Part 25 (1/2)

This was a nuisance for a number of reasons, not least because when in close proximity the doubles create a cosmic disturbance, one that threatened to send Lee and Silk back to their home world. So they corrected the balance by sending the doubles back instead. Lee's double was killed because presumably he proved troublesome. Lady Silk they kept alive.'

Butcher stood, staring at the Doctor. Ace felt a growing sense of embarra.s.sment. The Doctor had hardly embarked on his explanation when she sensed its utter futility. He had achieved nothing except to make Butcher think he was a madman. Ray Morita lumbered over and joined them.

'Hey man,' he said in a quiet voice. Butcher stopped staring at the Doctor 162and turned to look at him. 'Listen,' said Ray. 'It's all real simple. The Doctor and Ace were held prisoner here since last night. Those Storrow cats kept them doped with ether or chloroform or something, dosing them every time they woke up.'

Butcher looked at Ace. 'Is that true?' Ace nodded. After all, it was was true. true.

Butcher slowly began to smile. 'Well then,' he said. 'That explains everything.'

He grinned at the Doctor. 'No wonder you're thinking crazy thoughts. I'm surprised you're not seeing little pink elephants flying around the room.' He began to chuckle. 'It's just like when your Indian buddies forced me to take that peyote and I started seeing little green men. Now it's your turn Doctor!'

He slapped the Doctor affectionately on the shoulder. The Doctor regarded him with disgust.

Butcher took out the pair of handcuffs he'd been saving and snapped them onto Lady Silk's wrists. The woman didn't struggle or try to resist. All the fight had gone out of her. 'I've got a car parked in the street. Let's get moving.'

'Wait a minute, man,' said Ray. 'First I've got to get my records.'

163.

Chapter Thirteen.

The Devil Butcher was never quite sure how they did it, but the Doctor and Ace managed to give him the slip almost as soon as they left the chapel. He a.s.sumed that this was the last he'd ever see of them, but when he got back to the Hill with Ray, they were already there, waiting for him and looking innocent. As if b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in their mouths. As if nothing had ever happened.

Butcher had other things to worry about. The paperwork was a nightmare, but not as bad as it would have been if the police had got involved. Keeping it a military matter, under the blanket of an intelligence operation, had kept the LAPD at a frustrated and angry distance and meant Butcher was only put through the wringer for weeks instead of months.

Theoretically he had broken enough rules to spend the rest of his life in a stockade. But Butcher had also rescued the missing Los Alamos scientists, smashed a spy cell and best of all apprehended the notorious traitor and propagandist Lady Silk. This alone would have pretty much guaranteed him a pa.s.s, although Butcher's pivotal role in the arrest was soon obscured as everyone else higher up the chain of command took credit for it, General Groves in particular being quick to get his snout in the glory trough.

Soon Butcher's involvement was almost forgotten, which was just as well considering the number of dead bodies he left at the Chapel of the Red Apocalypse.

There hadn't been too much trouble over the three j.a.panese zoot-suiters.

All of them were petty hoodlums who escaped from, or avoided detention in, the internment camps. No one was sorry to see them go. The dead white man, Albert Storrow, could have proved to be a big problem. But he had clearly been shot down with one of the Tommy guns, by one of the zoot-suiters, so Butcher was off the hook for that. Storrow's wife, Elina, also considerately helped matters by getting herself diagnosed as a raving lunatic. The fat woman had evidently been unhinged by the death of her husband and after listening to a few days of her ravings, the Army handed her over to the civilian authorities to lock up in some California bug house.

Butcher had got out of it with his nose clean.

The only disturbing aspect was the missing body. Butcher had been busy 165returning Ray to Los Alamos, so he hadn't been present when the Army intelligence team had swept in to secure the chapel. He only read about it in the form of telexes. The initial reports were somewhat confused and it was some days before he'd discovered that only three dead j.a.panese-Americans had been found at the scene. The punk called Imperial Lee, last seen lying lifeless at the bottom of the red well, was missing.

Everyone a.s.sumed that Butcher had just got it wrong. 'Anyone might make a mistake like that,' General Groves had said, offering Butcher a cigar. Instead of summoning Butcher, Groves had actually done him the honour of visiting him in the Major's shabby corrugated hut. Plus, a cynic might observe that by not officially ordering Butcher in for a briefing, Groves was keeping him well and truly out of the limelight.

The cigar was presumably to compensate Butcher for the General taking all credit for Lady Silk's arrest. 'You simply got the number of dead j.a.ps wrong,'

said Groves. 'Not so surprising when the bullets are flying.' In the General's tone and in his eyes there was also the implicit suggestion that Butcher was trying to make himself look like some kind of John Wayne hero, shooting it out with four of the enemy and getting them all. Even three was pus.h.i.+ng it.

Butcher knew he wasn't mistaken. He'd got the numbers right, regardless of how many bullets were flying. But he decided to keep his mouth shut about it. He shared a beer with the General and that was that.

Imperial Lee couldn't do much harm now that he was dead.

What did it matter if his body had disappeared?

Butcher soon settled back into his routine at the Hill. Oppenheimer's team was frantic as Trinity approached and Butcher resumed the thankless task of keeping an eye on the eggheads. Klaus Fuchs' behaviour had begun to seem suspicious to him and he gradually rose to number one on Butcher's. .h.i.t parade of surveillance subjects, although he could never seem to get anything concrete on the kraut. That was the worst aspect of this a.s.signment. The scientists working on the Hill were considered so vital to the war effort that Butcher would have to catch one virtually in the act of murder to put him behind bars.

