The Doomsday Bag Read online

  That bag.

  The big one.

  The one that physically put a hydrogen bomb to shame.

  I walked out of the Situation Room, taking the same elevator that had brought me and Commander Markham up. The President's Abe was nowhere in sight as I rode the quiet, brown-gilded car down. My last look at Mr. President showed him at the desk, rubbing the weariness, concern, and tension out of his wrinkled brow and troubled eyes. I didn't envy him. I couldn't. He had the whole world on his shoulders, the American one anyway, and the wringer he was going to be put through the rest of that day, starting immediately with the barrage of questions he'd have to answer downstairs, would have been enough for him to commit suicide.

  His Bagman was missing.

  And he was going to have to account for his absence. And do it in such a way that the whole nation wouldn't know. The Panic Button could not be pressed no matter how many frightened, yearning hands reached for it. Security came first, but protecting the public from alarm, worry, and all-out hysteria was the first order of the day.

  The second one was: Drop everything and find the Bagman.

  Before the whole world, yours and mine, blew up.

  The thick file on Leonard Kanin, riding under my left arm and lashed together with a big brass clip, felt like a ton of hot potatoes.

  At a very conservative estimate indeed, I had just been handed the biggest and most important assignment of my sadly checkered career. But as well as I play checkers and manage a round of chess, I was completely in the dark about one thing.

  I didn't know what my next move was.

  Wallet had sent Money out into the Washington streets, looking for a missing bagman. But not for the purposes of making any kind of deposit.

  This was one kind of bagman who didn't carry the usual green coin of the realm.

  He carried chaos, catastrophe, and overkill. And something far more important, far more monumental.

  Peace in our time . . .

  The thin gaunt shade of Neville Chamberlain kept pace with me as I quietly, unobtrusively slipped out of the White House, leaving by a set of doors held open for me, positively on signal and instructions, by a trio of smooth-faced, nontalking, unsmiling Secret Service men. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes dead ahead. Somewhere on the ground floor of the building, a muted roar of voices and a babbling medley of oaths, curses, and footfalls punishing the stairways echoed and reechoed like the noisy third act of a summer-stock play.

  When I hit the green lawns again, stretching out toward Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House resembled a parking lot. Or a General Motors convention. If they were trying to keep the matter hush-hush, they were certainly going about it the wrong way. There was also a lot of uniforms and badges in evidence. Booted, jodhpurred state troopers standing on watch like sentinels. Nobody was flashing any hardware, though. Which was something of a help and a blessing. Nothing makes your average citizen get the wind up like a tommy gun or pistol drawn and ready for bear. Still, it was a major sight to see even for blase, it-happens-every-day Washington, D.C.

  The temperature had dropped sharply but it was as sticky as ever. Once out of the cooling environs of the White House itself, the heat smacked you right in the face. The promise of rain didn't seem like such a wild, weird notion anymore. There was mist and moisture in the air. I checked my watch. It read a quarter to three. The Bagman had been missing nearly a full two hours. Two hours. More than enough time to shake the civilized world to its very foundations. Where the hell could he have gotten to and what had happened to him?

  At 2:45 by the D.C. clocks that sultry afternoon, I just didn't know.

  Nobody else did, either.

  Not even Vice-President Raymond Oatley whose headquarters were the Executive Office Building, within walking distance of the White House, just across the green lawns. The Veep with the face of a hawk but the political soul of a dove. Like the Chief had said, Oatley would be chirping "I told you so!" from here on out.

  Beyond the iron fence which bordered the White House, I walked to the corner where Pennsylvania Avenue meets Seventeenth Street. The weather had gotten worse, angry clouds chasing each other in a darkening sky. Overhead, a jetliner thundered, leveling off in a glide pattern which would bring it smoothly into Washington National Airport. The Executive Office Building loomed starkly in the overcast afternoon. It was ablaze with lights, as if the night were coming on. Maybe it was. Maybe the lights ought to go on all over the world.

  An east-bound taxicab crawled into view and I hailed it. The driver pulled over with practiced skill and I got in. I gave him my destination. The Carlton, one of D.C.'s best hotels. Congressman Charles Cornell's request of my presence at his hearings had been a first-class accommodation all the way. I was living high on the hog, having left all of my New York business affairs in the capable sepia hands of one Melissa Mercer, secretary without peer.

