The Demolishers (35 page)

I said, “One of the Indian tribes out west had a pleasant trick. The punishment for adultery was, they slit the squaw’s nose. Of course, in some other societies, I gather, they cut it clear off, but that seems pretty drastic and we’ll reserve it for a real emergency.”

La Margarita licked her lips. “You should have worked in Auschwitz with the other Nazi animals! But you can’t make me talk. ...”

They always say that unless they’re really tough, in which case they don’t say anything. In spite of her spitfire routine, she turned out to be not so tough. In fact I was surprised at how quickly she yielded. All it took was a little blood and some further threats, building up to the promise of nasal amputation. I’ll admit I was relieved. I have my sexual kinks like most men—I won’t venture to speak for women—but whittling on pretty girls isn’t one of them.

Still, it bothered me a bit that, after all her brave defiance, she hadn’t put up a better resistance before breaking down and answering my questions tearfully. I reminded myself that I’d had another surprise today that had almost killed me; and that I’d better keep in mind the fact that things weren’t always what they seemed. Nevertheless, Dana hadn’t been gone a full ten minutes when I gave the recall signal on the horn. She came back across the park lawn and approached the car warily, gasping when she saw the red spots on the younger girl’s blouse, and the tear-streaked and blood-smeared face.

“Relax, she’s just got a couple of little nicks,” I said. “You seem to be kindred spirits. She can’t stand the sight of blood, either; at least not her own blood. But don’t forget this is the same little girl who was perfectly ready to pass her boyfriend a gun so he could spill my blood. Give me some Kleenex so I can wipe her face a bit, will you?”

“Don’t touch me!” That was the kid. Before I could start cleaning her up, she’d hauled up the loose front of her blouse and mopped herself off with it, making a gory mess of the ruffles. It seemed to please her in a masochistic way. “There, that’s good enough for a dead body, isn’t it?” she said triumphantly. “You’ve got what you wanted, now finish your filthy job. Kill me!”

“You’re not going to die art my hands unless you behave stupidly, or your friends do,” I said. I handed her the tissues Dana had given me. “Here, hold this to your nose. It’ll stop in a little while. It’s all inside the nostril, in case you’re brooding about it; it won’t show. Now we’ll check to make sure the address you gave me is correct. . . . 427 Pacheco Street,” I said to Dana. “Do you know where it is?”

“No. Pacheco Street? I never heard of it.”

”Tell her how to get there,” I said to La Margarita, and listened to some Kleenex-muffled directions that meant nothing to me. Then we were driving away from there. After a while I spoke to the back of Dana’s head: “There seems to be a local businessman named Paul En-cinias. Big in ladies’ clothing. A refugee from the current regime in Gobemador who managed to slip out with enough money to settle here comfortably some years back. Apparently Gobemador had a good reason to run him out, although they weren’t aware of it. He was secretly a member of the Caribbean Legion of Liberty, even a member of the Council of Thirteen. However, recently his terrorist colleagues have begun to suspect that he’s been passing information to someone in Washington. They don’t know to whom, but they’re trying hard to find out.”

Dana didn’t turn her head. “Go on.”

“Naturally, suspecting him of double-crossing them, the CLL has been keeping a discreet eye on Paul Enci-nias with the help of La Margarita’s people, the FFPR. Today an FFPR member shadowing Paul saw him make contact with a known American agent and receive a package. The FFPR checked with the CLL—God, their alphabet soup is as thick as Washington’s—and were told to grab the lousy traitor. They did, and found that his package contained a fancy silenced weapon complete with spare clip and ammo. They got out of him the fact that it was meant for a U.S. operative who’d soon be arriving in San Juan by air. Me. Then they received a phone call from the U.S. Kennedy International. Herman Heinrich Bultman on the line. Bultman said he had a man on my plane tailing me, Raoul Bonnette, who’d need a gun when he got here so he could deal with me permanently; meet him and arm him, please. ETA. Paper-bag routine. The kid, here, got the delivery job since she knew Bonnette by sight and vice versa. They gave her the weapon they’d just confiscated from Encinias to pass along. Guns aren’t easy to come by and why waste a freebie?”

