Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1962

Then that was the noise he heard — like the beating of a buzzard’s wings, heard from afar in a still place. Except that this was amplified a thousand times.

There were others near, but it hurt him to move even his eyeballs. He concentrated on Haynes.

Somebody threw back the tarp on the truck, and dust fell on his face. Haynes said, “Watch what you’re doing up there!” and gently brushed the dust away while a voice floated down from above, “Sorry.”

Then Haynes said, “When the FBI boys pulled in at the customs house and you and Burkett didn’t show up right away, I went along to see what was keeping you. I saw the blood on the side of the road, and we found Burkett’s body. I read the marks, followed your bloodtrail and footprints, guessed a lot, and we started north. We got here a few minutes after a truckload of technicians. They’re having a field day with the bomb. They had been so close that they saw you take your plunge off the truck onto Suarez. And Suarez talked. He’s over there, with his back broken and his chest caved in. He won’t live.”

A tall man in Air Force uniform was approaching, carrying a black kit. His cool fingers went gently to work on Randolph, who never felt the hypo through his other pains.

Haynes said, “Suarez is afraid that history may never know what he tried to do. So he talked. He had known Henrietta in Havana. There he had been one of Castro’s early underground aides. She was an AEC secretary, on vacation. When she came back to the United States she wrote to him with her scheme to make a fortune. He met her once in Juarez, again in Nogales. Then she married Smetana.”

And the overall plan, Randolph saw now, was what had made her stay with Smetana, no matter what he did to her.

Haynes continued. “Finally, she got him down to Santo Tomas, where Suarez was waiting. But Smetana wouldn’t cooperate. Except that she knew what to do. How she must have hated him! She tortured him until he told them how to build the bomb. After it was built, she shot him. She threatened Suarez, too, who had been waiting until the bomb was finished to tell her he wanted to use it in what he termed a try for world peace. He was fox-crazy. She saw that. She needed help. Gomez was the man to give it to her. Suarez, suspecting she would try to cross him, unloaded the bomb from the railroad car and put it in the truck. He planted Smetana’s body in the ice bunker and called the railroad company and told them to come and get the car. Then a chance to get rid of Henrietta came along. He had already planned to bomb her.

All he had to do was plant some dynamite last night when she was with you. When she stepped on the starter, she blew herself up. Knowing that Gomez would take over her scheme, Suarez drove the truck to an isolated garage. It was bad luck for him that as he later approached the border gate en route to the road that follows the fence down to San Manuel gate, he saw Gomez. He couldn’t be sure Gomez hadn’t seen him, and if he had, Gomez would figure the bomb might be in the truck. So Suarez parked near the railroad track and got out and moved up along the train — he was skinny enough to slide under the gate — and tried to get in close enough to where he could hear what was being said. When Gomez came out and pointed at the train, Suarez thought if they didn’t find anything on the train, Gomez would remember the truck. So he gambled and shot when the train moved out, using the gun Henrietta had used on Smetana. He dropped it and lost it in the darkness. Then he went on to the San Manuel gate, crossed into the United States, and the rest you know.”

The doctor finished, waved in two men with a stretcher, and they loaded Randolph on it. The hypo was taking effect now, making him hazy. He had a thought, even a pitying one, for doomed Suarez, to whom a human life was nothing.

The doctor said, “Only a few people will ever know what happened here until some time later. Even the knowledge of what happened might start the war the world is trying to avoid. And the world,” he added thoughtfully, “will go on owing Randolph an awful lot it can never repay.”

Before he drifted off into the haziness, Randolph heard Haynes say, “Take care of him, Doc. He’s on the way to becoming a national hero of some sort. See to it that he lives to enjoy it.”