Count Backwards to Zero Read online

It was on the bridge, in the most obvious place, lying at the foot of the great wheel. Wires were strewn about. The bomb was in a rectangular metal box about eighteen inches long and four inches high. A separate box, much smaller, was wired to the main one, and also attached to an ordinary drugstore alarm clock. The alarm was set for the half hour, well in advance of Jack’s announced sixty-minute deadline.

  Manship’s Geiger counters had so far given no sign of alarm. He put them down and studied the setup. Looking at Shayne, he shrugged and took out a pair of needlenosed pliers and an ordinary screwdriver. He waved Shayne off the bridge.

  From the glassed-in deck, Shayne could see the knot of officials around the cars on the other side of the boulevard. Cecily, at the rail two decks down, was thrashing around trying to free herself.

  Five minutes went by. Shayne began to itch inside the protective clothes.

  There was a sound behind him and Dr. Manship came out. He had unzipped his hood and thrown it back. Shayne pulled his own zipper.

  “I always did think Little was a bit of a nut,” Manship said. “There’s nothing inside but dirt.”

  “Dirt?”

  “Not plutonium. Ordinary garden dirt.”

  Shayne unlocked Cecily’s cuffs and took her down the gangplank. The others ran toward them.

  The two groups met at the mouth of the pier. Shayne stepped out of his spaceman’s costume and left it on the sidewalk, reaching for a cigarette.

  Everybody wanted to talk at once. Manship’s news passed quickly to those in the rear.

  Crowley was scowling. “By God, there better be some good explanation of this. We evacuated half the city of Miami!”

  Shayne had released Cecily, but she stayed where she was, shaking. One of the cops peeled off her bulky uniform. She emerged gasping for breath and looked around. As soon as she understood where she was she screamed wordlessly, clutching her forehead with both hands.

  “You really did think there was a bomb,” Shayne said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought the reason you killed your father was to keep him from giving the trick away before you could make some money out of it.”

  She shuddered helplessly, pulling her hair.

  Gentry said quietly, “Explain that for me, Mike.”

  “Everybody else was busy somewhere else when Little was killed. Cecily was the only one who could have squeezed it in. But it had nothing to do with the bomb, apparently. It was strictly a family matter.”

  He took a small sheaf of papers out of his inside pocket and sorted out Little’s letter to his insurance company, cutting Shayne in for a third of the death benefit. He made the shuddering girl look at it. When she realized what it was she screamed again.

  “Are you sure about this, Mike?” Gentry said.

  “She was the big thing in Little’s life. Drunk or not, if he’d expected her to be meeting him, he would have said something about it. It was a big surprise when she got in his car after he came through the Customs. She told him she’d run away from England and he had to take care of her. He’d arranged with me to crack up the Bentley to get the search out of the way, but he couldn’t do that while Cecily was with him. He drove her to a room she said she’d rented. He didn’t know Miami, but even so, he wouldn’t have gone in that Brownsville building with anybody but his daughter. She put a knife in him and went out the back way. I think she had a rented car waiting. Then she came back to the pier and pretended to be looking for him. She could say anything she liked about the arrangements. He was dead, and couldn’t contradict her.”

  “What’s this about a family matter?” Gentry pursued.

  “She knew about the insurance—she and her brother were down for fifty thousand apiece. But she couldn’t know he’d set that up expecting to be killed. I think she saw Anne Blagden kissing him when they separated on the pier. Or she thought he’d be arrested for smuggling and the insurance would be canceled. Or he’d be fired for drinking and couldn’t keep up with the premiums. Too many things could go wrong. And Cecily’s a girl who doesn’t like to wait.”

  She looked at him wonderingly. “I think I’m going out of my mind. Something bad’s going to happen.”

  “I agree with you,” Shayne said, “but you can use your share of the insurance to pay the lawyers.”

  Gentry ground a cigarette under his heel. “An insurance murder, quite a comedown. Don’t answer this if you don’t feel like it. When you put on that fancy suit did you know it wasn’t a real bomb?”

  Shayne grinned ruefully. “The odds were against it, but I would have looked pretty stupid if I’d been wrong.”

  “Along with looking pretty dead.”

  “I spent three or four hours with Little,” Shayne said. “They were concentrated hours. I’ve been talking to people about him ever since. He had a sense of humor, everybody tells me, and I saw signs of it when he could hardly stand up, and fully expected to be shot to death the next day. Very bright—everybody agrees on that point. Look at the deal from his point of view. He’d attempted suicide once. Dessau and Diamond offered to arrange it for him on a higher political level, so his death would mean something, and threw in a big insurance settlement for his loving daughter. For Little’s purposes, dirt was as good as plutonium, so why take a chance on smuggling the real stuff out of the laboratory? And what a joke on Dessau, a man I’m sure he couldn’t have liked. But two hard-headed intelligence agents, Diamond and Anne Blagden, were sure it was a real bomb, so the rest of us acted accordingly. And it was just too big. Too much money seemed to be involved. People began going off on tangents, first Dessau, then Lightfoot.”

  Crowley had been prowling around behind Gentry trying to keep from interrupting.

  “What’s this about intelligence agents?” he demanded. “You’ll have to start at the beginning, Shayne, and take me through it step by step.”

  Shayne looked at him wearily.

  “That’s the way it usually happens. Call off the emergency. I’ll meet you at Gentry’s office in two hours. Right now I’ve got to return a borrowed car.”

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16