Goodbye California (20 page)

Ryder awoke at 5.30 p.m., feeling less refreshed than he should have done, because he had slept only fitfully. This was less because of worry about his family – he was becoming increasingly if irrationally of the opinion that they weren’t in as grave danger as he had at once thought – than because there were several wandering wisps of thought tugging at the corners of his mind: only he couldn’t identify them for what they were. He rose, made sandwiches and coffee, and consumed them while he ploughed through the earthquake literature he had borrowed from Pasadena. Neither the coffee nor the literature helped him any. He went out and called up the FBI office. Delage answered.

Ryder said: ‘Is Major Dunne around?’

‘Sound asleep. Is it urgent?’

‘No. Let him be. Got anything that might interest me?’

‘Leroy has, I think.’

‘Anything from eight-eight-eight South Maple?’

‘Nothing of interest. Local nosey neighbour, a rheumy-eyed old goat – I’m quoting, you understand – who would clearly like to know your Bettina Ivanhoe, if that’s her name, better than he does, says that she hasn’t been to work today, that she hasn’t been out all morning.’

‘He’s sure?’

‘Foster – that’s our stake-out man, spends most of his time round the back – says he believes him.’

‘Eternal vigilance, you’d say?’

‘Probably with a pair of high-powered binoculars. She went out this afternoon, but walking: there’s a supermarket on the corner and she came back with a couple of carry-bags. Foster got a good look at her. Says he hardly blames the old goat. While she was out Foster let himself in and put a bug on her phone.’

‘Anything?’

‘She hasn’t used the phone since. More interesting, our legal friend was on the phone twice today. Well, only the second conversation was interesting. The first was made by the judge himself to his chambers. Said he’s been stricken by a case of severe lumbago and could they get a deputy to stand in for him in court. The second was made to him. Very enigmatic. Told him to let his lumbago attack last for another couple of days and everything should be all right. That was all.’

‘Where did the call come from?’

‘Bakersfield.’

‘Odd.’

‘What?’

‘Hard by the White Wolf Fault where the earthquake was supposed to originate.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Education.’ Courtesy of the CalTech library, he’d learnt the fact only ten minutes previously. ‘Coincidence. Coin box, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks. Be down soon.’

He returned to the house, rang Jeff – he’d nothing to say to his son that a phone-tapper would find of any interest – and told him to call round but to wear different clothes from those he had been wearing the previous night. While he was waiting he himself went and changed.

Jeff arrived, looked at his father’s usual crumpled clothes, looked at his own well-creased blue suit and said: ‘Well, no one could accuse you of entering the sartorial stakes. We meant to be in disguise?’

‘Sort of. For the same reason I’m going to call up Sergeant Parker on the way in and have him meet us at the FBI office. Delage says they may have something for us, by the way. No, we’re going to have the pleasure of interviewing a lady tonight, although I doubt whether she’ll regard it as such. Bettina Ivanhoe or Ivanov or whatever. She’ll recognize the clothes we were wearing last night, which is more than we can say about her. She won’t recognize our faces, but she would our voices, which is why I’m having Sergeant Parker briefed and having him do the talking for us.’

‘What happens if something occurs to you – even me – and we want Sergeant Parker to ask a particular question?’

‘That’s why we are going along – just in case that possibility arises. We’ll arrange a signal then she’ll be told that we have to go out and check something with the station by the car radiophone. Never fails to panic the conscience-stricken. Might even panic her into making a distress call to someone. Her phone’s bugged.’

‘Coppers are a lousy lot.’

Ryder glanced at him briefly and said nothing. He didn’t have to.

‘Let’s start with Carlton,’ Leroy said. ‘The security chief at the reactor plant in Illinois never got to know him well. Neither did any of the staff there – the ones that are left, that is. That was two years or so ago and a good number have moved on elsewhere. Secretive kind of lad, it would appear.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Ryder said. ‘Nothing I like better than minding my own business – in off-duty hours, that is. But in his case? Who knows? Any leads?’

