Four night-blooming-jasmine bushes which Duff had raised from cuttings blossomed along the edge of the veranda. Their perfume, so heady that some people cannot bear it, saturated the darkness and drifted downwind, exotic and sweet. When Duff noticed it, his attention came only in the form of a memory, a memory that Eleanor was very fond of jasmine. He tried to tell himself it was insane to imagine that, simply because she was missing, Eleanor had been kidnapped and perhaps killed by people whose very existence was shadowy.
He paced the porch, wondering what else might have happened to her, what less-horrifying thing. She had last been seen in the big yard, by Scotty and her mother, over near the banyan. He stood at the porch rail and looked at the black arcades beneath the trunks of the great tree. Had somebody been concealed there?
Suddenly, as if he had been told, Duff realized what had happened: Eleanor hadn’t previously known anything that had made her freedom on her existence a danger to “them.”
What had happened was that she had heard something from the lawn, down near the banyan.
He raced through the house, startling Mrs. Yates and the two children. “Be right back! Ten — fifteen minutes!”
He picked up the flashlight. In the barn, he shouldered a ladder.
Charles yelled, “Need me?”
“No, Charley! Stay with your mother.”
It was hard work moving through the jungle with the ladder. Time and again it hooked over trees and fouled up on boughs or vines so that he had to use his light, stop and maneuver. When, finally, he reached the sinkhole, he was panting heavily. He stood there, afraid to swing the beam of the electric torch. He shut his jaws and aimed the light down and around the edges. He didn’t see what he feared he would: a body. A girl’s body in a brown dress.
The ladder splashed in the water. It was, he noticed, abnormally muddy. Plenty of time to settle since he had roiled it. In the water, he plunged for balance as his feet settled uncertainly. His torch circled the recesses. All he saw was water, rock and innumerable roots.
A big moth flew through the light beam. He pushed forward under the rocky roof of the edge.
There were fresh tracks. He was sure of that. He was surer still when he could no longer find the one print that had held his attention, the mark of the side of a shoe on a foot that seemed legless. “They” had been in the pit that afternoon, taking the boxes away. But how had they kept from being seen?
Eleanor, because she had gone over to the banyan, must have heard a sound in the woods and gone to look. In daylight he could probably find the marks of her heels. She had gone to look. And that was that.
Where was she now? Alive? A prisoner? He groaned and only the walls answered sepulchrally. His flashlight fell sharply on the stones and threw sharp shadows. The recess was deeper than he’d thought. He waded back. It seemed to turn at a projecting wall.
Following the turn, Duff found a new feature of the sinkhole. An arch of limestone, shoulder-high, spanned some ten feet of water. He leaned and shone his light along its surface. The tunnel, half air and half water, led into the distance in a meandering line as far as he could see.
Some hundreds of yards away in. that direction was the overgrown real-estate development where Harry Ellings had had his furtive rendezvous with the gigantic man. And beyond those cracked sidewalks, cabbage palms and broken lampposts was the old rock pit, now used as a dump.
Sinkholes, if they held water, were sometimes connected, underground, with others.
This one could communicate with the water in the rock pit. In that case, the value of the Yates land to anyone wishing to store desperate cargo was self-evident. Such cargo could be unloaded at night in the old quarry and dragged through this tunnel to the place where he stood. It could then be buried in the soft ooze. And no one watching the house or its surrounding grove of jungle trees would see a sign of coming and going. Duff peered again.
Surely the boxes went out here that afternoon. Perhaps Eleanor also—
He started into the opening and changed his mind. The tunnel might go to the quarry.
It might be a blind pocket. It might have a hundred forks and turns; he could get lost underground. It was not sensible, not even sane, to explore alone. Taking gasps of air, he yelled “Eleanor!” repeatedly. Nothing came back but echoes.
He left the pit and raced toward the house. As he rounded the banyan tree he heard a distant siren.
Mrs. Yates saw him enter and paled. “You’re wet!”
“I’m all right. I was looking in that rock pit in the woods. Nothing. Don’t worry so, mother!”
He changed to dry clothes as rapidly as he could. When he came down, Higgins, with two men in business suits whom he’d never seen and two cops, had just come in. Duff jerked his head at the FBI man and they went to the kitchen, where he told Higgins about the sinkhole.
The men, soaking wet, yelling in the low, rocky passages, found a route to the quarry.
They found ample signs that men had used it — often and for a long time. They found evidence that vehicles had driven up to the quarry at a point different from the one used by dump trucks. But no trace of Eleanor.
Near midnight Higgins sat with Duff in the kitchen. Both were muddy to the waist.
But Higgins had been on the telephone for twenty minutes. He gulped coffee now and wiped a sticky forehead with a sodden handkerchief.
“Nothing!” he said to Duff. “No lead! Nothing new on the whole proposition. What we’ve got to do is go over it.”
“Go over it!” Duff groaned. “What do you think I’ve been doing since it started?”
