Kitabı oku: «The Golden Gate»

ONE

The operation had to be executed with a surgically military precision marked with a meticulousness that matched, in degree if not in scope, the Allied landings in wartime Europe. It was. The preparations had to be made in total stealth and secrecy. They were. A split-second co-ordination had to be achieved. It was. All the men had to be rehearsed and trained, over and over again until they played their parts perfectly and automatically. They were so trained. Every eventuality, every possible departure from the planned campaign had to be catered for. It was. And their confidence in their ability to carry out their plan, irrespective of reversals and departures from the norm, had to be total. It was.

Confidence was a quality exuded by their leader, Peter Branson. Branson was thirty-eight years old, just under six feet tall, strongly built, with black hair, pleasant features, lips that were curved in an almost perpetual smile and light blue eyes that had forgotten how to smile many years ago. He was dressed in a policeman’s uniform but he was not a policeman. Neither was any of the eleven men with them in that disused trucker’s garage not far from the banks of Lake Merced, halfway between Daly City to the south and San Francisco to the north, although three were attired in the same uniform as Branson.

The single vehicle there looked sadly out of place in what was, in effect, nothing more than an open-ended shed. It was a bus, but barely, by normal standards, qualified for the term. It was an opulently gleaming monster which above shoulder level was composed, except for the stainless-steel crossover struts, entirely of slightly tinted glass. There was no regular seating as such. There were about thirty swivel chairs, anchored to the floor but scattered seemingly at random, with deep armrests and aircraft-type swing-out dining-tables housed in each armrest. Towards the rear there was a cloakroom and a remarkably well-stocked bar. Beyond that there was a rear observation deck, the floor of which had for the moment been removed to reveal the cavernous baggage department. This was filled to near capacity but not with baggage. This enormous storage space, seven and a half feet wide by the same in length, held, among other things, two petrol-driven electric generators, two twenty-inch searchlights, a variety of smaller ones, two very peculiar-looking missile-like weapons with mounting tripods, machine-pistols, a large crated unmarked wooden box, four smaller wooden boxes, and a variety of other items of material, conspicuous among which were large coils of rope. Branson’s men were still loading.

The coach, one of only six ever made, had cost Branson ninety thousand dollars: for the purposes for which he intended to use it, he considered this figure a trifling investment. He was buying the coach, he had told the Detroit firm, as an agent for a publicity-shy millionaire, who was also an eccentric who wanted it painted yellow. And yellow it had been when it was delivered: it was now a gleaming, translucent white.

Two of the remaining five coaches had been bought by genuine and extrovert millionaires, both of whom intended them for luxurious, personal vacation travel. Both buses had rear ramps to accommodate their mini-cars. Both, presumably, would rest for about fifty weeks a year in their specially built garages.

The other three buses had been bought by the Government.

The dawn was not yet in the sky.

The other three white buses were in a garage in downtown San Francisco. The big sliding doors were closed and bolted. In a canvas chair in a corner a man in plain clothes, a sawn-off riot gun held on his lap by flaccid hands, slept peacefully. He had been dozing when the two intruders arrived and was now blissfully unaware that he had sunk into an even deeper sleep because he’d inhaled the single-second squirt from the gas gun without being aware of the fact. He would wake up within the hour almost equally unaware of what had happened and would be extremely unlikely to admit to his superiors that his vigilance had been a degree less than eternal.

The three buses looked indistinguishable from Branson’s, at least externally, although the centre one was markedly different in two respects, one visible, the other not. It weighed two tons more than its companions, for bullet-proof glass is a great deal heavier than ordinary plate glass, and those panoramic buses had an enormous glass area. And the interior of the coach was nothing less than a sybarite’s dream, which was no less than what one would expect for the private transportation of the country’s Chief Executive.

The Presidential coach had two huge facing sofas, so deep, so soft and so comfortable that the overweight man possessed of prudent foresight would have thought twice about ensconcing himself in either of them for regaining the vertical would have called for an apoplectic amount of will power or the use of a crane. There were four armchairs constructed along the same treacherously voluptuous lines. And that, in the way of seating accommodation, was that. There were cunningly concealed spigots for ice-water, scattered copper coffee tables and gleaming goldplated vases awaiting their daily consignment of fresh flowers. Behind this section were the washroom and the bar, a bar whose capacious refrigerators, in this particular and unusual instance, were stocked largely with fruit juices and soft drinks in deference to the customs of the President’s guests of honour, who were Arabs and Muslims.

