The Detonators (13 page)

The boat was up on shore when we first saw her, stored in a boatyard near the Dinner Key Marina in Coral Gables, just south of Miami. Twenty-eight feet long on deck, with a bowsprit adding another couple of feet, she was sandwiched in between two larger and racier yachts that made her look quite small, but sturdy and seaworthy, by comparison. The mast seemed very tall, however. The propeller was solid and had three businesslike blades, a reassuring sight. Skinny, two-bladed folding props that reduce water resistance under sail are fairly common on auxiliary sailboats these days, but I’d heard horror stories of such props folding at the wrong moment or not unfolding at the right one. Considering my limited sailing experience, I figured I needed a totally reliable power system to get me out of the awkward spots I was bound to get myself into.

Two days later, with a fresh coat of very expensive antifouling paint on the bottom to discourage the weeds and barnacles—you’d think they mix those paints with gold and platinum instead of tin and copper, the prices they charge—our ship was launched. The name on the transom was
Spindrift.
Salty, perhaps, but not exactly original.

“Oh, Johnny, darling, look how nicely it floats, I think it’s just
beautiful.
” My little blonde bride hugged my arm ecstatically as she watched a couple of workmen towing our boat to a nearby dock where more work would be done. “Can we… can we sleep aboard it tonight?”

Her expression said that sleeping was the last thing she had in mind. She was throwing herself into her sexy-child-wife act with as much enthusiasm as she’d employed for her bedraggled-lady-drunk routine. Sometimes I think acting comes more naturally to women. A man almost always feels self-conscious about pretending to be somebody else, while a woman apparently gets tired of forever being the same dull person and gets a big kick out of changing characters occasionally, even if the new character is slightly ridiculous or even somewhat disreputable. I once met a very nice, and very respectable, lady professor who was forced by circumstances to pretend to be a fairly wanton woman. She admitted afterward that she’d enjoyed every minute of it—far from home and with a good enough excuse to satisfy her stern professorial conscience, of course.

Amy Barnett—alias Penelope Matthews, Mrs. John Matthews—was wearing part of the yachting trousseau we’d bought her: blue boat shoes with tricky rubber soles, rather thin and very tight white pants, and a snug light-blue jersey with long sleeves. We’d decided to give her a few more days to heal before displaying her in public in a bikini, or shorts and halter, since it wouldn’t do for people to think I tortured my young bride in private.

Her hair fell smooth and straight and pale to her shoulders. The do-it-yourself rinse hadn’t done the job to her satisfaction so she’d had a beauty shop take it all the way to silver-blond. Like that, wearing the shining hair in that simple schoolgirl fashion, she looked much smaller; also, as she’d promised, much younger. Her fine little breasts peeked shyly through the soft blue jersey. The younger members of the boatyard crew thought I was a lousy old lecher, robbing the cradle like this; and if I found I wasn’t up to the bridegroom job at my advanced age, would I ask for volunteers, please?

“Can we, darling?” Amy pleaded.

I said, “They’ve still got to install the Loran and self-steering, and do some work on the engine. We’d better not get the cabin all cluttered up with our stuff before they’re through.”

She pouted. “I’m tired of that old hotel. I want to move aboard that cute little boat right
now
!”

I glanced around. For the moment, there was nobody within earshot. I said softly, “Don’t overplay it, sweetheart.”

She whispered right back, “You run your act, mister, and let me run mine!” She pinched my arm painfully. “And who was it who said we had to
live
our parts every minute of every day? Matt, I mean, Johnny.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. Thank you very much for taking a chance on me.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “But maybe you ought to wait until the job is done and we’re back here alive, if we make it back, before you thank me.”

“It doesn’t matter, really. Already I’m a different person, a rather silly little person, but one I like a lot better than that morbid, masochistic wench… Well, all right!” she said petulantly, seeing a man approaching. “All right, if we have to wait, all
right
, but I’m just melting standing here in the hot sun, darling. I’ll see you back at the hotel.”

