The Smuggled Atom Bomb

Scotty smiled sympathetically and thought a moment. “I was going to fly up home for the holidays,” he said. “Come back after, with the family, as far as Palm Beach. But I could drive. We could. We could stop off at the various cities.”

The Yates family was surprised and disappointed by Duff’s sudden announcement that he was going home for the holidays. It was a very hard thing to do, and he almost hated himself for his decision. Eleanor took the news especially badly. She accused him of deserting. She reminded him that he wouldn’t see her as Orange Bowl Queen. And she burst into tears. But he stuck to his story that he was going to Indiana to visit his family.

Even Indigo Stacey, at whose home he spent an evening playing bridge — the one game in which he was expert — expressed disappointment. She told him that she had developed a “large passion” for him and that the approaching holidays would be the “longest and dullest in years” without him.

He felt, therefore, very much like a fugitive when, carrying a big, beat-up cheap suitcase, he took the bus, ostensibly to the train. Actually, at the station, he was picked up furtively by Scotty Smythe.

In Washington they put up at a second-class hotel, donned old clothes and began “job hunting” at the regular delivery places of the Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company.

These were stores, markets, wholesale houses and other trucking firms. There seemed to be nothing suspicious about any.

“Trouble is,” Scotty said at supper that night, “we don’t know what we’re looking for.

We do know it wouldn’t be anything conspicuous. To locate a receiver of the freight we believe is moving, evidently might take fifty guys a month. And I’ve got to show up at home pretty soon. I got one idea.”

“What?” Duff was leg-weary, insult-weary, discouraged.

“General Baines. Three stars. Friend of my old man. Has something to do with Military Intelligence. Maybe the FBI didn’t see your tale as anything but hallucination. The Army boys might be different.”

“We could try,” Duff agreed.

They tried the next morning. The general was located by phone in his office in the Pentagon Building. He told Scotty that he was “right busy.” He agreed, however, that, since the matter “involved national security;” he could spare a few minutes.

So Duff and Scotty wound their way through the Pentagon labyrinths, found the outer office, waited half an hour, and at length stood face to face with a uniformed, silver-haired, paternal-looking officer who worked in an atmosphere of maps, papers, flags and autographed portraits of great men. He was cordial and quiet.

The general’s reaction to the narrative was familiar to Duff; it angered Scotty. When the interview was ended, when the two young men were out in the winding, sloping corridors again, Scotty said enragedly, “He thought it was a gag! Tried to be polite! Tried to shoo us out, like a couple of flies at a picnic! Got positively humiliated when we kept talking!

Annoyed too.”

Duff shrugged. “That’s how the G-men felt about it!”

“What a country! Easy pickings for an enemy!”

Neither Duff nor Scotty had any way of knowing that that the moment after they had left General Baines’ office, he had picked up his phone, switched to a special line, and said,

“Chief of Staff. It’s an emergency call.”

The two self-appointed investigators reached Manhattan in an aggrieved mood.

Ordinarily, the elegance of the modernistic, duplex Smythe penthouse would have awed Duff. The warmth with which he was received by Scotty’s white-haired, aristocratic-looking mother would only partially have put him at ease. The amiability of Scotty’s father would have helped. On the other hand, the cool though well-mannered greeting of Scotty’s sisters — Adelaide, home from Sweet Briar, and Melinda, back from Vassar— would have frightened him. As things were, however, he was so downcast about the journey that the skyline view from the picture window had no impact for him. Even the palatial surroundings, the silver and damask at dinner, the dressed and dated, orchid-wearing sisters scratched only the surface of his mind. Inner suffering enabled him to appear more poised than he would otherwise have been.

Duff spent a night at the Smythe residence, and then put up at a small, midtown hotel.

Scotty had wanted him to remain in his home, but Duff had been too embarrassed for that, too aware that he lacked the clothes, even the temperament, and above all the funds for the round of entertainment on the Smythe holiday schedule. His hotel bill was to be paid by money which Scotty wanted to “give to the cause” and which Duff insisted he would only borrow.