Rebound (10 page)

Dartley let him come, then grabbed him by his belt and one lapel. Using the man’s forward momentum, he lifted him off his
feet and threw him head first through the gap in the swing-out window. His body forced it open, and Dartley watched him sail
downward, looking smaller as he went, before leaving the office and closing the door. The pretty secretary who had showed
him in smiled at him from her alcove.

He was walking fast down the long corridor when he suddenly remembered something. Two for every one. Cabalan was not enough.
He had to kill someone else. Who? Certainly not Cabalan’s secretary. He liked her ass. The receptionist with the nice legs
was at the far end of the corridor. But why kill her? She probably knew nothing about Happy Man’s activities or even the fact
that he owned Luzon Star Developments. He could find someone more deserving than her. Dartley looked in the next open doorway.
A pleasant-looking guy about twenty years old sat at a desk. The office was tiny, his desktop was crowded with paper, and
he looked overworked. Not him, either.

A small secretary’s room opened to his left off the corridor, and beyond that he glimpsed another large office. The name on
the door plate read S
ANTIAGO.

“Mr Cabalan told me to go right in and see Mr. Santiago,” Dartley told the secretary, another leggy beauty who smiled sweetly
at him as he went in the office and closed the door behind him. The office was slightly smaller and much less plush than Cabalan’s,
and the man behind the desk was younger and not so plump
and smug; but he was getting there. He looked up from some papers when he heard his office door shut.

Dartley strode swiftly across to him, a smile on his face. “I’m Kelly. Cabalan says he wants you in on this deal. He told
me to brief you. No, please don’t bother to get up,” he told the man, who had began to rise from behind his desk. Dartley
leaned across and placed a hand on his right shoulder, pressing him back down into his office chair.

Santiago blinked. He was of the opinion that Americans were all crazy and had no manners, but this one was even worse than
the others.

That was his last conscious thought as Dartley grabbed his hair and yanked his head down fast, so that his forehead met the
sharp edge of the hardwood desk. Dartley did it twice more, needlessly, because he had cracked open the man’s skull with the
first blow.

Ruperto Velez swam four miles in the Laguna de Bay, a speedboat manned by four heavily armed men inching along close to him.
When a fishing boat or pleasure craft came too close to the swimming man, the men loosed some shots in the air and gestured
for them to keep away. Happy Man stepped out of the water at his estate and was met by servants carrying a terry-cloth beach
robe, towels, messages, and two cordless telephones. Ruben Montova sat at a rattan table beneath a large shade tree, sipping
tuba,
a coconut wine, and admiring the hibiscus and frangipani shrubs, which had just broken into flower.

The two men greeted each other effusively. Velez scanned his messages, handed them back, and sent the servants away with the
telephones and everything else.

“If a man cannot take time out to talk with
a good friend,” he said to Montova as he settled himself in a rattan chain and poured a
tuba,
“the life he has made for himself is not worth living.”

Montova raised his glass. “I am complimented.”

They fenced back and forth with some more elaborate pleasantries before they got down to brass tacks.

“Four people got a real good look at him,” Montova said. “The two men’s secretaries, the receptionist, and an accountant.
This man was definitely American. He was forty at most, maybe less, had close-cropped black hair, and a lean face with high
cheekbones. All three women noticed that his eyes were light gray-green.”

“He sounds like an officer from one of the bases,” Happy Man said.

“That’s what the Presidential Palace said too. Whether they really believe it or not, they’re using this to hit Bonifacio
with. I don’t think we should let them use us, Ruperto. What you and I need to do right now is look at this thing very closely
and see what we have to gain and what we have to lose.”

“I can see where all this is heading,” Happy Man grumbled tolerantly. “You’re back to saying that enough Americans have been
killed and that we must stop.”

“That would have been the inescapable conclusion of my argument,” Montova admitted. “So? Why did you order them killed at
all? Only to be a major force on the national scene and to pick up left-wing support.”

“I was being ignored as some kind of soft, pleasure-loving rich boy.”

“You were. Now you showed them. The government is afraid to try anything against you and blames Bonifacio so they won’t have
to face up to you. The Americans can do nothing because you are too powerful. The communists are beginning to see that they
will not be allowed to win a military struggle, and so they will back you as the least capitalistic evil and as the one they
will most likely be able to topple after you are in power. You’ve made your point. Everyone high enough in the power structure
to know what’s really going on now regards you as a force to be reckoned with. It’s time to change your tactics.”

“I don’t want to be seen as so easily forced into a change,” Happy Man said. “I would be sending out the message that a lone
individual with no special access to me can force me to change my plans by killing a few of my men. I’d hate for some people
to start thinking that.”

“I agree,” Reuben Montova said, knowing he had made his point and that he must now pull back and let Happy Man feel that he
was the one who was making the entire decision.

“But likewise, I don’t want them to think I haven’t got sense enough to change course when I meet obstacles,” Velez said,
continuing. “This American assassin has become a serious obstacle. I don’t care about him killing guards at my gate—muscle
is cheap. But Cabalan is a big loss to me on the business side, and Santiago was second in command. Luzon Star Developments
is in trouble unless I can find someone to take
over fast. I have to be able to trust him. There’s no shortage of sharp operators, but ones you can trust are scarce.”

“I’ll find someone,” Ruben offered.

