'Mine and the Turkish girl's that I'm sure about.'
'I'd sure love to dust it for prints,' he said in a regretful tone. 'But if we're going to return it-' He didn't complete the sentence.
He walked to the back wall of the office and activated the concealed switch that operated the hidden wall panel. He returned from the equipment room, carrying a rolled-up leather tool case. When he unrolled it and spread it on the desk top, I saw numerous, blue steel drills with what I suspected were diamond tips, a small, but powerful drill motor, six-inch pipe lengths that could be screwed together and attached to a lead block or to interchangeable tips to make a mallet or a prybar, and numerous other familiar items.
'You must have gone to the same school I did,' I said to McLaren.
'Not quite,' Erikson said dryly. He had been watching my examination of the safe-cracking equipment.
I consider myself reasonably expert on small tools, but the narrow pockets of the tool case contained additional items the likes of which I'd never seen before. McLaren selected a pair of brightly polished, long-fingered tweezers with a hooked nose and picked up the envelope by one corner. He raised it gently and held it closer to the desk lamp, inspecting it from all sides. He seemed especially interested in the gap where the envelope's flap hadn't quite closed tightly after it had been sealed. He took a jeweler's loupe from the case, fitted it into his eye, and scanned the envelope.
'Well, Jock?' Erikson said.
'I can't be sure.' McLaren removed the jeweler's glass from his eye. 'I'd better 'scope it.' He picked up the envelope with the tweezers again and carried it into the equipment room.
Erikson and I followed him. McLaren clipped the envelope to a sloping glass screen atop a box about the size of a one-drawer file cabinet. He flipped two switches, and a red light came on accompanied by a humming sound. Then the light went out, and McLaren pressed a concave button with his thumb.
Bright lavender light surrounded the envelope, and I could see two metal objects in its lower left-hand corner in the fluorescent image. 'I thought those might be the old Klienschmidt trigger device when I first noticed them,' McLaren said. 'But you can see it's only a couple of staples.'
He pointed to a dark panel covering most of the underside of the envelope's flap. 'That's just as effective in showing evidence of entry, though. It's an oxidation detector, an atmosphere-sensitive surface, hermetically sealed to keep air out. If the flap is torn or pulled apart, as it would be if the envelope were steamed or pried open, the inner surface changes color and acts like a warning flag.' He raised his thumb and the X-ray lamp went out.
We all returned to the office. McLaren removed from the tool case a thin steel rod about the size of a knitting needle. The rod was slitted from its tip to within three inches of its base. It looked something like an extremely slender tuning fork.
He set it aside while he tamped the envelope, flap-edge down, until he had driven the contents against the sealed flap. Then he inserted the needlelike tool into the envelope through the small gap between the envelope's folded edge and the point on the flap where the glue ended.
He rotated the needle patiently, turning the slitted rod as carefully as any safecracker manipulating a safe dial. Finally he withdrew the needle with a smile. Wrapped around it were two double-stapled sheets of paper whose ends had been caught in the needle's slotted aperture.
McLaren eased the ends from the slit and handed the curled-up sheets to Erikson. The envelope still remained bulky from other material remaining inside it. 'I'll have another look at this since it's too big to extract via the probe,' McLaren said briskly. 'I'll be right back.' He went into the equipment room again, carrying the envelope with the tweezers.
'What have we got?' I asked Erikson.
'It looks like an instruction sheet,' he replied, scanning the first page rapidly.
I moved in beside him. At the tip of the typewritten page it said MOTOR FREIGHT CARGO, and there followed short paragraphs preceded by a series of three-digit numbers. I had to read only half the first paragraph to know what it was. 'This is a plan for another hijack,' I said. 'What's on the second page?'
Erikson turned over the stapled page. The second sheet looked like a schematic of a complicated football play. Four small circles numbered one to four were inside outlines shown in various positions around a small square butted up against a rectangle. Above each group of circles was a three-digit number which corresponded to those listed on the first page.
The layout looked exactly like the detailed plans I used to buy from Robert 'The Schemer' Frenz when I was knocking over banks. 'It's a hijack,' I repeated. 'The rectangle is a truck, and the square is the place it's going to be knocked off. The second page shows the different positions of four men during various stages of the operation, and the three-digit numbers are the times for the step-by-step plan outlined in the first-page paragraphs. See how the numbers go from zero-zero-zero to eight-three-zero? That means the whole job is supposed to take eight and a half minutes.'
'I went to the wrong school,' Erikson said. He examined the two pages again. 'But there's nothing here that indicates where the hijack is going to take place.'
'There must be further instructions in the envelope. Maybe McLaren-'
'There aren't any more single sheets in the envelope,' McLaren said from behind us. 'But here's a stat of part of what's inside it.' He showed us a weak black-and-white photostat. It was ghost-thin in appearance, but there was no mistaking that it was a photocopy of the cover of a New Jersey road map. I wondered how McLaren had obtained it without removing the multi-folded map from the envelope, but I didn't ask.
'This job was planned by a pro,' I told Erikson while McLaren read the two pages he'd removed from the envelope. 'I can tell you right now that even if we opened the envelope, the map wouldn't tell us anything. Someone has an overlay that fits on this map, and without the overlay the map means nothing. Either the overlay comes later, or the man who's going to lead the operation already has it. If that was Hawk, you know what happened to him.'
'He wasn't carrying anything,' McLaren said positively. 'I checked him out thoroughly at the morgue.'
'Then it could be in the hands of Talia's boss who seems so willing to put up cash to recover the envelope. Let me see the plan again, Karl.'
He handed it to me, and I read it through completely.
'Okay,' I said. 'It's simple enough. See these roads lettered A, B, C, D? The hijack will take place on Road A. Two minutes are allowed to jimmy the truck's rear doors; three minutes to find a small package called
There was a moment's silence.
'Well, you said it was laid out by a pro,' Erikson said thoughtfully.
'I still think it's a dope shipment,' I said.
'And I think you're wrong,' Erikson countered. 'Everything the Treasury boys have ever told me indicates this would be the last way in the world to move dope. It seldom leaves the hands of the individual entrusted with it.'
'What was that you said awhile ago about returning the envelope?' I asked McLaren.
'Since we've lost Hawk, the girl is our only link,' Erikson answered for him. He gave me his smile-that- wasn't-quite-a-smile. 'So all we have to do is send you back to the Turkish girl and have you follow through on her boss's offer to pay you to recover it.'
'Me? It's your baby, Karl.'
'The girl knows you,' Erikson continued. 'Who else could get close to her in a hurry?' He handed the stapled plan to McLaren. 'Make photostats of these sheets, Jock, and then get the originals back into the envelope. Earl will sell it to the girl's boss, and then we'll know who the boss is.'
'Let me point out to you the holes in that Swiss cheese,' I said. 'How do I account for the fact that the envelope is unopened? Shouldn't whoever took it have been curious about what was inside?'
'You'll think of something,' Erikson said, unruffled.
'The envelope can't be opened, because then they'd change the plan. And when you talk to the girl's boss, haggle. Start high on the price you want. That may give us some idea of how valuable this