This fact had been hammered home when, unbelievably, Ray Morita and the Doctor and his female a.s.sistant were all allowed to resume work on the Hill as if nothing had happened. Butcher had been particularly looking forward to nailing the Doctor after that business with the Indians and the peyote. But it had turned out that the little weasel was some kind of undercover British agent. He had credentials that were verified at the highest level. Apparently he'd been a.s.signed to Los Alamos to do virtually the same job as Butcher. And General Groves had known all about it.

166.Of course n.o.body had bothered telling Butcher.

Still, he told himself he could at least take comfort in the fact that the business was over now and, with Trinity looming, he'd soon never have to worry about Ray Morita or the Doctor again.

But the affair kept coming back to haunt him and, on the very eve of Trinity, with the 'gadget' already in place on its tall detonation tower at the isolated desert test site, he received the absurd news that Lady Silk was coming to Los Alamos. The arrest of the 'j.a.panese Songbird' had been big news and the Army decided that if she had been providing propaganda for the j.a.ps she could now do the same for Uncle Sam, by being paraded as a captive, a s.h.i.+ning example of Army efficiency. And naturally all the bra.s.s wanted to get their mugs in the papers, photographed with Silk.

So it was that, with the firing unit now attached to the gadget and mere hours before the thing was scheduled to be detonated, Butcher was told to expect the arrival of Lady Silk on the Hill to be photographed with General Groves. There was no suggestion, of course, that she be photographed with Butcher Butcher. He ground his teeth and finally convinced himself there was no point being bitter, although the publicity would no doubt have helped tremendously with the sale of his books.

Butcher would be responsible for security during Silk's visit. He had to make sure, for example, that the girl didn't spring up with a pair of sharpened chopsticks and a.s.sa.s.sinate the General by propelling them through his hairy ears into the centre of his swollen head. But it turned out that there was little danger of that. When she arrived, Silk proved to be a cowed, frightened little figure and despite her considerable natural beauty the photographers had to work hard so she didn't just look drab in the pictures. The lightbulbs flashed and Butcher stood on the sidelines and watched. When they had finished glorifying General Groves, they handed the girl back over to Butcher for safe keeping. As he left the General's quarters he heard Groves joking about the phone call he needed to make to the governor of New Mexico. He was notifying the governor that it might be necessary to evacuate the entire state, if the explosion was more 'successful' than they antic.i.p.ated (Fermi was taking bets that all of New Mexico would go up in flames).

Butcher stepped out into the cool night air with the girl at his side. Lady Silk had been scheduled to reach the Hill at midnight but had arrived two hours late. This hardly mattered, since everyone at Los Alamos was now working around the clock and had pretty much given up any notion of sleep before the Trinity detonation. But it did mean that, with one thing or another, it had been three in the morning before the Groves' publicity circus got under way, and it was now after four o'clock, on the morning of Monday 16 July 1945.

He set off back towards his quarters with the girl at his side. Butcher took a 167good look at her as they walked. The haughty figure he had glimpsed through the bas.e.m.e.nt window was now gone. The j.a.panese Songbird had become a bedraggled little sparrow. Butcher wondered if this was the consequence of the weeks of interrogation she'd undergone. Maybe she'd cracked. But everything he'd heard had indicated the opposite.

Silk had stuck unswervingly to her story, that she had been kidnapped and taken somewhere and had never betrayed her country. The guys who'd questioned her said she was so convincing that they almost believed it. Or believed that she believed it.

Maybe she was another candidate for the laughing academy, like Elina Storrow.

In any case, he was stuck with her until about noon, when a jeep would be coming to pick her up and take her back into custody. He unlocked the door of his tin hut and ushered the girl inside. Butcher had no worries about her trying to escape. Her spirit seemed too comprehensively crushed for there to be any chance of that. His main worry was what the h.e.l.l to do with her for the next few hours. His hut was spa.r.s.ely furnished, with a narrow bed, a desk and two wooden chairs. Butcher growled at the girl to sit down on one of the chairs and he took the other one, behind the desk. He didn't want anybody sitting on the bed. It might give the girl the idea that she could pull some kind of a Mata Hari number on him, seducing him, and make good her escape.

But Lady Silk just sat quietly in her a.s.signed chair, staring at the floor, making no move even to take off the raincoat she was wearing. Butcher sat in the other chair, his elbows on his desk, trying to look authoritative and businesslike and forget that he was locked up with a beautiful woman, traitor or no traitor, for the rest of the night. Silk's captors had made an attempt to doll her up for the General's photo session and they'd even gone so far as giving her some perfume to put on. The smell of that perfume was beginning to drive Butcher crazy.

He was grateful when the phone on his desk rang. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up before the second ring. 'Butcher here.'

'Major Butcher,' said a familiar voice, affable and sardonic and somehow always conveying the infuriating impression of effortless superiority. 'It's the Doctor here.'

'Isn't it a little late to be calling?' said Butcher.

'I understand that you were roped in for the General's photo session with Lady Silk, so I was fairly sure you wouldn't be asleep. Is she with you?'

'Is who with me?'

The Doctor sighed. 'All right, maintain the facade of official security if you feel it's necessary, even now that you know we're colleagues.'

168.'If British intelligence wanted me to co-operate with you they should have notified me through the proper channels.'

'Yes, that must rankle,' said the Doctor. 'As I'm sure must the General's mugging and posing with the famous fugitive that we both know you you arrested. arrested.

I don't imagine you were invited to appear in any of the photographs, were you?'

'Look, if you haven't got anything to say, get off the line,' said Butcher. 'I'm expecting some important calls.' He wasn't actually expecting anything.

'I have indeed got something to say. It's in the nature of an invitation, really.'