Beyond this again, in a glassed-in compartment that extended the full width of the bus, was the communications centre, a maze of miniaturized electronic systems which was constantly manned whenever the President was aboard. It was said that this installation had cost considerably more than the coach itself. Besides incorporating a radio telephone system that could reach any place in the world, it had a small row of differently coloured buttons in a glass case which could be removed only with the aid of a special key. There were five such buttons. To press the first brought instant contact with the White House in Washington: the second was for the Pentagon: the third was for the airborne Strategic Air Command: the fourth was for Moscow and the fifth for London. Apart from the necessity of being in touch with his armed forces all the time, the President was an acute sufferer from telephonitis, even to the extent of an internal phone connecting him with his habitual seat on the bus and the communications compartment at the rear.

But it was not in this coach that the intruders were interested but in the one standing to its left. They entered by the front door and immediately removed a metal plate by the driver’s seat. One of the men shone a torch downwards, appeared to locate what he wanted almost immediately, reached up and took from his companion something that looked like a polythene bag of putty to which there was attached a metal cylinder not more than three inches long and one in diameter. This he securely bound to a metal strut with adhesive tape. He seemed to know what he was doing – which he did, for the lean and cadaverous Reston was an explosives expert of some note.

They moved to the rear and went behind the bar. Reston climbed on to a stool, slid back an overhead cupboard door and looked at the liquor contents. Whatever the camp-followers in the Presidential motorcade were going to suffer from, it clearly wasn’t going to be thirst. There were two rows of vertically stacked bottles, the first ten to the left, five in each row, being bourbon and scotch. Reston stooped and examined the upside-down optics beneath the cupboard and saw that the bottles that interested him in the cupboard were duplicated in the ones below and that those were all full. It seemed unlikely that anyone was going to be interested in the contents of the cupboard for some little time to come.

Reston removed the ten bottles from their circular retaining holes in the cupboard and handed them down to his companion who stacked five of them on the counter and placed the other five in a canvas bag which had evidently been brought along for this purpose, then handed Reston a rather awkward piece of equipment which consisted of three parts: a small cylinder similar to the one that had been fitted forwards, a beehive-shaped device, no more than two inches high and the same in diameter, and a device which looked very like a car fire extinguisher, with the notable exception that it had a plastic head. Both this and the beehive were attached to the cylinder by wires.

The beehive had a rubber sucker at its base but Reston did not seem to have any great faith in suckers for he produced a tube of quick-acting glue with which he liberally besmeared the base of the beehive. This done he pressed it firmly against the forward-facing side of the cupboard, taped it securely to the large and small cylinders and then taped the three to the inner row of circular holes which retained the bottles. He replaced the five bottles in front. The device was completely hidden. He slid shut the door, replaced the stool and left the bus with his companion. The guard still slept peacefully. The two men left by the side door by which they had entered and locked it behind them. Reston produced a walkie-talkie. He said: ‘PI?’

The amplified voice came through clearly on the fascia-mounted speaker in the bus in the garage north of Daly City. Branson made a switch.

‘Yes?’

‘Okay’

‘Good.’ There was no elation in Branson’s voice and no reason why there should have been: with six weeks of solid preparation behind him he would have been astonished if anything should have gone wrong. ‘You and Mack get back to the apartment. Wait.’

Johnson and Bradley were curiously alike, good-looking, in their early thirties, almost identical in build and both with blond hair. They also bore a striking resemblance, both in build and coloration, to the two men, newly wakened from sleep, who were propped up in the two beds in the hotel room, gazing at them with an understandable mixture of astonishment and outrage. One of them said: ‘Who the hell are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing here?’

‘Kindly modulate your voice and mind your language,’ Johnson said. ‘It ill becomes a naval air officer. Who we are doesn’t matter. We’re here because we require a change of clothes.’ He looked at the Beretta he was holding and touched the silencer with his left forefinger. ‘I don’t have to tell you what those things are.’

He didn’t have to tell them what those things were. There was a cold calm professionalism, a chilling surety about Johnson and Bradley that discouraged freedom of speech and inhibited even the very thought of action. While Johnson stood there, gun dangling in apparent negligence by his side, Bradley opened the valise they had brought with them, produced a length of thin rope and trussed up the two men with a speed and efficiency that indicated a long or intensive experience of such matters. When he had finished Johnson opened a cupboard, produced two suits, handed one to Bradley and said: ‘Try them for size.’

Not only were the suits an almost perfect fit but so also were the hats. Johnson would have been surprised if they had been otherwise: Branson, that most meticulous of planners, almost never missed a trick.

Bradley surveyed himself in a full-length mirror. He said sadly: ‘I should have stayed on the other side of the law. The uniform of a Lieutenant in the US Naval Air Arm suits me very well indeed. Not that you look too bad yourself.’

