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thought passed, leaving him basically undisturbed. His own life had been at
stake, and he had struck back with as much precision as the circumstances
allowed; that settled the matter.
For the moment, at any event, he was a free agent. He was just one more truck
driver, prowling the traffic-heavy streets of a storm-ridden city. Sir Lewis
no longer knew where he was, and might even think him dead. Neither did the
FBI. Since there was no telephone in the cab, he was even out of Sean s range.
The traffic light ahead flickered, and Danny swung his monoxide-breathing
mastodon down a side street. There d be no sense in attracting the attention
of cops by careless driving. If he obeyed the traffic signals and kept out of
scrapes, he d be just one more truck on the way to pick up a trailer. In the
meantime
In the meantime, it was going to have to be Sean. Clearly Sean had meant to
be overheard when he had offered his one-word congratulation to Danny for
working out the puzzle of the resonator. And equally clearly he was involved
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in this business somewhere, despite his very vocal skepticism.
Danny ran over his memory of that one word, listening especially to its
quality, its  sound. It had a peculiarly remote, eerie quality to it, quite
unlike the overheard thoughts of Tooey and the boss racketeer, almost as if it
had come along some special channel reserved for extraordinary
communications he had almost thought  official. But since there were no
channels in telepathy, Sean must have imparted that coloration to the word
deliberately a code, an identification tag
If Danny could place that coloring, he could read the code. The quality of
the word had one feature which was unlike normal thought; it sounded
Underground.
Sean had been one of the voices Danny had heard on the first night. The one
that had said, Let the finder beware.
The psychiatric advice, the involved statistical arguments, all that had been
a blind but a blind for what? Was everyone in this game carrying all his cards
up his sleeve? It was time to find out.
It was a cinch, at least, that Sean wouldn t care a snap of the fingers
whether or not the FBI was interested in Danny. Very probably, the idea would
excite him; when Nietzsche had said,  Live dangerously, he was talking to
Sean Hennessy.
Sean s place was a good distance away, up on 125th Street near the
University. Danny turned his behemoth toward the West Side, where he could
pick up a thruway to the north side of town.
Halfway there, he discovered that he was hungry. He couldn t remember having
eaten anything since the liverwurst-on-rye sandwiches, unless he counted the
resonator or the soap.
He turned the truck off the thruway again and found a one-arm joint. Inside,
he ordered hash-and-eggs, checked belatedly to make sure the PRS hadn t robbed
him to boot, and filched a tabloid from a drunk asleep in the booth behind
him. On page three there was a headline:
SNATCH WITNESS IN
PRICE-FIX PROBE
Mystery Girl Held By FBI;
Missing Scientist Is
Linked To Dead Gypsy
The story was incredibly garbled but a few facts could be worried out of it.
Todd had vanished before the cops, attracted by the shot, had arrived. Marla,
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evidently without stopping to think, had told the police enough about the
kidnapping to make them discount her story entirely; the paper had her billed
as a temptress interjected into the picture by International Wheat. What Danny
could not understand was how the gamblers, who evidently had survived their
battle with the Pinkerton men, had managed to come back and get Todd before
the cops had arrived; but on that question the story fell into total
confusion.
The old man couldn t take very much rough treatment. Danny could only hope
that he would tell the exact truth. The fact that both men talked the same
kind of  double-talk might puzzle the top man of the syndicate enough to make
him hold off on the brutality for a while. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]