The Demolishers (17 page)

“Last chance, Miss Varek,” Tallman said. “Oh, excuse me, I meant to say Mrs. Helm. Tell us where to find it and we won’t have to resort to a body search, very humiliating.”

Sandra threw me another questioning glance; but I gave her no help. She started to speak, checked herself, and shook her head. Tallman snorted angrily.

“All right, you little bitch, if that’s the way you want it! Strip her, Vance! Cut them off her if she resists.”

Sandra, still watching me, let her hands move towards the buttons of her shirt, obviously thinking that if it had to happen she’d much prefer to undress herself. I shook my head minutely. She let her arms fall and stood quite still while the little man with the slender white hands unbuttoned her shirt and unfastened and unzipped her jeans. Then he slipped the shirt off her and pulled the T-shirt over her head.

He made a point of examining both garments carefully, letting her wait, bare to the waist. You had to give the kid credit. She made no silly, September-morn attempts to cover herself; she didn’t even clutch at her insecure trousers. She just stood there. Vance tossed the shirts onto the nearest bed and turned back to her, making it clear that he was aware, like every man in the room including me, that she was a nicely developed young lady. He prodded each of her breasts with a forefinger in an exploratory way.

“Pretty,” he said. “Very pretty, and all her own. I got one lady, once, a society lady no less, who’d added a little something plastic there so cleverly you could hardly tell by looking, hollow inside, of course. Made her look real good in sweaters for a while, but she’s back to A-cup now, sweating it out behind bars. Kick off the shoes, sweetie, and drop the pants and step out of them.”

Sandra obeyed, her face expressionless. She was wearing white nylon panties and no socks or stockings. For a girl who’d recently been hurt and hospitalized, and hadn’t had much chance to recuperate on the beach, she retained a nice tan; but the five-inch scar down her thigh had not had time to fade. It was red and angry-looking against the smooth brown skin. After examining the jeans and tossing them aside, Vance picked up the high-heeled white shoes.

“I wouldn’t say those heels had ever been off,” he said judiciously. “Well, we can check them out later if we have to. Come out from the wall a little, honey, and we’ll slip those panties down. . . .Ah, what have we here?”

He’d placed his hand low on her back to urge her out
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into the room. Now, abruptly, using both hands, he dragged her last garment down her hips. He reached behind her again, right-handed, to grasp something, and pulled hard. We heard the hissing sound of adhesive tape releasing its grip on human skin; then Vance was displaying his trophy triumphantly and tossing it to Tallman. It was a wide strip of flesh-colored tape, to the sticky side of which adhered a small, flat, white package.

When I looked at Sandra, the shock that I’d expected to see on her face wasn’t there. Instead she looked wryly amused. She was watching Tallman as he examined his find—well, Vance’s find—with the tolerant expression of someone watching a very bad stage performance. Then she winked at me. It was, I realized, a sign of trust and confidence. She was saying that, well, we got these clowns to commit themselves and it wasn’t fun; now let’s lower the boom on them, please. Hard.

But her voice was shy when she spoke to Tallman. “Please, is it all right if I put my clothes on?”

The blond man looked up. “For now, you can put your own clothes back on, but we’ll have some other clothes for you shortly, not so fashionable but nice and durable, provided by the state. Everybody’s been pussyfooting around Sonny Varek and his whore of a wife and his jailbait daughter; but I’m going to put them all away where they belong, beginning with you, sister. Unless ...”

“Unless what?” Sandra asked quickly.

“Unless you can convince your boyfriend here to help us out.”

I decided that Mac was definitely not going to like this man. Mac has a strong prejudice against having his agents coerced by anybody but him; but more important, he can’t stand people who use the word “convince” when they mean “persuade.”

I asked, “Help you out how?”

