The Threateners (24 page)

I’d made my preparations as well as I could. Having watched me squirming and squealing pitifully under interrogation, making no attempt at resistance, clearly afraid even to utter an angry protest, signing my name to anything that was put in front of me, and marching obediently where I was told, Morton would be thinking by now, I hoped, that this loudmouthed Helm clown was redly just a big false alarm, nothing to worry about. That was one of my facedown cards; the other was that he’d once suffered a serious humiliation at my hands. He wouldn’t kill me immediately. He’d want to get his revenge first.

“Get out there, hotshot!” he snapped, with a wave of the gun. “Go on, move! Unless you want to die right here.”

I looked at the short-barreled revolver and backed away onto the precarious shelf of cracked asphalt. He followed, stalking me. I glanced fearfully over my shoulder and acted shocked at where I found myself, ten feet from the brink—it didn’t really take much acting. Well, if my real fear made my phony panic more convincing, at least I was putting the damned disability to some practical use at last. I took a terrified step to the side so I could grab at the wooden railing for security.

“Keep going!” Morton ordered.

Clinging there, I threw another frightened look backward and shook my head desperately. I gasped, “I can’t, I can’t! You’re going to have to shoot me right here, damn you! I . . . I c-can’t go any closer. My G-God, it’s hundreds of f-feet s-s-straight d-down!”

Actually I didn’t think the cliff was over fifty feet high at that point, but it was no time for niggling accuracy.

Belinda’s voice said, “The poor man is frightened of high places. I saw him on the cable car in Rio, riding up to Sugarloaf, he almost wet his pants he was so scared.”

“My God, a secret agent with vertigo. Shades of Alfred Hitchcock!”

Morton’s laughter was a shout of joy; he had his vengeance in spades. I sank to my knees, clinging to a fence upright. Huddled there, a trembling bundle of panic, I saw his feet approach across the wet asphalt. I knew that being the man he was, he was bound to kick me at least once. He did. I took it in the ribs and grabbed his ankle and lunged forward; he might be braced for a pull but he wouldn’t be expecting a shove. I hoped. I also hoped that the gun would now be waving high as he tried to keep his balance. I heard it go off but nothing hit me. I got his other ankle and, still on my knees, shoved my head between his legs and reared upward with him riding my neck ridiculously, like a horseman facing the tail of his mount. With a major effort, throwing his legs free, I bucked him off violently, hurling him toward the end of the world—well, at least the end of his world.

Afterward, I stood there for a moment gasping, incapable of movement, wondering how many muscles and ligaments I’d strained, how many vertebrae I’d cracked, with that Herculean heave. I turned slowly and saw nothing there, no man, no gun, not even a smear on the wet black pavement, although he must have hit and rolled a bit before he went over the edge. I couldn’t possibly have thrown him all the way clear, or could I? A scream hung in the air, barely audible over the roar of Iguassu Falls.

It was still not a nice place for a man who got dizzy on a high curb, if you’ll excuse a bit of exaggeration. I stumbled away from the lousy precipice into the reassuring shelter of the trees. Only then did I remember Belinda, but she was nowhere to be seen. The noise of the falls seemed to be everywhere. Still breathing heavily, weak with reaction, I started back toward the main trail, but stopped at the sight of a high-heeled white pump—no little fairy-tale Cinderella slipper, but a good-sized female shoe—lying in the middle of the path in the rain. There was no girl in the pump. I bent over to pick it up. Then I heard a soft footstep behind me and realized belatedly that I was being stupid for the second time that day. I tried to duck, but the scarf went around my neck, tightening instantly.

I kicked backward and hit nothing; that was the expected response and my attacker was ready for it. I groped for my pocket knife, but realized that I’d never get it open in time to cut myself free. Thrashing around wildly was a waste of effort. There was really nothing for me to do but wait for the wrench that would crack my neck, but it didn’t come. I simply drifted off into gray, airless unconsciousness.

My first thought upon awakening was that I seemed to have managed it again, and survived it again, with a large assist from luck. Using my clumsy, alcoholic, acrophobic self as a decoy, I’d lured another predator out of the jungle; and this one hadn’t eaten me, either, at least not yet. I hoped I’d attracted the right tiger this time.

