Trail of the Twisted Cros Read Online Free PDF Page B

cars and cars
     named after animals and insects that all looked to be cloned from one another were the best and brightest of Detroit.
    Back when Ben Slayton was a kid, he had spent a lot of time hanging out in the back seat of his father’s 1950 Buick Roadmaster.
     On long cross-country trips, when one could actually tell the difference between, say, Ohio and Tennessee, he would count
     the differences between all the cars on the road. He would know immediately, for instance, when he saw a ’49 Ford, because
     of the distinctive shaping of the tail lights; he would know the Pontiacs by the definite slope of the hood; Chevies had headlights
     like no other car; and of course, the Cadillacs and Lincolns of those days, along with the eminent Packards, were the great
     highway ships of the time.
    Those dinosaurs, Slayton knew, were roomy and solid, and delivered twenty miles per gallon of gasoline or better. And so to
     give himself solace from the puny insults to American technology now wheezing and chugging along the roadways, parts falling
     off as if they had been taped and stapled into place at the factory, Ben Slayton continued his father’s collection of automobiles.
    He spread a freshly laundered cotton drop-cloth over the front fender of the ailing ’47 Hudson, fixed an overhead light into
     place on the underside of the open hood, and prepared to spend his early morning tinkering.
    And he above all others, he reasoned, had earned the right to putter away a day or two. After all, Winship had put him through
     all his paces, and then some, with that last assignment—the business with the
Star of Egypt
.
    But no sooner had his head dipped into the engine cavity than the telephone started screaming from the far end of the garage,
     putting an abrupt end, Slayton assumed, to his rest and recreation.
    “Blast!” he cursed at the telephone, even as he trotted across the garage to answer it. It was the extension that Winship
     had ordered installed in the garage, sending around a pair of men from the General Services Administration to make sure the
     job was done.
    “It’s a scramble,” Winship said from Washington. He didn’t have to identify himself. “How soon can you get into the District?”
    Slayton glanced at his everyday car—which happened also to be his fastest—a 1952 Nash Healey two-seater, a beautiful piece
     of precision machinery, all ivory and chrome and balloon tires, and astonishingly nimble on the road. He swiftly calculated
     the hour, the fact that there would be virtually no traffic on the road from Mount Vernon into the District of Columbia, little
     or no city traffic, and dry pavement, against the top speed of the Nash Healey.
    “It so happens that I’m ready to roll, Ham. I should say nineteen minutes, twenty-one at top. Where do we meet?”
    “My office at Treasury. Now step on it.”
    Slayton ran to the Nash Healey, jumped over the driver’s side door, and fired the engine. He pressed a remote switch built
     into the dash to activate the electronic garage door opener.
    He then eased the Nash Healey out of the garage, letting the engine warm to the job it would have to do in service to the
     country. Slayton gunned the Nash Healey once he was clear of the garage, activated the remote control again to close and automatically
     lock the garage, then sank the gear shift into the lowest grade to torque quickly into a racing cruise.
    The rear tires bit down hard into the asphalt-and-gravel drive leading from the Slayton farm to the freeway. The Nash Healey
     jumped into high-speed action with an almost animal-like life. Slayton was able to run through all the gears before reaching
     the end of his long drive; he down-shifted only once to take the hairpin turns preceding the smooth straight-away of the main
     road.
    Once headed toward Washington, the Nash Healey streaked along at 105 miles per hour with such evenness, due to the low gravity
     center, that the coffee cup Slayton had