Goodbye California - Alistair [108]
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Jeff looked at him in something close to horror but Ryder had eyes only for LeWinter. ‘Then I’ll have nothing on my conscience if you die and there won’t be a mark on you when the mortuary wagon comes to collect you. Was it the same man?’
‘Yes.’ A barely audible whisper.
‘The same man as called from Bakersfield?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ryder half-lifted his gun. LeWinter looked at him in defeat and despair and repeated: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Jeff spoke for the first time and his voice was urgent. ‘He doesn’t know.’
‘I believe him.’ Ryder hadn’t looked away from LeWinter. ‘Describe this man.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Or won’t?’
‘He wore a hood. Before God, he wore a hood.’
‘If Donahure got ten thousand dollars, then you got a lot more. Probably a great deal more. Give him a receipt?’
‘No.’ LeWinter shuddered. ‘Just said if I would break my word he would break my back. He could have done it too. Biggest man I ever saw.’
‘Ah!’ Ryder paused, seemed to relax, smiled briefly and went on, far from encouragingly: ‘He could still come and do it. Look at all the trouble it would save the law and the prison hospital.’ He produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them round LeWinter’s wrists.
The judge’s voice was weak and lacked conviction. ‘You have no arrest warrant.’
‘Don’t be simple-minded and don’t make me laugh. I don’t want any vertebrae snapping. I don’t want you getting on the wrong phone. I don’t want any escape attempt. And I don’t want any suicide.’ He looked at the photograph he still held. I’ll be a long time forgetting. I want to see you rot in San Quentin.’ He led him towards the door, stopped and looked at Parker and Jeff. ‘Observe, if you will. I never laid a finger on him.’
Jeff said: ‘Major Dunne will never believe it. Neither do I.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘You used us!’ Burnett’s face was white and bitter and he was shaking with such uncontrollable anger that his Glenfiddich was slopping over on to the floor of Morro’s study, a shocking waste of which he was uncharacteristically oblivious. ‘You double-crossed us. You evil, wicked bastard! A beautiful job, wasn’t it, the way you spliced together our recordings and your own recording?’
Morro raised an admonitory finger. ‘Come now, Professor. This helps no one. You really must learn to control yourself.’
‘Why the hell should he?’ Schmidt’s fury was as great as Burnett’s, but he had it under better control. All five physicists were there, together with Morro, Dubois and two guards. ‘We’re not thinking just about our good names, our reputations. We’re thinking about lives, maybe thousands of them, and if those lives are lost we’re going to be held responsible. Morally at least. Every viewer, every listener, every reader in the State is going to be convinced that the hydrogen device you left off the coast is in the one-and-a-half range. We know damn well it’s in the three-and-a-half. But because people will believe – they can’t help believing – that it was all part of the same recording they’re going to imagine that what you said was said with our tacit approval. You – you monster! Why did you do it?’
‘Effect.’ Morro was unruffled. ‘Very elementary psychology. The detonation of this three-and-a-half megaton device is going to have rather spectacular consequences, and I want people to say to themselves: if this is the effect of a mere one-and-a-half megaton what in the name of heaven will the cataclysmic effects of thirty-five megatons be like? It will lend persuasive weights to my demands, don’t you think? In the climate of terror all things are possible.’
‘I can believe anything of you,’ Burnett said. He looked at the shattered wreck of what had once been Willi Aachen. ‘Anything. Even that you are prepared to put thousands of lives at risk in order to achieve a psychological effect. You can have no idea what this tsunamai will be like, what height it will reach, whether or not the Newport-Inglewood