an opinion from higher quarters, but I can assure you it will be negative. However, there’s a time element involved and I advise you not to delay making up your mind or the entire situation will revert unconditionally to your recapture.”

  “But the rest of the deal stands?”

  “That’s the offer. Take your choice.”

  I nodded. “Okay, buddy, I’ll take it.” I scanned the room and watched the small glances they exchanged, those tiny motions of relief like finding out that there was still some time left in the ball game after all. I said, “How do you know you can trust me?”

  Gavin Woolart gathered his papers together and stood up. His eyes were cold beads that said he hated every facet of the arrangement, but it was out of his hands. Very tersely, he told me, “We don’t, Morgan.”

  2

  FOR A WEEK they sweated me in the Montebahn Hotel, a crappy six-story building wedged between two similar ones in the upper forties. Maybe it was to condition me to the idea of what they wanted. Maybe it was to diagram the security arrangements they could use if they wanted to.

  They had recruited types from somewhere who seemed just too damned innocuous to be carrying a badge until you spotted all the little things that marked them as being top guns who would as soon slice you up as say hello. The rooms opposite and flanking mine each held a pair, with each door cracked enough so they could see any passing movement in the hall outside. Nobody had to tell me there would be others. Every exit from the roof to the basement would be covered with a twenty-four-hour watch after a lot of heavy minds went into screening any possible escape route.

  A half hour after I was in the room I spotted a couple of bugs they had planted but didn’t try to scramble them. In this age of electronics they didn’t need anything quite so obvious, so my guess was that they were deliberately left exposed enough to see what action I’d take. The mirror over the battered dresser was new enough to be a give-way. The Montebahn Hotel didn’t go to such extremes to make its guests happy, so the thing had to be a two-way job. The only amusement I had for a while was making faces into it, so if there was a psychiatrist back there trying to observe my actions for a possible stability factor, he was going to have a hell of a lot of notes to play with.

  Oh, they were covering every angle, all right. The bathroom mirror was gimmicked the same way and that particular invasion of privacy I didn’t like at all.

  So I had to teach them a lesson. And like the man said ... the aggressor always has the initial advantage.

  The first night I shut the venetian blinds, pulled the musty curtains across the windows and got into bed in total darkness. I gave myself another hour, then pulled the drawer out from the nightstand beside the bed, hauled it under the covers and bashed the back out of it with the heel of my hand, then put it back in position. Any sound they heard would have been interpreted as a normal sleeper’s movements and disregarded. And that was their tough luck.

  Now all I could hope for was a habit pattern. I knew they were observing mine, so I could take advantage of theirs. The one thing they allowed me was room service from the grill downstairs and calling for a steak each night could damn near be expected. Something else could be expected too. In a place like this the steaks had to be tough, so the knife they supplied had to be sharp enough to compensate for it.

  Then I began toilet training the great Federal agencies. Ten minutes after I finished I turned the news up on TV, went to the bathroom, draped a towel over the mirror there, knowing damn well they’d grin at my reluctance to be observed at what was my private affair, then I’d start to carve out the gun. Ten minutes was all I gave myself, then I flushed down the chips, shoved the chunk of wood well under the bathtub, went back and finished my coffee and called the waiter up to get the mess out of my room.

  He was another one of them and his eyes neatly tabulated the dishes, the cutlery and everything else, then satisfied, he left. In the morning I’d use the john again properly so if they thought about it at all, I was just one of those regular types who never had any congestion of the lower tract.

  The seventh day the flat little imitation automatic was finished. The only deviation from my habit pattern, and one they didn’t notice, was that when I used the bathroom this time I took the bottle of Worchestershire sauce with me and it made a handy dye to blacken the wood of the mock-up gun. When I got back the gimmick was stuck inside my shirt, the bottle replaced and I called for the waiter again.

  It had to figure out. They’d give me credit for having spotted the waiter, so they wouldn’t take a chance of having me jump him and grab his rod, so he’d be unarmed. The door was always locked from the outside; the only time it was opened was when room service or the maid opened it. The maid was a scared hotel employee, so somebody would be waiting outside if I tried a break for it then. But when the waiter was there, the guard wouldn’t be quite so worried.

  He came in on schedule, but used to his job now, a little more efficient and unconcerned. I had arranged his habit pattern too. When he was pushing the tray toward the door I crossed behind him, ostensibly to adjust the TV, whipped the Worcestershire sauce bottle from the table and laid it across his ear from the only position the two-way mirror couldn’t cover.

  I was out the door with the wooden gun in my hand and the single guy there who turned around languidly expecting the waiter almost choked on his own spit and before instinct could make him react I shook my head and said, “Don’t try it, old buddy. Just turn around.”

  It was all too fast. He did as I told him to. I fingered his gun from the belt holster, then pushed him toward the door of the room opposite mine. The other one inside got the same stricken look too. Without being told he went palms out on the tabletop he was playing cards on and let me take his gun too and all he did was look up at his partner and whisper hoarsely, “How the hell did it happen?”

  “He had a gun,” his partner told him.

  “But ... where?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  I used their own handcuffs around the radiator to keep them in place, gagged them both, tied their feet down with sheets so they couldn’t bang around too much, then blew them a good-night kiss. They were two pretty sad-looking characters right then. Tomorrow they were going to be a lot sadder like a lot of others.

  Just as long as one of them wasn’t me, that was all right.

  The rest was easy.

  The elevator operator took me downstairs to the basement, after I pocketed his gun, held still while I tied and gagged him with his own clothes; the guy on the back exit did the same; the one roaming the small courtyard almost threw up with disgust, but submitted to the same procedure; then I was on my own. I was carrying a damn arsenal by then I didn’t want or need, so I piled up the weaponry beside the last one, laid my wooden model on top for an object lesson and took off over the fence.

  This time I let them sweat for a week. I let them get it all out of their systems, knowing damn well what was going on behind a lot of closed doors, and every time I thought about it I’d start to grin, then break out into a laugh, and more than once people thought I was a little nuts or els
e they would grin back figuring I was nursing a secret joke.

  But the week was working for them too and I didn’t realize it. Life gets too grim without its little challenges and they had thrown a big one at me. I made them eat it, but the big one I hadn’t bought yet and the thought of it became more interesting every day.

  After six days I had enough. On Saturday I went back to the Montebahn Hotel, asked the startled clerk for the same room I had occupied the week before, went up and turned on the TV, flopped on the bed and waited for the clerk to call the boys.

  It was one hell of a boy, all right. They don’t hardly make ’em like that any more. This agent was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen and if they had wanted a deterrent to an escape in the first place they should have sent her along earlier. Her hair was long and dark, sun-streaked in spots and tumbled around her shoulders in a carefully casual manner that almost made you stop looking at the rest of her. Except that was impossible. She never would have modeled for the women’s fashion magazines because there was too lovely much of her, but from a man’s point of view she was geometrical perfection. Even though she was agency trained, she didn’t try to conceal the full rise of her breasts, or the sweep of waist to hips and the concave tautness of her belly. But for that matter, she couldn’t. Like I said, there was just too lovely much of her. Her face was large dark eyes with a near-Oriental cast and a full-lipped mouth that had a damp sparkle, curved in a small, wry smile that studied me for a moment before she sat down.

  “Kimberly Stacy,” she said. “B-4 Intelligence, Section A. So you’re the monster.”