The Demolishers (39 page)

“Sandy, you’re supposed to be in the hospital. What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

Young
Mrs. Helm led me two blocks over and three and a half blocks back, meaning away from the target area. The door at which she paused looked no different from any of the doors I’d passed elsewhere in that rather down-beat area, but a small dark man in grimy jeans and a tom T-shirt was squatting against the wall nearby, smoking a cigarette. I didn’t know him; but I knew that he wasn’t the local bum he was trying to impersonate, and I sensed that he was armed. He had that look. Sandra glanced his way, he gave her a nod; and we went up two steps and inside.

“It’s the third floor,” she said over her shoulder, leading the way up the stairs.

“I think I can make it if I get to stop and pant occasionally,” I said.

”I hope I can,” she said. “I don’t seem to have got much strength back yet.”

“You’re doing well to be standing on your feet at all,” I said. “It’s only in the movies that people get shot and go rock-and-rolling next day.”

“Pulling on my pants one-handed is the really hard part,” she said.

I hadn’t asked where she was taking me and she hadn’t volunteered the information. Of course she could have been leading me into a trap. There are ways of putting pressure on just about anybody, to do just about anything. But I didn’t think there was any way of turning this girl into a good enough sneak to make it convincing. Besides, hell, you have to trust somebody.

“In here,” she said, opening a door.

The hallway had been shabby, but the apartment we entered, while far from new, looked clean enough if a bit cluttered. There was a man guarding the door whom I recognized.

“Willard,” I said, to let him know I remembered his code name. We’d worked together once, quite a while ago.

“Go on in, Eric,” he said. “The living room. The door to the right.”

It wasn’t a bad living room, if you went in for strong colors and statuettes of Mary and Jesus and lots of knick-knacks and ornate, overstuffed furniture. I’m not being ironical. It wasn’t my taste, but it looked like a lived-in room in which people had been happy and comfortable among their souvenirs and mementos, and might be
again, as soon as somebody removed the compact walkie-talkie, antenna extended, that rested on the bathtowel that had been spread to protect the low shiny table in front of the sofa, and the two machine pistols beside it, and the four extra twenty-round magazines. In order to be really happy and comfortable, they’d also have to get rid of the man on the sofa. He’s one of the least comfortable characters I know.

The weapons were the smallest of their type I’d seen. I like to keep up with the new ones, and I’d read up on the Yugoslav Skorpian when it made its appearance years ago. However, although its compactness has made it fairly popular, I’d never met one before. I remembered that, while it’s offered in several calibers, the best-known version, which this seemed to be, shoots the .32 ACP cartridge, a gutless old round that has only about a third the muzzle energy of an ordinary police .38. The revival of this weak and obsolete cartridge is in line with the modern weapons theory stating that with a fully automatic firearm you don’t need a powerful cartridge for short-range social functions since you can put several of the feeble bullets into the target. If you just keep plugging, pun intended, the multiple impacts will eventually add up to a greater shock factor than can be achieved with a single powerful slug.

The truth is, of course, that nowadays they pass out these squirt guns just so they won’t have to be bothered with teaching people how to put one bullet where it counts.

“Be careful, Eric,” Mac said as, entering the room, I brushed against a flimsy little table by the doorway that held some souvenir ashtrays, a tricky vase with artificial flowers, and a small statuette, perhaps a saint. “Don’t knock anything over. The nice people just lent me this place to use as a temporary command post. I don’t want any of their treasures broken.”

I looked at him for a moment. I suppose I should have been surprised to see him, since he doesn’t get out into the field much. However, nothing he does ever really surprises me.

“What’s a B-code, sir?” I asked. “Our B-code?”

“We have no such thing as a B-code,” he said.

“I was told differently.”

“Then you had better check with your informant.”

“I will if I can reach her,” I said.

I had no idea whether or not he’d given me a truthful answer. He hadn’t seemed surprised by the question; but he doesn’t give much away. I regarded him a moment
¹
longer. We’d never really been friends in spite of working together so many years; but there had been times when we’d been friendlier than now. I found that, rather to my surprise, I regretted this. I remembered that it had all started with an argument about a dog, for God’s sake! How ridiculous could you get? I turned and pulled up a chair for Sandra.

“Better sit down. You look a bit shaky.”

“I’m all right.” But she sat down.

I turned back to face Mac. He wore one of his customary gray three-piece suits, perhaps a little lighter in weight than the last one I’d seen, in Washington. He picks them to match the climate. His hair was as gray as ever, his eyebrows as black, and his eyes as bleak.

He said, with a gesture towards the portable two-way radio, “I’ve been getting reports of you circling this neighborhood for over an hour, like a lost dog looking for a home.”

I said, “Sandra should be in bed. That arm is hurting her. ’ ’

“It was her choice to discharge herself from the hospital and come along to help us.”

“And roam around without protection? They’re al
ready holding two hostages, assuming that both still live. Do we want to give them a third?”

“There was little danger,” he said. “I knew you would find that car eventually, so I stationed her there. I wanted you brought here, and I had nobody else to spare whom you knew by sight. Willard was needed here. I didn’t think it advisable to send a strange operative to slip up on you; you tend to get a bit trigger-happy under stress.” “Thanks for the testimonial.”

He smiled thinly. “I have no objection whatever to trigger-happy agents, Eric. Some people would say we specialize in trigger-happy agents. I am merely cautious about approaching them. Anyway, Mrs. Helm was reasonably safe because most of the Caribbean Legion’s Council of Thirteen, what you’ve left of it, is pretty well forted up in their headquarters at 424 Pacheco, along with some rank and file to perform sentry and guard duty while they’re getting things organized and holding their meeting. Modesto managed to get the word out before they took him. It’s scheduled for tomorrow.”