  In the rear window of the cab, I took a last look at the White House. The sight was not heartwarming. The steady flow of traffic had seen no letup. You'd have thought the place was going under the auctioneer's hammer and the whole city's population was rushing down to pick up a bargain.

  I gripped Leonard Kanin's manila file folder and tried to think of something else.

  My mood, like the weather, was rotten.

  What's in a Dossier?

  "Excuse me, mister. Are you anybody official?"

  I came down out of the clouds. The cab driver, still with half an eye on the road, had flung me the question, accompanying it with a suspicious glance at his rear-view mirror. I saw a tough, rugged face with a long scar that ran down from the right eye to the jawline like an extra wrinkle. Despite the relic of an old injury, the face was pleasantly handsome.

  "Come again?"

  He shook his head, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

  "We're being followed. Give a look."

  I looked. Close behind our rear, at a steady fifty yards, and looking like it was ready to tailgate us, was a sedate black sedan. A Plymouth. Oregon license plates. I could see two men crowding the front seat, but I coudn't make out their faces. Both men wore slouchy dark fedoras.

  I thought about that and turned back to the driver. He was waiting for my answer. There was a glass plate on the passenger side of his seat. It showed the same pleasant face and the scar was barely visible. The permit to drive a cab gave his registration number and his name. Thomas Miflow. A stranger to cabs could have been forgiven if he thought the name was Miflow Thomas.

  "You sure?" I asked.

  "Listen," he snorted. "I've been kicking this machine around ever since I left Andrews Air Force Base ten years ago. That heap has been with us since we left Seventeenth Street. Came out of a driveway on K. Now you tell me if you're FBI or CIA or what. I don't want to get into any kind of trouble—"

  "Lose them," I said. "And I'll show you something."

  "No deal. Show me first."

  I moved fast. The dark sedan was boring down and Thomas Miflow, despite his hesitation, had stepped on the gas to maintain the fifty yards' distance. Hurriedly, I unearthed the special card the Chief had been talking about. It was pinned to the thick sheaf of information on Leonard Kanin. A plasticized, laminated blue card that bore my own photo and the very famous signature. Like the Chief had said, the card practically gave me the keys to the Treasury Building. Miflow cast a quick glance at it, studied it for a full second, and swung his eyes back to the road. He let out a short, almost happy laugh.

  "A VIP. Hot damn. Hang on, you little old Man from U.N.C.L.E., you. Those suckers haven't got a prayer."

  I wasn't listening anymore. I had turned to the window, making myself scarce by crowding one corner as much as possible. I slipped my .45 out of its leather bed and rested it easily on my right knee. Miflow was as good as his promise. The taxi suddenly seemed to receive a booster propulsion shot and literally rocketed off the launching pad. In five seconds flat, the Plymouth fell back, growing smaller in the glass. And then there was no m
istake about Miflow's conclusion. There was a roar and whine of speed and the dark sedan shot forward again, almost panicking to match the startled behavior of its driver.

  The highway, wide and five-laned, was a broad artery feeding into the heart of downtown D.C., past the monuments, the Senate Building, Union Station, the Supreme Court Building, and all the other historic sights that made The Mall such a land of hallowed memory. Shrinesville, U.S.A. But there was nothing scented or nostalgic in the gray angry skies nor the solid mass of vehicles moving east and west along Miflow's route. I had no time to think except the one outstandingly bitter notion that Washington gave a man who earned his living as a private investigator some very bad habits. I had been so engulfed and enbalmed in the legends of Security and Secret Service and FBI, I had lapsed into careless habits. In crowded, bustling Manhattan, I would have spotted a car tail in less time than it takes to turn an ignition key. Out here, I had acted the typical gawking tourist, wrapped up in the supremacy of the Government's law-enforcement agencies.

  Miflow tooled the car, wheeling expertly and deftly between a lumbering tow truck in the left lane and a desultory Ford station wagon in the right. He shot down the middle like a released catapult, patently enjoying himself. But the Plymouth was no Johnny-come-lately to high-speed driving, either. He seemed to be gaining steadily.