Dana continued to look straight ahead, driving. “What about Paul Encinias?”

“She says he was alive when she last saw him, but not in very good shape. I gather they’re saving him for further interrogation. They think, from the information that’s been compromised, that he must have accomplices elsewhere in the movement, a whole network. They hope to weed it all out, like crabgrass, with his reluctant help.”

“But he still hasn’t betrayed his contact in Washington?”

“Not yet, but they’re hoping.”

“We’ve got to get him out of there!”

“We don’t gotta do nothing, baby. And we certainly don’t gotta discuss it in front of a prisoner. If you tell her too much, you’ll have to shoot her. I promised I wouldn’t if she behaved, but I didn’t say anything about you.”

“Tie her up and I’ll see if I can find a park bench where we can talk.”

Old
San Juan is a walled city defended by several ancient forts. There have been numerous sieges, the first being the 1595 siege of El Castillo de Felipe del Morro, known as El Morro, by Sir Francis Drake. As we came up to the fort on the shore road, Dana was trying to remember whether Queen Elizabeth’s favorite sea rover-well, I guess Sir Walter Raleigh actually had the inside track there—had made it or been beaten off, she thought the latter. She said that, as I could see, the old city was located on a peninsula that was almost an island; causeways and bridges connected it with the mainland, if you want to call Puerto Rico a mainland.

She said that “morro” simply means headland or bluff; and she hadn’t meant to take us clear out to the point on which El Morro was located, but it had been a while since she’d last driven here and she’d missed the turn for which she’d been looking. To rectify her mistake, she followed the shore around and then chauffeured us into a maze of very narrow one-way streets between shabby buildings several stories high, little urban canyons at the bottom of which the streets were only two cars wide. Parking was permitted on one side, leaving only one lane for traffic. When somebody stopped to make a delivery or chat with a friend on the sidewalk, everything came to a halt, but that’s par for the course in any Latin country. I’d lived long enough in New Mexico to know that it never occurs to a driver of Spanish descent that someone behind him may be in a hurry, since he never is.

In the meantime, I’d bullied our prisoner into cleaning herself up a little better, telling her that if she insisted on looking like a battlefield casualty she’d have to ride on the floor where she didn’t show, with my feet on her. Fortunately, Dana had a couple of those little plastic-wrapped soapy washcloths in her purse. Even clean, La Margarita’s face wasn’t as pretty as it had been; there was a certain amount of swelling and inflammation. It wasn’t permanent, it would heal, given time, but it made me feel guilty nevertheless. I told myself to hell with it; chivalry was obsolete and these days they didn’t even want it, right? If she’d been a man, the state of her face wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, right?

I made her struggle into the late Raoul Bonnette’s jacket and zip it up to cover her stained blouse. It was much too big for her, of course; but if they arrested women for wearing baggy clothes these days, half the female population would be in jail. Then I lashed her wrists with my handkerchief, and buckled my belt around her ankles, hoping my slacks would stay up without it.

“All set back here,” I said to Dana. “Where are we heading?”

“I’m looking for another park I remember, complete with benches,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s not too far from that address she gave us. . . . There it is; and it looks as if a car’s just pulling out across the way. Let’s see if I can grab the space before somebody else gets it.”

She could; and a Qouple of minutes later we were sitting side by side on a bench under the trees. All we needed was a picnic basket. The little oasis of green measured one long block in one direction, and two short blocks in the other. There was a small department store facing the park from one corner, and various other retail establishments all around including a hardware store and a dress shop. They looked very much like their smalltown U.S. counterparts. I wondered if the dress shop was the one, or one of the ones, owned and operated by Paul Encinias. It was called The Fashion and the window featured a skinny mannequin in a shiny blue jersey dress with an uneven hem that the designer probably hadn’t planned on, but that’s jersey for you.

We didn’t speak at once. Instead we watched a lady policeman stroll by. She was quite handsome in her broad-brimmed hat and snugly fitting tan uniform; but you’d never mistake her for a male officer although she was wearing pants. A polished Sam Browne supported all the usual cop paraphernalia including a big automatic pistol.

