The Detonators (18 page)

I took the jewel case back to where I’d gotten it and hesitated. It was really time to leave, but I found myself returning to the wheelchair instead for some reason. I guess I wanted to say some final, wise words that would help her; but there were no such words. She was a proud and brave and intelligent woman facing years of imprisonment in this dreadful remnant of a body. Well, I’d given her the means to escape. Whether or not she employed it was up to her.

Abruptly she held out her good hand, and I took it. I thought she was trying to speak again, but the words still wouldn’t break through. Instead, watching me steadily for a sign of flinching, she took the other hand, the ugly one, and placed it on top of mine. I grinned down at her.

“Lady, you scare little girls, but you don’t scare me. I wish… Ah, hell!”

She pressed my fingers lightly and released me. I turned and walked quickly out of there. Amy and the nurse were waiting in the corridor. Miss Pritchard glanced at me sharply and hurried in to see her patient. Amy had dried her wet face, but her eyes were still pink. She started to speak, but I shook my head.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, it was sunny and pleasant, that is if you overlooked the canes and crutches and wheelchairs. I opened the door of the waiting taxi for Amy, slid in after her, and told the driver to take us back to the airport.

I spoke at last: “You’re a good man, Barnett. You did fine in there.”

Amy whispered, “You might have warned me!”

“Shock effect,” I said. “Did it work?”

She didn’t answer directly. “Who
was
that poor woman?”

I said, “I’m not in the mood for rhetorical questions. You’re a bright girl. You know perfectly well who she was.”

“Somebody Daddy was… is fond of?”

“I would say the lady had been elected to be your stepmother, wouldn’t you? Judging by what she said in there.”

“How did you find out about it? About her?”

“We don’t normally spend too much time on explosives experts who aren’t very good with weapons. I mean, anybody can handle them, the only hard part is catching them. Our specialty is the guys nobody else can handle, if you know what I mean. Yet suddenly this particular dynamiter wound up on our high-priority list. Whenever-wherever. I figured that the last job he pulled before his appearance in such select company must have touched a nerve somewhere. The Buenos Aires job. It couldn’t be just that he hit an embassy; people are always blasting U.S. embassies these days and nobody seems to think much about it. Or do much about it. And there was an awful lot of Doug Barnett in the story. So I checked the list of casualties. Except for a young married woman accompanied by her husband, the dead were all men; and to the best of my knowledge your daddy is strictly heterosexual. He might have flipped on account of a brother or something; but I’d never heard he had a brother, and the name Barnett wasn’t on the list. But among the injured, terribly and permanently injured, was a handsome widow… Okay, it was thin. It was a gamble. However, as I said, I needed to shake you up a bit, show you what kind of a guy your boyfriend really is, what kind of suffering he’s responsible for. If my vague hypothesis about Doug and this unknown lady was correct, so much the better. Two birds with one stone.”

After I’d finished talking, the taxi ran on for a while along a hot sunny boulevard filled with stinking traffic. At last Amy glanced at me warily.

“Why… why would you want to shake me up, Matt?”

“You know why. You’re holding out on me,” I said. She started to voice an indignant denial but fell silent. A little color came into her face. I went on: “Feeding me all that crap about your self-respect taking such a beating because the man you’d allowed to do all those mean things to you didn’t really love you; he’d just picked you because you were your daddy’s girl. Well, that’s why he picked you in the first place all right. But I watched you while you were saying it, and you were a kid with a warm little secret. I think you have some reason to believe that after a while your beautiful body, and your beautiful you, came to mean a little more to Alfred Minister—Albert. Pope—than just a means to a business end.”

She drew a shaky breath. “It isn’t fair! I go sailing with a man, and he can’t sail worth a hoot, but he turns out to be a sneaky clairvoyant!” After a little, she said defensively, “There isn’t so much love in the world, Matt, that we can afford to betray any of it lightly.”

I said, “I hear the words. What do they mean?”

