The Smuggled Atom Bomb

The three days remaining before Christmas Duff devoted to a survey of Miami-Dade delivery points in and near Manhattan. It was an exhausting and fruitless effort. He posed, according to the nature of each firm, as a potential buyer, shipper, customer or job seeker. He learned nothing and spent the lowest Christmas in his life — alone at his hotel, unable to engage even in his vain researches because every place in the city was closed. He thought of the Yateses all day and of the work his foolish venture had added to their slim yuletide.

Then, on the day after Christmas, his patient checking of the list Eleanor had contrived to get for him led to a warehouse located in the downtown area of Manhattan, three blocks from Broadway, near Wall Street. There was nothing remarkable about the warehouse. In fact, it was the least provocative of any of the places he had visited, inasmuch as he was able to see, by peering through a very dirty window in the early twilight, that the mammoth interior was absolutely empty. Duff would have gone back to his hotel, then and there, tired, defeated, shamed by his absurd efforts, if he had not heard, while he was still peering, the sound of a door closing somewhere. An empty building is unsuspicious; an empty building with someone moving about inside it is different.

Duff crossed the street and fixed his eye on the vast brick structure overtowered on both sides by taller buildings which were as grimy. He buttoned his coat under his chin. He crouched in a doorway.

It began to rain. The rain brought quick darkness, shiny streets, spattering traffic and a glitter of light on the cobblestone pavement. At last a little door cut in the truck entrance of the warehouse opened slowly. A man came out. One of the tallest men Duff had ever seen in his life — a man proportionately broad.

The misery, the despair, the frustrations of past weeks disappeared in the first sharp breath Duff drew. For this huge specter against the night was like an abrupt light in a long and dreadful darkness. The man looked up the street, down the street and across the street.

He flipped up his coat collar and strode toward Broadway.

With surging excitement, Duff followed. He was sure it would be simple to do. The man towered above the other pedestrians; he would stand out a block away, even at night.

People, furthermore, looked up at him in sudden astonishment and made extra way for him, which added to the ease of pursuit. On a city street, furthermore, Duff felt that his own clumsiness would be no handicap; there was noise and confusion everywhere.

But what Duff hadn’t thought of soon happened. The huge man stopped walking abruptly. Duff dived into a doorway. The man again looked up the street, down the street and across it, as he stood at the curb. He had that habit; evidently, he seemed to suspect or fear he might be followed. Quite suddenly, then, he too keys from his coat pocket, bent, opened the door of a parked car, climbed in, switched on its lights and drove into the traffic stream.

Duff searched so wildly for a cab in which to follow that he neglected to notice the license number of the car. There wasn’t an empty cab in sight. When Duff thought of the number, the big man’s car had disappeared.

He was ashamed of his error. But now he was no longer without resources. He would have to find a hardware store that was still open, and make certain purchases. He would have to learn, after that, the timing of the watchman’s rounds, if the empty warehouse was watched at all. It took him an hour to locate a store. He gave half an hour to watching the warehouse. No man seemed on duty there. He crossed the street in a hard, icy rain — a rain now welcome — and applied himself to the lock on the small warehouse door. It was difficult and he was forced, whenever a pedestrian passed, to exhibit a bunch of keys and pretend he was having trouble finding the right one. Nobody stopped him or questioned him, and eventually the door opened. He went in, turning on a flashlight as he did so.

He hurried through an office that showed, by closed roll-top desks and gritty furnishings, long disuse. Another door led to the main floor of the place. A ramp in the rear sloped up through cavernous emptiness to a floor above. Another like the first rose to the top floor.

Afraid that there might be a partitioned room within-a-room on the two upper floors, Duff climbed both ramps with his flashlight switched off. He found that in the whole building there was nothing — nothing but over-all grime and rubbish in the corners, nothing but spiderwebs and a scuttle of rats somewhere in the walls, nothing but gleaming specks on the ground floor of rock particles such as constitute the underlying base of Manhattan and stick to wheels of vehicles— nothing but hollow silence, the dusty odor of desertion and the dim-heard rumble of the great city outside.