Operation Moon Rocket (15 page)

The three of them filed out of the room and Simian pointed to a chair. "You wanted action," he said to Nick. "Sit." Reno Tree and Red Sands advanced out of the shadows and eased themselves into chairs on either side of him. "Ten G's a chip. Any objections?" Nick shook his head. "Then deal."

Ten minutes later he was cleaned out. But the setup was clear at last. All the missing keys were there. All the answers he'd been searching for without knowing it.

There was only one problem — how to walk away with that knowledge and live. Nick decided a straight approach was best. He pushed his chair back and stood up. "Well, that's it," he said. "I'm flat. Guess I'll be going."

Simian didn't even glance up. He was too busy counting the Clevelands. "Sure," he said. "Glad you sat in. When you feel like dropping another bundle, contact me. Reno, Red, see him out."

They walked him to the door and did just that — literally.

The last thing Nick saw was Reno's arm swinging in a swift arc toward his head. There was a brief sensation of nauseating pain and then darkness.

It was there, waiting for him, as he slowly regained consciousness. A single thought, lighting up the interior of his brain with a sensation that was almost physical —
escape. He had to escape.

The information-gathering aspect of the assignment was over. Now it was time for action.

He lay quite still, disciplined by a training that had stamped itself even on his sleeping mind. In the darkness his senses put out feelers. They began a slow, methodical exploration. He was lying on wooden boards. It was cold, damp, drafty. The air carried a sea tang. He could hear the faint slap of water against pilings. His sixth sense told him he was in a room of some kind, that it was not very large.

He tensed his muscles gently. He wasn't tied. The lids of his eyes snapped open as sharply as camera shutters — but no eyes stared back. It was dark — nighttime. He forced himself up. Moonlight filtered palely through a window on the left. He climbed to his feet and went over to it. The frame was screwed to the molding. There were rusting bars across it. He went softly toward the door, tripped over a loose board and almost fell. The door was locked. It was solid, old-fashioned. He could try kicking it in, but he knew the noise would bring them running.

He went back and kneeled by the loose board. It was a two by six, raised about half an inch at one end. He found a broken broomstick in the darkness nearby and worked the board up further. It ran from the middle of the floor to the baseboard. His hand felt around beneath it, encountering rubble. Nothing else. Better yet, the gap beneath the floor and what appeared to be the ceiling of another room below was quite deep. Deep enough to conceal a man.

He went to work, keeping part of his mind tuned to outside noises. He had to pry up another two boards before there was room for him to slide underneath. It was a tight fit, but he made it. Then he had to work the boards down by tugging at the exposed nails. Inch by inch they descended — but they wouldn't fit flatly against the floor. He hoped that shock would preclude any close examination of the room.

As he lay there in the cramped darkness, he thought about the poker game and the desperation with which Simian had played his hand. It had been more than just a game. Each turn of the cards had been almost a matter of life and death. One of the richest men in the world — yet he'd lusted after Nick's measly hundred G's with a lust born not of greed, but of desperation. Perhaps even fear...

Nick's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key being turned in the lock. He listened, muscles tense, poised for action. There was a moment's silence. Then feet scraped violently on the wooden floor. They pounded along a corridor outside and down a flight of stairs. They stumbled briefly, recovered. A door slammed somewhere below.

Nick shoved the floorboards up. He squeezed out from under them and leaped to his feet. The door hit the wall as he flung it open. Then he was at the head of the stairs, going down them with great springing leaps, three at a time, not worrying about the noise because Teddy's loud, panicky voice on the phone would cover it.

"I'm not kiddin' for chrissake, he's gone," the gorilla was shouting into the mouthpiece. "Get some boys over here — fast." He slammed the receiver down, turned, and the bottom half of his face practically fell off. Nick lunged forward from the last step, the fingers of his right hand extended, rigid.

The gorilla's hand stabbed toward his shoulder rig — but faltered in mid-air as N3's fingers plunged into his diaphragm just below the breastbone. Teddy stood there spraddle-legged and limp-armed, sucking for oxygen, and Nick doubled his hand into a fist and hit him. He heard teeth break and the man fell over sideways and hit the floor with a thump and was still. Blood came from his mouth. Nick leaned over him, slid the Smith & Wesson Terrier from his holster and charged out the door.