Tallman said harshly, “You’ve got the inside track with Varek. Your son married his daughter, and more recently you saved her life. I’ll make a deal with you: You cooperate with us to nail that slippery bastard and we’ll forget about your security problem and, if the little bitch means anything to you—your late son’s wife—we’ll let her go, too. She’s not important; Varek is. Otherwise she faces a lot of years in the pen. We’ve got the goods on her right here, and don’t think it won’t stand up in court even if she does yell frame-up. People have heard that I-wuz-framed routine too many times before. They’re sick and tired of seeing criminals and their families and associates go free on legal technicalities. They’re not going to look too hard at the evidence in a cocaine case where the accused has been living in luxury all her life on the money provided by drugs and racketeering. . . .” He stopped as the telephone rang. “You take it, Helm. Be careful!”

I shook my head. “Waste of time. There won’t be anybody on the line. That’s just my associates out there, telling me I’ve got exactly five minutes to figure out how I’m going to grab the girl and roll under the bed when they smash the doors and come in shooting.”

The
phone stopped ringing, leaving the room in silence. After a moment, Tallman laughed contemptuously. He walked to the nearest door, the one leading into Sandra’s room, that she’d not yet had a chance to see. He knocked a certain way. International Morse code. Soft for a dot, hard for a dash. Dot-das/i-dot.
Dash.
RT for Robert Tallman. Cute.

“You’re bluffing, Helm. I have men covering both doors of this room. ’ ’

I shook my head. “Not any longer, or that phone wouldn’t have rung.”

We waited. There was no response to the identifying knock. Tallman’s face was flushed with anger when he turned on me.

“If your gang of secret assassins has attacked agents of the U.S. government, you’ll regret it!”

“Says the man who’s pointing a large revolver at an agent of the U.S. government,” I said dryly. “Hell, with one exception, we’re all feds here, Mr. Tallman. You might remember that the President authorizes quite a few operations. What you forgot to ask was who’d authorized my operation.”

“Operation?” he sneered. “What kind of an operation could you be conducting, gallivanting around the country with that little gangster-bitch.”

“Who happens to be my daughter-in-law, as you just pointed out yourself; and I’m getting a little tired of hearing her badmouthed,” I said. “But never mind that. The fact is that you and I both draw authority from the same source, the White House. We’ve both been instructed to treat our missions as imperative and to deal ruthlessly with any opposition or interference we encounter, correct? Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t always coordinate these things very carefully. The authorization I was given was just as strong as the one you seem to have received. There’s apparently no machinery for deciding a conflict between our two imperative operations, so we’re going to have to work it out between us. I’d say the decision we reach will depend largely upon which of
us has the clout, wouldn’t you?” He started to speak, but I went right on: ‘‘Do you read western novels, Mr. Tail-man?”

He allowed himself to be distracted. ‘‘I wouldn’t waste my time on that melodramatic trash; and the way it’s being dirtied up with pornography these days, it shouldn’t be allowed on the bookstands!”

I hadn’t know westerns had gone pornographic. It was an interesting idea. I’d have to pick up a copy or two and find out just what could be accomplished on horseback.

‘‘That’s too bad,” I said. “Then you’ve never come across the wonderful old line they often used to put on the covers:
No man is bigger than the bullet from a .45.
How big are you, Tallman?”

He laughed scornfully. “Don’t try to frighten me, Helm.”

I said, “The old .45 Colt is almost obsolete these days; so let’s discuss instead the 9mm Luger cartridge as fired at the rate of about eight hundred rounds per minute from an UZI submachine gun. I believe that’s the weapon our kill team is equipped with, out there, and I’d guess they’d have at least four of them. Plus other assorted hardware. Can you beat that for clout?”

“Man, you must be mad!” he said. “You can’t really be threatening to use armed force against ...”

“Against whom?” I asked gently. “You don’t understand the situation, man. My people outside don’t know what sterling characters you are, all personal buddies of the President. They’re operating under a serious misapprehension. They think you’re a bunch of political fanatics who call themselves the Caribbean Legion of Liberty and don’t like Mrs. Helm and me very much. They made one attempt on us yesterday. Today we set a trap for them, hoping they were still in the mood. The lady and I were the bait. Well, somebody took that bait. You did. Now the trap is snapping shut, and there’s no way for my
friends out there to know that they’ve caught themselves a quartet of purebred heroin hounds instead of a pack of shabby terrorist mongrels. And let me remind you that we’re not in the arrest business. If you arrest a terrorist, all you get is more terrorism, as his pals try to free him. The boys outside have their orders, and those orders are very simple:
Exterminate
/”

Tallman said harshly, “You’re lying! You can’t tell me you’d deliberately set up a situation that would leave you and the girl at the mercy of . .