One of the bound men said: ‘Why do you want those uniforms?’

‘I thought naval helicopter pilots were intelligent.’

The man stared at him. ‘Jesus! You don’t mean to stand there and tell us -’

‘Yes. And we’ve both probably flown Sikorskys a damned sight more than either of you.’

‘But uniforms? Why steal our uniforms? There’s no trick in getting those made. Why do you -’

‘We’re parsimonious. Sure, we could get them made. But what we can’t get made are the documentation you carry about with you – identifications, licences, the lot.’ He patted the pockets of his uniform. ‘They’re not here. Where?’

The other bound man said: ‘Go to hell.’ He looked as if he meant it, too.

Johnson was mild. ‘This is off-season for heroes. Where?’

The other man said: ‘Not here. The Navy regard those as classified documents. They have to be deposited in the manager’s safe.’

Johnson sighed. Oh, dear. Why make it difficult? We had a young lady stake-out in an armchair by the receptionist’s last evening. Redhead. Beautiful. You may recall.’ The two bound men exchanged the briefest of glances: it was quite clear that they did recall. ‘She’d go on oath in a witness stand that neither of you deposited anything.’ He smiled in a wintry fashion. ‘A witness stand in court may be the last place on earth she’d want to go near, but if she says it’s no deposit, it’s no deposit. Let’s not be silly. Three things you can do. Tell us. Have your mouths taped and after a little persuasion tell us. Or, if those don’t work, we just search. You watch. If you’re conscious, that is.’

‘You going to kill us?’

‘What on earth for?’ Bradley’s surprise was genuine.

‘We can identify you.’

‘You’ll never see us again.’

‘We can identify the girl.’

‘Not when she removes her red wig, you can’t.’ He dug into the valise and came up with a pair of pliers. He had about him an air of gentle resignation. ‘Time’s a-wasting. Tape them up.’

Both bound men looked at each other. One shook his head, the other sighed. One smiled, almost ruefully: ‘It does seem a gesture of useless defiance – and I don’t want my good looks spoilt. Under the mattresses. At the foot.’

Under the mattresses they were. Johnson and Bradley flicked over the leaves of the two wallets, looked at each other, nodded, extracted the not inconsiderable dollar billfolds in each wallet and placed those by the bedside tables. One man said: ‘Couple of crazy crooks you are.’

Johnson said: ‘Maybe you’ll be needing that more than us pretty soon.’ He extracted money from his newly discarded suit and placed it in his uniform while Bradley did the same. Our suits you can have. Unthinkable for US officers to be running around the city in their striped underpants. And now, I’m afraid, we have to tape you.’ He reached into the valise.

One man, a quick mixture of suspicion and apprehension in his eyes, tried, vainly, to sit up in bed. ‘I thought you said -’

‘Look, if we wanted to kill you, the noise from those silenced guns wouldn’t even be heard in the corridor outside. Think we want you to start hollering the place down the moment we step outside that door? Besides, it would upset the neighbours.’

After they were taped Johnson said: ‘And, of course, we don’t want to have you jumping and wriggling around and making banging noises on the floor or walls. I’m afraid we can’t have any bangs in the next couple of hours or so. Sorry.’ He stooped, retrieved what looked like an aerosol can from the valise, and squirted it briefly in the faces of both bound men. They left, hanging up the no disturb notice outside. Johnson double-locked the door, produced his pliers, leaned on the key and snapped it leaving the head jammed in the lock.

Downstairs, they approached the clerk at reception, a cheerful youngster who gave a cheerful good morning.

Johnson said: ‘You weren’t on last night?’

‘No, sir. The management wouldn’t believe it but even a desk clerk requires a little sleep now and again.’ He looked at them with interest. ‘No offence, but aren’t you the two gentlemen who’re going to ride herd on the President this morning?’

Johnson smiled. ‘I’m not sure if the President would care to have you put it quite that way, but yes. It’s no secret. We phoned for an alarm call last night. Ashbridge and Martinez. Was it recorded?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The clerk put his pen through the names.

‘Now, we’ve left one or two – ah – naval things in our room that we really shouldn’t have done. Will you make certain that no one goes near our room until we return? Three hours, about.’

‘You can depend on me, sir.’ The clerk made a note. ‘The no disturb sign -’

‘We’ve already done that.’

They left and stopped at the first pay telephone on the street. Johnson went inside with the valise, fished inside and brought out a walkie-talkie. He was immediately through to Branson, waiting patiently in the dilapidated garage north of Daly City. He said: ‘PI?’

‘Yes?’

‘Okay’

‘Good. Get down there.’

