The Threateners (22 page)

Ackerman asked, “Are you refusing . . . ?”

"The poor girl’s got a weak stomach." This was the handsome character holding the silenced automatic. He laughed scornfully. “I haven’t. Certainly not where this quickdraw cowboy is concerned. Let me take over as she suggests, Mr. Ackerman.”

“Well, all right.” The older man threw a baleful look at Belinda. “But I’ll speak with you later, young lady.”

After that it was just more and worse of the same, complicated by the fact that Mr. Dennis Morton clearly wasn’t accustomed to defiling his lungs with tobacco. This led to a considerable amount of coughing as he sucked inexpertly to keep the cigarette fired up and choked on the resulting smoke. A real comedy routine; but the fact that he was aware of making a fool of himself with the unfamiliar fags after volunteering so bravely for torture duty only made him all the more eager to take it out on me: he was faster to start a bum than Belinda had been and slower to stop. Ruth stalled a little, but gradually she let it all come out. The woman in Santiago was Conchita Perez. Address. The woman in Lima was Rafaela Hoffman. Address. The woman in Quito was Evelyn Herrera Gonzales. Address.

Then there was a little silence. At last Ruth looked up at Ackerman and asked sharply, “Well, are you satisfied?”

“One more name,” he said.

“There aren’t any more!”

“Oh, yes there are. There is. The name of the man or woman, I presume back in the States, to whom you’re sending the original disks after you get them copied. . . . Dennis!”

“Oh, stop it!” Ruth said wearily. She sighed. “Why don’t you use your brains for a change? Who in the world would I send them to except Mark’s publisher?”

After taking a moment to consider her answer and decide that it made sense, Ackerman asked, “The name of the firm?”

“For heaven’s sake! You can read it off any copy of his first book; if you knew your business, you already would have. Horizon Press. New York. I don’t have the street address in my head. . . . Oh, all right, all right, don’t start that again, let me think! 243 Mackey Street. Zip 10022, if I remember right. Actually, our dealings were with one of their senior editors.”

“Name?”

“Paul Rentner. But I’m not sending them to him directly. We were sneaky, we didn’t think it would be smart to address the packages so obviously to a publishing house, so Paul arranged to have a young associate editor receive them at home and bring them to him at the office. Elizabeth Johns."

“Address?”

Ruth gave it, and Ackerman copied it into the little notebook in which, rather clumsily since he also had to juggle Morton’s revolver, he’d been recording the information as it was extracted. He flipped to a new page.

“And now,” he said, “now we’ll have the code or whatever you computer people call it, please, Mrs. Steiner, and the unpleasantness will all be behind us.”

“No.”

“Dennis!”

“You’re getting tiresome,” Ruth said wearily. “I’m not going to give it to you. You can fry him to a crisp—I’m sorry, Matt—and you can toast me like a marshmallow on a stick, but you won’t get that out of me. I know there are drugs that could make me talk, but if you had access to those you’d have used them already instead of going in for these . . . primitive methods." She drew a deep breath. "Forget about Matt, Mr. Ackerman. He doesn’t have the information you want, and nothing you do to him will make me give it to you. He’s a nice enough person, but he doesn’t mean that much to me. Tell your junior-grade inquisitor to come over here and work on me. I assure you, he’ll die a long, lingering death from lung cancer before I talk, if he doesn’t rupture something vital first, the way he keeps coughing. . . ."

The slap knocked her glasses off. I decided that a hatchet would be too quick; when the time came I’d do a slow job with a dull hacksaw. No-Hands Ackerman.

“You’ve been stalling, you bitch!”

She made no move to touch her bruised cheek; she just straightened up in the chair, adjusted her glasses once more, and laughed at him.

“That’s right, I’ve been stalling,” she said. “I’ve been making you work for a lot of names and addresses that mean nothing at all, because even if you get the disks, what good will they do you if you can’t read them? Oh, I’ll be sorry to lose them; they represent Mark’s last work and I hate to see it wasted; besides, I had greedy hopes. . . . But never mind that. Obviously there’s a drug-related evil no one talks about, that’s worse than the drugs themselves: the lovely power the so-called drug wars give to certain ambitious, ruthless people, the power to push and slap people around with impunity. The majority of your colleagues are probably honest and sincere and maybe even reasonably considerate law enforcement people, Mr. Ackerman, but you and men like you make the whole noble crusade stink. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a much greater danger than Gregorio Vasquez; at least everybody knows what he is. He’s not a hidden menace like you, a secret threat to everything our country stands for. As I said before, you’ll never get your hands on my husband’s book. You’ll never use it to further your dirty career. Never!"