He was cut off from the highway by the house and footsteps came pounding across the grounds from that direction. A shot slammed past his ear. Nick spun around. He saw the bulky shadow of the boathouse perched on the edge of the breakwater some two hundred yards away. He headed toward it, crouching low and twisting as though he were running across a battlefield.

A man stepped out the front entrance. He was in uniform and carrying a rifle. "Stop him!" a voice behind Nick shouted. The GKI guard started to raise his rifle. The S&W bucked twice in Nick's hand, roaring, and the man spun backwards, the rifle flying from his hands.

The speedboat's engine was still warm. The guard must have just returned from patrol. Nick cast off and pressed the starter button. The engine caught fire at once. He pushed the throttle wide open. The powerful boat roared out of the boathouse and across the inlet. He could see the tiny spouts rising from the calm moonlit surface ahead of him but he couldn't hear the shots.

As he approached the breakwater's narrow entrance, he eased the throttle and gave the wheel a touch to port. The maneuver carried him neatly through. Outside, he swung the wheel all the way over, which placed the breakwater's protective rocks between him and the Simian estate. Then he pushed the throttle wide open again and headed north toward the distant, twinkling lights of Riviera Beach.

"Simian's up to his neck in this," said Nick, "and operating through Reno Tree and the Bali Hai. And there's something else. I think he's broke, and in hock to the Syndicate."

There was a brief silence and then Hawk's voice came through the shortwave speaker in Room 1209 of the Gemini Inn. "You could well be right," he said. "But with a hip-pocket operator of this type, it would take the government accountants ten years to prove it. Simian's financial empire is a labyrinthine mass of complicated transactions..."

"Most of them worthless," Nick finished. "It's a paper empire; I'm convinced of it. The slightest push could topple it."

"That jibes with something that happened here in Washington," said Hawk thoughtfully. "Senator Kenton delivered a slashing attack on Connelly Aviation yesterday afternoon. He spoke of incessant component failures, cost estimates that have tripled and the company's do-nothing attitude about security. And he urged that NASA drop Connelly and use GKI's services on the moon program instead." Hawk paused. "Of course everyone on Capitol Hill knows that Kenton is in the GKI lobby's hip pocket, but his speech has shaken public confidence badly. Connelly stock took a sharp dip on Wall Street yesterday."

"It all figures," said Nick. "Simian wants the Apollo contract desperately. It's a matter of twenty billion dollars. That's the amount he needs, apparently, to refloat his holdings."

Hawk was silent a moment, thinking. Then he said, "There's one thing we've been able to verify. Reno Tree, Major Sollitz, Johnny Hung Fat and Simian all served in the same Japanese POW camp in the Philippines during the war. Tree and the Chinaman were mixed up in Simian's phony ramie-fiber empire, and I'm pretty sure that Sollitz turned traitor in the camp and was later protected, then blackmailed by Simian when he needed him. We still have to check on that."

"And I still have to check on Hung Fat," said Nick. "I'm praying he's a dead end, that he doesn't represent a hookup with Peking. I'll contact you as soon as I find out."

"Better hurry, N3. Time is running out," said Hawk. "Phoenix One, as you know, is scheduled to blast off in twenty-seven hours."

It took the words a few seconds to sink in. "Twenty-seven!" Nick exclaimed. "Fifty-one, isn't it?" But Hawk had already signed off.

"You've lost twenty-four hours somewhere," said Hank Peterson, who was sitting across from Nick, listening. He glanced at his watch. "It's 3:00 p.m. now. You phoned me from Riviera Beach at 2:00 a.m., telling me to pick you up. You'd been gone fifty-one hours at that time."

Those two plane trips,
Nick thought,
that torture session. It had happened there. A whole day lost
...

The phone rang. He picked it up. It was Joy Sun. "Listen," Nick said, "I'm sorry I haven't called you, I've been..."

