The By-Pass Control Read online

  It sat that way for a good ten seconds, the slight movements of their eyes recording their impressions. I let them sweat it long enough, then I said, “Shove a probe down the toilet of Salvi’s bathroom and see what you find. Don’t bother pushing on the deal because you had all the time in the world to come up with it. I would have told you only you didn’t ask politely.”

  Randolph’s face started to blossom into the familiar florid hue and I grinned at him. He said, “You bastard.”

  “Any number of people could have told you that.”

  There wasn’t anything more to say. I knew what I wanted to know and walked out. From the corner I watched the three of them scramble into a black sedan and take off out of there in a hurry. Somebody on that Salvi searching party was going to catch hell pretty shortly.

  I found a phone booth in a drugstore to call Charlie Corbinet. He still had his fingers on enough direct contacts through the local police and the Treasury Department to come up with some possible new leads in the narcotics situation and I wasn’t betting on full cooperation from Hal Randolph at all. He’d play it his own way as long as he could and would call me in only when it was expedient. That was a chance I couldn’t take.

  Charlie mulled the information over, said he’d get right on it, then added, “I sent over those photographs of Louis Agrounsky to your hotel an hour ago.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “He was a rarely photographed person so there isn’t much to go by. One set is the official pictures used on his project admittance badge and the other lifted from a motion picture film the government authorized for a news broadcast when the last space shot was made. It wasn’t our policy to let these men be well known and they preferred the anonymity anyway, so it was the best I could do. A detailed physical description is there too in case you need it.”

  “Good. I’ll pick them up right now,” I said. “Heard anything on the hot-line circuits yet?”

  “Tiger, we have every available technician checking out the entire system, but it’s so damn complex it will take a long time to locate the by-pass. One team is concentrating on how it could have been done to start with. There were supposed to be a dozen positive locks that would eliminate any possibility of accidental or deliberate firing except from the final control but there are still ways it could have been done by a man like Agrounsky as long as he was in charge of the system’s installation. It’s a pretty shaky deal, friend.”

  “It could be worse.”

  “Another note’s been added.”

  I waited, saying nothing.

  Charlie said, “One of the few people close to Agrounsky told us he had a peculiar off-duty hobby he had been working on for years—miniaturization of electronic components that would make transistors as out of date as a vacuum tube. He had a sub-mini circuit no bigger than a dime that could run a twenty-one-inch TV set an hour before it blew. He never explained his experiments and if he recorded his experiments, we haven’t been able to find any notes on it.”

  “Damn!” I said.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking of,” Charlie told me quietly. “A remote control system that can activate a unit so completely hidden it will be impossible to find.”

  “The entire hot line will have to be totally disassembled.”

  “Tiger, we can’t afford it. Agrounsky must be found.”

  “I know. Who was the friend who knew about his hobby?”

  “Claude Boster, a technician still assigned to the Cape. He lives in Eau Gallie, Florida, but he has nothing more to say than what I’ve told you. We’ll still look for Agrounsky’s notes, but he probably took them with him.”

  “Okay, Charlie, thanks, I’ll keep in touch.”

  Twenty minutes later I was at the hotel, picked up the envelope he had delivered and took my first look at Louis Agrounsky. He was a harried little man crowding fifty, thin, partly bald with an intense look to his eyes and a tight, withdrawn set to his mouth. I stuck the photos in my pocket and walked out of the building.

  When I spotted the first cruising cab I flagged it down and gave the driver the address of the Belt-Aire Electronics Corporation and settled back to watch the city go by on the way out over the Triborough Bridge.

  One man, I thought, one little man who held the world in his hands. Louis Agrounsky. A loner, dedicated. He had worked himself into a nervous breakdown when he was a student and those things always left scars. A genius with scars. Then one of those scars developed adhesions and while he was involved with the mechanical solutions of world problems he took exception to the belief that control of world stability should be in any single person’s hands whether it was the President’s or the head of NATO. What did they call the hot-line system? Yeah... the permissive action link. Nuclear weaponry, whether aggressive or retaliatory, was locked tight under the control system, totally impotent until the safety factors were rendered impotent, until an electronic message communicated by the President, who holds the coded electronic key to the weapons in his sole possession, was delivered by the right push of the right button.

  But Agrounsky didn’t favor ultimate control. He wanted a say in the matter and that’s what comes of being a genius. He could force the matter himself. He installed the system, but gimmicked it quietly, and in the labyrinth of electronics who could say how or where? A reinstallation of the entire system would take years, and to nullify the present system would leave us immediately helpless. And all this while one man was sitting there trying to make up his mind.

  Where, damn it, where!

  I got out of the cab and walked up to the gate where a guard met me with a nod of recognition, checked my identification, and telephoned into the main office. Henry Stanton came out to meet me, still licking his lips with a nervous gesture, and ushered me inside.

  “I ... hope everything is all right. Drink?”

  “No thanks. I want to see Camille Hunt.”

  “Certainly. I’ll have ...”

  “I know where she is.”

  “But you need a pass and ...”

  “Get me one. I’m tired of chaperones.”