It’s not considered proper professional behavior, after being rendered unconscious, to pop up wide-eyed and ask:
Oh, my goodness, what happened, where am I?
I knew what had happened, and I could still hear the roar of Iguassu Falls, so I couldn’t have been transported very far from where I’d been captured. Without opening my eyes or moving my body conspicuously, I took inventory. Moving would have been difficult in any case, since I seemed to be roped in a sitting position, to a tree, perhaps. There was a sore place on my head. Well, I had an explanation for that, I remembered getting sapped in my hotel room; but I couldn’t recall the origin of the funny little itching sting in my upper left arm.

The familiar lump of the Swiss army knife seemed to be missing from my pants pocket; in its place was a larger bulge I couldn’t identify. I added to my store of exotic knowledge the fact that being strangled with a soft scarf beat being throttled by hard fingers, as had happened to me once or twice in the past. Fingers tend to bruise; but the scarf had left no hurting memories behind. My cigarette-scorched chest, however, was still quite painful. . . .

“Helm, wake up, damn you!”

It was a throaty, sexy, female voice and I’d heard it before.

Things were coming back to me. It was the voice of the girl I’d known as Belinda Ackerman who’d last signed her name as Belinda Nunn, and I remembered clearly that any woman less nunlike would be hard to find.

Her voice went on insistently: “Who the hell grabbed me like that, just as you were heaving pretty boy into the drink? I was so busy watching, and that damn waterfall was making such a racket, I didn’t notice the guy sneaking up behind me with a noose or something. . . . I thought he was going to wring my neck! How’d he get you, the same way? Where the fuck are they taking us?" After a moment her voice went on: “Oh, stop playing possum, there’s nobody back here but us trussed-up turkeys. I
know
you’re not dead, you can’t be! They just stuck you with something when you started coming around like they did me. Didn’t they?”

That explained the bee sting in my arm. There was a panicky note in Belinda’s voice; apparently she didn’t want me to be dead now, leaving her alone in her captivity, although she’d been raising blisters on my hide only a little while . . . It occurred to me that I didn’t really know how much time had passed since we’d left my hotel room, and Ruth Steiner, and the man who’d given the torture orders, Roger Ackerman. I pulled out all the names—Dennis Morton’s also, although he no longer counted—to make sure the mental machinery was working properly.

However, while my memory seemed to be intact, I was becoming aware that my initial, hasty, hazy appraisal of my present circumstances had been badly flawed. What I was leaning against was too soft to be a tree, the noise I was hearing wasn’t that of a waterfall, the air I breathed didn’t smell like jungle air, and there was a certain amount of vibration that had been unaccounted for in my preliminary status report to myself.

I opened my eyes to see above me, shockingly, instead of vines and trees and leaves and blue sky, the low ceiling of an airplane cabin. The lights were on, and my first thought was that I’d been unconscious so long that the sun had set; then I realized that there was daylight up forward where the cockpit was shared by pilot and copilot—or perhaps the second man was just riding shotgun up there. Aft in the cabin, however, the window blinds had been drawn, presumably so we’d have no idea of where we were being taken, not that there was much chance of my recognizing the South American landscape below, but I could at least have got some idea of our direction from the sun.

The plane seemed to vibrate more than a jet. On the other hand, although I had a view straight ahead between the heads of the two men up there, I could see no fan up forward. Okay, give it two propeller-driving motors, one in each wing. Although small by airlines standards, it would probably have seated a dozen people, give or take a few, if there had been seats for them all. However, up forward there were only the two cockpit seats. Then there was a large vacant space with slots in the floor to which seats had once been secured. Finally there were the seats we were occupying, back against the rear bulkhead.

Having been wrong about everything else, I wasn’t surprised to find that I’d been wrong about the method that had been used to secure us. We weren’t tied, we were taped. Well, that figured. Rope isn’t necessarily a part of an airplane’s equipment, but no flying machine takes off these days without a roll of silver duct tape on board; they use it for sticking the bird back together whenever it starts falling apart. I was fastened to my seat by two or three wraps of tape around my arms and upper body and several more around my thighs. I saw that Belinda was similarly secured. At the moment she was looking at the floor and sniffing like a hound on a hot trail.

