The Threateners (21 page)

“My dear lady . . .”

“Nevermind that dear-lady nonsense!” Ruth said sharply. “I’ll tell you what you
haven’t
done. You haven’t come out of your beautiful, secure anonymity to comfort the grieving widow and apologize for the fact that you and your underlings failed dismally to keep your promise of safety, the promise with which you lured us to the U.S. I haven’t heard a single word of regret or remorse from anybody in your idiotic undercover circus that let Mark be murdered as easily as I was kidnapped. I haven’t even heard anybody—not Mr. Morton and certainly not you—promise to make up for your total incompetence, at least a little, by making certain Mark’s murderers are brought to justice.”

“Mrs. Steiner. . ."

Ruth went on, unheeding: “All you people cared about when he died was getting hold of his book, because you thought it might give you the answer to some of your drug problems. Well, I didn’t give a damn about your stupid problems; I wanted Mark’s assassins found and punished. So I turned to an organization in which people had the odd notion that murder is a slightly more heinous crime than substance abuse, to use the silly name you people have for it.” She glared at Ackerman. “I was a new widow, my husband was
dead
, and all your boy Dennis could think about and talk about and hound me about was that lousy manuscript! I presume he was acting under your instructions. Well, there’ll be six-foot snowdrifts in the jungle outside that window before either of you ever lays hands on that book, Mr. Roger Ackerman!”

Ackerman stepped forward and slapped her hard.

I always wonder about these sluggers: how do they manage to live so long with both hands still attached? The normal human reaction to being slapped—at least it’s my normal human reaction—is to perform at least an amputation, if not a total extermination; so how do they continue to survive intact?

"Watch her, Belinda!" Ackerman snapped, stepping back.

But Ruth made no effort to lunge at him; she just set the spectacles straight on her nose, touched her mouth with her fingertips, saw the blood, and dug a crumpled Kleenex out of a skirt pocket to hold against her split lip.

“This disk is also coded, sir.” That was the boy wonder returning from Ruth’s room.

“And you say you can’t break it?” Ackerman asked.

“I’m afraid not, sir. Not with the facilities I have here.”

“Very well. We’ll try it another way. You’d better get behind Helm and hold your pistol to his head. Correction, make that my pistol. It’s silenced, so it shouldn’t disturb anybody if you have to use it. Here, take it and lend me yours. Belinda, I believe you carry cigarettes.”

“Yes.”

Ackerman said, “It’s a dirty habit and an unhealthy one, but it has advantages. Light one, please. You can put away your weapon; I’ll watch the woman.” He moved to stand before Ruth, holding Morton’s revolver. “Now, Mrs. Steiner, I want two things. I want the password or computer code or whatever it takes to unscramble the text on these disks. And I want the names and addresses of the people here in South America to whom your husband sent the remaining disks on which he recorded his book. We still lack Chapters One to Ten, Chapters Twenty to Twenty-six, and however many chapters he wrote beyond Thirty-four. You can start by telling me how many there were altogether.”

Ruth glared at him over the wad of Kleenex. “What will you do if I don’t tell you? Hit me again?”

“No, but Mrs. Ackerman will apply the lighted end of her cigarette to Mr. Helm’s chest. And Mr. Morton will blow his brains out if he tries to object—well, let’s be generous and allow him to squirm just a little, shall we? And small moans will be permitted, but no loud screams that could disturb the occupants of neighboring rooms. . . .”

"I don’t believe this!" Ruth protested. ‘‘You work for the U.S. government! And you know that I’m a respectable American citizen; I was married to a member of the Foreign Service and later to a well-known author. Mr. Helm works for the U.S. government just as you do. What gives you the right to march in here with . . . with your slaps and your torture; what makes you think you can get away with it?” She appealed to me: “Matt, has he gone absolutely crazy?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t the time or place to go into the question of Ackerman’s sanity. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all nuts, but then I’ve spent my life in a fairly hard-boiled profession and I never can understand the soft-boiled folks who make careers of saving people from their own bad habits. Go ahead and smoke up a storm for all I care. It’s your emphysema.

I said, "Maybe yes, maybe no, but for the moment he has the guns. Moral and legal rights are all very well, sweetheart, but in the crunch it’s the guns that count, always.”