I made a silent apology to Paul Encinias, alias Modesto, the man I’d never met although we had a lady in common. I’d said some harsh words about him, but you can forgive an inexperienced operative a few blunders if he gets his job done before he gets himself caught.

I looked at Mac, frowning. “You said 424? The number I was given was 427.”

“That’s the building across the street. It’s standing empty and I don’t think they have anybody in it, although there may be a lookout we haven’t spotted yet. This is a depressed area, and the building on this side of the street is also supposed to be unoccupied. The restaurant on the ground floor, Caf6 Ernesto, has supposedly gone out of business. As you may have noted.”

“I never got that close,” I said. “I just saw the sign from a distance.”

“Actually, the derelict cafe is their meeting hall,” Mac said. “They are camping out in the empty rooms and apartments above it. The whole building is theirs. I suspect they have it pretty well guarded. I hope so.”

I glanced at him sharply. “Hope?”

He nodded. “I want them to feel safe in there. The fact that they are still there even though they’re aware of having been betrayed by Modesto indicates that they consider San Juan, and particularly this section of it, a sanctuary of sorts. They feel they are in friendly surroundings, among people sympathetic to their cause, the cause of freedom for little Gobemador now, larger Puerto Rico later, and finally the whole Caribbean with the exception of those few areas already free enough to suit them—like liberated, democratic Cuba.” He grimaced. “These self-styled patriots always tend to overestimate the popular sentiment in their favor. They persuade themselves that their fanatical beliefs are universal. They expect a great popular uprising whenever they wave a flag.”

I said dryly, “As we did at Bahia de Cochinos.” “Precisely. Overoptimism is common phenomenon not confined to terrorists.” He shook his head, dismissing my irrelevant comment, and went on: “At any rate the Legion did have considerable local support until last year, when they murdered those children. Now even the people who believe strongly in Puerto Rican independence have little sympathy for this particular gang of baby-killers. And there have always been those who prefer to remain Americans, like the family that has given me the use of this apartment.” He regarded me for a moment. “Dolores was seen being taken from your rental vehicle to the Cafe Ernesto.”

“Dolores?”

“Miss Delgado’s working name. She chose it herself; insisted on it, in fact.”

It gave me an uneasy feeling to learn that Dana had made a point of conducting her mission of vengeance under the name of her murdered little girl; it hinted again at depths of emotion that belied the image our cool computer lady had been so careful to project. I didn’t ask why an attempt had not been made to liberate her while she was still out in the street and fairly available. Whatever he had planned here, Mac wouldn’t consider betraying his presence, and his operation, for the sake of one lousy agent.

“Did you notice her escort?” I asked.

“A small, dark-haired young lady with a knife, was the description received here.”

“It was probably my knife, sir,” I said. “I’d lent it to Dana, I mean Dolores. My knife, and my goof. I overestimated our girl a bit, I guess; but mainly I underestimated the kid we’d grabbed. At least I thought she was just a kid, somebody expendable they’d picked to deliver a message and a gun to the guy who’d tailed me from Kennedy. Now I think she’s maybe a bit older than I thought, and certainly much brighter and more important.”

“Explain.”

I gave it to him in detail, from my glimpse of Bultman at Kennedy to my belated realization that our young female prisoner must be a more significant figure in the CLL than I’d assumed; and my hasty return to the little city park to find our vehicle and the two girls missing.

“The girl left the tape she’d been bound with lying there to let me know she was free and it wasn’t Dana who’d driven the car away for some mysterious reason. A threat or a warning, you might call it.”

Sandra stirred. “I don’t understand. How could she have got free, all taped up like that?”

I said, “No problem. Dana obviously cut her loose.” 309

Sandra looked shocked. ‘'You mean . . . you mean that Miss Delgado is on their side?”

I grinned. “Hell, no. But cute little Angelita held her breath until her face turned black, or went into dramatic convulsions, or just moaned and groaned into her gag and maybe even puked a little, strangling spectacularly on her vomit, until Dana couldn’t bear to let her suffer any longer and made with the blade. Don’t get proud, small fry. You’d have done the same thing.”

“I would not!”

I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right, but I doubt it. I hate to say it, since it was my fault she escaped, but this is probably the young woman responsible for the West Palm Beach bomb that killed Matthew, not to mention the Newport bomb, and quite possibly even the one here in San Juan.”

Mac said, “I see. You are reasonably certain, then, that the same girl was behind all these incidents, or at least involved in them, and that this is the girl?”

I shrugged. “It’s a guess, but it doesn’t seem likely that they’d have a collection of lethal young ladies that size and a collection of wigs to put on them. It’s too bad I didn’t have Sandra with me when I grabbed her at the airport. Sandy could have said for sure if she was the bomb-planting maid in our Newport hotel. But I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. Of course, if she’d thought there was a risk of being recognized, she wouldn’t have come; but she was aware that neither Dana nor I had ever seen her.” I frowned. “But what I don’t quite understand, sir, is why she’d give me that address right across from their terrorist fortress. If she could have been sure I’d go there alone, okay, but what if I stopped at a phone and called for reinforcements? They could have found themselves surrounded by a Puerto Rican SWAT unit, if there is such a thing. Or the U.S. Marines.”

Mac said, “You forget, she knew that the location had already been compromised by Modesto; she didn’t do any additional damage by giving it to you. And she undoubtedly also knew that we don’t often ask for police or military assistance.” He shook his head. “You give these people credit for too much caution and common sense, and too little arrogance. As I have pointed out already, in spite of discovering an informant in their midst, they haven’t scattered; they’re still stubbornly inhabiting an address they know has been betrayed. They are reckless and violent activists, remember; they’ve had a good deal of success to make them overconfident; they consider themselves clever and powerful and invincible; they are even associated with a daring military operation they fully expect to be victorious. . . . What is it, Eric?”