“Penny…”

But she’d flounced away. We watched her go, since the action of the neat little buttocks in the thin white sailor pants was not to be missed; then the man who’d come up said he was the yard’s electrical specialist and I’d better come aboard and show him where I wanted the Loran installed. I’d told Washington that since I was-going to try to make it without a human navigator to help me, I’d better at least have an electronic one, even though dockside rumor had it that Loran doesn’t always function well in the remoter regions of the Bahamas. Propagation anomalies, somebody’d told me. Whatever that means.

There’s a big mystique associated with seamanship. If you weren’t born in a forecastle in the middle of a hurricane and didn’t cut your teeth on a marlinespike, you’ll never qualify. Well, hell, they told me just about the same thing about horses when I was a kid. The fact is, there are people with vested interests in just about every sport who get a big kick out of making their particular athletic activity seem too difficult for ordinary mortals to comprehend, let alone master. I’ve been known to tell beginners how hard it is to shoot straight, myself. Actually, making a boat or horse go where you want it to, or making a gun go bang in approximately the right direction, isn’t all that tough once you’ve decided not to let the experts intimidate you; and I wasn’t really worrying about the technical aspects of getting myself and my boat over into the Islands with a landlubber crew. The human aspects were something else again.

Before heading back to the hotel, I stopped at a pay phone near the yard gate. Doug Barnett, having set things up to his own satisfaction, had dropped out of sight completely, as befitted a dead man, and Mac was coordinating things from Washington. It didn’t take long to get him on the line. He may be a bastard at times, or even all the time, but he’s an available bastard.

“Yes, Eric?”

“Has she made any false moves yet? Or any moves?”

“There’s been only one telephone call from your hotel room since the last one you were told about, to the clinic in Cincinnati where she’s employed, asking for more time off. We recorded another call yesterday to the same number. Apparently an afterthought. She wanted a friend, female, to take a couple of plants from her apartment and look after them. Some kind of an ornamental cactus, I believe, and a philodendron. She’d had a neighbor coming in to water them, when she’d thought she’d only be gone a few days, but she doesn’t want to impose on her any longer.”

I said dryly, “It could be some kind of fancy code. Cactus. Philodendron. And watch out when she says chrysanthemum. That’s when the shit really hits the fan.”

Mac said, “A nurse who works in the same clinic was later seen carrying two potted plants from Miss Barnett’s apartment building.”

I said, after a moment, “Cincinnati’s a long way to send a man to check on a telephone conversation, sir.”

“He was already in the city, waiting for Minister to return.”

“But Minister hasn’t?”

“Correct. I’m afraid we must assume that the Preacher is now operating from a different base and that of the people we know, only Miss Barnett is aware of his present location.”

“Mrs. Matthews, please,” I said. “Mr. John Matthews here, at your service. Address, The Palms, Coral Gables.”

“Yes,” Mac said. “Which reminds me, somebody has been making inquiries at the Marina Towers in Miami about that immoral Mr. Matthew Helm who lures intoxicated young ladies to his hotel room. Although that wasn’t exactly the description used. We haven’t been able to locate the man who was asking the questions.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense, sir. Hell, they don’t have to track me down; they have a tracking device planted right on me to let them know my movements. A cute little blonde tracking device. All they have to do is wait for her to call in.”

“It would seem that there are two possibilities,” Mac said. “Either Miss Barnett—Mrs. Matthews—has been silent so long that her associates in the PNP are getting worried and making cautious efforts to locate her, or…” He paused to let me complete the sentence for him.

“Or there’s somebody else on the trail,” I said, “An element we’ve overlooked. Nice thought. Well, all I can do is be ready to duck. That won’t be easy on a twenty-eight-foot cockleshell bobbing around in the middle of the Gulf Stream, where we hope to be pretty soon.”

“In the meantime, have you made any progress toward finding out what the young lady knows?”

“I haven’t really tried, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to louse up everything by crowding her.”

“That’s the safe approach, certainly, but I’m under a certain amount of pressure, Eric. The international conference in Nassau is getting close. I’ve had it impressed on me that it may be our last chance, the world’s last chance, and nothing must be allowed to jeopardize it. Even if we don’t have quite so much faith in this gathering, we’re obliged to give it an opportunity to succeed.”

