The Threateners (13 page)

I sipped my Scotch deliberately. “I’m not a sweet guy,” I said.

“I certainly hope not,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Actually, I am not worrying about your alcoholic intake for my sake, and certainly not for yours, Mr. Helm. I just want to be certain you are not diminishing your effectiveness.” She leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “You see, Mr. Heim, I want you in top condition; in good enough condition to kill Gregorio Vasquez for me. I have suffered quite enough at the hands of that man!”

The hatred in her voice, and in her small face, was quite impressive. That old man was certainly accumulating a lot of enemies.

I wasn’t one of them. I mean, as far as I was concerned, Senor Vasquez was dead. He wasn’t my enemy any more than he was my friend. He was simply a man who had ceased to exist at a certain moment, but who persisted in continuing to breathe. I merely had to see that he stopped.

Rio de Janeiro was a big disappointment to me. I guess I’d heard too many wonderful things about this marvelous city on its fabulous beach washed by the gentle waters of the South Atlantic. There was no way it could live up to its advance billing, and as far as I was concerned, it didn’t.

Oh, the scenery was moderately spectacular with the two famous peaks—Sugar Loaf and Corcovado (Hunchback) Mountain—rising from the great rocky ridge that splits the city in two, so that half of it has to be connected to the other half by a series of tunnels. (Corcovado’s the one topped by the much-photographed statue of Christ the Redeemer.) However, I live seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Rockies and I’ve seen a mountain, thanks. The legendary beach was impressive, to be sure, but I once spent some time in Waikiki, where you step out of your hotel right onto the gleaming sands instead of having to first fight your way across six lanes of traffic. (There’s also a pretty fair stretch of sand, undisturbed by the noise and fumes of city traffic, at Vara-dero, Cuba; and don’t ask me what I was doing in Varadero, Cuba.)

But my chief disillusionment in Rio concerned the people. Even in the fairly expensive hostelry to which we were taken, while they didn’t look poverty-stricken, they didn’t look especially smart or glamorous, either. Waiting, with the rest of the group, for our tour manager to take care of the red tape at the hotel desk, I watched a well-developed Brazilian girl in shorts and high heels heading for the elevators; moderately interesting, but hardly worth the trip, since my hometown is full of sexy Latin ladies in shorts and high heels. Still looking where the girl had vanished, I saw a sturdier figure appear, one I recognized.

“Oh, Jesus!” I said to Ruth. “Don’t stare, but try to get a good look at the dame just coming from the elevators so you’ll know her if you see her again.”

We were waiting in an alcove off the lobby that was furnished with three overstaffed sofas in a loose C-formation and several big easy chairs, into which most members of our tour had settled; but I’d done enough sitting for a while and Ruth had felt the same way. We were giving our tired rumps a break by standing up, for a change, in the alcove opening, just out of the lobby traffic. The woman passed within ten feet of us.

It was the closest look I’d had of her—back in Santa Fe I’d been handicapped by having to pretend I wasn’t aware of being under surveillance as she and her friends trailed me around. Like us, she was a bit rumpled this morning, in a beige linen pantsuit I’d seen before, that looked as if she’d spent the night in it, perhaps on a plane like us, perhaps even on our plane. I hadn’t spotted her, but King Kong could lose himself on board one of those giant jets, particularly with a first-class ticket—I was still trying to recover from the strains and aches resulting from having to fold my six feet four, for most of a day and night, into the midget space provided in tourist class.

I noted that the woman had had her brown hair restyled from the stringy, straggling hippie mop I’d last seen. Short and smooth and glossy, it flattered her snub-nosed face and gave her a rather pleasant grown-up-tomboy look. She looked as if she used to play a mean game of golf or tennis before she took up homicide. As far as I could see, she showed no evidence of being on cocaine or anything else, but it’s not my field of expertise and I don’t really know what signs to look for. She walked by without glancing our way and went out the hotel’s front door into the bright Brazilian sunshine.

“Yes, I’ll know her,” Ruth said. “Who is she?”