  Stanton drew himself up, an overworked executive who has to put up with things not in his own domain and was ready to read me off. There were tired lines around his eyes and he was sick of being polite.

  “Just do it,” I said. “If you really feel like forcing the issue I’ll make one call and get you canned. Or I can belt you in the mouth. So scrap all the regulations you’ve been issued, drop the ideas you have and play along. I’ll assume that by now you’ve contacted Martin Grady and are just trying to protect your own status. Forget it. I’m no efficiency expert or anyone who can jeopardize your job or the project here. All I want is to protect both and I’m as tired as you are of all the manure. Now hop to it or you’ll see what I can do if I’m pushed.”

  Stanton had made the call, all right. It showed in his eyes and in the sudden change of demeanor when I laid it at his feet. It didn’t take him long to have a little blue temporary pass issued me that I could wear pinned to my lapel, and when I pinned it on he said, “I trust there will be no interference with this project, Mr. Mann. It’s a matter of national importance.”

  “Not from me,” I assured him. “We’re all in this thing together.”

  “What thing?”

  “You just take care of your project.”

  Stanton’s face seemed to set itself. In his own way he was dedicated too. “I intend to,” he said, and his tone was as cold and hard as steel wire.

  Patriots, I thought. In ’42 they went into factories and drove rivets into the bellies of bombers. They read the signs that said SILENCE SAVES LIVES and TALK SINKS TANKERS and you couldn’t pry their mouths apart with a crowbar. Some were big and strong and some were short and weak, but they had one thing in common—they were patriots out of an old school you could hardly find any more in this age of radicalism and super-liberal stupidity.

  I winked at him, made sure my badge was on firmly and walked o
utside past the guard who was ready to be my date if it weren’t for the blue badge and found my own way down to the door that read CAMILLE HUNT, PERSONNEL.

  The secretary wanted to announce me, but I pushed her hand away from the phone and let her see the Martin Grady ID in the wallet I held in my hand, and to make sure she didn’t budge, let her catch a glimpse of the .45 in the speed rig on my belt when I put the wallet back.

  Just to ease the tension I patted her cheek and said, “That’s a good girl. Now how about making a pit stop in the powder room for a little bit until I finish my business?”

  She was glad to get out of there. Interested, but glad. Later she could have something to add to the office gossip.

  It was nice to catch her off guard for a second. Nice to see the sudden rise of her head with the desk lamps framing her face with shadows that brought out all the loveliness of every striking feature and accentuated the blossom of a lower lip held between teeth in concentrated thought. Her hair was still lost in the darkness of the background, but this time there was no concealing the ripe maturity of her body in reflectionless black because now she wore a gossamer thing of yellow that made her breasts fuller and swept in tucks to a waist girded in a broad green belt.

  “Hello, spider.”

  Camille Hunt held one hand up to shield her eyes from the glare of the light, giving me time to cross the room, then she smiled. “Hello, fly. You took your time.”

  “It’s only been a day.”

  “That’s much too long. They usually can’t wait to be bitten.”

  “You’re talking about the true diptra types.”

  “And you?”

  “More like a mud dauber. I break down webs and eat spiders.”

  Camille leaned back and smiled gently. “Oh?”

  “Don’t get dirty,” I said.

  “You mentioned it.”

  “But I didn’t mean it.”

  “Then we’ll start over without any promises.”

  “We’d better.”

  She smiled again and sat back in her chair. “Now ... about that job ...”

  “I’m unemployable.”

  “Then ...”

  “I came to see you, understandable?”

  She waved me to a chair, still smiling. “Oh, I understand, but I just don’t believe it.”

  I threw the envelope on her desk. “That was my excuse. You can put these files back in the vault again. When I’m done with the copies I made I’ll destroy them.”

  “Were they any use to you?”

  “Not specially. Look ... how familiar are you with the personnel here?”

  “I know everyone by sight, Mr. Mann.”

  “Tiger, kitten ... remember?”

  “I won’t forget any more.”

  “Ever see this man here?” I spread the Agrounsky photos out in front of her and waited while she studied them carefully.

  Camille took her time about it, making sure of the details of his face, then she frowned very slightly. “This man doesn’t work here, I know that.”

  “Could he be disguised in any way?”

  “No ... I’m sure I would see through it. Besides, our people are all fingerprinted and filed with Washington. There is no doubt as to their identities.” She put the photos down and looked at me across the desk. “Facially, he isn’t an impressive-looking person. Rather common, I’d say, the type who could get lost in a crowd of two. However, there is a slight degree of familiarity here.”

  There was a sudden constriction in my stomach and my hands wrapped tight around each other. “How?”

  “When we last expanded we interviewed several hundred people for employment. Those I selected were given to Mr. Hamilton to process in the usual manner and the final selection was made on the basis of his reports and my personal approval. I have the feeling that this man might have been among those interviewed.”

  I sat back and rubbed my face. “And you don’t have the original applications,” I stated flatly.

  Her expression took on a serious note. “No ... but often I do record my own personal observations of people as a matter of interest. It isn’t part of my job, actually, but character studies are important in this work.”

  “You have the notes?”

