Assignment to Disaster Read Free Page A

Lew."
    He went out into the light of the new day, found his car parked under the poplar trees where he had left it at three in the morning, and drove through the winding, early-morning streets of Washington, N.W. It was the first of July, and it was already hot, as he had expected. He felt better for having talked to Lew, after Deirdre Padgett's silent tears.
    He had breakfast at a stand on Fourteenth. Stale coffee and doughnuts, left over from the night before. The morning sun made the wet streets steam. At seven o'clock he drove toward Rock Creek Park and 20 Annapolis Street.
    The brass plaque on the gray-stone front of the big Georgian house read simply, "The Johnson-Kimball Company," in dignified letters. He felt gritty and tired, his shirt already sticking to his back as he entered. As he went through the Italian marble foyer he heard the busy rattle of office machines in the cover offices that formed a façade for the real business conducted in the building. The elevator man was young and husky. He looked at Durell with photographic eyes and said, "Good morning, Mr. Durell. Hazel's called down twice to see if you showed."
    "Thanks, Alex." Durell went up in the elevator to the third floor, passed two doors that looked wooden but that were built of armor-plate steel, and down a long corridor into the adjacent gray-stone house. All the light was artificial, since none of the windows were really windows. When he opened his office door, Hazel looked up and quickly gathered some papers from her desk.
    "Hi, Sam. You, too, eh? Nobody got any sleep last night. Swayney is waiting for you."
    "Don't fret, Hazel."
    He went into his inner office and flicked a finger across the neat stack of personal mail that included an alumni bulletin from Yale, a clothing bill, a rent bill, a letter from a couple he had befriended in England during the war, and a battered, dog-eared envelope postmarked Bayou Peche Rouge and addressed in fine copperplate. He put the last in his pocket and went to the outer office again and Hazel.
    "Set up an interview for me with Dickinson McFee, will you, please?"
    She looked appalled. "The General? If you top Swayney, he'll pout for a month."
    "Can't be helped. I need the information. Set it up, eh?"
    On the second floor Durell paused and took a handkerchief and dried his palms meticulously and then walked through a room that contained a battery of electronic computers, through another room where charts and graphs covered the walls, and a Class R administrator was struggling to analyze Middle Eastern reports while teletype bells and phones jangled next door. Swayney's office was beyond all these.
    Burritt Swayney, as chief of section, rated a large, airy room with an air-conditioner snoring quietly in a window overlooking a tidy, enclosed garden. Swayney was round and plump and pale, with a habit of making sucking sounds with his small mouth. His eyes were the coldest, palest blue Durell had ever seen. The man was a human memory machine and a confirmed lecher. Durell didn't like him, but for the sake of the work, he got along with him.
    "Oh. Sam, hey?" Swayney said. He waved plump hands. "Sit you down."
    Durell sat. "I want some facts, Burritt."
    "Sure. Sorry there was no time for a thorough briefing. I've got most of the poop. You drop everything else until this is over."
    "It's that important?"
    "Nothing else matters. Find Calvin Padgett."
    "Tell me."
    Swayney closed his eyes and recited: "Born in Prince John. Parents, Franklin Padgett, Mary Sprague Lewis. Good stock. Old aristocracy. Lots of money then. Two siblings — John Franklin Padgett, Deirdre Sprague Padgett. When their investments turned sour, father and mother turned on a gas oven and went out on the kitchen floor. The oldest boy, John, was then eleven. He found them. Something happened, nobody knows what — explosion. John's leg injured. Still a cripple. Brilliant man. Physicist. In charge of electronics at Las Tiengas."
    "What?" Durell said.