I said, “Yes, but we still don’t know for sure that it’s the target Minister and his backers have in mind. In fact, there are no indicators whatever pointing that way except sheer geographical coincidence. And simple common sense says it just can’t be.”

“I have long since given up expecting simple common sense from fanatics of any persuasion,” Mac said dryly. “All over the world fanatic patriots are destroying their own countries in the name of patriotism. Can we expect more rational behavior from an organization of fanatic pacifists or supposed pacifists—there’s some question about how idealistic this wealthy PNP group really is—led by a rich, spoiled woman who’s spent time in a mental institution?” Mac was silent for a moment; then he went on: “Actually, it doesn’t matter, Eric. We want Minister anyway; and under the circumstances we must deal with him before the conference gets under way, to be on the safe side.”

“Yes, that’s what Doug told me.”

“And in order to deal with Minister we have to find him. At the moment, the girl is our only lead.”

“I hate to force it, sir,” I said. “I’d prefer to let her set the pace; sooner or later she’ll want to talk about herself some more, and about her demon lover. It’s safer if I wait. Right now I’m in good shape. I didn’t jump to accept her offer to come along; in fact I sneered at it and told her how impossible it was for me to even consider taking her. I made her practically get on her knees and plead with me to give her sanctuary of sorts. I think she’s pretty well convinced that she talked me into it; but if I start asking leading questions about the whereabouts of her sadistic gentleman friend she could start to wonder if this conjugal voyage was really her idea after all.”

“Well, do what you can. We don’t have much time, and it will be quicker if you can persuade her to talk than if you have to wait for her, or her friends, to lead you to Minister somehow. Or him to you. Quicker, and much safer.”

“Thank you for your concern, sir.”

“In the meantime, of course, all you can do is go through the motions of carrying out your part of the Griego operation for the U.S.C.G. Abraham is investigating the connection between Constantine Griego and the PNP in a quiet way, both in Nassau and down in the lower Bahamas where it’s believed the man has an important transshipment point where the drugs are unloaded from the ships coming up from the Caribbean and put into fast motorboats for delivery to this country. That’s what the Coast Guard’s ill-fated expedition was searching for. You will do likewise, up to a point…”

“The point where I get eaten by a shark,” I said dryly. “Yes, sir. I’ll try to avoid repeating the Coast Guard experience past that point. But with my pretty little wife broadcasting my operations to the enemy whenever she gets the chance, it won’t be easy.”

“But it will take the pressure off Abraham,” Mac said calmly.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Watching me make a jackass of myself again, this time under a false name with a phony marital cover trying to make a five-ton sailboat with a forty-foot mast look invisible, they’ll be laughing so hard they’ll never notice a dead man sneaking up on them from behind.” I grimaced at the phone. “Aren’t you going to tell me to be careful, sir?”

Mac said, “If I need to tell you to be careful, you’re the wrong man for the job. Good luck, Eric.”

He always wishes us good luck. It’s really very nice of him. As I left the booth, I wondered why I’d felt compelled to refer to the girl in a more derogatory fashion than was absolutely necessary, as if I had no liking for her at all. You’d have thought I was afraid of admitting, to myself as well as to Mac, that I actually found her rather pleasant company in spite of what I knew about her.

To get to the Bahamas, I first had to start the little two-cylinder diesel and back the boat out of its narrow slip in the boatyard’s cramped basin and get out of the basin without hitting anything. Then I had to find the Dinner Key Channel between the sheltering islands and follow the channel markers out into Biscayne Bay without running onto the pale shoals on either hand, then we had to motor several miles across Biscayne Bay and pick up the narrow channel that ran close to the southern end of Key Biscayne, again running the markers cautiously to avoid the threatening shallows. Finally, passing the picturesque old Cape Florida lighthouse on the tip of Key Biscayne, I had to locate the offshore marker that would guide us off the shallow coastal shelf—I believe it’s actually a coral reef—and out into the deep water of the Straits of Florida.

That was all supposed to be easy sailing for any competent yachtsman or yachtswoman. Next came the hard part: finding the Bahamas.