‘One, but it sounds more than fair. The security chief – name of Daimler – had traced his old landlady. She says Carlton and her son used to be very close, used to go away weekends quite a bit. Says she doesn’t know where they went. Daimler says it’s more likely that she didn’t care where they went. She’s well off – or was: her husband left her a good annuity but she takes in boarders because most of her money goes in gin and cards. Most of her time and interest, too, it would appear.’

‘Sensible husband.’

‘Probably died in self-defence. Daimler offered – he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the offer – to go and see her. I said thanks, we’d send one of our boys – an NFI card carries more weight. He’s going there this evening – boy still lives at home.

‘That’s all. Except for his mother’s comment about him – says he’s a religious nut and should be put away somewhere.’

‘It’s the maternal instinct. What else?’

‘LeWinter’s fancy codes. We’ve traced nearly all the telephone numbers – I think you’ve been told they were mainly Californian or Texan. Seem a respectable enough bunch – at least, preliminary enquiries haven’t turned up anything about the ones investigated so far – but on the face of it they would seem an odd lot for a senior judge like LeWinter to be associated with.’

‘I’ve got a lot of friends – well, friends and acquaintances – who aren’t cops,’ Jeff said. ‘But none of them, as far as I know, has ever seen the inside of a courtroom, far less a prison.’

‘Yes. But here’s an eminent lawyer – or what a cock-eyed world regards as an eminent lawyer – with a list of people who are primarily engineers, and not only that but specialists in the engineering field. Specializing in petro-chemicals and not only chemists, metallurgists, geologists, what you would expect to find, but also oil-rig owners, drillers and explosives experts.’

Ryder said: ‘Maybe LeWinter is figuring on moving into the oil exploration field – the old rogue has probably accumulated enough in the way of ill-gotten pay-offs to finance a stake in something of that nature. But I think that’s altogether too far-fetched. Much more likely that those names have something to do with cases that have come up before him. They could be people that have been called as expert witnesses.’

Leroy smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but we thought of that all by ourselves. We turned up a list of his civil, as distinct from criminal, court cases over the years and he has been involved in quite a number of law-suits primarily involved with oil – exploration, leases, environmental pollution, marine trusts, Lord knows what. Before he became a judge he was a defending counsel, and a highly successful one – as you would expect from such a devious villain –’

‘Assumption, assumption,’ Ryder said.

‘So? You just called him an old rogue. As I was saying, he made quite a reputation for himself for protecting the legal interest of various oil companies who had quite clearly transgressed the law until LeWinter proved otherwise. In fact, the amount of oil litigation that goes on in this fair State of ours is quite staggering. But it would seem that that’s all irrelevant. To me, anyway. You, I don’t know. But one way or another he’s been swimming around in this oil business for close on
twenty years: so I can’t see how it bears on this present business.’

‘Nor do I,’ Ryder said. ‘On the other hand, he could have been preparing for this day for all those years and is only now putting his knowledge to use. But again I think this is farfetched. If there’s any connection between oil-prospecting or oil-recovery I have never heard of it. How about this code-book-Ivanhoe thing? I was given to understand that the Washington Russian code-breakers were making progress on that.’

‘They may well be. Unfortunately they’ve come all over coy. The centre of their enquiries appears to have shifted to Geneva.’

Ryder was patient. ‘Could you enlighten me, or did they choose to enlighten you on just what the hell Geneva has to do with a nuclear theft in this State?’

‘No, I can’t enlighten you because they clammed up. It’ll be this damned inter-service jealousy, if you ask me. “Internecine” would be a better word.’

Ryder was sympathetic. ‘You’ll be telling me next that the accursed CIA are shoving their oar in again.’

‘Have shoved, it would appear. Bad enough to have them operating in friendly countries – allies, if you like – such as Britain and France, which they freely do without the permission of their hosts, but to start poking around in a strictly neutral Switzerland –’

‘They don’t operate there?’

‘Of course not. Those agents you see lurking around the UNO, WHO and Lord knows how many international agencies in Geneva are only figments of your imagination. Heady Alpine air, or something like that. The Swiss are so sorry for them they offer them chairs in the shade or under cover, depending on the weather.’

‘You sound bitter. Let’s hope you all resolve your differences in this particular case, and quickly. How have Interpol been doing with Morro?’