Higgins ignored that. “I’ve got every man we have looking into everything they can think of! Mac — my chief — will be here soon. Reports will come in here. Now! Let’s go back to that day when you went upstairs to clean the rooms and you noticed Ellings’ closet was locked and you decided to pick the lock. You talk. I’ll ask questions. Start in!”
Duff stared at the other man, wondering if this was a useful effort or merely a kindly attempt to keep his mind from the final happening. It didn’t matter. Either way, it was better than just being silent and frantic.
Higgins and he covered every detail. McIntosh came and stayed a while, talked on the phone, issued orders, tried to comfort Mrs. Yates and Marian and Charles, and left.
Higgins and Duff talked on, without effect. Sometime after three in the morning, Higgins stopped alternately sitting and pacing. “Bogan,” he said, “I know you can’t sleep.
But I’ve got to. For me, it’s a job.”
“I understand that.”
“So I’m starting home. If you hit on anything else, let me know. If we can think of another thing for you to do, we’ll call you. This is rugged.”
Marian was asleep in a chair in the living room. Charles was asleep on the cot in his mother’s room. And Mrs. Yates didn’t say a word when he looked in. He went upstairs. After a while he lay down. Through his mind rushed the events he had just so painstakingly discussed with the FBI man. Little by little, in the dark, they ran less swiftly. And after a time, Duff sat up, rubbing his hair, putting his feet on the floor. He had told himself, with a different mental tone, that no feverish attempt such as he was making could accomplish a thing. He reminded himself that he was a scientist, capable of concentration, attention, analysis.
“What I ought to do, he thought, is take it like mathematics. Check back. Look for discrepancies. Things not included. Things not explained. Mistakes. Also, I should extrapolate. Imagine. He felt more detached, less frantic.
There were several elements not satisfactorily accounted for. Little things. Why, for example, had the warehouse in New York been empty? And what had there been about it that had impressed him as meaningful, but that he had never called to consciousness? He had the answer to that, abruptly. The floor of that vast building had glittered faintly with the mica-like brilliance of such broken stone as is excavated in Manhattan. He’d thought of it as coming in from the streets on truck wheels. Actually, it could have come from excavating in the building. And they wouldn’t have wanted things stored there if they had wanted to dig.
Before this instant, Duff realized, he had conceived of an assembled A-bomb as something in a huge case or a truck above ground. Why not bury it? The warehouse wasn’t far from Wall Street. An A-bomb going off there, even underground, would destroy the financial heart of New York City, of America.
That was one thing. He could tell Higgins to have them tear up the floor of the place.
Then, perhaps, they’d get tangible — and terrifying— evidence. That idea, a fresh idea, one in which he had confidence, excited him; his mind raced anew. But he saw the error of that. He had to think, not feel.
The second idea he evolved had to do with Harry Ellings’ history. It was odd, in a way. He’d been a letter carrier. Developed varicosis — he had said. He limped a little and complained of leg pains. True. That could have been put on. Why? Because, Duff reasoned, a bad leg might have been a first step in training for a new job. If Harry had belonged for years to a secret underground, the organization might have wanted him to be in a trucking company, where freight could be forwarded secretly.
It would be easier, Duff thought, and a great deal safer, to retrain an established underground member than to try to persuade some unknown mechanic to turn to treason. So, perhaps, Harry had feigned the bad leg, learned to be a mechanic and moved into Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company as part of a plan. That way Harry could retain his mask of ordinariness. The idea was strengthened, if not corroborated, by the existence of the quarry, the sinkhole and the connecting tunnel, and by Harry’s meeting with the huge man near the quarry.
That pattern, while logical, seemed not to lead any further toward Eleanor. It took Duff more than an hour — an hour of slow, relaxed new thought. He had been turning over in his mind all he knew about the man seven feet tall. He had actually seen the man twice: one evening in New York, one night with Harry Ellings. The FBI also had reports on the man.
Two different agents, on two different nights, had seen the man enter a place. But not come out. They’d lost him, both nights.
Why nights? Did he come out only at night, because of his great stature, as Higgins evidently believed? Or could it be that there was something about his immense size which wouldn’t look natural in daylight? Could size be a kind of truck? Itself a ruse? The figure, menacing, looming, weird, had obviously perturbed even the sanguine G-men. Was that intentional?
Could a man, Duff asked himself, who was, say, Duff’s own height — two and a half inches over six feet — add the balance? Special shoes, such as many very short men wore to increase their apparent height, would help. He might wear a wig, to, that increased the size of his head. But the man had been taller even than that, Duff thought. Stilts would do it — little stilts.
Duff remembered the print in the mud. A shoe, laced over a wooden form from which a steel bar rose to a second shoe, would do it. The steel bar wouldn’t have to be very long, either. Nine or ten inches. And if a man so equipped fell over, as he might in a mucky place, the side of his shoe would be printed in the mud, and there would be no ankle for ten inches above it, but only a steel rod which mightn’t touch the mud at all. Then there would be left exactly such a print as Duff had seen in the mudbank.
