Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

I opened the suitcase. It was filled with carefully arranged packages of thermoplastique. I set it down gingerly and hauled Draftsman into the apartment. I must have made more noise than I thought, because everyone’s eyes were turned my way.

“What’s this?” roared Narijian.

Greem let out a little sob when he saw me. King knocked Narijian to one side and broke for the window. Greem lunged for Akutagawa. Joan Chandler sat frozen. I made for Greem, but Akutagawa was there first, reacting with stunning ease. Straight finger blow to the solar plexus. Short chop to the side of the head. And that was all for Greem.

Narijian hadn’t done so well. He made a flying tackle at King and got kicked in the head for, his ingenuity. Proof positive that you can’t carry college football techniques over into the real world. Now King was on the fire escape, descending rapidly.

I was about to take a shot at him when Narijian roared, “Hold it.” He came rushing to the window. “Craven will take him.” He yelled down. It sounded like a full-throated bullhorn and I’ll swear the street reverberated.

King shot at Narijian and splintered the wood frame by his head. It sounded like he was using a .38. Then the deeper sound of a .45 cut in. Craven. Two shots, a scream from the third story of the fire escape, then a soft thud, and silence.

That about wrapped it up. King was dead when he hit the sidewalk. Which was a pity, because it would have been nice to know where he got the thermoplastique, also the crates of .30 caliber ammunition and the automatic rifles outside his back door.

As it turned out Draftsman and Greem wouldn’t talk. Joan Chandler would, only she didn’t know quite as much as they presumably did. She knew enough, though, to deeply implicate them. Violation of the Sullivan weapons act was only part of it.

As Akutagawa put it the following morning: “The group — The Citizens’ Council for the Preservation of American Liberties — had planned a wave of terror against the United Nations by planting thermoplastique in the cars of prominent UN officials. The object was to disrupt the daily operations of the Organization, to the extent that no business could be transacted.

After several months of this, interspersed with 3.5 mm rifle shots at the buildings and maybe a few long range rifle assassinations, the American people would see how ineffectual the UN was, besides being a drain on the economy, and they would demand that it pack up and go to where it should have gone in the first place — namely, Moscow. That at least was the plan George King thought up.

International Acoustics, which was quite prosperous, existed solely to finance the plan. More than ten years of effort went into perfecting the plan. King was a meticulous man. He kept voluminous notes on the plan’s progress, as you know. At the bottom of it all was his sickness, which caused him to believe the UN was part of an international communist conspiracy, aimed at his and his country’s destruction.”

I said: “So King was crazy, a nut, like I said.”

“Of course he was. But you see the plan might never have been threatened if Draftsman hadn’t panicked and tried to kill his wife.”

“You mean, she stumbled onto it?”

Akutagawa shook his head. “Not at all. She stumbled onto quite something else again. They were only separated, you see, not divorced; and she discovered that he was making rather extensive use of her charge accounts. She confronted him with this and threatened to expose him. He thought he was a desperate man. Hence the extreme reaction.”

Akutagawa checked his watch, reached over for the teapot and poured. The scent of jasmine filled the air. “A small celebration,” he said. “Imported Pouchong Aromatic.”

We sipped and were silent for a moment. Finally he said: “It was doubly ironic, don’t you see. Draftsman gave the game away for the wrong reason. But there’s no indication that King was ready to implement the plan.”

“He convinced Draftsman.”

“Yes. Draftsman entered into his madness. But this was a desperate scheme which had been maturing for ten years. King could easily have spent another ten years perfecting it. My feeling is that after awhile the means took precedence over the ends.”

“You mean,” I said, “he got hung up on the details.”

“Certainly. Just look at his journals. All of it represents planning. Not a word about operations. That, incidentally, was another reason why the Army could no longer use him. He was supposed to be an operations officer. Instead, he spent all his time planning. Incredible.”

I started to get up when the phone rang. Akutagawa got it, listened for a moment, grinned, then handed it to me. It was Joe Benares of Ajax Probes. He sounded excited. “Listen, Lowry, I’m calling about George King. He—”

“Who?” I took a sip of jasmine tea. It was heady stuff.

“George King. International Acoustics. For Pete’s Sake, the guy you asked me to investigate.”

“Oh, George King. Yeah, Joe, What about him?”