The sun was coming up as the six men filed out of their cabin in the hills above Sausalito in Marin County, north across the bay from San Francisco. They made up a nondescript and not particularly attractive group, four of them in overalls and two in faded raincoats that might have been lifted from some unsuspecting scarecrow. They all piled into a rather battered Chevrolet station-wagon and headed down to the town. Before them stretched a stunning vista. To the south the Golden Gate and the staggering – if rather Manhattanized – skyline of San Francisco. To the south-east, lent a slightly spurious glamour by the early rays of the sun, Alcatraz Island, of unhappy history, lay to the north of the Fisherman’s Wharf, in line of sight of Treasure Island, the Bay Bridge and Oakland on the far side of the bay. To the east lay Angel Island, the largest in the bay, while to the north-east lay Belvedere Island, Tiburon and, beyond that again, the wide reaches of San Pablo Bay vanishing into nothingness. There can be few more beautiful and spectacular vistas in the world – if such there so be – than that from Sausalito. On the basis that not to be moved by it would require a heart of stone, the six men in the station-wagon had between them, it was clear, the makings of a fair-sized quarry.

They reached the main street, travelled along past the immaculate rows of sailing craft and the far from immaculate hodge-podge of boathouses, until eventually the driver pulled off into a side-street, parked and stopped the engine. He and the man beside him got out and divested themselves of their coats, revealing themselves as clad in the uniforms of California State Patrolmen. The driver, a sergeant by the name of Giscard, was at least six feet three in height, burly, red-faced, tight-mouthed and, even to the cold, insolent eyes, was the conceptualized epitome of the dyed-in-the-wool tough cop. Policemen, admittedly, were part and parcel of Giscard’s life but his frequent acquaintanceships with them he had kept to as limited a nature as possible on the numerous occasions when, hitherto without success, they had attempted to put him behind bars. The other, Parker, was tall, lean and of a nasty appearance and the best that could be said for him was that he might have passed for a cop if one were myopic or he were viewed at a considerable distance: his habitually wary bitter expression was probably attributable to the fact that he had experienced considerably less success than the sergeant in evading the long arm of the law.

They turned a corner and entered a local police precinct station. Two policemen were behind the counter, one very young, the other old enough to be his father. They looked rather tired and unenthusiastic as was natural for two men who were looking forward to some sleep, but they were polite, courteous.

‘Good morning, good morning.’ Giscard could be very brisk indeed as only befitted a man who had shown a clean pair of heels to half the police forces on the Coast. ‘Sergeant Giscard. Patrolman Parker.’ He pulled from his pocket a paper with a long list of names. ‘You must be Mahoney and Nimitz?’

‘Indeed we are.’ Mahoney, a guileless youth, would have found some difficulty in concealing his Hibernian ancestry. ‘And how do you know?’

‘Because I can read.’ The niceties of salon conversation were not for Giscard. ‘From this I take it that your station boss didn’t advise you we were coming. Well, it’s this damned motorcade this morning – and from what I’ve found out this morning maybe I’m not wasting all that much of my time in making this final check-up. You’d be surprised at the number of policemen in this state who are either illiterate or stone deaf.’

Nimitz was polite. ‘If we were to know what we have done wrong, Sergeant -’

‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’ He consulted his sheet. ‘Just four things. When do the day shift come on? How many? Where are the patrol cars? And the cells.’

‘That’s all?’

‘All. Two minutes. And hurry. I’ve got to check every place from here across the bridge to Richmond.’

‘Eight o’clock. Eight men – twice the usual. The cars -’

‘Let me see them.’

Nimitz lifted a key from a board and led the two men round the corner of the block. He opened double doors. The two police cars, as was only proper on this auspicious occasion when a President, a King and a Prince were travelling through their precinct, had the impossible glitter of showroom models.

‘Ignition keys?’

‘In the ignition.’

Back in the station, Giscard nodded to the entrance door. ‘Keys?’ ‘I beg your pardon.’

Giscard was heavily patient. ‘I know it’s normally never locked. But you might all have to leave in a tearing hurry this morning. You want to leave the shop unattended?’

‘I see.’ Nimitz indicated the keys on the board.

‘The cells.’

Nimitz led the way, taking keys with him. They were only a few feet away but round a corner out of sight of the more sensitive citizens who had reluctant occasion to enter the front office. Nimitz entered and Giscard unholstered his pistol and stuck it against his back. ‘A dead policeman,’ Giscard observed, ‘is no good to anyone.’ Parker joined them in ten seconds pushing a furious and flabbergasted Mahoney in front of him.