Happy Man grinned. “Anyone you found for me is the last one I’d trust, Ruben. No offense, but he’d be loyal to you before
me.” He accepted a cigar and a light. “This damn American probably has a list of my companies here—I had to file one to do
some business on the New York Stock Exchange a couple of years ago, a big takeover. He could go on hitting me through those
companies, and he’d only have to do it a few more times before top people started leaving me. They’re not going to sit around
and wait to be made a martyr over something they know nothing about. I’ve decided to suspend attacks on Americans for a while,
but I’m not going to break up my group. Know what I’m going to do? Put them after this American. I’ll put a price on his head.”

Montova smiled. “Ruperto, you have the makings of a great man.”

Dartley drove around Laguna, following the lakeshore past Happy Man’s estate without taking the side road that passed by the
gate. He pulled into some country clubs and yacht clubs, but they were “members only,” and he left without a fuss. The last
thing he needed was people asking him who he was, who he knew, what he did. His intention was to get information on the layout
of the Velez place through casual conversation. Only the very rich, as Happy Man’s guests, and the very poor, as Happy
Man’s servants, would have this knowledge, and Dartley, as a foreigner, was not finding any opportunities for such casual
conversation. Of course, neither the very rich nor the very poor, for different reasons, have much time to stand around and
get in idle conversations with strangers. He decided that Harry would be immediately spotted as a big-city intruder out here
in the sticks and might attract the wrong kind of attention. He was standing at a marina, looking over the boats for hire.
He could take a speedboat on a few runs past Happy Man’s place, but he suspected that he would not see much because the water
level would be well below that of the land and there would probably be bushes and trees to further block the view. As he stood
on the pier jutting out into the lake, a solution glided over his head.

The glider pilot expertly used an ascending thermal, rising from where the water met the land, to spiral higher, soar, and
climb again. Dartley asked several people before he found one who knew where the airfield was. There they agreed to rent him
a glider after Dartley presented a hundred-dollar bill as his pilot’s license.

The two-seat sailplane was a Schweizer 2-33A, a very popular American training craft because it was not temperamental. It
had a fiberglass nose, and the rest was metal and fabric. The performance was not great—a 22 to 1 glide ratio, meaning that
the plane could glide twenty-two feet for each foot of altitude—but Dartley was not trying for any records; all he wanted
was to see what lay inside those walls.

“We have no surface wind,” the youth helping him in the front cockpit said, “but you got some pretty good thermals at the
lake edge. You going up alone?” When Dartley nodded, he shut the canopy over the empty rear seat.

Dartley checked the control stick and rudder pedals. Since there was no engine, the instruments were simple: a vertical-trim
lever; a spoiler-control lever; a yaw indicator; a variometer for measuring the rate of climb or descent relative to the horizon;
an airspeed indicator; and an altimeter. He harnessed himself into the seat and nodded to the youth to close the Plexiglas
canopy. The youth then attached one end of a towrope beneath the nose of the glider and dragged the other end forward to a
small two-engined plane taxiing across the grass toward them. The plane turned around, and the rope was fixed to it. The youth
walked back and lifted the glider’s right wing tip off the ground. Dartley worked the rudder from side to side, a signal to
the pilot that he was ready to go.

The plane moved slowly forward, taking up the slack from the towrope. Then Dartley felt a sharp pull forward and heard the
hiss of the glider’s single wheel rolling on the grass. The youth ran some yards, supporting the right wing tip. Suddenly
Dartley found himself airborne at the end of the rope while the tow plane was still taking off on the ground.

When the tow plane climbed into the air, Dartley kept in formation with it by keeping it, from his viewpoint, even with the
horizon. Once he dropped too low and the glider was buffeted by the turbulent air in the plane’s wake. It was
all a matter of imitating the tow plane’s movements with the glider and keeping the plane on the horizon. They were climbing
steeply—at seven hundred feet per minute, according to the variometer. Dartley was to release the towline at five thousand
feet and was startled by the loud explosive snap. The rope snaked away in the wake of the tow plane, which dived toward the
left. Dartley climbed to the right, and the craft felt as light as a feather in the air. The only sound now was the low hiss
of air over the wings.

Dartley got a fix on the airfield’s position in relation to the shape of the lake. There was no compass, no radio, so he had
to remember his way back by landmarks. The lake stretched like a huge sheet of glass as far as the eye could see; calm and
broken only by long arrowheads, each with a boat at its point. He trimmed for level flight and kept his airspeed at around
forty-five miles per hour as he looked down at the mansions in their grounds along the lakeshore. From up here they all looked
almost exactly alike.

He realized that he was looking in the wrong area. There were too many houses here. Making a right turn to follow the shore,
he had to use plenty of rudder to compensate for the yaw. As the craft glided almost level, it suddenly hit a sink and lost
almost a hundred feet in altitude before Dartley’s backward pressure on the stick brought the glider out of it. But he brought
the stick too far back, and the nose rose up and airspeed was lost, resulting in a bubbling stall and a sudden drop, like
a stone, for
another hundred feet before Dartley lowered the nose and the glider recovered.

The Velez place must be farther from the airfield than he had estimated. Since he had to travel back as well as go there and
was losing one foot of altitude for every twenty-two he glided, he decided to climb any thermal he could find on the way.
He saw some vultures or eagles soaring ahead and decided to join them. Their advantage was that they could flap their wings
when the updraft gave out, while all he could do was glide and hope to find another column of warm, ascending air. He came
in at the same level as the birds and saw that they were five eagles or big hawks, all the same kind. They paid no attention
to the glider and calmly shared the thermal with it. The plane’s much greater wingspan immediately outperformed the birds,
and Dartley put the craft into tight climbing circles, making maximum use of the thermal. Once he could no longer see the
birds for comparison, he had no sensation of climbing—yet the variometer was registering two hundred feet per minute.