‘They haven’t. You have to remember that a good bit more than half the world has never even heard of the word “Interpol”. It might help if we had the faintest clue as to where this pest comes from.’

‘The copies of the tapes of his voice? The ones that were to be sent out to our learned scholars?’

‘There hasn’t been time yet for any significant amount of comments to come in. We have had only four replies yet. One is positive that he is the voice of a Middle Easterner. In fact, he’s positive enough to state categorically that the guy comes from Beirut. As Beirut is a hodge-podge of most of the nationalities in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and a fair sprinkling of Africans, by which I mean people in African nations, it’s hard to see what he’s basing his conviction on. Another says, although not prepared to swear, that he’s Indian. A third says he’s definitely from the south-east of
Asia. The last says that, as he’s spent twenty years in Japan, he’d recognize Japanese-learnt English anywhere.’

Ryder said: ‘My wife described Morro as being a broad-shouldered six-footer.’

‘And Japanese answering to that description are not thick on the ground. I’m beginning to lose faith in the University of California.’ Leroy sighed. ‘Well, with the possible – and I’m now beginning to regard it as only faintly possible – exception of Carlton, we don’t appear to have been making much headway. However, we may have something more encouraging for you in the way of those odd-ball organizations you wanted us to enquire about. You specified a year in existence and a large group. We’re not saying you’re wrong, but it did occur to us that it could conceivably be a smaller group, or one that has been in existence for a considerably longer period than a year and that may have been infiltrated or taken over by Morro and his friends. Here’s the list. I’m not saying that it’s a complete one: there’s no State law that says you have to register yourself, or yourself and your like-minded friends as a nut or nuts. But I should imagine it’s as complete as we can get, certainly within the limited time available.’

Ryder glanced at the list, handed it to Jeff, turned to say a few words to Sergeant Parker, who had just entered, then returned his attention to Leroy.

‘List’s fine as far as it goes, dates and existence, approximate numbers, but it doesn’t tell me what they’re nutty about.’

‘Could that be important?’

‘How should I know?’ Ryder was understandably a mite irritable. ‘Might give me an idea, even an inkling, just the shadow of a clue just by looking at such a list. God knows, I can’t come up with one by myself.’

With the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, Leroy produced another sheet of paper. ‘And here we have what you want.’ He looked at the paper with some disfavour. ‘They’re so damned long-winded about their reasons, their motivations for existence as groups, that it was impossible to get it all on one sheet. They tend to be a forthcoming, not to say garrulous, lot about their ideals.’

‘Any religious nuts among them?’

‘Why?’

‘Carlton is said to be associated, or have associated, with one. Okay, so it’s a far-out connection, but any straw for a drowning man.’

‘I think you’re mixing your metaphors,’ Leroy said kindly. ‘But I see what you mean.’ He eyed the sheet. ‘Well,
most
of them are religious organizations. I think one would expect that. But quite a number have been established too long – long enough to achieve a measure of respectability – to be classified as nuts. The followers of Zen Buddhism, the Hindu Guru groups, the
Zoroastrians and some home-grown Californian groups – at least eight of those – you can’t go around calling them nuts without having a lawsuit slapped on you.’

‘Call them what you want.’ Ryder took the sheet, and examined it more in hope than expectation. He said in complaint: ‘Can’t pronounce half of them, far less understand them.’

‘This is a very cosmopolitan State, Sergeant Ryder.’ Ryder looked at him in suspicion but Leroy’s face was perfectly straight.

‘Borundians,’ Ryder went on. ‘Corinthians. The Judges. The Knights of Calvary. The Blue Cross. The Blue Cross?’

‘Not the hospital insurance people, Sergeant.’

‘The Seekers?’

‘Not the singing group.’

‘Nineteen-ninety-nine?’

‘That’s the day the world ends.’

‘Ararat?’

‘Splinter group of nineteen-ninety-nine. Where Noah’s ark fetched up. Working with a group called the Revelations, high up in the Sierras. Building a boat for the next flood.’

‘They could be right. According to Professor Benson of CalTech a large chunk of California is going to disappear into the Pacific. They may have to wait a bit though – million years, give or take. Ah, now. This is more like it. Group over a hundred strong. Established only eight months. The Temple of Allah.’