The Spoilers / Juggernaut Read Online Free PDF

all—to be confronted by Hewling and Morrin with their offers and propositions, all booby-trapped.
    The sudden necessity to fly to Los Angeles and to beat the Hollywood moguls on their own ground. Then back to New York to be inveigled by Morrin to go on that trip to Miami and the Bahamas, an unsubtle attempt at corruption by hospitality. But he had beaten them all and had returned to England with the fruits of victory and at the high point of his career, only to be confronted by the devil of a mess because no one had been strong enough to control Matchet.
    In all that time he had never once thought of his daughter.
    The dimming light concealed the greyness of his face as he contemplated that odious fact. He sought to find excuses and found none. And he knew that this was not the worst—he knew that he had never given June the opportunity of communicating with him on the simple level of one human being to another. She had been something in the background of his life, and the knowledge hurt him that she had been something and not someone .
    Hellier got up and paced the room restlessly, thinking of all the things Warren had said. Warren had seemed to take drug addiction as a matter of course, a normal fact of life to be coped with somehow. Although he had not said so outright, he had implied it was his task to clear up the mess left by the negligence of people like himself.
    But surely someone else was to blame. What about the profit-makers? The pushers of drugs?
    Hellier paused as he felt a spark of anger flash into being, an anger which, for the first time, was not directed against himself. His was a sin of omission, although not to be minimized on that account. But the sin of commission, the deliberate act of giving drugs to the young for profit, was monstrous. He had been thoughtless, but the drug pedlars were evil.
    The anger within him grew until he thought he would burst with the sheer agony of it, but he deliberately checkedhimself in order to think constructively. Just as he had not allowed his emotions to impede his negotiations with Matchet, Hewling and Morrin,, so he brought his not inconsiderable intellect to bear unclouded on this new problem. Hellier, as an efficient machine, began to swing smoothly into action.
    He first thought of Warren who, with his special knowledge, was undoubtedly the key. Hellier was accustomed to studying closely the men with whom he dealt because their points of strength and weakness showed in subtle ways. He went over in his mind everything Warren had said and the way in which he had said it, and seized upon two points. He was certain Warren knew something important.
    But he had to make sure that his chosen key would not break in his hand. Decisively he picked up the telephone and dialled a number. A moment later he said, ‘Yes, I know it’s late. Do we have that firm of investigators still on our books? They helped us on the Lowrey case…Good! I want them to investigate Dr Nicholas Warren MD. Repeat that. It must be done discreetly. Everything there is to know about him, damn it! As fast as possible…a report in three days…oh, damn the expense!…charge it to my private account.’
    Absently he picked up the decanter of whisky. ‘And another thing. Get the Research Department to find out all they can about drug smuggling—the drug racket in general. Again, a report in three days…Yes, I’m serious…it might make a good film.’ He paused. ‘Just one thing more; the Research Department mustn’t go near Dr Warren…Yes, they’re quite likely to, but they must steer clear of him—is that understood? Good!’
    He put down the telephone and looked at the decanter in some surprise. He laid it down gently and went into his bedroom. For the first time in many years he ignored hisnormal meticulous procedure of hanging up his clothes and left them strewn about the floor.
    Once in bed the tensions left him and his body relaxed. It was only then that the physical expression of his