"You're an agent of some kind," she interrupted tensely, "and I gather you're working for the U.S. Government. So there's something I've got to show you. I'm at work now — at the NASA Medical Center on Merritt Island. Can you get over here right away?"

"If you'll get clearance for me at the gate," said Nick. Dr. Sun said she would and he hung up. "Better put the radio away," he told Peterson, "and wait here for me. I won't be long."

"It's one of the guidance engineers," Dr. Sun said as she led Nick along the antiseptic corridor of the Medical Building. "He was brought in this morning, babbling incoherently about the Phoenix One being fitted with a special device that will place it under outside control the moment it's launched. Everyone here has been treating him like a lunatic, but I thought you should see him, talk to him... just in case."

She opened a door and stood aside. Nick entered. The shades had been drawn and a nurse stood beside the bed, taking the patient's pulse. Nick looked at the man. He was in his forties, prematurely gray. There were marks on the bridge of his nose where a pair of glasses had pinched. The nurse said, "He's resting now. Dr. Dunlap gave him an injection."

Joy Sun said, "That will be all." And as the door closed behind the nurse, she muttered, "Damn," and bent over the man, forcing his eyelids open. The pupils swam in them, unfocused. "He won't be able to tell us anything now."

Nick pushed past her. "This is an emergency." He pressed his finger against a nerve in the man's temple. The pain forced his eyes open. It seemed to momentarily revive him. "What's this about the Phoenix One's guidance system?" Nick demanded.

"My wife..." the man muttered. "They got my... wife and kids... I know they'll die... but I can't go on doing what they want me to..."

The wife and kids again. Nick glanced around the room, saw the wall phone and quickly crossed over to it. He dialed the Gemini Inn's number. There was something Peterson had told him on the way up from Riviera Beach, something about that busload of NASA dependents that had crashed... He'd been so busy trying to figure out Simian's financial situation that he'd only half-listened "Room Twelve-o-nine, please." After a dozen rings the call was shifted to the desk. "Would you check Room Twelve-o-nine," said Nick. "There should be an answer." Anxiety had begun to gnaw at him. He had told Peterson to wait there.

"Is this Mr. Harmon?" The desk clerk used the name Nick had registered under. Nick said it was. "You're looking for Mr. Pierce?" That was Peterson's cover name. Nick said he was. "I'm afraid you just missed him," said the clerk. "He left a few minutes ago with two policemen."

"Green uniforms, white crash helmets?" said Nick, his voice tense.

"That's right. The GKI force. He didn't say when he'd be back. Can I take a?.."

Nick slammed the receiver down.
They had grabbed him.

Through Nick's own carelessness, too. He should have shifted his headquarters after the Candy Sweet angle had blown up in his face. In his haste to follow through, though, he'd forgotten to do it. She had pinpointed its location for the adversary and they had sent a mop-up team. Result: they had Peterson and maybe the radio link to AXE, too.

Joy Sun was watching him. "That was the GKI force you just described," she said. "They've been keeping close tabs on me for the last few days, following me to and from work. I was just talking to them. They want me to stop by headquarters on my way home. They said they have some questions they want to ask me. Should I go? Are they working with you on this case?"

Nick shook his head. "They're on the other side."

Alarm flickered across her features. She pointed to the man in the bed. "I told them about him," she whispered. "I couldn't get you at first, so I called them. I wanted to find out about his wife and children..."

"And they told you that they were all right," Nick finished the sentence for her, feeling the ice suddenly run down his shoulders and into his fingertips. "They said they were at the GKI Medical Institute in Miami and therefore perfectly safe."

"Yes, that's exactly..."

"Now listen carefully," he broke in, and began to describe the large room filled with computers and space testing devices in which he had been tortured. "Have you ever seen, or been in, a place like that?"

"Yes, it's the top floor of the GKI Medical Institute," she said. "The Aerospace Research Section."

He was careful to let nothing show in his face. He didn't want the girl to panic. "You'd better come along with me," he said.

She looked surprised. "Where to?"

"Miami. I think we ought to investigate that Medical Institute. You know your way around inside. You can help me."

"Can we stop by my place first? I want to get some things."