“Grass!” she said.

It was her line of business and Ackerman’s, not mine and Mac’s. By most modem standards, although not those of my super-pure tour companions, I’m really an innocent. I stick to Scotch and martinis—booze does seem pretty innocent these narcotic days—and an occasional glass of wine with my more festive meals. Champagne for a real celebration. I know very little more about the other kinds of happy stuff than the average drug-free citizen.

The plane had not been swept out recently and there were scattered stalks and crushed dry leaves on the floor; but it could have been feed for starving Peruvian llamas for all I knew. Or cared. Except that the fact that we were being transported somewhere in what, if Belinda was correct, was a drug-smuggling plane, seemed to indicate, like the strangling scarves that had been used on us, that we’d wound up in the right hands at last, traveling toward the right destination, and maybe even the right man: the high priest of the
Compañeros de la Hoja
, the old man who’d died some time ago but who didn’t know it yet. I hoped I’d get to break the news to him soon.

“How long have you been awake?” I asked the girl beside me.

“Just a few minutes. We must have been out quite a while; I’m practically dry. The last thing I remember was that damn rain running down inside my clothes as they kind of walked me between them to a van they had standing by; I never knew we’d been transferred to a plane until I woke up strapped to this seat. Christ, I bet I look like something fished out of the river.” She was silent for a moment, clearly thinking of something—well, somebody—who probably hadn’t been fished out of the river yet. “You’re a sneaky bastard, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hell you don’t, Helm. My God, the way you were whining and moaning while I. . . Sorry about that, incidentally.”

“All in the day’s work,” I said. “No hard feelings.”

“And then on your knees clinging to that fence post like a scared little boy freezing in panic on a high diving board .... And waiting until he moved in close to kick you—you knew he’d do that, didn’t you?—and flipping him off the cliff so neatly, gun and all! Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer creep. But you don’t mind making yourself look bad, do you?”

I said, “The world is full of folks trying to impress other folks with how brave they are; but the ones who survive are usually the ones who don’t mind looking cowardly when required.”

“I figured you were putting on an act,” she said. “That’s what gave me the idea.”

“Idea?”

“Do I look like a girl with a weak stomach?” Belinda glanced down at her rather substantial figure and laughed. “Don’t answer that question! But you were making such a fuss about a few little bums—considering the kind of tough guy you were supposed to be—that I figured you just had to be acting a part and had some kind of a plan. I was looking for an escape hatch, anyway. That guy was beginning to scare me.”

“Ackerman?”

She nodded. “I mean, he was way out of his tree, you know what I mean? Moving in on another government department like that, with guns yet! Even if it was our assignment in the first place, shit, it was only a job. But when it happened, he ranted around like a hellfire preacher I heard as a kid, like he had the Word from Above, and anyone who interfered with his sacred mission of salvation was obviously in league with the Forces of Evil, since he was the only one who could save us all from sin and Satan. Only with Mr. Ackerman it was coke and
El Viejo
.”

“He didn’t trust us—me—to do a proper job?”

“He said you weren’t
concerned;
 you didn’t
believe
. You didn’t really care-, you were merely engaged in a puny private vendetta. You were after Yasquez, not because he was wicked, not because he’d brought pain and death to millions of people, not because he’d even made a religion of that vicious addiction, but merely because he was responsible for your girlfriend being killed. A gal named Rustin, he said. Madeleine Rustin?” It was a question.

“That was her name,” I said. I found that I had to clear my throat for some reason. “A very nice girl. They got my Labrador retriever, too. A very nice dog. But why does Ackerman care who reaches the old guy first? I mean, what he yearns for is a drug-free world, right? And one big step in that direction is the elimination of Gregorio Vasquez, right? Whether he does the job for beautiful idealistic reasons or I do it because the bastard’s assassins killed my big yellow dog, what’s the difference?”

Belinda laughed scornfully. “You can’t be that naive, Helm. What Mr. Ackerman wants is a beautiful drug-free world, sure, but a beautiful drug-free world presented to humanity in a moving public ceremony by Mr. Roger Ackerman—applause, applause—not privately by a jerk named Helm. Wake up and smell the incense, Buster. Shy and self-effacing saints we don’t got nohow; they’re all into PR these days.”