Both captives were gagged and left sitting on the floor, backs to the bars, arms thrust uncomfortably through them and wrists handcuffed. From the baleful expressions on their faces it was as well that they were so securely gagged. Giscard put the keys in his pocket, picked up two other sets from the board, ushered Parker out before him, locked the entrance door, pocketed that key too then went round and opened up the garage. He and Parker backed the cars out and while Giscard locked the doors – and, inevitably, pocketed the keys – Parker went to fetch the other four men from the station-wagon. When they appeared they were not, surprisingly, any longer overalled working men but gleaming advertisements for the California State Patrol.

They drove north on the US 101, took the cutoff west to State I, passed by Muir Woods and its pre-Christian stands of two-hundred-and-fifty-feet-high redwoods and finally stopped in the Mount Tamalpais State Park. Giscard brought out the walkie-talkie that went so well with his uniform and said: ‘PI?’

Branson was still patiently waiting in the bus in the abandoned garage. ‘Yes?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Good. Stay.’

The forecourt and street outside the luxurious caravanserai atop Nob Hill were, understandably at that hour of the morning, practically deserted. There were, in fact, only seven people in sight. Six of those stood on the steps of the hotel which was that night housing more dollars on the hoof than it ever had remotely had in its long and illustrious career. The seventh of those, a tall, handsome man, aquiline-faced, youthful-looking despite his grey hair and clad in immaculate hound’s-tooth, was pacing slowly up and down on the roadway. From the looks exchanged among the six men – two doorkeepers, two policemen and two men in plain clothes whose coats fitted awkwardly under their left armpits – his presence appeared to be giving rise to an increasing degree of vexation. Finally, after a low-murmured conversation among them, one of the uniformed men came down the steps and approached him.

He said: ‘Morning, sir. No offence, sir, but do you mind moving on. We have a job to do.’

‘How do you know I have not?’

‘Sir. Please. You must understand we have some very important people in there.’

‘Don’t I know it. Don’t I just know it.’ The man sighed, reached inside his coat, produced and opened a wallet. The policeman looked at it, stiffened, unmistakably swallowed and deepened his complexion by two shades.

‘I’m very sorry, sir. Mr Jensen, sir.’

‘I’m sorry, too. Sorry for all of us. They can keep their damned oil as far as I’m concerned. Dear lord, what a circus.’ He talked until the officer relaxed, then carried on his to-and-fro strolling. The policeman returned to the steps.

One of the plain-clothes men looked at him without a great deal of enthusiasm. He said: ‘A great crowd mover-on you are.’

‘Like to try?’

‘If I must give you a demonstration,’ he said wearily. He walked down three steps, paused, looked back up. ‘He flashed a card at you, didn’t he?’

‘Sort of.’ The policeman was enjoying himself.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t you recognize your own deputy director when you see him?’

‘Jesus!’ The FBI man’s miraculous return to the top step could have been attributed to nothing other than sheer levitation.

‘Are you not,’ the policeman asked innocently, ‘going to move him on?’

The plain-clothes man scowled then smiled. ‘From now on, I think I’ll leave those menial tasks to the uniformed branch.’

A bell-boy of great age appeared on the top step, hesitated, then went down to the street as Jensen gave him an encouraging wave. As he approached his wizened face was further creased in worry. He said: ‘Aren’t you taking a helluva chance, sir? FBI man up there.’

‘No chance.’ Jensen was unperturbed. ‘He’s California FBI. I’m Washington. Chalk and cheese. I doubt if he’d know the Director-General if he came and sat on his lap. What’s the word, Willie?’

‘They’re all having breakfast in their rooms. No sleepers-in, all on schedule.’

‘Let me know every ten minutes.’

‘Yes, sir. Gee, Mr Jensen, aren’t you taking one godawful chance? The place is swarming with fuzz and not only just inside. Those windows across there – there’s a rifle behind a dozen of them and a man behind each rifle.’

‘I know, Willie. I’m the man in the eye of the storm. Dead safe.’

‘If you’re caught -’

‘I won’t be. Even if I were, you’re clear.’

‘Clear! Everybody sees me talking to you -’

‘Why? Because I’m FBI. I told you that. You’ve no reason to doubt it. There are six men on the top of the steps who believe the same thing. Anyway, Willie, you can always plead the Fifth Amendment.’

Willie departed. In full view of the six watchers Jensen pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘PI?’

‘Yes?’ Branson was as calm as ever.

‘On schedule.’

‘Fine. Pl’s moving now. Every ten minutes. Right?’

‘Of course. How’s my twin?’

Branson looked towards the rear of the coach. The bound and gagged man between the aisles bore an uncanny resemblance to Jensen.

‘He’ll live.’