She licked her lips. “You know so much about me, I’m sure you already know there were two boys in college; but all they really wanted was to get my skirt up and my panty hose down. But Albert—I can’t think of him as Alfred—was different, or became different very quickly. All right, what we did together, what he liked to do, wasn’t very conventional or very nice, but… Oh, dear, I don’t know how to say it! Love is such a big word and maybe it doesn’t apply to the violently possessive way he feels about me. Let’s just say that even though I don’t really
like
him—I’m afraid of him and I hate the power he has over me and what he wants to turn me into—I couldn’t bring myself to betray something he’d told me in confidence under, well, rather intimate circumstances. There’s got to be a little loyalty, doesn’t there? Anyway, I’m afraid it won’t help you much.”

She was silent for a while, perhaps waiting for me to persuade her to continue; but I sensed that she’d already convinced herself and didn’t speak. At last she went on without being urged.

“Once, after we’d made love, he told me not to worry if he disappeared someday without warning. He said if it happened he’d let me know very soon where to join him. He… he didn’t seem to have any doubt that I’d come.” After another little pause, she said rather bitterly, “You see, your shock treatment worked. After seeing Mrs. Osterman, I can’t keep quiet any longer. If that’s what he does to people, he’s obviously got to be stopped. But it really isn’t much of a clue, is it?”

“That depends on the message he sends and how soon it comes,” I said. “Did he give you any idea how he planned to get in touch with you?”

She shrugged. “I assumed at the time he meant a simple letter or phone call.”

I said, “You won’t mind if we monitor your mail?”

She shrugged again. “You’re probably doing it already.”

We probably were. I said, “And if he should somehow manage to get in touch with you secretly…”

She looked at me directly. “I suppose you had to say that. Yes, Matt. If there should be a… a contact, I suppose you call it in your jargon, I’ll let you know immediately. Even though I’ll feel like Salome holding the bloody head of John the Baptist or whomever it was she gave the chop to. I… I haven’t had so many lovers that I can bring myself to consider one expendable, even a pretty weird one. Matt?”

“Yes?”

“You were in that room for quite a while after I ran out.”

I said, “I just stayed to ask Mrs. Osterman if there was something I could do for her.”.

Her eyes were steady on my face. “Was there?”

“I think you’d better reconsider that question, doll. Don’t ask unless you’re sure you want to hear the answer.”

She shivered slightly. “I guess I already know the answer. It’s… not as nice a world as I thought when I was a little girl. But then, I was a rather stupid and sentimental little girl.”

“I bet you were cute, though,” I said.

She smiled a little at that, but not very cheerfully. Well, it hadn’t been a very cheerful day.

At the Miami airport, we found that we had a couple of hours to wait for the next flight back to Freeport, Grand Bahama. I arranged to have a fifth of Jack Daniels black delivered to a certain gent at the
Tribune.
We bought some magazines at a newsstand, and Amy settled down to read in a waiting area while I used one of the nearby phones. After the endless Bahamas communications hassle it was a relief to be back, if only momentarily, in the U.S.A., where making a call from a pay phone wasn’t quite as difficult as putting a man on the moon.

“Where are you, Eric?” Mac demanded after I’d identified myself.

“Miami, for the afternoon,” I said. “Waiting to catch a plane back to Grand Bahama and our private yacht, junior grade.”

“Your instructions—”

I interrupted rudely: “I don’t mind playing second banana to Doug Barnett, sir. I just wish he’d get his goddamn act together. Our goddamn act. And if he doesn’t tell me things I need to know, and you don’t, then I damn well have to find them out for myself. Where the hell is he, anyway?”

“As a matter of fact, he’s right here in Washington for the day. He’ll be on the line shortly.”

I said harshly, “Why wasn’t I told that this was a personal vendetta on his part? I don’t have the least objection to helping him settle a private score, but I don’t see why I’ve got to do it blindfolded.”

Mac said, “Perhaps Abraham has been overly security-conscious, knowing your casual attitude. But the target is a legitimate one.”

I said, “Sure. You legitimized it for him, put it on the list so he could go after it officially. Fine. I’m the last man in the world to complain, sir. I can remember your doing as much for me quite recently. That Chicago business involving Elly Brand. And in both cases you could soothe your official conscience with the fact that the private interest, mine back then and Doug’s now, coincided with the public interest. Well, I’ve just been visiting a victim of Minister and his explosives—”

“You’ve seen Mrs. Osterman?”

