Dr. Emil Shariyk, who unaccountably is no longer at his post with the Physical Sciences Research Group at Los Alamos? It should be beneficial to both of us to verify the present whereabouts of Dr. Shariyk.'
'Shariyk?' Erikson repeated.
'Let's be honest with each other, Mr. Erikson,' Bergman said stiffly.
'My understanding is that Dr. Shariyk is on a sabbatical with the Atomic Science Foundation in Paris, Mr. Bergman.'
'I know that is your government's official position.' Icicles dripped from every syllable. 'But it is not a true position. Your FBI has secretly requested Interpol assistance in locating Dr. Shariyk, whom we strongly suspect is working in a guarded laboratory in a country sympathetic to the Palestinian renegades.'
'Can you substantiate your reasoning?'
'There is no need!' It was an explosive roar from the younger man, Ravish. 'Your government knows it as well as we do! We waste time with this eternal fencing! I demand-'
'We ask again that your government take immediate steps to put a stop to the activities of the terrorists operating in your country,' Bergman interrupted his companion. 'You seem to take too lightly their battle cry 'Death to All Jews!'.'
'Recognizing that I'm one man with limited prerogatives,' Erikson wedged into the verbal assault, 'what is it that you'd have me do?'
'Eliminate the terrorists,' Ravish said quickly before Bergman could reply. 'By any means. Or we will be forced to take matters into our own hands.'
'We can maintain this informal liaison only as long as it promises fruitful results,' Bergman added.
'Please don't think that we-' Erikson stopped speaking. Ravish reached into a jacket pocket and drew out a small leather case about the size of a cigarette pack. He thumbed a switch, silencing the tiny buzzer which had caused Erikson to fall silent.
Bergman rose to his feet. 'An important telephone call,' he said. 'You will excuse us, please?' Erikson pushed his desk telephone toward the stocky man who smiled wryly. 'You jest, my friend. We prefer to accept the call in privacy.
The two men left Erikson's office. The fluorescent tube above my head blinked a goodbye as Ravish crossed the threshold. The red light near the monitors turned green, and Erikson opened the wall panel and looked in at me. 'Come on into the office.'
I followed him inside after turning off the switches on the television and tape-recorder monitors. 'Wasn't that whole business a waste of time?' I asked him.
'It depends on how you look at it. By letting them sound off, I may have prevented their doing something.'
'I doubt you've prevented that Ravish from doing anything he made up his mind to do. He looks like a handful.'
Erikson smiled. 'If it came down to guns, I'd bet on you. Let's see what sort of gun he carried.'
'What the hell do you mean, what
'You noticed the flickering fluorescent light? It's not a bad tube; it's a signal. The frame of the door has an imbedded sensor wire. If there's a concentrated metal mass on an individual passing through the door, which could equate to a pistol or a knife, the sensors trigger the light tube. It's only a warning, of course, but in the split second during which a person walks through the door, other data are fed into a computer across the hall. Let me show you.'
Erikson took a ring of keys from a locked drawer in his desk and led the way from his office. While crossing the hallway, he took out his wallet and extracted from it what appeared to be a white, plastic credit card. I could see that the card had only a network of thin copper wires imbedded under the surface.
'Printed-circuit code lock,' Erikson said as he inserted the card into a concealed slot at the edge of the doorframe. An inner latch clicked, after which he used a normal key.
'Too fancy for a country boy like me,' I commented.
'Don't ever try to pick one of these, as I've been given to understand you do occasionally with conventional locks,' Erikson said with a smile. 'Without the coded card release to disarm the lock, you'll set off an alarm. And if you persist in forcing it, there's a shaped explosive charge which will blow off your hands.'
The room inside wasn't much larger than a janitor's closet. Erikson and I almost filled it when we entered. On a sturdy shelf extending from the far wall was a machine that looked like a teletypewriter. 'Did you ever see either of those agents before?' Erikson asked as he closed the door.
'Never.'
Erikson removed the cover from the machine and punched half a dozen buttons. A whirring, thumping noise followed; then a sheet of yellow paper blossomed jerkily from an aperture at the top. A dozen lines of squarish print covered the paper.
Erikson quickly decoded figures and symbols that were meaningless to me, as I leaned over his shoulder. 'Well, here it is. At nine-twelve, Bergman and Ravish entered the office. The first man through the door, Bergman, was clean. The second, Ravish, was armed with a 7 mm Luger, validity factor eighty-three percent. The weapon was carried between the waist and the shoulder. Ravish is six feet, one and one quarter inches tall, weighs one hundred and eighty-six pounds, and has steel lifts in his shoes.'
Erikson ripped the printed sheet from the machine and dropped it into a chrome-rimmed receptacle. Flashing knife-blades chewed the paper into tiny, pinhead-size confetti, and a rush of water through the receptacle flushed even that fragmentary evidence away.
'That bit of science fiction won't hold enough water to float a teacup,' I told Erikson.
He smiled.
'Admit it,' I said. 'You're putting me on.'
'Nary a put,' he insisted. He patted the machine as he replaced the cover. 'Maxine here is getting more sophisticated all the time. It's getting harder to fool her now, although a year ago she registered a man with a 37 mm rocket launcher entering the office. Turned out to be the maintenance man with a file cabinet on a hand truck. And another time Maxine blew it was when I had a visit from a CIA man who had been a polio victim. Maxine interpreted his leg braces as a bulletproof vest. At that time she couldn't distinguish the placement of metal except between the shoulders and feet. Now she can.'
We left the room.
I couldn't help thinking that if banks were half as well equipped as Erikson's office, my former career wouldn't have lasted nearly as long.
Back at his desk, Erikson lit a cigarette. 'It's interesting that the Israelis feel that the fedayeen are buying up high-priced scientific talent. And they really touched a sore spot with Shariyk. We'd like to know what's become of him, too. A couple of years ago he was a contender for a Nobel in physics. His specialty was mesons and antimatter. You know, digging into the guts of the atom.'
'With that name, what was his nationality?'
'American born, of Armenian stock. He spent the three years prior to the Six-Day War teaching at Beirut in the American University. What do you suppose Bergman would have said if I'd told him that?'
'Bolt the doors before you lose any more.' The thought of bolted doors reminded me. 'Who's your next-door neighbor on this side?' I waved in the direction of the photographer's studio.
'A girly-magazine publisher's office. Why?'
'Just curious. Well, what comes next?'
'I want you back at the Alhambra to try to get a line on the hijacker, Hawk,' Erikson frowned. 'You'll have to get yourself a place to stay, too, so I can reach you when I need you.'
'Okay. I'll call you when I have a phone number.'
I rode down sixteen floors to the street and caught a cab to within a block of the Alhambra. I stood on the sidewalk on Lexington Avenue, running my eyes up and down the street in the direction of lighted hotel marquees, wondering where to come to roost. Then on a hunch I decided to try the Alhambra again first, to see if Hawk had made an appearance.
There were fewer people under the billowing canopy when I entered the cocktail lounge, and I was able to
