The Demolishers (10 page)

“Well, it’s the first few years that count, isn’t it?” Lia said.

I ate my soup, reflecting that it had been rather sweet of Alexander Varek to make such a production of his fifth wedding—assuming that Sandra’s count had been correct, and that she’d had one real mother and four stepmothers. You’d expect that by this time in his marital career, Varek would simply drag the dame down to city hall when he got the urge. . . .

“Seventeen!”

That was Sandra, facing me across the big table. She’d obviously been brooding over what I’d said in the gunroom.

Lia frowned. “What are you talking about, dear?” The younger woman said sharply, “He’s got a little list, seventeen names. And they’ll none of them be missed; they’ll none of them be missed.”

“Yes, dear, we all know our Gilbert and Sullivan. That is from
The Mikado,
isn’t it?” Lia frowned, puzzled. “What about a list?”

Sandra jerked her head in my direction “Ask the Lord High Executioner over there!”

Varek spoke, with a glance at the maid removing the soup bowls. “Maybe it would be better to put off this discussion until after dinner.”

I said, “No. It’s no secret that we’re coming for them. If they haven’t got their own ways of finding out, and I think they have, we’ll take a TV spot and tell them. Let them feel the pressure, Alex; let them know that they’re dead, or will be as soon as we get around to it.”

“We?”

I shrugged. “With you or without you, it’ll get done.” Lia said, “If you are talking about those wicked people who threw the bomb, they deserve anything that hap
pens to them! If I could push a button and make them all dead, I would!”

I laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. The CLL, the Caribbean Legion of Liberty, claims something like two thousand members. Our information is that they do have a few hundred. It isn’t really feasible to track down and eliminate them all, so it has been decided in Washington that we should settle for just the governing council and a few strays. As Sandra indicated, the number we came up with was seventeen.” I looked at the girl on the other side of the table. “But now she seems to feel that’s overdoing it. Apparently her nonviolent act in Texas wasn’t altogether an act. How about it, Sandy?”

Sandra shook her head quickly. “Don’t pick on me, Matt. I . . .I’ve never been involved in anything like this before. I hadn’t really visualized . . . Hearing an actual number makes it seem more grim and real, sort of.” She swallowed; but when she spoke again her voice had hardened. “I’m all right. I apologize for the sentimental noises. Seventeen of the lousy creeps is all right with me. Make it eighteen if you like!”

“I probably have,” I said. “It seems unlikely that the kid this afternoon was important enough to be on our list, so he becomes an added number. However, I’m authorized to take out any of them who try to interfere; and I classify a gun pointed my way under the heading of interference.”

Varek stirred. “The boys would like to know who told you he’d be there. They said you headed right into the building as if you’d had advance information. Considering that you weren’t supposed to know you’d be going anywhere near the place, they thought it was kinda funny, if you know what I mean.”

I said, “Hell, they should have figured it out for themselves. With the ambush set for us on the side street, there was bound to be a lookout posted on the main street
to let the guy with the blocking car, and the guy with the cannon, know when we were approaching. And the most likely spot, if they could arrange to use it, was one of those windows facing the T-intersection from which the lookout could see down both streets. Of course, there was a possibility that none of the offices up there had been available and they’d had to post him somewhere else. If so, I’d have lost my gamble and had my exercise for nothing.”

‘‘But you didn’t.” Varek signaled to the maid to refill his wineglass. “Tell us about the heavy artillery. What the hell kind of a howitzer did they have mounted in that window? They boys said it shot right through armor and bulletproof glass like it was cheese.”

I said, “I’ll have to do some guessing. I just caught a glimpse of the muzzle up there; but of course I saw the results and checked how long it took the guy to reload. I’d say we were dealing with an overgrown and kind of clumsy single-shot rifle, probably on a tripod mount. At least I didn’t see a bipod at the muzzle; and even if you could lift it and hold it steady, say, kneeling inside that window, you wouldn’t want to fire a piece like that off your shoulder. It would kick you back into last week. I’d say it used fifty-caliber machine-gun ammunition with armor-piercing bullets ”

“Where would one acquire such a weapon?” Lia asked.