“They killed my husband!’’ That was Sandra. She was stepping into her shoes, fully dressed again. She didn’t look up, and her voice was very soft as she went on: “I can’t speak for Mr. Helm, although it was his son who died, but if I can decoy a reasonable number of them to their deaths, I’ll feel it’s worth anything that happens to me; I’ll die happy.” None of the reservations about this vengeance Mission she’d expressed earlier showed now; she was very convincing.

I glanced at my watch. “Make up your mind, Tallman. You’re cutting it very close. Do you want a shoot-out or don’t you? I guarantee that you’re outgunned and outnumbered. Unless I show Mrs. Helm and myself, unharmed and unthreatened, within the next ninety seconds, the fireworks start, irreversibly. Do you and your men want to be dead heroes fighting a bunch of fellow employees of our great government, who’ll be rushing this room under the impression that you’re dangerous activists with homicidal intentions? I suggest you put that Magnum away, and tell your troops to holster their pieces, and let me take my daughter-in-law out the front door where they can see us. . . .”

Tallman started to speak angrily. He stopped, looking around as a rustle of movement caught his attention: the little man, Vance, had holstered his .38. Without looking at their leader, the other two followed suit. I walked for-

ward slowly, took Sandra by the arm, and led her towards the door. The man standing there stepped aside for us. As I reached for the knob, I was very much aware of that big, shiny .357 behind me. Then we were outside in the fading daylight.

For a moment nothing moved out there. Nobody showed. The rear of the motel was now lined with parked vehicles nosed in towards the building. Almost all the spaces were full; apparently the hotel/motel business was pretty good in Savannah, even this late in the year. I had time to wonder if the phone call had been a coincidence; maybe the boys had lost us or been driven olf somehow. Then a man rose from behind the hood of a small white pickup truck with a camper top, parked three slots off to the left. He was holding a machine pistol I didn’t recognize. Well, they come out with new ones all the time. I’d only used the UZI name for effect; everybody knows the UZI.

“Ciao,
Eric,” he said.

“And
salud y pesetas
to you, Trask,” I said, completing our fancy all-clear nonsense. Why a transplanted German—his real name was Miller, derived from Muller—should be giving an Italian greeting, to be answered by a Spanish phrase badly pronounced by a transplanted Swede, was a minor mystery of a kind often encountered in our melting-pot nation. Trask came forward to join us. I didn’t take time to perform any introductions. I said, “Watch out in there, a little. Those heroic drug sniffers can get awfully peevish if they’re not treated with the respect appropriate to their glorious crusade against chemical evil. Don’t be overcome with brotherhood just because we’re all working for Uncle Sam, is what I mean.”

“No chance, I never had a brother.”

“Don’t try to disarm them; the top man’s got a bad case of Magnum jitters. Just cover them and hold them,
but don’t hesitate to shoot if they act up. We can’t help it if people blunder into our operations and get themselves killed, can we?”

Trask was a rather stout, pale man without too much hair; the last man in the world you’d pick as a dangerous secret agent, and don’t think he didn’t work at it. What there was of his hair was black. He was two hundred pounds of competent operative on a hundred-and-sev-enty-five-pound frame, wearing a green sports shirt, a black windbreaker, and baggy black pants. I knew him to be fast in spite of his bulk, and good with the hand-to-hand stuff and the shining blades, maybe better than I am. At least I’m sure he thought so. However, on the record, I was better with the guns, particularly the long guns. Also, I’d been around a bit longer, which wasn’t necessarily an advantage except that it did give me the experience and the seniority.