The younger man flushed and stammered. What he finally got out was, “Apparently not!”
Higgins summed up his view of the affair, “To start with, you go on a wildgoose chase. If any customer of Miami-Dade was the sort of drop you thought of, you had no chance of finding it out just by making a call. Take a hundred men, working weeks — short of some lucky break. So your scheme is dumb. The next thing you do, just because you can pick locks, is break into what you call a suspicious building. That was plain crazy! If you d run into what you suspected, you’d be lying on the bottom of the Hudson now in a barrel of cement. Fortunately, the joint’s empty. But you saw a man — a whopping big man — come out. You’d also once seen Ellings talking to some flagpole-sized guy. There are many big men, Bogan, and unless a man stands beside somebody whose height you know, how can you tell how big he is exactly?”
“If you’d seen him! Here in Florida. There on Broadway—”
“So, all right! He gets in a car. Drives off. You never notice its license! So there’s no way on earth of tracing him. Even the FBI can’t find a man in New York by merely knowing he’s outsize.”
Duffs face was a deep scarlet. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m at last beginning to think I was souped up over nothing.”
For perhaps a minute, Higgins merely looked at Duff. When he spoke again, his brisk manner had left him. His tone was level and there was nothing sarcastic in it. “Look here, son. We’ve checked you from hell to breakfast You’re a solid citizen, from a solid family.
Can you keep your mouth shut?”
The long series of disappointments and embarrassments suddenly, incredibly vanished. Duff said, “Yes.”
Higgins rocked back in his chair. “I wouldn’t tell you this if General Baines hadn’t been brought into it by you lads. He thought you ought to know. One more crazy thing you did! A three-thousand-mile, cockeyed chase! And you go interview the Chief of Intelligence — through Smythe’s pull! Okay! Look. There is something going on in the country, Bogan, that involves a group of agents we’ve only just got wind of. It could be—
what you came in here claiming a while back. Getting A-bombs stashed here. It could be. It could be something less spectacular — some other sabotage system. Like making arrangements to start diseases, epidemics. We don’t know. We haven’t connected your boarder — your late boarder — to any of it. But something’s happening!”