Birrel looked at the hand in the coat pocket. He went.
He came out into the cool dark wetness of 71st Street, the summer shower over and the red and white neon signs toward Broadway reflected cheerily on wet asphalt. A sedan, with a man at its wheel, was waiting.
He heard the mild voice close behind his ear. "Get right in, Mr. Birrel."
The car swept them up the West Side Highway, with the electric glow of Manhattan behind them. Ahead, the strung-out lights of George Washington Bridge arched the black gulf of the river.
Birrel sat in the back seat, with the gray man keeping well away from him at the other end of the seat. He could see nothing of the driver but a thick neck under a crusher hat.
They crossed the Hudson and went on westward, skirting cities and running quietly and fast through a region of small factories and junk-heaps and power-plants.
Birrel felt a mounting panic. What the devil had he got mixed up in? He tried to think why anyone would want to grab him like this.
He couldn't think of anything. Since the war he'd completed his education, taken his engineering degree, landed a job in a Long Island electric company, and—that was all. He didn't know any technical secrets, he wasn't doing any top-secret work, he was an utterly undistinguished thirty-year-old engineer and nothing more.
Then why?
"Listen," he said, "I know there's a mistake—"