The possible meaning of that, in turn, was clear. He and the FBI had been searching for a giant. But the man they wanted, actually, was perhaps no taller than Duff. Size, and especially vast size, is the most conspicuous of all human characteristics. If a veritable giant was seen entering a building and then even a dozen merely tall men came out, no one would connect the first man with the others.
Almost, then, Duff phoned Higgins. But Higgins was sleeping, and Higgins needed sleep. In a couple more hours he would telephone the G-man. Meanwhile, he would go on thinking, There might be still more that could be dredged up and made to mean something other than what he had supposed, until then.
He tore open a new package of cigarettes, saw how his hand shook and forced himself to be calm again. By and by, it grew faintly light. He realized he had dozed a little when the thwack of the morning paper on the porch made him start. He went downstairs in stocking feet. It was light enough by then to read the headlines:
Orange Bowl Queen Vanishes Police Search for Miss Eleanor Yates Kidnaping Feared Crank Suspected
Duff couldn’t wait any longer. He dialed Higgins’ number, got a sleepy “Yeah?” and began to talk excitedly. Fifteen minutes later he hung up. He knew that he was close to tears, but only when he heard himself sniffle did he realize that fatigue, humiliation and a sense of incompetence had actually brought tears into his eyes.
About the particles on the warehouse floor, Higgins had said, “Hunh! Interesting! I’ll pass it on to New York.”
But about the idea that Harry Ellings’ entire life had been planned, the G-man was brief and cutting, “Good Lord! We’ve assumed it was that way for weeks!”
A similar response greeted his theory about the huge man. “Did that just occur to you? We’ve been on the lookout for anybody of any size for a hell of a while!”
Duff said wretchedly, “I shouldn’t have phoned.”
“Oh, sure. That warehouse hunch is solid. And my alarm will let go in less than an hour, anyhow.”
Nevertheless, Duff felt disappointed; he felt as he had ever since the beginning, foolish. The FBI and the police knew. They could and did think and act. And he chimed in afterward with his half-baked hunches. Bitterly, he started toward the porch, but he heard Mrs. Yates crying softly, and he went in to try to comfort her.
Cars surrounded the Yates home, parked in the drive and on the lawns — police cars, press and radio cars, Orange Bowl officials’ cars and the cars of friends, neighbors, curious strangers. They had accumulated all day.
Mrs. Yates and Duff were obliged to keep telling people that they had no idea where Eleanor might have gone, with whom or whether she could have been kidnaped. Because of the numbers “of people, the shock and the confusion, they had sent Marian and Charles to stay with friends.
Some time after lunch Duff observed that Mrs. Yates was not strong enough to bear both her anxiety and the thronging people. He arranged with the police to get her moved to the home of the friend who had already taken in the youngsters. The police saw to it that neither the reporters nor the merely curious followed the Yates station wagon, and when Duff returned to the house, the crowd was thinning.
Toward late afternoon he was alone. As far as he knew, not even the police or the FBI were keeping watch. The Yates place had served its final purpose where Ellings’ colleagues were concerned. And if Eleanor should happen to come back home somehow, he was there.
He believed she was dead. So, he was sure, did the FBI. But Duff knew he would not give up hope until it was certain.
He went upstairs and lay down exhaustedly. By and by he realized it was the afternoon of Harry’s funeral. They had all forgotten. No matter. He slept because a time comes when no one, whatever his anxiety, can stay awake longer. When he woke up, the sun was setting. He realized he had been dreaming about the events of the past weeks and remembered vaguely a jumble of faces, including the face of Indigo Stacey. He lay thinking about her, and it occurred to him that she represented another of the anomalies he’d sought the night before. Scotty had once said that Indigo had wanted to meet Duff even before their first date. Duff wondered why, as he had wondered at other times. He wasn’t the type for whom glamour girls fell on sight. Still, Indigo wasn’t an ordinary glamour girl. A White Russian — or at least her parents were that.
He thought now about their history. Had Indigo’s father and her father’s brother necessarily been loyal to the Czar? Necessarily fled the Bolshevik revolution? Was it possible that a conspiracy against America could have been forming back in the days of Lenin and Trotsky? Could Indigo Stacey have had a special reason, related to everything else, for wanting to meet him? Had her “large passion” been an unsuccessful attempt to find out what he knew? Who — and where— was her uncle? Apparently, according to Mrs. Yates, her now-deceased father and her uncle had become successful businessmen.
He phoned the house where the Yateses were staying. He said there was no news, but that he would like to ask Mrs. Yates a question. Her answers were tremulous.
“Uncle?” she repeated perplexedly. “Why, no, Duff. He didn’t like Stacey for a name.
He’s Stanton — a very important person in Miami. On directorates and owns businesses. As a matter of fact, he is a director of the trucking company Harry used to work for.”