Ackerman took a quick step forward. He was pale with fury and he might very well have smashed Ruth’s face with the revolver he was holding if Belinda hadn’t stepped forward quickly and caught his arm.

“Please, Mr. Ackerman! Somebody’s coming!”

Footsteps approached the door and stopped. There was a polite little knock, very different from Ackerman’s recent assault on the panels.

“Matt?”

It was a woman’s voice, that of our tour manager, Annie. Ackerman reached out and grabbed Ruth’s chin left-handed to hold her head steady. He placed the muzzle of his gun-well, Morton’s gun—between her eyes. I decided that the way he kept losing his temper, he might be a bit screwy after all, as Ruth had suggested; or perhaps the fact that he was on very shaky legal ground here, actually no legal ground at all, was affecting his nerves adversely—not that any of us spend too much time brooding about legality.

Ackerman glared at me over Ruth’s head and whispered, “Answer, Helm! Very, very carefully!”

I raised my voice and said, “Yes, Annie?”

She spoke through the closed door: “The tour to the falls is about to start. You and Ruth said you were planning to come with us.”

It was no time to be clever; the room was infested with too many nervous people with guns. I said, “I’m sorry, I think we’ll have to pass after all. Ruth’s a bit tired.”

The woman outside the door said, “Oh, that’s too bad!

Well, we’ll go ahead without you. When she’s had a little rest, maybe you can just take her across the road in front of the hotel and over to the river, it’s only a couple of hundred yards. You can get a nice view of the cataracts from there, and you can follow the cliffs upstream toward them as far as she feels like walking, there’s a good path along the edge. It’s quite a spectacle. You really shouldn’t miss it.”

“We won’t. Thanks, Annie.”

We heard her walk away. When her footsteps were no longer audible, Ackerman released Ruth and backed away from her. Relieved of the strain of staring cross-eyed at the threatening gun barrel, Ruth blinked a couple of times and drew a shaky breath. Dennis Morton, still holding the silenced pistol to my head, sighed deeply.

“Mr. Ackerman,” he said after a moment. “If I may suggest. . .”

“Yes, Dennis?”

“I’ll do whatever you say, of course, sir, but . . . well, we’ve already spent a lot of time in this room and we don’t really need Mrs. Steiner’s information, do we?”

“Explain.”

“We know where the disks are now. Once we have them all, Washington can take it from there. Those boys are real pros and I’m sure they’ve long since figured out how to deal with the kind of encryption provided by an off-the-shelf computer program available to civilians. Even back during the coldest cold-war days, the Russians with all their facilities couldn’t keep their secret communications secret from us very long; do you think a housewife with a battery-powered portable is going to?” He cleared his throat. “As I said, it’s only a suggestion, sir.”

It sounded reasonable, but I sensed a hidden uncertainty. Mr. Dennis Morton didn’t have quite as much faith in the Washington computer geniuses as he pretended. He was simply, like Belinda but in a slightly different way, losing his nerve. He was beginning to realize that his fanatic superior had put them all into a very unhealthy situation in a foreign land, and he wanted to persuade Ackerman, diplomatically, to get them the hell out of there before the Brazilian police, or somebody, broke in the door and found them abusing a couple of helpless victims, with illegal weapons in their hands.

Ackerman was not a man sensitive to hidden uncertainties; he was nodding thoughtfully. “You make a good point,” he said. “And we have, as you say, spent too much time here. Very well, but I think we had better keep Mrs. Steiner in reserve, so to speak, just in case she’s cleverer than you think—or our cryptographers are stupider, which is not inconceivable. If so, well, we have access to interrogators who have better techniques than we have, and they’ll be able to obtain the information from her, I’m sure.”

Ruth licked her lips. “I don’t understand. How are you going to keep me in reserve, as you call it? Lock me up somewhere?”

