“I know. I tried to pin Ives down but he really wasn’t sure about it. He wasn’t trying to fudge it.”
“What else?”
“When money comes in for Kendig, Ives is supposed to send it to Switzerland in the form of a cashier’s check. It’s Kendig’s brokers, I’ve got the address here.”
“We’ve already got that in the file. It won’t help us-they wouldn’t know where he was.”
“I got the names of the fourteen publishers.”
“For all the good it’ll do us.”
Ross said, “We probably can discourage the New York publisher.”
“What’s the good of that if it’s published all over the rest of the world? There’s no way to keep it secret. We’ve still got to stop him from writing the rest of it.”
Cutter parked in the Official Cars Only zone and they went into the FBI building.
Tobin was waiting for them. “We’ve got a line on your man.” Ross disliked his complacency instantly.
Tobin was all but smirking. Cutter said, “Yes?”-withholding a great deal from his tone of voice.
Tobin sat back and ticked the items off on his fingers. “He entered the country a couple of weeks ago on a Pan Am flight from Lisbon. P.O.E. Dulles. He rented a car there and turned it in twenty-four hours later at Newark Airport.”
Cutter said, “Then he went into New York.”
“Did he? Well anyhow. He shows up again two days later in Philadelphia-another rent-a-car. Then we lose him for a week. But he turned the car in.”
You bastard, Ross thought. “Okay. Where?”
“Down South somewhere?” Cutter said.
Tobin gave him an irritated look. “That’s right. Charleston, South Carolina.”
Ross nodded. The Southern-accented operator.
Tobin said, “So we’re a lot closer behind him now.”
“Unless he stops using those credit cards,” Cutter said. “All right, thanks for the update. Keep on it, will you?”
“We’ll nail him cold for you, brother, don’t give it another thought. Any time we can be of service.” Tobin grinned at them.
Out on the sidewalk it was Cutter’s turn to smile. “Those guys gloat too early. He’s put one over on them.”
“How?”
“We’ll see. You don’t suppose there’s a phone booth in this neighborhood that the boys back there haven’t bugged for practice, do you? No, why take the chance-we’ll drive a few blocks.” They went around to the car and Cutter said, “When we find a booth I want you to call Customs and Immigration. Check on all planes and ships that left Charleston in the past ninety-six hours. Find out if James Butler was on one of them.”
They found a booth and Cutter double-parked and sat in the car until Ross came back from the phone. “Okay?”
“All set. Now what?”
“Back to the salt mines. We’ve got to catch up on the paperwork.”
At four-fifteen the call came from Bu Customs. Ross took it and wrote down the information and hung up. Then he swiveled to Cutter. “James Butler took passage on a steamer for Capetown three days ago. One of those freighters with accommodations for twelve passengers. The Cape of Good Hope, Panamanian registry. First port of call is Casablanca on the nineteenth.”
Cutter nodded. “Sure. That’s nearly two weeks away.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Two weeks from now we’ll nab him coming down the gangplank in Casablanca. He’ll look like Kendig and he’ll be carrying James Butler’s credit cards and passport, but he won’t be Kendig.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants us to think.”
“No. Because he knows we’ll be there on the pier to meet the guy whoever he is. Kendig wouldn’t box himself into a trap like that. It’s got to be a ringer.”
Ross said, “It could be he’s made some arrangements to transfer to another boat while they’re at sea, you know. Then we’d never find him. Suppose they get to within half a day of Casablanca and a small boat comes out and takes him off?”
“No. He’d like us to worry about that but he won’t play it that way. For one thing it would mean depending on a second party. Suppose the boatman chickened out or got appendicitis on the wrong day? No, Kendig’s too independent-he never relies on anybody else to pull him out of anything. For another thing he’s too restless to confine himself to a ship like that one. He’d get cabin fever. Kendig needs a lot of room around him-he needs several exit doors. He won’t trap himself on any ship.”
“You know him better than I do,” Ross said, “but let’s not ignore the fact that he may be using your knowledge of him. Maybe he knows how you’ll figure it and he’s acting accordingly-by doing exactly what you don’t expect him to do.”
Cutter gave him a slow nod. “I’ll tell you what, Ross, if it’ll make you feel better you can send a radiogram to the captain of the Cape of Good Hope-ask him to signal us immediately if James Butler leaves the ship.”
“Hell they can’t be that far out to sea yet. We could probably reach it by helicopter right now.”
“And do what?”
“Well-apprehend him. That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it?”
“On a Panamanian ship on the high seas? What would you use for a warrant, Ross, a stone tablet from God? Or would you prefer to go in shooting and mow him down in front of two dozen witnesses?”
Ross spread his hands. “At least we’d find out if it’s Kendig or not.”
“Take my word for it,” Cutter said, “It’s not Kendig.”
— 10 -
By the end of the third week in the pines he’d written and blue-penciled one hundred and eighty pages of double-spaced material but for several days he’d realized there was no way to wrap it up in two hundred pages; it was likely to run at least half again as long before he got it all said.
He wasn’t bored with it. But the steady work was getting to him. He was getting jaded; he had concentrated too intensely for too long without respite. It was like repeating a word so often that suddenly it lost its meaning. He’s lost his grasp of the thing. It wasn’t irretrievable but he needed a day away from it.
He thought of packing and moving out: going to Mexico or Africa and getting back to work in new surroundings. It was a little unnerving to spend too long in one place. But in this stage it was best to stay inside the United States because it kept him out of Cutter’s technical jurisdiction. It didn’t mean Cutter wasn’t hunting but it meant Cutter couldn’t mobilize much manpower. They’d have to use the FBI. The Bureau had its talents-like establishing Communist cells so that its agents would have something to report on-but the FBI wasn’t likely to track him down unless he stood in Constitution Avenue waving a Soviet flag… And if he stayed in the States he might as well stay here because it would be hard to find a better place.
But he’d need certain things when he began his run and they weren’t obtainable in the backwoods. The nearest cities were Atlanta and Birmingham and he decided on Birmingham because he knew its workings.
It was September seventeenth, a Tuesday. The drive took nearly seven hours. At two in the afternoon he saw the industrial smudge on the sky and at half-past three he was parking the car against the curb on a hill as steep as anything in San Francisco. He spent the next hour buying articles of clothing, luggage, cosmetics, automobile spray-paint, a leather-worker’s sewing awl and a few other items. The city was acrid with coal fumes from the great steel furnaces. Its faces were predominantly black.
He bought a ream of bond paper, carbons, erasers, masking tape, a thick stack of nine-by-twelve manila envelopes; as with all his purchases he paid cash and asked for a receipt because if you did that it meant you had a legitimate business reason for buying things.
He had a meal in a mediocre restaurant and there was still time to kill; he walked back to the car and stored