The telephone directory listed an Ivan L. Stanton, 4300 River Vista Drive, Miami Beach.
Duff walked about in the darkening house. He thought of calling Higgins again and cast the thought aside. Stanton was too well known to be made a sudden object of suspicion.
A connection between a young lady’s interest in a graduate student and the possibility that a leading businessman was also a criminal syndicalist would probably make Higgins believe Duff had lost the last of his senses. Besides, Eleanor would hardly be anywhere near the Stanton place, even if Stanton was connected with her disappearance and even if she was still alive. An immense underground organization could take the girl to any of a hundred places.
And in that moment Duff had the last of his new ideas. He and the FBI had assumed they were dealing with many members of a secret society — scores, perhaps hundreds. That very assumption had made Higgins marvel that no trace of such a group had been uncovered.
Why, Duff abruptly asked himself, would it take many people? A few could accomplish all that Duff suspected had been done, if they had time enough. At least one would have to be an engineer. But the fewer they were, the better their chance of undiscovered activity. And if one of them owned part of a trucking concern—
Duff went to the barn garage. He backed out the Yates station wagon. There was nothing more he could do at the Yates house. The theory on which he was operating was tenuous, all but incredible, yet he had no other.
Before driving away, he had a protective impulse. He returned to the house and wrote a note which he left on the dining-room table.
Flagler Street was still Yuletide-gaudy in the twilight. Its red and green decorations made a gay tent. When he stopped for a traffic light, a newsboy intoned, “No trace of missing Bowl Queen! Read all about it!” He drove on. Down Biscayne Boulevard, across the Causeway.
The inland passage gleamed with lights from big houses and the lights of Christmas trees. Many homes were strung with colored lights and many palms wore crowns of lights.
Boats were tied up at private wharves — speedboats, luxury fishing cruisers, houseboats, yachts. He passed No. 4300, a Spanish residence set back from the street, with a seagoing yacht of its own, brightly lighted trees in its yard and a wall all around.
Duff turned into a side street and went back on foot, furtively. There were no pedestrians. For a moment, as he peered around the ornamental coral entrance posts at the big house, Duff had a feeling of hopelessness. The estate looked civilized, secure, and so remote from what tormented him that Duff considered turning back. Then, in the first real confirmation of his frantic weeks, he saw it: a little square of whiteness, of almost luminous whiteness, in the shadow. He made as sure as he could that he was not seen, crossed the drive and picked up a woman’s folded handkerchief, not dropped on the walk, but tossed, it seemed, toward the entrance post. His fingers shook as he saw the initials: E. Y.
He found a rubber tree that overhung the wall and, after a look in each direction, disappeared in its foliage. He dropped onto the lawn. Moving from bush to bush, he reached the big house.
The lawn lights intensified the shadows. As long as he didn’t expose himself to the red, green, blue and yellow shimmer, they would dazzle anyone looking out of the windows.
Duff moved along the wall behind thick crotons.
There were four men in the library, drinking cocktails. Dinner guests, Duff imagined.
No women. There were three or four servants in the kitchen and pantries; they, also, were men. At the back of the house, a concrete driveway and a paving-stone walk led to the dock where the yacht was moored. Two decks, about eighty feet long. A motor was running somewhere aboard her; she showed lights.
Duff barely managed to hide himself in time when a rear door opened and a man carried a carton of supplies to the ship. The man wore a white coat and Duff heard him speak to someone on board.
“Last load?”
“Yeah.”
The yacht — he couldn’t see her name — was going to sail soon. He tiptoed into the darkness of overhanging vegetation; his eyes searched the nearby grass and shrubs and planks swiftly, not very expectantly, but with care. When he saw at the base of tree a second square like the one now in his pocket, he smiled, slightly, grimly. Perhaps she had struggled to cover what she had done; perhaps she’d managed it secretively. But she’d left two tiny markers.
He didn’t risk retrieving the second one; he was already on the pier, near the yacht.
Instead, he walked along the sea wall a short distance, stepped over a short stretch of water and clambered aboard the boat near the bow. He could hear men talking in one of the cabins, aft; a smell of cooking came from the galley. He hid behind a lifeboat lashed to the triangle of deck at the bow.
The back door of the big house opened; men came down the walk. Duff had an instant in which he saw with horror a silent foot close beside him before there was a shocking flash and he lost consciousness…
He was in pain; the moaning sound he heard was his own voice. He was tied and gagged. And he was on a moving ship. He thought for a while that he was blindfolded and then he realized the place where he lay was pitch-dark. There had been a woman in the room because he could smell perfume. Presently he thought it was the kind Eleanor used. The engines of the boat slowed. ‘ Duff heard voices outside.
“Hello, Coast Guard!”
Thinly, the answer came. “Making a check of outgoing boats, Mr. Stanton!”
“Come aboard! Taking a little party for a cruise!”
“No need to board you, Mr. Stanton! Go head!”