“Relax,” I said to Dana, who kept throwing apprehensive glances at our parked car. “The kid isn’t going to beat on the car windows and scream for help; she doesn’t want fuzz any more than we do.”

“You keep telling me to relax.”

“In this business, you’ll wear yourself out if you don’t. Just tell yourself it’ll all be the same in a hundred years. Okay, the council of war is now called to order. This captured clown Encinias, I suppose he’s our missing Modesto.”

“Yes, but he’s not a . . .”

“Not a clown? Any agent who lets himself be spotted making an important contact is a clown in my book. If he then lets himself be taken alive with important information in his head that can threaten the whole operation and endanger other agents, he’s a real comedian. Hell, even if he didn’t have a capsule, he had a gun, didn’t he?”

She said hotly, “You can’t judge Paul by the brutal rules under which you operate! He’s not a trained agent, any more than I am. We’re both volunteers, Matt. The man who came down here to recruit us—your Mr. Trask, as a matter of fact—knew perfectly well that we knew very little about guns and violence; and I’m sure he never expected us to commit patriotic hara-kiri.”

I said, “So Encinias/Modesto is our man inside the Caribbean Legion, and you’re his Washington contact.” “That’s right.”

“Then it’s a simple turncoat operation, after all? Where does all your well-publicized computer expertise come in?” I shook my head quickly. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. I’ll bet your Paul Encinias had his clothing business pretty well computerized, right? Rather than be entirely dependent on the hired help, he’d learned what buttons to push. So when he decided to come over to us, for whatever reason, it was arranged that he should use his office setup for transmissions, working after hours when nobody was around—he was probably in the habit of staying late, anyway; most successful businessmen put in a lot of unpaid overtime. He’d pass information through normal commercial channels, Compuphone or Telecomp or whatever they call it, using some kind of an innocentlooking code or cipher. Say he’d order from a certain supplier in the U.S., who happened to be you, so many pairs of panty hose for his stores, and so many pairs of jeans; and it would mean that the redcoats were landing on Omaha Beach at midnight. Then you’d send back Mac’s instructions the same way.”

She smiled faintly. “Well, it wasn’t exactly like that, it was more complicated than that, but you have the general idea.”

Something stirred in my mind. “What kind of instructions did you pass along? Did Mac ever order Modesto to use his influence to have the CLL bomb a specific target?”

Dana looked shocked. “Heavens, no! Mac wouldn’t...”

I said, “There may be something Mac wouldn’t do, but I haven’t come across it yet. If he needed somebody taken out, and didn’t care to make it official by using a regular agent, and had a bunch of gullible terrorists available, he wouldn’t hesitate to make use of them by pointing them that way.”

“Well, he never passed any orders like that through me.” Then she hesitated. “I mean, that I knew about. Of course there was the B-code.”

“What’s a B-code?”

“Usually we used the A-code; and I’d encode the message for transmission myself. Once in a while, though, when security was very tight, the B-code would be used and I’d be handed the message ready to go and told to send it off exactly as written and not to get curious.”

“Did that happen often?”

“Three times since we started operations. The last was a few weeks ago, I can’t recall the exact date.” She made a face. “I didn’t like it. It made me feel . . . untrusted, being bypassed like that, as if Mac and Modesto were ganging up on me.”

“Join the club,” I said. It was time to drop what was, after all, pretty much a personal matter between Mac and me, and get to the business at hand. I went on: “How do you think I feel, learning that you’ve had a plain old human contact on the Council of Thirteen right along. Here I thought you were producing all that fine information out of thin air with that computer of yours.”

She laughed. “I doubt very much that you really believed that, Matt.”

“Well, it was the impression you and Mac were working very hard to put across, wasn’t it? That you were some kind of a mad electronic genius who just had to play a few tunes on the keyboard to come up with a detailed picture of what the opposition was doing. It made a cover of sorts, and it may actually have kept some peo
ple from getting too curious about your source of information; but I kind of figured there had to be an input somewhere to make an output in Washington. Computers don’t construct information from nothing. As they say: shit in, shit out.”