  The speed-limit signs along the shoulders all said that doing more than sixty was breaking the law. Miflow had pushed the cab to sixty-five.

  I expected the keening siren of a state trooper car any moment now. That or the shrill sputter of a motorcycle patrolman. The radar signals must be advertising Miflow's excesses all along the line. Not that I cared. If we got a ticket, the Plymouth would, too, and I just might get some idea as to why I had been followed from the White House. Me. Whom hardly nobody knew. Who couldn't be connected with anything official, other than Congressman Cornell's hearings.

  Miflow cursed.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Can't shake them. Not until we hit the downtown section. This is too open and I can't—oh-oh!"

  I didn't have to ask him why he had suddenly stopped explaining. It was all too obvious. Like a scene from a fantasy. In the rear window we could both see the Plymouth suddenly bursting forward. It was uncanny, really. As if somewhere under that dark hood lay a supercharged motor, just waiting to open up at the right moment. Miflow slammed his accelerator to the floorboards, and the speedometer climbed magically to 70, 80, and hovered at 90. But it was no use. The Plymouth, mysteriously and inexorably, was closing the distance between bumpers. Doing over 100, at the very least.

  "What do they want?" Miflow suddenly cried out in a frightened voice. "They won't do anything silly, will they—?"

  I didn't know. I could only guess.

  And the time had come for taking long shots. If I was wrong, I'd apologize later. I brought the .45 up, knocked the glass out of one corner of his rear window, and sighted the nose of the weapon at the Plymouth. It loomed in the frame now. Big, dark, somehow awesome in its inexorable plunge toward us. All the other vehicles in its immediate vicinity had dropped back like tired runners or drivers who didn't want to compete anymore. Car horns blasted the roaring medley of motors. Up ahead, oncoming cars began to pull to one side, veering sharply to get out of the way. Miflow cursed again, the wheel riveted between his fingers like it was part of him.

  For one split second, the tableau held. Miflow straining the cab to get away, the Plymouth coming on, getting bigger and bigger. I saw the faces of the two men in the front. Dim, expressionless faces. Heavily tanned or dyed, like makeup jobs. There was no time for anything else. I aimed the .45 at the right front tire and squeezed off a shot. The big gobbling noise of the gun was almost lost in the thunder of racing engines.

  I hadn't reckoned on the Plymouth driver.

  The vehicle literally right-angled out of the way, cutting sharply abreast of us with a fresh burst of speed. My slug lost itself somewhere on the front fender wall, spanging off harmlessly. And then everything went too fast. And Thomas Miflow, performing like a Stirling Moss with a '69 Dodge motor, tried to pour on the gas and get over to one side without killing the drivers in the next lane. It was a game try and had guts written all over it. But he was too late. The Plymouth was thundering alongside of us, just abreast, door to door, driver to driver. I saw the glint of the big double-barreled pump gun thrusting from the side window and there was nothing I could do.

  Except duck. There was no time for a shot. Lucky or otherwise.

  "Miflow!" I screamed. "Down!"

  I'll never know whether he heard me or not. The world opened up in a nightmare of noise, shock, and volleying thunder. There was a cataclysmic belch of orange flame, exploding cordite, and white-hot violence. Thomas Miflow screamed. Just once. The last sound a man can possibly make. And the cab screeched like a terrified woman, lurched crazily and careened wildly across the next lane, rushing driverless to destruction. The Plymouth zoomed on by, Oregon license plates glowing dully, before it disappeared somewhere up ahead in the maze of traffic. Now I heard the high keen of a police siren. Now I felt the stunning violence of the thunderous assault in my ears. Now I knew the world was mad, indeed. I must have been half out of my head at that precise moment.

