The Golden Gate. Alistair MacLean
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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