“One of the
Compañeros de la Hoja
, I think.
Compañeras?
”

Ruth looked surprised. “That freckled, bouncing phys-ed major? She looks too wholesome to . . . You do mean those people who were watching Mark and me?”

“And me, and Madeleine Rustin. They seem to have plenty of manpower. And womanpower. Although they lost one person of each gender in Santa Fe. Well, so did we. They’re still a dog ahead of us, however.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, in case you’re interested, that was Spooky Three who just went out.”

Ruth frowned. “Spooky?”

“I call them all Spookies. That one’s been following me around for the past several weeks, off and on. Chronologically, she’s the third one I spotted of the four taking turns watching me back in Santa Fe. Spooky Three.”

Ruth glanced at me. “Should they have found us down here so soon?”

I shrugged. “There was never any chance of their losing us for long, no matter how sneaky we tried to be, considering that you have to visit most of the obvious South American cities to look up Mark’s friends and determine which of them received little three-and-a-half-by-three-and-a-half-inch presents in the mail. Maybe we could have slipped away briefly, but we have to figure that this continent belongs to Gregorio Vasquez. There’s no practical way of getting from country to country except by plane. No matter what offbeat route we chose, his people would have spotted us at the first airport we hit, and passed the word. It was decided in Washington that we’d do better to play it straight and just follow along with this tour group, since it was hitting all the places youd indicated plus a few more. We’re supposed to act as. if we’re quite sure that the two of us can handle any problems that arise, although, as a matter of fact, we do have some backup if we need it. Maybe, thinking us cocky and careless and overconfident, Vasquez’s people will get a little overconfident and careless themselves." I glanced over my shoulder. “What do you think of our fellow travelers?”

Ruth looked at our companions, slumped wearily and sleepily on the hotel furniture. There were seven couples. Ruth and I made eight; sixteen warm bodies. We’d all boarded the plane independently, so this was our first group get-together. Our tour manager, a Mrs. Tobler, whom we were supposed to call Annie, had made contact with each of us at the Varig counter in Miami, using our Weston Tours carry-on bags for identification. She’d helped us get our seat assignments and turned us loose with our boarding passes to make the flight on our own. Then she’d rounded us up at the Rio airport, directed us through immigration and customs, shoveled us and our luggage onto a waiting bus, and herded us into the hotel. She’d instructed us to introduce ourselves to each other while she picked up our room keys, and we had, but I doubted that many names had stuck in many minds; although I figured that Ruth’s name and mine were probably imprinted boldly on one mind. The question was: which one?

Ruth moved her shoulders slightly. “It’s a little early to form any opinions, isn’t it? They look as tired as I feel. I seem to have been sitting in airplanes for a week; and how many hours did we lose, coming east? Two time zones from Albuquerque to Miami and two more from Miami to Rio? I never realized that South America was that far east of North America." She glanced at her watch. "That means it’s barely six o’clock in the morning back home. Ugh! As soon as that woman produces a key, I’m going to disappear into my room, take a hot bath, and sleep the rest of the day and let the world catch up with me.”

I said, “In that fistful of tour literature we were handed, there’s a passenger list we’d both better memorize. There’s also a schedule indicating that we have a get-together cocktail party and dinner tonight. It’ll give us a chance to match the names to the faces. I understand that some of the people on the list canceled out after it was printed, and I believe two couples joined up too late to be listed—three if you include us. I’m particularly interested in the four people besides us who aren’t on the list, but try not to let them know it. After we’ve had a chance to get everybody sorted out, we’ll compare notes. Okay?”

“What are we looking for?”

I said, ‘ ‘Even though we joined the tour at almost the last possible moment, it seems likely that one of those other unlisted characters joined even later, doesn’t it? A Compañero who was assigned to keep an eye on us, once our travel plans were known, until his gang is ready to move in on us. ”

Ruth shivered slightly. “It makes me feel, well, hunted, to think of all those eyes watching me.”

I said, “That’s because you are hunted; we both are. If you have any arrangements to make here, be careful what phone you use. And if you have to leave the hotel for any reason, I’d better go with you. I’d hate to have you disappear on your first morning in Rio."