“One would probably make it,” I said. “The barrel and ammo can be picked up as military surplus, if you know where to look and whose arm to twist. A clever gunsmith could cook up some kind of an action without too much trouble. I seem to recall that years ago somebody made up a bunch of similar weapons for insurgency use, kind of a poor man’s antitank gun.” I grimaced. “I’d hate to be a ragged
campesino
lying in the road firing that thing one round at a time at a government tank
clanking at me; real tanks have armor that won’t quit. However, those AP projectiles took care of the supposedly bulletproof stuff on your family Mercedes all right. Maybe you should take it back for a refund.”

“We didn’t expect they’d be shooting anything like that at it,” Varek said.

I said, “Which brings up the question: Why did you expect them to be shooting anything at it? Or to put it differently, how did they know we’d be coming there to be shot at? They were ready and waiting for us, with all the right equipment.” There was a little silence. I looked at Varek for a moment, and turned to Sandra. I said, “Maybe I should tell you what I really came down here for. I wanted to ask you to help us out in a kind of risky way. ’ ’

Sandra glanced quickly in the direction of her father before speaking to me. “What risky way, Matt?”

I spoke carefully: “My chief and I had a very bright idea. Here was a young lady, you, who’d been involved in the bombing and had actually seen the bombers. Of course she claimed she’d only caught a fleeting glimpse of them through the restaurant window before the world blew up in her face, and that she couldn’t possibly recognize them if she saw them again—but that’s what she’d naturally say to protect herself. If she admitted to being able to identify them, she’d have been up to her pretty butt in cops and feds and prosecutors, and she’d have faced the strong possibility that the people she could finger would try to silence her.”

Sandra licked her lips. “Go on.”

I said, “Our computer lady is' still kind of short of names to work with; she needs more information. This seemed to offer a possible way of teasing some of those fanatics out of the woodwork and into the open where we could catch them and squeeze them dry. The idea was, I’d come down here and protect you, with whatever man-

power I needed—with your permission, of course—while my chief spread the word through some of his underworld contacts that, in spite of her disclaimers, the young widow who’d survived the Mariposa bombing was a secret government witness who, when the time came, would definitely identify the guilty parties. That should give somebody the notion that maybe it would be better if you didn’t live long enough to testify in court.” I grinned at Sandra. ‘‘But I’ll have to report back to Washington that we were just too slow with our bright idea. You and your daddy have already used you as bait in just that way, right? That was what it was all about his afternoon, wasn’t it?”

She licked her lips. “Yes, and I feel terrible about exposing you to . . . That car was supposed to make it perfectly safe, or I’d at least have told you what we were trying to do. I should have, anyway.”

“Forget it. I’ve been shot at before,” I said. “Did you dream it up yourself or was it your pop’s plan?”

Varek spoke up quickly: “Sis had the idea. I thought it was too risky, but she insisted on trying it, so I used the bulletproof heap for insurance.” He grimaced. “The barge was supposed to be safe against the kind of weapons a gang like that would be likely to use; and we leaked the rest of our plans to them on purpose. To pull them out of the woodwork, as you put it. I’ve got a few connections, too. I primed them with the phony information about Sis and her photographic memory to get them interested. Pretty soon . . .’’He looked around the room, but the maid was in the kitchen temporarily. “Pretty soon, one of the girls we had working here quit very suddenly for no good reason. We guessed that somebody’d leaned on her and got her to move out and recommend a sneak to take her place, great. Of course, we left the new girl strictly alone, just keeping an eye on her while figuring out what information to feed her.”