The water roughened. Duff knew they were outside the bay. At sea. He heard a murmur in the dark and thought it was Eleanor’s voice. Excitement surged through him. If he could let her Know he was there — that the groaning she must have heard had been his! He tried to make a clearer sound, but the gag stifled him.
He doubted his senses then. All this was hallucination, nightmare. But she continued to murmur, and presently he noticed her complaining had a single form. A long moan and two little moans afterward. He moved his mouth in what might have been a near-grin if he had not been gagged. Telegraphy had been a hobby of his, long ago. And he’d taught the Morse code to Charles, Marian and Eleanor. If she was using it, she was signaling his initial: D. He started a series of moans to spell out “Eleanor,” but he’d gone only as far as the second e when she signaled back, “Duff.”
So, for minutes, they alternately made sounds. In that time Eleanor stated, “Heard a noise at sinkhole. Looked. Was grabbed. Brought here. By whom?”
He prepared to reply in the dark, but to his dismay, a third voice spoke, “Very darn ingenious’“ And all the lights went on.
It was a big cabin with two bunks and modernistic furnishings. On a tubular chair sat a man of about sixty — tall, gray-haired, wearing a white dinner jacket — one of the men Duff had seen in the house drinking cocktails. Beyond him on the other bunk Duff could see a female knee and the brown dress Eleanor wore.
“I’m Stanton,” the man said.
Duff made a sound. Then, realizing Stanton had listened in on their conversation, Duff moaned in code, “Ungag us.”
The man bent over Duff. His expression was cold. He had high cheekbones, rather pale gray eyes — features that spelled his Slavic ancestry— features vaguely familiar through newspaper photographs of important Miamians giving parties, heading charity drives.
Stanton stared at Duff a moment and then spoke, “I’ve been waiting for you to come around ever since we cleared the Coast Guard.” He paused. “Your — visit — wasn’t precisely expected. But we took no chances. You were seen coming over my wall.” He turned to Eleanor. “I think you both know why you’re here, in a general way. My yacht is heading for an island in the Bahamas. A small one, uninhabited and far from any others. We won’t be spotted there, even from the air, because that island”—he smiled chillily—“has been arranged so that my yacht’s hidden when she’s in. It has been a transshipment point for cargo from — another country. Cargo brought here by me. Your interrogation won’t begin till we reach that island, a while before daylight. I’m glad we have Miss Yates along. We’d intended to question her. But it will be more effective to use her as a means to get the truth out of you, Bogan.”
Duff could feel his muscles freeze. “What truth?” he painfully signaled.
Stanton leaned over him for a moment, bracing himself on the far partition for support as the yacht rocked heavily. His face was passive. He might have been talking about the weather, which was warm, clear and breezy. “Through the unfortunate fact that you got onto Ellings’ part in our work, Bogan, my value to my cause has suffered.” He was silent as, apparently, he thought of his cause. He shrugged. “Ellings believed for some time that he had you — and the FBI — fooled by the device he’d had prepared for just such a meddlesome discovery as you made. But when we found his stratagem hadn’t been entirely effective, we had Ellings destroy himself. And went on with our — assignment.”
The ship heaved and he balanced again. “You and Miss Yates will also be destroyed.
But it is necessary for us to learn, before your deaths, precisely how much information about my activities the FBI has. This will be painful — as painful as certain trained men on board can make it — for you both. We cannot judge whether our work is accomplished and will stand up or whether it must be done over by others, until we have made certain that neither one of you — and you especially, Bogan — has held anything back. Anything. That means the last hours will be — rugged — for you both.”
He went out. Minutes later three men carried Duff to another stateroom. Its light was extinguished. Sweat-soaked, Duff lay in the darkness, trying to get his mind to work at all.
Here and there in American cities the bombs had certainly been planted and were waiting for an unknown zero hour. The FBI, the Army, all intelligent services, surely knew that now. But not at what sites, in what cities.
After torturing and killing Eleanor and him, Stanton would be able to decide whether to flee the country or to go back to his palatial home, his business affairs, his social prominence and his underground activity. What he had to know was whether the FBI had connected him in any way with Ellings or with the gigantic man — evidently Stanton’s own disguise — or with the sinister boxes.
Duff clamped his teeth on his gag. He writhed in the ropes that rawly confined him.
He thought that the torture had already begun, not with the physical pain of lying there, but with the knowledge of what was to happen to the girl. For the rest of his life he was to dream occasionally about that long night of agony.
Toward morning the ship entered calm water, slowed, reversed and touched a dock.
Men came for him, blindfolded him and heaved him onto a stretcher. He felt the open air on his face. His bearers walked on planks and then on sand for a little way, and finally down half a dozen steps. A door slammed. He was dumped out on a cement floor. Soon the door opened again and the men moved in once more. He heard Eleanor murmur as she was tipped onto the concrete, and he heard the heavy door shut again. He tried to communicate with her as he had before, and was frightened because he got no response. She had probably fainted.