  “At home. They may not be very helpful because sometimes I use names or numerical identification rather than names.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “Who is he, Tiger?”

  “Louis Agrounsky.”

  “The name isn’t at all familiar and names I recall well. Why is he so very important?”

  “Because he’s holding a death threat over the heads of everyone in this country.” I got up and nodded my head toward her. “Let’s go, sugar. We need every minute we can get.”

  Camille Hunt didn’t answer. She simply looked at my face and without a word reached for her coat and handbag and followed me out the door. I turned in my badge at the gate, was cleared into the parking lot, got in her car beside her and we drove out to the highway.

  Her apartment was on the east side of Central Park in the Seventies, an upper-middle-class section newly renovated to accommodate those who still liked the sprawling octopus of the city enough to live in it. The doorman took care of the car while a black-suited assistant in the lobby ushered us to the elevator with a smile of subservience and made sure we pushed the right button.

  Camille lived on the sixth floor, her apartment facing the street with a grandiose spread of glass. She threw her coat carelessly across the back of a chair, pushed a panel open to expose a built-in wall bar and said, “Make a drink while you’re waiting.”

  I built a pair of them, whiskey and ginger ale heavy with ice, and set them on a coffee table. Camille didn’t take long. She came back in a few minutes, changed into a black skirt and sweater, with a fistful of papers in her hand and laid them out on the table in front of me. “There they are. I’ve noted physical characteristics and reactions to the interview along with my personal reflections, and if it can help ... I’m glad.” She picked up her drink and sat down opposite me.

  The notes were impersonally objective, recording what her eyes saw and her ears heard. They described the interviewees well right down to the shape of their heads and the tone of their voices. In places that seemed like simple doodles she explained the meaning of the characters there, what might denote intelligence or lack of it, or what might mean to her a personality trait not suitable for a Belt-Aire employee.

  Each one I went over in detail, trying to make a description fit Louis Agrounsky, but none came up. If he had ever been face to face with Camille Hunt it wasn’t acknowledged there.

  It took an hour. She said nothing, merely refilling my glass when it was emptied, occasionally handing me a page when I took one out of sequence, letting me digest every word she had written until I threw the last page down in absolute disgust and leaned back in the couch with my eyes half closed.

  “Hell,” I said, “it’s another blank.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault, kid.”

  “Is it something you can talk about?”

  “No.”

  “Does it involve Belt-Aire?”

  “I don’t know. It involves Doug Hamilton’s death but I don’t know how.” I looked up at her. “How well did you know him?”

  “Very impersonally. He was employed by the head office. We ... worked together as part of personnel requirements, but I knew little about the man. When we got the contract and he was assigned to investigate our employees, I had lunch with him twice, helped him with the files and accepted his recommendations. Personally, I found him rather ordinary. He was very efficient in his work though.”

  “He made one mistake. The big one.”

  Camille got up from her chair, picked up our glasses, and filled them again. Then she sat on the arm of the sofa and held one out to me. “The papers said he was involved in an accident. Two detectives came to ask me questions and a pair of nice young men who were
polite but determined in finding out all I knew about Mr. Hamilton.”

  “And?”

  “I answered their questions as directly as they were put. They didn’t seem quite as determined as you. What really happened to him?”

  “Killed, sugar. I know how, but not why.”

  “And this Louis Agrounsky?”

  I shrugged. “A name. Nothing more. It’s ended here now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why?”

  The fragrance of her perfume was a gentle thing like flowers in the night. Gently, her fingers touched my face and I felt her lips touch my hair. “Because I won’t see you again.”

  “Afraid of the fly, spider?”

  “I haven’t had time to weave him into my web.”

  My fingers hooked into the soft texture of her hair and I brought her face down close to my own. “It wouldn’t do you any good, baby. I could always break loose.”

  “It would be a great fight.”

  “Would it?”

  “Not really,” she said. “You’d win in the end.”

  “I always do, kitten,” I told her.

  She smiled, her mouth wetly pink and inviting, offering itself to be taken. I touched her lips with mine, the warmth of her a subtle radiance I couldn’t resist, a quiet ember that flamed into a wild heat stirred by the frantic quest of her tongue.

  The glass fell from her hand and tinkled in fragments on the floor. Almost in slow motion, she tumbled from above me into my lap, a tremulous abandon hardening her body into firm complexities of muscular curves that rose and fell under my hands, quivering with each touch.

  Her voice was a demanding sob, whispering to me, her breath a sweet thing that was at one with her lips as she reached out for me and when I held her face in my hands and looked at her there was a wetness to her eyes like a beggar’s plea and she said, “Tiger ... now ... please.”

  Camille Hunt was an animal in her own right, a wonderful, primitive thing suddenly released from the constraints of civilized bondage and her own hands stripped her naked in her yearning for fulfillment. Her skin had the glossy texture of satin, tanned by the sun and striped with ribbon bands of a bikini. The swell of her breasts and hips, the hollow of her stomach and the luxuriant sweep of her thighs burst upon my sight like the clashing of great cymbals and I reached out and let my fingers bite into the resilient flesh and dragged her down beside me.