"I want you to pick up that phone and make a call to Washington," said the Saint, without rancor. "The number is Imperative five, five hundred. Extension five. If you don't know what that means, your local FBI gent will tell you. You'll talk to a voice called Hamilton. After that you're on your own."
Even Kinglake looked as briefly startled as his seamed face could.
"And if I let you talk me into making this call, what good will it do you?"
"I think," said the Saint, "that Hamilton will laugh his head off; but I'm afraid he'll tell you to save that nice quiet cell for somebody else."
The Lieutenant gazed at him fixedly for four or five seconds.
Then he reached for the telephone. Simon Templar germinated another cigarette, and folded into the remnants of an armchair. He hardly paid any attention to the conversation that went on, much less to the revolver that rested for a few more minutes on the detective's lap. That phase of the affair was finished, so far as he was concerned; and he had some-thing else to think about.
He had to make a definite movement to bring himself back to that shabby and dissected room when the receiver clonked back on its bracket, and Kinglake said, with the nearest approach to humanity that Simon had yet heard in his gravel voice: "That's fine. And now what in hell am I going to tell those mugs outside?"
10
The Saint could string words into barbed wire, but he also knew when and how to be merciful. He smiled at the Lieutenant without the slightest trace of malice or gloating. He was purely practical.
"Tell 'em I spilled my guts. Tell 'em I gave you the whole story, which you can't repeat because it's temporarily a war secret and the FBI is taking over anyhow; but of course you knew all about it all the time. Tell 'em I'm just an ambitious amateur trying to butt into something that's too big for him: you scared the day-lights out of me, which is all you really wanted to do. Tell 'em I folded up like a flower when I tried to sell you my line and you really got tough. So I quit; and you were big-hearted and let me highhtail out of here. Make me into any kind of a jerk that suits you, because I don't want the other kind of publicity and you can get credit for the pinch anyway."