Sandra said, “It wasn’t hard. Everybody in the house knew I’d had bad nightmares after . . . after the bombing. I just pretended that they’d started up again, all about La Mariposa. I kept saying that I didn’t want to go to a shrink. I didn’t need to go to a shrink; all I needed was to face it, to go back to the lousy place again and look at it hard and get it out of my system. Only I just couldn’t work up the nerve to do it, after what had happened there. But this morning I suddenly announced at breakfast that I was going to be brave at last and make the lousy pilgrimage on my way home from the airport. Naturally, I waited until Bernadette was pouring the coffee. Daddy says she went out right afterwards.”

“She called her boyfriend from the house. Just lovey-dovey stuff, but there must have been a special word in there somewhere,” Varek said. “Afterwards she kept looking at her wristwatch. After forty-five minutes, she went out of the house and slipped out a side gate on foot. The boys had been told not to interfere. A young fellow came along in a commercial van:
a-i plumbing co.
They drove back over to West Palm and stopped at a gas station. He used the pay phone. They headed for the freeway south. They took the Miami airport exit. The boys ran them to the curb. They had airline tickets for San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s where you’d normally go if you were heading for Islas Gobemador, or nearby Montego where there’s some kind of half-ass invasion force being trained, according to the boyfriend.”

I said, “Yes, we’ve heard about that. Is that where the two of them were heading?”

Varek shook his head. “They didn’t have reservations beyond San Juan. You have to switch to a smaller airline to get to the little islands, but there was nothing indicating that they’d been going to. The boys got the idea they were aiming for some kind of a CLL hideout right there in San Juan. It would make sense for a terrorist outfit to have a regional headquarters, sort of, in a big city with good air connections handy to the scene of their current operations. But neither Bernadette or her boyfriend could come through with an address. They’d been told, when they got the word to run, they should get themselves down to San Juan. Somebody’d meet them at the airport and take care of them from there.”

“Where’s the loving couple now?”

Varek looked at me coldly. “Don’t ask. I might tell you.”

Sandra was shocked. “Daddy!”

“She was planted on us, Sis. She set you up for it today, at La Mariposa. She admitted it; she said she was sorry, she liked you okay, but one life was not important in the great forward march of history. Anyway, the way she was after the boys had worked on her awhile, she’s better off where she is, along with loverboy. ” He frowned at his daughter. “I told you it would get rough.”

The girl shivered. “All right. I suppose it’s all right. I’ll just work on remembering how . . . how things looked in La Mariposa right after the blast.”

I said, “What about the ambush? Did you pick up anybody there?”

Varek shook his head. “We had a fancy envelopment maneuver, as they say in the military, all figured out; but when they sprung the field artillery on you, everybody was ordered to start shooting and bust straight in, to keep them busy dodging bullets while you got clear. The boys counted five of them, including the guy working the big gun. One was hit hard—he had to be carried away—and a couple of the others were probably nicked, but as far as information is concerned we wound up with zilch, unless that kid told you something.”

“He told me something,” I said. “How much it’s worth, I won’t know until it’s planted in the computer and watered to see if it grows.” I gave him a hard look.

“But we still haven’t really settled the big question. You didn’t want me on this job; you tried to get Sandy to steer me off it, but I’m here. Are you willing to cooperate with a lousy G-man?” I reached into my pocket, brought out a folded slip of paper, and gave it to the maid to take around the table to him. “Do you recognize that phone number?”

Varek frowned. “Area code three-oh-five. That’s right here on this side of Florida.”

“A penthouse in Miami Beach. Sixty miles away. The call won’t break you.”

He hesitated; then he rose and left the dining room.

Lia looked at me curiously and asked, “Who’s in Miami Beach, Matt?”

“A man whose name I don’t bandy around if I don’t have to,” I said. “If Alex wants to make it public when he gets back, that’s his business.”

She made a little face at me. “I was just making conversation; I wasn’t snooping. How about some more dessert?”

“Thanks, it’s delicious.”

Actually, it was some kind of a fruity mixed-up mess; and I’m an old ice cream man from way back, although I’ll settle for cake if I have to. Then Varek was returning.