“That’s what I flew back to Miami for,” I said. “It wasn’t a good thing to see, and I’ll be very happy to help Doug eliminate the blast-happy sonofabitch responsible. All I ask is to be treated like a grown man with a gun, not a little boy with a cap pistol.”

“What do you need to know, Eric?”

“How can I tell, working in the dark? Let me lay it out for you the way I’ve got it figured to date, and you tell me the parts I’ve missed and the parts I’ve got wrong.”

“Go on.”

I looked over my shoulder at the waiting-room bench where Amy was sitting engrossed in a fashion magazine. It seemed an odd choice for her, since even for her present sexy-blond incarnation she’d selected a fairly conventional wardrobe, without much regard for the curious dictates of current fashion. But maybe she was interested in reading about how the other half, the superstylish half, lived. She rose and, with a wave of the hand to me, headed for the nearby restrooms.

I said into the phone, “Let’s start with the Buenos Aires bombing in which five embassy employees and visitors were killed and Mrs. Marsha Osterman was so badly hurt, not to mention the lesser casualties. Afterward, presumably, there was official pressure on you to retaliate in the name of the U.S. against those Argentine terrorists and the specialist they’d hired for the job. There always is, after every such outrage. But we haven’t got the manpower to go chasing after every murderous little political action group that thumbs its nose at Uncle Sam or every guy who knows how to set off a stick of dynamite. Right?”

Mac said, “I refused to consider a punitive expedition against an organization of rabid patriots on their own soil. That type of gunboat diplomacy is always counterproductive. If we support one country against another, we can expect the citizens of the other to dislike us. As for the explosives expert involved, however, it isn’t altogether a bad idea to let independent specialists like Minister know they should be a little selective in accepting employment. I said I’d take the matter under advisement.”

I nodded. “And while you had it under advisement, I figure, Doug came to you and asked permission to go after the guy directly responsible for his lady’s brutal injuries. To hell with the fanatics who’d merely paid the bills, they’d at least had a political grievance; but Minister had done the job strictly for money, in cold blood. Or maybe Doug just handed in his resignation and told you he was off to track down Minister if it took the rest of his life.”

“I refused to accept the resignation,” Mac said.

“Sure,” I said. “Instead you told him to relax, you could make Minister an official agency project, since you’d already been asked, and assign it to him. And in order to permit him to work on it without attracting attention, he was to exaggerate the injuries received in his recent plane crash and take disability retirement and make a big thing of building the boat he’d been talking about for years. You can cover a lot of territory, I believe, while picking up pieces of nautical equipment at bargain prices. So Doug worked hard at learning everything he could about Minister’s background and habits so he’d be ready when the guy resurfaced, which he did for that Ben Gurion Airport job. I presume Doug got fairly close to him there, but not close enough. No score. Then Minister was reported living in Cincinnati on more or less intimate terms with a young lady named—surprise, surprise—Barnett. That must have been quite a shock to Doug Barnett, in a couple of different ways.”

“I can assure you that it was, Eric; aggravated by the fact that before he could respond to the report, Minister had slipped away again.”

I frowned at the wall, Working it out. I said, “Doug’s late ex-wife had made no bones about hating him and everything he stood for, meaning us. Now he jumped to the conclusion that, brainwashed for years by her mother, Amy was knowingly aiding and abetting his enemies—well, one of his enemies. But that was personal. On the professional front, it was obvious that the Preacher had learned who was tracking him. It could hardly be a coincidence, his making a play for the daughter of the man who’d been assigned to get him. So Doug figured out a dramatic, if slightly complicated, way of becoming officially dead, leaving him free to operate unsuspected while I dealt with the girl and took whatever heat was going around. Thanks loads, Douggie—boy!”

“You’re welcome, Eric,” said a new voice in the phone.

I said, “Oh, there you are! The mastermind himself.”

“What have you got for us besides a lot of gripes, hotshot?” Doug Barnett asked.

I said, “What I was told to get. Pretty complete information about your little girl’s motives and intentions
vis-à-vis
—I’ve always wanted to use
vis-à-vis
in a real sentence—
vis-à-vis
a certain individual she knows as Albert Pope. But you won’t like how I got it.”