Ruth licked her lips. ‘ ‘But how can he expect to get away with—”

Ackerman didn’t want us to get into that. He snapped, “All right, Belinda!”

The blond girl, with the cigarette dangling between her lips, pulled open my already unbuttoned shirt with both hands. When she leaned over me, I got an intimate view of her chest in return: the rather spectacular white breasts were, I noted, quite unconfined inside the purple blouse. At the moment I didn’t find them unbearably stimulating, but I’ll admit to a small reaction, of which she was aware. She smiled at me affectionately, puffed hard on the cigarette, blew the smoke into my face, and pressed the glowing coal against my breastbone.

There was the well-remembered, instant blaze of pain, of course, and the familiar smell of burned chest hairs and scorched skin mingled with the odor of tobacco. I mean, I’d played this scene before too many times, with all conceivable variations. I’d long since learned that suffering doesn’t become any easier with practice, but this time, at least, I didn’t have to pretend it didn’t hurt, as is sometimes required. I believe I performed the expected squirm-and-moan act quite convincingly; and how much of it was truly an act is none of your damned business.

“You sadistic bitch!” I gasped. Corny verbiage was also expected.

Belinda grinned. “I’d just love to hurt you a different way, lover, and have you hurt me right back, but since this is all the fun we can share today, just relax and enjoy it. Your lady friend doesn’t seem to be talking, so . . ." She leaned forward again.

“Forty-three!”

That was Ruth’s voice, sounding a bit dim through the pain haze, as Belinda set another small part of me afire.

Ackerman’s voice said, “What did you say, Mrs. Steiner?”

The girl above me withdrew temporarily, leaving my chest throbbing. I saw that Ruth’s face was set and shiny. She’d taken the Kleenex from her mouth. The bleeding had already stopped. There was some swelling of her lower lip where Ackerman’s blow had caught her. Maybe a double amputation was in order. You wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble of chopping off one just to have him learn how to slap even harder and oftener with the other.

Ruth snapped, "You wanted to know the number of chapters, damn you! There are forty-three of them. The total number of manuscript pages completed is five hundred and thirty-four. There was to have been an appendix—Mark thought it would come to some fifteen pages, for a total manuscript of about five hundred and fifty double-spaced pages—but he never got enough of the final section written out, and revised to his satisfaction, to put it on a disk and send it away.”

“Very well. Now the names.”

“What will you do to them if I tell you who they are?”

It was time for me to be brave. I whispered hoarsely, “Ruth, you don’t have to. . . . Hell, in this business a little toasting session is all in the day’s work. These dumbos always reach for the cigarette or the soldering iron or the blowtorch and think they’ve invented a lovely new form of interrogation, as if the Spanish Inquisition hadn’t beat them to it by centuries! I’ve had it done to me so many times I’m practically fireproof. Don’t tell the bastard a damn thing you don’t want. . . . Ahhh!”

“Don’t be a hero, hero,” the plump giii said, taking the cigarette away and puffing it back to good, bright ignition. “Well, Mrs. Steiner?” Ackerman asked.

Ruth hesitated.

“Ahh-ahh!” I said as Belinda did her stuff once more. I decided that the antitobacco crusaders had missed one good argument against the filthy weed: Mrs. Roger Ackerman.

“That doesn’t seem to be one of your fireproof spots, lover,” she said solicitously. “But let’s check it out again. . . ."

“Ahhhhh!”

“Stop it, stop it! ” Ruth cried. ‘ ‘Please, what is it you want to know, Mr. Ackerman?”

“Where are your other contacts to take place?”

She licked her lips. “Lima, Santiago, Quito. There was supposed to be one in Buenos Aires, but I switched it to Itaipu at the last minute.”

“The two disks Mr. Morton found in your room, are they copies of the one you just received at Itaipu?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the original?”

“It was . . . picked up a few minutes ago. A man came to the window and I handed it out to him.” She shook her head quickly. “You don’t need to know who he was. As a matter of fact, I don’t know who he was, myself. Over the phone, I’d asked Lenny Otero to arrange it, just giving me time to fire up the computer and run off a couple of copies of the disk before I passed it on.”

Ackerman pounced on the name. "Otero? Is that the name of your Buenos Aires contact, or somebody here in the hotel?”

