Sam Katz, captive in the stockroom, did not immediately understand that he was being liberated.
He hardly noticed when the music in the T-shirt shop was suddenly turned off. Braced for death, he flinched and nearly toppled backward off his high stool as the locked door to his ugly chamber was kicked in. Seeing his son in the vacant frame, his first words were, "It isn't safe here, Aaron. Go away."
"It's okay, Pop. It's okay."
"What?"
"It's safe now," Aaron shouted. Shouting it brought it home to him, and the beginnings of tears burned the corners of his eyes.
"Really?" shouted Sam.
"Really."
Sam got a little happy then. "My gizmo worked. It worked."
"Your gizmo?" Aaron said.
Sam explained as Suki un-taped his ankles. His legs and spine had forgotten how they fit together; for a while Aaron had to hold him up.
Bert, hostage for a shorter time, was in much better shape. He clambered to his feet as soon as he'd been untied; he had the presence to straighten the placket of his shirt He didn't want to intrude on the family reunion , but he wanted very badly to go retrieve his dog.
So the four of them drove to Key Haven.
On the way there they were passed by the ambulance that carried Carol Lopez. The bullet that hit her had shattered a rib, missed her heart by an inch or so, and lodged in her right lung. She was conscious off and on, and she seemed to understand that the rookie cop, her partner for an hour, had been slain. His was the vague sad glory of the soldier killed in his very first foray, who went down with hardly a moment to savor what he'd done or to contemplate exactly why he'd done it. Carol Lopez, by contrast an old campaigner, would soon rejoin the force. With a decoration on her shirt and a dented bullet carried in her pocket, she would be taken seriously at last.
In the crazy tiled house where Bert and Sam had posed as golden age lovers, the chihuahua was still curled around the yellow Walkman. Its blind eyes panned the room when people entered, then it dragged itself along the tiled floor. Its whiskers probed, its tail flicked, and, at the perfect instant, like one half of a long-established dance team, it arched its creaking back to accept its master's hand around its belly.
Sam reclaimed his souped up Walkman, the proof of his abiding competence, with hardly less affection than Bert lavished on his dog. The cassette inside explained much that was otherwise obscure—the circumstances leading to the murder of Lazslo; the pathetic revenge attempted in the killing of Ludmila; Ivan Cherkassky's coolly premeditated plan to eliminate everyone who might testify as to his larger crimes, then to lie and bargain toward clemency.
But the full extent of the Russians' Key West empire could not be grasped until warrants were obtained to search the T-shirt shops. In various stockroom stashes, police found roughly fourteen million dollars in American cash. Paintings from Leningrad and lapis jewelry from the Caucasus. Tiger skins from Siberia; a Faberge egg smuggled out of Moscow; sapphires that had once been worn by czars.
And even then, the real root source of all that wealth was not revealed until Pineapple had mustered his nerve and his composure, and asked Lieutenant Gary Stubbs to drive out to the hot dog and look at some things that he and Fred had dug up from the old fallout shelter in the mangroves.
Stubbs had never intended to call in the Feds, not if he could possibly avoid it, but when he saw the stacks of dusty, lead-lined tubes and boxes arrayed around the clearing, he admitted to himself at last that this was something that could not be handled locally. He called the FBI.
Within two hours the experts had descended. Men in what looked like spacesuits opened the metal containers and assayed the substances inside. Plutonium 239. Ninety- seven percent pure; weapons grade. Around seven hundred kilograms in all. Enough to build thirty bombs of the strength that leveled Hiroshima. Or to power three breeder reactors that would keep rogue nations supplied with fissionable goods for a millennium. It was by far the biggest stash of nuclear material ever known to have fallen into private hands.
Fred and Piney were treated with suspicion for a while. They were questioned for a long, long time, though they could tell their story in fifteen seconds: They had a friend in danger from Russians. They saw a fat man who maybe was a Russian in the mangroves with a red wagon and a shovel. He didn't belong there. They thought they should see what he was going to dig up.
The FBI concluded at last that Piney and Fred were not part of the conspiracy.
Huge military trucks arrived to take the plutonium away. It was hard to keep all this a secret, and someone— most likely Donald Egan—leaked the story to the national media.
By nightfall the TV crews had mustered, with their arc lights and satellite hookups and correspondents with sprayed hair, broadcasting live from the clearing near the hot dog and in front of the Mangrove Arms. The publisher of the Island Frigate, thrilled to be near the middle of a breaking story, spoke to everyone, told of how the phony article in his paper had forced the Russians' hand.