Nearby, in an adjoining room or cell, he heard steps, grunts, thumpings, as men moved objects about. A sick stretch of time went by and then the door came open, clanged shut. Hands ripped his blindfold away. He saw plain chairs, bare tables, two kerosene lamps, four men including Stanton, Eleanor’s form on the floor and four bare walls. An underground storage room on the island, probably camouflaged above, Duff thought. “
Start with the girl,” Stanton said to his men. “She’s out,” he added, after shaking her.
“Or pretending.” He gave her a terrific slap — a slap that knotted Duffs nerves. “Out,” he said.
“Open up the case. Get the ammonia.”
One of the men fiddled in a case that Duff could not see. He smelled ammonia.
Eleanor muttered.
Someone took the gag from Duffs mouth. He worked his jaws and tried to lick his lips with a dry, numb tongue.
Stanton came to him, stood over him, suddenly kicked him. “All right. Start talking.
From the beginning, and tell everything you know. The first run through it, we won’t hurt you — unless you hold out.”
Duff found that he could hardly speak at all. They poured a glass of water and gave it to him. Then a second. And he began to tell them the now-overfamiliar story, starting with the first instant of suspicion. He talked slowly, carefully, using time, yet without any real hope that delay would help. He told nearly all the truth because he knew that if they began to do to Eleanor such things as he had read they did, he would try to stop them with the truth anyway — or with lies or by any other method. If he had been alone, he would have held out to the end or as near the end as his sanity lasted.
There was nothing in anything Duff knew to suggest that Higgins had traced a connection to Stanton. And only one way Higgins might learn. That Stanton was a director of the trucking company would seem, to the FBI man, irrelevant. Some big shot had to own it—
some man exactly like Stanton. That Harry Ellings and Stanton had been allied in evil would not occur to any reasonable person.
Duff finished.
“That’s it?” Stanton asked. “All?”
“All.”
Stanton turned to a corner of the room that Duff couldn’t see. “Got that water boiling?”
Duff said, “I couldn’t add anything if you tore us both apart inch by inch! You must know that! Why not simply — kill us both?”
Stanton smiled a little. “Just to be certain. And besides, I owe you something special.
Because of you, they’ll find the one in New York!”
Duff began to pray.
And the door opened. Daylight showed.
“Boss!” a scared voice called.
“Hold it!”
Stanton left. He did not return. Ten minutes later the door opened and a man shouted,
“All out! Taking off! Leave ’em lay! A damn Coast Guard plane went over twice!”
Time passed. Duff thought he heard the ships engines. Then silence.
A while after that the chamber was filled with reddish light, a thunderous blast. A pressure wave banged Duff against the floor. The concrete walls cracked. Sand gushed into the room. It turned furnace-hot. He thought he was dying and realized, seconds later, that he could see sunlight in the swirling, wrecked chamber.
He rolled across the floor. He got his arms up against a sharp edge of rent metal. It took fifteen or twenty choking minutes to free his hands, as long again to untie his legs. Then he crawled to Eleanor. She was half covered with sand and her nose bled.
They began digging feebly with bits of debris. Before long they had made a way out.
The room where they had been was under the island sand. Around them now were barren dunes and coral escarpments, blue sea and blinding sun. In front, in the painful sunshine, they saw a tall stand of mangrove and the well-hidden mooring where the yacht had been tied.
They looked out to sea and spotted the yacht, hull down.
The island was small — not a mile around — and except for the concealed pier, the now-smoking storage cellars, a few palms, patches of weed and water birds, there was nothing but tropical ocean. Eleanor stood with him for a moment and then collapsed.
Duff carried her away from the wreckage of the underground chambers. “More dynamite might go off.” It was the first thing he had said.
He took her down the dunes to the beach and they washed in the limpid, warm salt water. Eleanor had a spell of shuddering and sobbing. He held her in his arms until she had mastered the spasm.
“What happened? Where is this?”
Duff shook his head. “Bahamas. It was their base. A Coast Guard plane came by twice. Might have been an accident. But probably Higgins is close to the answer. I left a note, anyhow! So they beat it. Blew up the works. But they’d built that cellar like a fort, luckily for us! The blast didn’t bring the ceiling down — which they probably presumed it would. Just caved the walls some.”
“Bury us?” she said in a sore-throat tone. “Alive?”
“Would they have cared which way?” The wind blew on them. The sun shone. “We’ll have to figure out how to get along here till somebody comes for us or till we can signal a boat going by,” he said.
“Let’s find some shade. We’ll sunburn.”
They moved to the shade of three coconut palms. The yacht was gradually lost on the blue emptiness of the Gulf Stream. For a while they lay on the sand, silent, resting.
Then Eleanor cried, “Look, Duff! Look!”
He barely glanced toward the sea. Then he threw himself on top of her and forced her to lie face-down on the earth. She gasped, struggled.
“Lie still!” he ordered.