Ruth looked annoyed with herself, then she shrugged. “What difference does it make? She doesn’t have what you want any longer. Lenny’s the one in Buenos Aires.”

“You made two copies?” Ackerman said thoughtfully. “One for you and one ft»r Mr. Helm?”

“No, one for him to keep for me and one to send to his people in Washington. The same as I did with the disk I got in Rio. One copy of that must already be on its way to Washington, since you found only one on him.”

“To Washington!” Ackerman turned on me sharply and started to speak, but changed his mind. He swung back to Ruth: “But no copy for you? That seems odd.”

She said sharply, “Nothing odd about it! The way I had it planned, we’d have one copy of each diskette with us, the one Matt was holding, in case I needed immediate access to it. There was no sense in my carrying still another, and I didn’t want too many floating around. Three seemed enough to ensure . . . Well, if one of the originals didn’t make it by the route I’d arranged, there would be Matt’s copy right at hand, and if something should happen to that, there would still be a backup in Washington.”

Ackerman was silent for a little. At last he asked, “These Mends your husband trusted to safeguard his work, were they all female friends? You said your contact in Buenos Aires was a girl. And the one in Rio? We think your rendezvous there was also a sanitario—in that restaurant where we had lunch on Monday, am I right?—which would make her a woman, too.”

Ruth drew a long breath. “I’m afraid my husband was kind of a ladies’ man in his younger days, Mr. Ackerman. Of course he also had a good many male friends and acquaintances down here, but yes, the people he asked to keep his disks safe for him were all women.” She grimaced. “Fortunately for this project, as it turned out, he hadn’t been exactly reticent about his ... his premarital relationships. Or you could say he’d just been painfully honest when he came courting me, to use the old-fashioned term, telling me what kind of a man I’d be getting and swearing that it would never happen after we were married, even though keeping a mistress was an old Spanish custom. He kept his word. He ... he loved me. But I did get to know a considerable amount about the women in his past. Strangely, he seemed to have remained friends with practically all of them. Well, he was a very nice guy. I even kept meeting them socially when I accompanied him on his journalistic travels around South America. A bit embarrassing at the time, knowing what I knew, but useful later when I was trying to track down the ones who’d received the disks.”

“Yes, I can see that. Now the names, if you please.”

She licked her lips. “I can’t. . . . What will you do to them?”

"They will come to no harm if they turn over the disks."

“I’m afraid I don’t trust you. If ... if one of them gets a bit stubborn, you’ll hurt her, too, just as you’re hurting . . . No, I don’t think I care to betray them to you!”

“Belinda!”

When there was no immediate groan from me, Ackerman looked our way. Belinda Ackerman—whatever her real name might be—was taking a final long drag at the stub of her cigarette. She crushed it out deliberately in one of the hotel ashtrays.

Ackerman said irritably, ‘ ‘Belinda, you are not on stage; a dramatic production is not required. Just light another and . . .”

The blond girl shook her head. “No.”

Ackerman looked startled. “
What
did you say?” he demanded.

Belinda spoke calmly: “That’s enough sadism for little Linda, the Krafft-Ebing girl. I’ve had my kicks for today, thanks, Mr. Ackerman; now let the boy wonder take a crack at it. Hell, this guy owes him one, from what I hear, or vice versa. I’ll just hold the gun and watch the fun for a change. ”

I should have noticed. I suppose, if I hadn’t been distracted by my own discomfort, I would have seen that the girl was in trouble. Her voice had been steady enough throughout, but now her face was quite pale, even a little greenish, and there were drops of perspiration on her forehead. She’d sweated through her sexy silk blouse under the armpits.

I didn’t like it. I prefer to deal with psychopathic creeps. The girl had suddenly become human, just a hardworking junior agent who’d been plugging away to the best of her ability at the new job assigned to her. She’d been professional enough not to let herself be distracted by the right and wrong of a spot of interrogation—ethics don’t play a very large part in our training—but in the end what she’d been ordered to do had turned out to be just a bit too much for her. Maybe she was just a nice girl at heart. Too bad. It’s easier to pull the trigger on the opposition when the time comes, or push the blade all the way home, if you can tell yourself you’re dealing with a bunch of conscienceless freaks from outer space, not real, vulnerable human beings.