awkes turned in his chair to face Johnson fully. "You're driving at something," he said sharply. "Get to the point."
"Personally I've wondered at a few things about you myself," Johnson said. He held the gun steadily in his hand now, no longer pretending to play with it. "I told you that our second robbery occurred while I was a clerk with the Company," he went on. "They jerked me in to the Home Office, and for a while I had a pretty rough time.... You know, when I joined the Company, I was an amnesiac. I remembered my name, but that's about all...."
"No, I didn't know," Hawkes muttered, growing slightly paler.
"I learned then from the Home Office that I had been a member of their Secret Service some twenty years earlier. I'd been sent here to investigate the first robbery. And I had disappeared. Naturally, they had suspected me.
"However, they had no evidence, and when I reappeared twenty years later they played it smart by just waiting, instead of arresting me. When the second robbery occurred, they closed in.
"The only thing that saved me was the fact that tests proved my memory was really gone, and that I had told the truth—as I knew it. From the few scraps of information I retained—about being out on the Moebius Strip—they and I arrived at the theory I mentioned a short time ago. I was sent back here to wait. The Company never gives up. Remember?"
"Are you insinuating that I was in cahoots with this fellow here?" Hawkes asked harshly.
"I'd say it was more than an insinuation," Johnson replied. "You made several other slips. In the first place, Secret Service men are usually better informed about a situation they're investigating than you seemed to be. Also, those identification papers you showed me were faked."