She said, “No phone calls or excursions are needed, Mr. Helm. The contact procedures have already been established. I don’t have to call anybody and tell them to meet me on the beach just to the right of the third wave, wearing a hibiscus in my navel.”

I laughed. "And you’re not telling me what the established procedures are, right?”

She studied me for a moment and said quietly, “I know Dennis Morton would sacrifice me in an instant if it would buy him the information he wants. For all I know, you would, too. And I don’t know about you, but Morton has absolutely no interest in seeing my husband’s book published, certainly not before he gets the credit for catching Gregorio Vasquez and smashing the Evil Empire, as Mark so dramatically called it.”

“I’m not Dennis Morton,” I said. “This is strictly a bodyguard job for me. What you do with the stuff you collect is your business. It doesn’t figure in my instructions.”

Ruth Steiner said, “I hear you saying it, but how can I be sure? I want Mark’s book published, and I want it published
before
Gregorio Vasquez is arrested or killed so that when he is finally brought to justice, one way or another, the news uproar will push
The King of Coke
, to use your rather tacky and inaccurate title—we’ll have to think of a better one; Mark just called it Manuscript X2, since Empire had been XI—onto the best-seller list. I want it, not only for Mark’s sake, but for my own and that of my girls. I have a little money of my own, and Mark left me some, but I’m strictly the housewife type; I have no marketable skills. These days it’s very expensive to bring up a couple of kids and put them through college. I want to find all the pieces of Mark’s book, I want to put them together, I want to see the book published, and I want it to sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money. I’m very mercenary about this, and I’m not going to have Dennis Morton’s government gang, or yours, stealing Mark’s thunder prematurely, so the book will be old hat when it comes out.”

I said, “Swell, but I thought I understood you to say something, earlier, about wanting Vasquez killed very dead, very soon.”

She colored slightly. “I was being emotional. I’ve had more time to think now—what else can you do on a plane?— and I’ve come to realize that building a secure future for Andrea and Beatrice is more important than avenging their stepfather.”

Then Annie Tobler was back, a hefty, businesslike female in a baggy pantsuit, with a red pugilist face surrounded by careful white curls. There was a dark little mustached man with her, who was formally dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and silk tie. She introduced him as the local guide who’d be showing us around, but I didn’t catch the name: it sounded as if she’d said Senor Avocado, which seemed unlikely. We got our passports back and were given our room keys.

“That little man’s name wasn’t
really
Avocado, was it?” Ruth asked as we stopped in front of her door. She gave me her key when I held out my hand.

I said, “That’s what I heard, too, but we could both be wrong.” I used the key and preceded her into the room, discourteously and cautiously. It was a large and light and pleasant room, with a bird’s-eye view of the beachfront boulevard and the beach itself—we were on the ninth floor. I checked the bathroom and the closet and turned to look at her. “I see they’ve already brought up your luggage, so there should be no immediate reason for you to open the hall door. Lock it after me. Call me if somebody knocks, and let me handle it. I’m going to unlock the connecting doors, if you don’t mind.”

She nodded. We stood there for a moment, a little awkwardly. Even if they have no reason to like each other much, two adult people, male and female, can’t help but feel at least a hint of sexual tension, alone in a hotel room with a big, convenient bed—actually two beds—particularly a hotel room in a foreign country. I noticed that she didn’t look too bad for a lady who’d just crossed two continents. Her feathery hairdo was as tidy as it ever got and her lipstick was straight, and not much can happen to a knitted shirt and denim skirt. If her eyes looked tired, whose didn’t? I put her key into her hand and went to the hall door.

“Matt.”

I turned. “Yes?”

“You’re quite sure my girls are safe? Those people kidnapped me once to get information from Mark; they could try to take my children to get information from me.”

I said, “I don’t know if a certain government installation will ever be the same after those two little charmers get through with it, but your kids are as safe as if they were locked into Fort Knox.”

While she was still under guard in the nursing home to which Dennis Morton had taken her I had, with her permission, flown her daughters to Arizona and escorted them to the Ranch, where they’d immediately been adopted by a couple of female agents recuperating from injuries incurred in the line of duty.