  I reached over the back seat, clawing for the empty wheel, all too conscious of the destroyed face, head, and shoulders of the poor innocent named Thomas Miflow. He was rammed like a battered rag doll toward the other side of his vehicle. Red blood, Miflow's blood, and bits and shreds and pieces of something I didn't want to identify had rained around the front seat of the cab like somebody had been very careless with overly ripe fruit. Dumbly, in a daze of self-preservation, the .45 forgotten, the precise second of this emergency all, I fought the wheel, trying to steer. Trying to keep the cab from hurtling into the retaining wall on the left side of the highway. I couldn't reach the brake. There wasn't time. But I could reach the ignition key. I turned it off, feeling the sticky wet blood staining my fingers, scalding them. Behind me, there was a concerted pandemonium of car horns blending in one huge cacophonous caterwauling. That and the damned sirens which always seem to sound too late for the Thomas Miflows of this cockeyed caravan.

  I can't say how I did it but I did it. What man can really tell you, word for word, deed for deed, exactly how he gets out of a mess that has terror, violence, and sudden death written all over it?

  Somehow I got into that deadly front seat. Somehow I got around Miflow's ravaged corpse, found the brake pedal and pumped it like a maniac. With no gas flowing, the cab was relatively easy to halt. Especially with every motorist out for a drive that ghastly gray day giving me a wide berth and continuing on to their destinations with little more than a passing glance. Very few people help anybody else on a highway. They leave it to the cops. The Good Samaritan is a myth created by Bible-makers.

  A different era, a different kind of civilization.

  The cab rocked to a mad stop, wheels half up the incline of the stone retaining wall. I collapsed against the wheel. I could hear my heart beating now in a sudden unique stillness. I didn't look at Thomas Miflow. I couldn't. I had cost him everything, including his life. He had died like an innocent bystander. Smashed by twin blasting explosions of a pump gun. The automatic kind that can wipe out a roomful of men if they're unlucky enough to be standing in the line of fire.

  The shrieking sirens drew closer. The damned noise was enough to make me want to bite through my tongue. My head was pounding, my blood was roaring, red and white corpuscles doing a berserk waltz of attrition. And I was smack in the middle of a dilemma that would need an army of investigative geniuses to bail me out. I was only one man. A good one I will be the first to admit, but how good are you when your cab driver can be blasted out of existence right under your very intelligent nose?

  When I started to smell him, that unmistakably gory stench of mutilation and death, I batted the side door of the cab open and tumbled out. And I counted the terrible odds
once again. I was a special investigator, a spy for Mr. President.

  The souped-up Plymouth was gone.

  Miflow, Thomas, cab driver with an unusual scar and an eye for trailing vehicles, was dead.

  I, of course, was supposed to be dead, too.

  I retrieved my .45 from the back seat, reholstered it, and picked up the thick manila file folder on Leonard Kanin. I dug a cigarette out of my crumpled pack of Camels and lit one up. My hand was trembling. Doing a palsied jig of delayed shock. The nervous system can only take so much.

  I took a deep, long grateful lungful of potential cancer. Cancer, hell. The gray gloomy skies were even darker now. And all around me, the smooth, uniformed minions of the law began to close in. I saw them coming and waited. They rushed across the dividing lines of the highway, coming on a dead run. Alarm and emergency were written all over their movements. I leaned against the left-front fender of Thomas Miflow's cab. It was streamlined, blending into the smooth exterior design. I exhaled a high blue cloud of smoke. It was good to be alive.

  Even in a dark dismal D.C. with a bagman missing and the enemy all up in arms and alerted against the forces of good. Me. A little old private eye from New York.

  The cops were almost upon me, blue state trooper uniforms looking bright in the overcast day.

  I waited for them.

  I wasn't going anyplace.

  The Washington coppers are no different from any other coppers the world over. I showed them my P.I. card, my ID cards, my Diners' Club card, and last but not least, the very latest in carte blanches, the President's blue laminated pass. But they weren't rubes or hicks. They had a stalled taxicab on their hands with a blasted corpse in the front seat and a stranger from Manhattan in their midst. After all the hemming and hawing was over, two square-jawed Captain Marvel types who looked great in their trooper uniforms, made some radio calls from a white and green squad car. Whatever instructions they received, they didn't tell me. They confiscated my papers, cards, and .45 and hustled me down to Tenth Street and Constitution Avenue. The Justice Department Building. I was obviously too big and odd a fish to land in the local hoosegow. They wanted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to give me a clean bill of health. In a strange streak of charity, they let me hang on to Kanin's dossier.