CHAPTER TEN
Once back inside of his office, Mr. Taylor motioned for Eddie and Teena to be seated. Then he picked up the phone and made two quick calls. They also must have been local calls, Eddie thought, for within five minutes two men hurried into the office. Both were dressed in normal summer business clothes.
Eddie’s father introduced the dark-haired one in the light-tan suit as Mr. Paul Evans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The other man was tall, light-haired, and blue-eyed. His name was Walter Jamison. He was from the Drake Ridge atomic reactor. Eddie’s father didn’t explain what either man was doing there, but Eddie had no doubts that their main interest was recovery of the stolen radioisotope. Probably they had been around the Oceanview College campus ever since the theft had taken place.
“All right, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said after the two men sat down. “Start from the beginning and give us the whole story. Don’t leave anything out. Teena, you see that he doesn’t.”
Eddie didn’t know exactly what his father meant by the whole story. But he started with the day when he and Teena had come upon the two men at the cove. He told about their somewhat strange actions, and the puzzling sight of the sealed metal tube lying in the bottom of the rowboat. He mentioned how the men had not had it with them when they returned the boat to Anderson’s Landing a while later.
He told about seeing the men fishing out over the sand bar the Saturday after that, and again today.
Then, to Teena’s surprise, he brought in yesterday’s lone hike out to the cove. He told of his curiosity over the tracks leading to the abandoned fisherman’s shack set back from the top of the bluff, and how he had been greatly surprised, at peeking through the crack in the door, to see the chubby man named Roy Benton inside, as well as a bright metal cylinder—like the one they had just taken apart in the laboratory—standing in a corner of the shack.
“Probably it was the same tube you just took apart,” Eddie said. “When Teena and I were rowing out to Cedar Point this morning, we saw the two men coming down the bluff carrying something shiny. Later, looking back from Cedar Point, we saw them anchored over the sand bar. Probably over the same place we found the cylinder.”
“It figures,” Mr. Evans, the FBI man said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the two men are spies. Could be even more than two here at the college or working at Acme Aircraft.”
“Spies!” Teena gasped in disbelief.