A wave of pressure eventually swept the island, bending the trees; it was accompanied by an immense rumble. Only after that did Duff sit up. Far out on the sea a cloud made unforgettable by the news pictures rose toward the blue zenith. A many-hued, mushroom-shaped cloud with fire flashes eddying enormously in its midst.
“Atom bomb,” she whispered.
Duff spoke, too exhausted for emotion and yet unable to stop the working of his mind
“Maybe they destroyed themselves that way. Maybe they thought they — and it — would be captured. Maybe an accident. They could have got too many cases of uranium too close together — a last one, dropped down through a hatch. That might have done it.”
For perhaps an hour they watched the cloud rise, change shape in the strong winds aloft, and start to dissipate.
“Somebody else,” Duff had said, “should have seen it. Though there are darn few ships in these parts, I imagine.” His eyes moved from the distant, separating clouds to the beach; they followed its curve to the Bahama Banks, a glittering, empty infinitude of shallow sea. “Anyhow, it’ll show up on plenty of instruments and a slew of people will be down here, looking, pretty soon.”
Eleanor said, “Was it close enough to — to hurt us?”
He stared at her, then smiled, and found a lump coming in his throat. “Lord,” he murmured, “why didn’t you ask that before? No. Too far away. The radiation here couldn’t have amounted to anything.”
The girl smiled back. “Glad I had a physicist along to tell me.”
The first half of the Orange Bowl game ended in the usual pandemonium. Teams trotted from the field and were replaced by bands in red uniforms, in blue, in green, in gold and in the white of the University of Miami. Thousands of colored balloons rose in the sky.
The combined bands began to play. Floats moved sedately from the corners of the stadium and paraded around the field. One of these — an immense replica of an orange — proceeded to the center of the field and opened magically. The Orange Bowl Queen stood inside it, and girls on the floats, pretty girls in bathing suits, began to throw real oranges to the crowd. The governors of three states marched forward with what the program called “a retinue of beauty” to crown the queen.
Standing in her robes, smiling, waving, Eleanor felt happy. She was very tired, but everything would soon be over.
In the Yates box, Duff grinned at the yelling of Marian and the shrill whistling of Charles. He handed a pair of borrowed field glasses to Mrs. Yates, who faced her wheel chair to see every detail of the coronation.
Duff gazed at Eleanor, standing straight and lovely, as he mused on the recent, dramatic past. They had been discovered on the island by a Coast Guard plane which flew in to investigate. A second plane had taken them back to Miami, where they had landed secretly. Eleanor had given out the story that she had suffered a “loss of memory” due to “exhaustion and an accidental fall” and spent two nights with “a friend in Fort Lauderdale.”
Nothing about kidnaping, about enemy agents, about a mushroom cloud rising where a boat had vanished. That would not become public, Duff reflected, until it was all over.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see the grinning face of Scotty Smythe.
“Duff, old boy, can you come over to our box for a few minutes? Dad and mother are there.
And a couple of other people who want to see you.”
Out on the sunlit field the coronation ended. Eleanor’s float led a circling parade to the jubilant blaring of bands. Duff followed Scotty along an aisle of the jam-packed stadium.
He greeted the Smythe family happily, and found himself, to his surprise, shaking hands with General Baines, and then with a physicist he had always wanted to meet, a Doctor Adamas who was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The general presently murmured to Duff,” Adamas and I actually came down to see you.”
“Me!”
“We both are flying back to Washington as soon as possible after this dandy game. If you could spare us a few minutes now, for a stroll outside—”
It was there, between the stadium walls and the parked cars, that Duff got the shock of his life. He walked along slowly with the general and the scientist.
The soldier did most of the talking. “No use, Bogan, of my telling you what the country owes you. We’ve dug out that bomb in New York. One in Philadelphia. Two in Washington. Soon have them all. The Stacey woman talked.”
“I should have figured her out sooner,” Duff said, with a self-depreciatory shake of his head. “And the country owes Scotty Symthe far more than me. After all, if he hadn’t driven over to the Yateses’ to help me, and if he hadn’t come in when nobody answered his knock, he’d never have found my note or phoned Higgins where I’d gone, and why. The search for the yacht wouldn’t have started.” Duff shuddered slightly. “They’d have got away with the whole thing!”
“There is nothing tangible we can do for young Smythe,” the general replied, grinning at the disclaimer. “His father, my good friend, is amply endowed with worldly goods. In fact, Bogan, the father thinks your influence has made a serious man out of a rather featherbrained boy.”
“Scotty was always a man,” Duff answered defensively. “He just liked to look frivolous.”
“The point is,” Adamas said dryly, “you’ve done a very great, very brave and very brilliant service to your country, and one for which there cannot be, at this time, any public reward whatever.”