“Oh, no, dear lady,” Ackerman said. “You and I are going to put on a great performance for the other members of the troupe as, although deserted and humiliated by our respective partners, we stubbornly accompany them through Argentina and Chile and all the other beautiful South American countries we’ve paid to see. I presume you’ve alerted your husband’s female friends in Santiago, Lima, and Quito to expect you with this group, so we’d better not confuse them by traveling independently. In the meantime, for the benefit of our companions, we’ll play the betrayed husband and the deserted mistress, seeking consolation with each other.”

Ruth stared at him. “Just exactly how are you planning for me to console you? If you think for one little moment—”

He laughed shortly. “You flatter yourself, Mrs. Steiner. Your body attracts me not at all; I’m merely interested in the contents of your brain. And particularly your late husband’s brain. We’ll merely associate in a friendly fashion as we travel, you and I, drawn together by shared adversity. We’ll explain to Annie what has happened and give her a note from the missing lovebirds addressed to her, telling how they were compelled to run off together by a passion greater than . . . Well, you can fill in the cliches for yourself, I’m sure. Signed, with apologies, Belinda and Matthew. It will be a scandal in a teapot, it will make us—the two pitiful rejects—objects of great curiosity, and the whole tour group will be so pleasantly titillated by this romantic escapade that nobody will ask any awkward questions about Mr. Helm’s disappearance, or Belinda’s. Or Dennis’s, for that matter; but since I’ve been careful to keep him out of sight, they aren’t likely to miss him. As for Annie, I’m sure a lady of her experience is hardened to having strange things, including mate swapping, happen on her tours. All she really cares about is having all warm bodies accounted for.”

Ruth frowned. “And just what’s going to make me cooperate with this wild scenario?" She laughed sharply. "Oh, I see! Instead of keeping me imprisoned, you’re going to take Matt off somewhere and hold him so you can use him as a hostage while I help you get the rest of the computer disks. I suppose you’ll threaten to do dreadful things to him if I get stubborn, maybe even kill him.”

Ackerman said, “It’s pleasant to deal with an intelligent woman.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” Ruth said. “You’re forgetting that this intelligent woman has already told you to go right ahead and set fire to Mr. Helm if you like. Or do anything else you care to. He doesn’t mean all that much to her."

I said, “Gee, thanks loads, sweetheart!”

She ignored my interruption and went on: “I’m a reasonably humanitarian person, Mr. Ackerman, and I won’t let somebody suffer if I can help it; but one has to draw the line somewhere. What I’m trying to say is that this man is really just a bodyguard type to me. I’ll admit I slept with him once, just once; he’s reasonably presentable, and when you’ve been married, you do get lonely for. . . But that doesn’t mean I’ll jump through hoops for you just because you threaten him. I owe him nothing; actually less than nothing, since the fact that you’re here, and in control of the situation, proves that he’s failed at his job of protecting me just as you did.” She laughed shortly. “I don’t seem to have much luck with my government protectors, do I? Well, he took his chances and lost and we’re sorry about that, but I’ve got two daughters to look after and my own life to live and I’m not going to worry too much about a government gunman who doesn’t seem to be very proficient at his work.” She looked at me directly. “Sorry, Matt, but that’s the way it is.”

She was really quite good. She was putting on the best performance possible under the circumstances. There’s nothing more tiresome than the old TV hand-wringing routine in which the heroine, when the pressure comes on, immediately starts to moan and weep with desperate concern for her threatened hero and instantly agrees to all demands no matter how outlandish. I mean, we all know the script and the outcome, but we do like to see the girl display a little backbone before the final curtain.

Ackerman also knew his lines; he said, “Very well. Since you say the man can be of no use to us . . . Dennis, you know what to do. Take him to the place we selected. Belinda had better back you up. Mr. Helm is supposed to be tough, although I’ve seen no evidence of it.”

Morton spoke bravely: “I don’t need a backup, sir. I can handle him.”

Ackerman was impatient with this posturing. He snapped, “You will take Belinda anyway; it’s time for her to disappear and she might as well be giving you a hand. But she’d better first write her farewell note, hers and Helm’s. . . . Belinda, there should be some hotel stationery in the top drawer of that bureau. Here’s a pen if you don’t find one there.”

Then they did some pistol juggling. The silenced .22 went back to Ackerman while Morton reclaimed his own .38. Belinda, freed from guard duty, sat down at the desk and started writing. It didn’t take her long. She showed the result to Ackerman, who gave her a sharp, offended look and started to speak, but checked himself.