Duff laughed. “Reward? Why should I get a reward? Anybody would have done what I did — and better. If I hadn’t been so dumb—”
The general’s mouth dropped open and snapped shut. The scientist coughed, cleared his throat and looked closely at the trunk of a nearby palm. And he spoke. “We’ve gone over your records, Bogan. The FBI has quite a dossier. Besides being a twenty-one-carat fool for danger, you’re a good man in the field. My field. Our field. A certain nuclear project is being moved down here under old Slocum. We’d like you to work on it as you continue your studies. We’ve fixed it so the work itself will contribute toward a doctorate.”
Duff had been trying to say he’d be glad to work on any project the Atomic Energy Commission thought he was worthy of. But the mention of an opportunity to get his final degree made him stand still. Tears came in his eyes.
“D-d-don’t deserve anything of the sort,” he stammered.
General Baines snorted, “Damn it, man! Stop the modesty! Surely you realize what you saved the country from!”
“A lot of people besides me—”
“Fiddlesticks! Rubbish! You can continue your studies here. Take your M.A. Then your Ph.D. And have a job meanwhile. It will pay you seven fifty a month, Bogan, and I have orders from the President of the United States — who wants to shake your hand someday, incidentally— that you’re to accept.”
A roar came from inside the stadium as the opposing teams returned to the field. The scientist, after a look at Duff, took the general’s arm. “Let’s watch the kickoff.”
Duff couldn’t speak. When he was able to control his emotions, he walked back into the frenzied stadium and joined the Yates family. He saw the game, and didn’t see it. He was thinking that he was a rich man now. For a minute he had imagined that “seven fifty” a month had meant seven dollars and a half. Then he knew. He could rent Harry’s room and they wouldn’t need to find another boarder. He could put in some improvements, like an electric stove. By and by he’d be a doctor of philosophy, an atomic scientist. Miami made a touchdown and he was only dimly aware—
After the sun set and as the first unimportant-looking buds of the night-blooming jasmine commenced to explode their honey-sweet perfume into the twilight, Duff sat alone beside his lily pool. They’d just come home from the game. He hadn’t told the Yateses, yet, about his reward; he was afraid, still, that he’d break up — maybe blubber.
Eleanor had been escorted home, minutes before. He expected she would leave again, soon, for another dinner party.
Charles kicked open the front screen. “Hey, Duff! Kitchen faucet’s leaking!”
The homely need somehow bolstered Duff. He laughed. “Washer coming up!” He had shut off the water when Eleanor appeared — in a house dress.
“I thought—”
She read the thought. “I begged off, Duff. After all, I did say I’d been ill. I’m cooking tonight— thank heaven! No more Cinderella! The coach is a punkin again and the horses are mice. And am I happy about that!”
Duff nodded vaguely. He felt that women were impossible to understand. He tinkered with the faucet and she came close, watching him. There was a way her hair curved at the nape of her neck. There was a certain shape of her eyes and a special light in them, a topaz light. A warmth and a femininity about her. She had lovely lips. And he knew the girl very well — though not, perhaps, well enough to do what he did, which was to put down the wrench, take her in his arms and kiss her, hard. Alarmed afterward, he let go.
“I’m sorry! I couldn’t help it! I’m still distraught — judgment’s shot!”
Her eyes shone. “Sure is! You let go. Why?”
Duff turned away a little. “I’ve tried to be a brotherly kind of a guy, Eleanor. It’s a beam I can’t entirely stay on. But after all, your type of man is some really elegant person, like Scotty.”
“Scotty is pretty elegant,” she answered very softly. “He had a big crush on me. I had to kind of bust it up — pretend I was crazy about six other lads. He caught on. I mean, he caught on to who I really did care for. So he pitched in to help that guy. It’s like Scotty.”
Duff nodded and his blue eyes were never more vague, more forlorn. “Then there is somebody.”
Her first words of love were, “What does a girl have to do in the case of scientists—
hire a marriage broker? You dope! You oaf! You nitwit! You precious dumbbell!”
Marian, who had come quietly through the door, yelled, “Mother! Duff and El are having a quarrel!”
Her big sister ignored the interruption and went on talking to Duff in a strange voice,
“Yes, there’s somebody! Somebody who ought to find out — seeing I phone all over the country to get him when I’m in trouble! Seeing how jealous I am about his dating another girl! Somebody I’ve practically been married to for a year and a half! At least, I’ve had him around, like a husband. And we’ve had all the trials and tribulations and domestic problems and discomforts and the scrimping and misery and work of marriage, together. Enough to know for sure we could make a swell team! And none of the joy, except a sort of — distant companionship.”
“Mother,” Marian bawled jubilantly, “I was wrong! They’re necking!” She added in mock horror, “You better come out here and chaperon!”
Eleanor drew away a little and said, “I’ve loved you, you lug, since the day you came stammering in here, towering and shuffling, polite and uneasy, asking for a place to board that was ‘reasonable’! Everything at the Yateses’ is reasonable, Duff — even poor — and maybe we’re crazy if we get married, the way it is. But we’ll make out. I know it!”
“About that,” he said, and gulped, “maybe I ought to tell you. I just got a job.”