The Demolishers (31 page)

“I brought my suitcase down,” she said, after I’d done my gentlemanly duty by her chair. “It’s beside yours in the lobby.”

“That’s cozy,” I said, sitting down to face her. I was surprised to see her blush like a young girl, as if I’d said something very intimate.

She licked her lips. “Matt.”

“Yes, Dana.”

“Don’t . . . don’t let’s allow it to become too important.”

I looked at her for a moment. I said, “Sure. Hell, it was just an act of mercy on your part. My endocrine balance was all loused up and you generously restored it to normal, for which I thank you. Okay?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling faintly. “Yes, okay. I’m very glad to hear that your balance is normal.” She went on rather hastily: “It looks like a good day for flying. Of course you can’t tell how it’ll be down where we’re going. Regardless of what the travel folders say, they’re not is
lands of eternal sunshine. I was in Santo Domingo once when it didn’t stop raining for a month.”

“Is it diplomatic to ask what you were doing in Santo Domingo?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I get the impression that you’re a little more than a computer jockey, Dana.”

“More? Or less?” She shrugged. “I’m not a trained agent, if that’s what you’re asking. Well, you know that. You complained once that I was so helpless I didn’t even know how to shoot a gun, and you were going to have to look after me and hold my hand when we get down there.”

I said, “Somehow my attitude seems to have changed. It will be a pleasure, looking after you and holding your hand. But it isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t?”

“Since Mac sent you here to work with me, he probably told you as much about me as he thought fit for public consumption. But he hasn’t told me a damn thing about you.”

“There’s very little to tell,” she said. “I was bom down in the islands, I got to know them pretty well as I grew up, I became acquainted with a few useful people, and I learned a few useful things like how to run a computer, so when the job came up of correlating information on a terrorist group based down here, I was the top choice among those available.”

“That doesn’t tell me how you came to be applying for a job in that crazy-house—or were you recruited? Most people don’t know we exist.”

She smiled serenely. “No, it doesn’t tell you, and I’m not going to. Nobody’s told me how you came to be working there, either, and I’m not asking.”

I grinned. “The old whore answer is: Just lucky, I guess.”

She said, “Let’s leave it at that, Matt.”

“Sure.” Actually, it was bad form, as the British say, to question a colleague about his, or her, origins and motives. I saw the waitress heading our way with a laden tray, and glanced at my watch. “Well, here it comes. We’d better gulp it down. Our limousine will be at the door any minute.” I grimaced. “I don’t like making the trip naked, even just from portal to portal, or airport to airport.”

“Naked?”

“Unarmed. I get very unhappy without my little thirty-eight-caliber security blanket. Well, let’s hope our friend Modesto, whoever the hell he may be, is on the ball down there in San Juan and doesn’t let us get shot before giving us something to shoot back with.”

Dana said a bit reprovingly, “I know the man they call Modesto. He’s a very reliable person. I’m sure he won’t let anything happen to us.”

I said, “Only God is that reliable, and we haven’t been able to recruit Him yet. But it’s not for want of trying.” It was a good thing Trask had given us plenty of lead time because we had to run a gauntlet of construction zones on our way to Kennedy. When we got there, it was the same madhouse as always, it doesn’t matter which airline building you’re sentenced to. After checking our bags and receiving our boarding passes we still had the better part of an hour to waste, having arrived as early as ordered in spite of the driving delays.

We wandered around a bit. I picked up a couple of hunting-fishing magazines at a newsstand. Dana, more intellectual, settled fora news magazine and a journal of opinion a little to the right of center; well, everybody’s going conservative these days, except me. I’ve learned to remain apolitical since Mac never asks our opinions; he’s just as apt to send us after a rabid rightist as a wild-eyed leftist. I led Dana along the concourse to a wide-open
coffee bar where she had coffee, and I had coffee and a very gooey cinnamon roll.

After we’d sat there for a while on our stools, sipping and chewing as appropriate, she glanced at me curiously. “Why are we stalling?” she said. “Why don’t we just go to the gate and read our magazines comfortably in real chairs, until they find us a plane? I don’t think you really wanted that sugary mass of dough. We’ll be having lunch on board shortly.”

“Shhh,” I said. “You’re interfering with extrasensory perception.”

“What?”

I said, “Somebody’s interested in us. I’ve been catching activity out of the corners of my eyes, movements that don’t fit the crowd pattern. Somebody’s following us closely; several somebodies, in fact. After enough years in the business you learn to sense it, even if you don’t quite see it or hear it. But I haven’t been able to pick out a face. ...”

Then I saw him, shuffling along with the crowd with the slow movements of the sick or aged: a bent old man with a cane. He was wearing a shabby black suit and hat, and carrying a worn, old-fashioned black-leather valise. The cane was also old-fashioned, also black, and I wondered if the two feet of steel inside would show up on the airport scanners.

At least, when I’d last known him, I’d classified him as a potential sword-cane type. It seemed unlikely that, in a getup that demanded a walking stick, he’d be satisfied with just a wooden stick. However, the face I was seeing now was not quite the- face I remembered. It was lined with suffering, and it was noticeably emaciated as was his body—he looked like a cancer patient who was beginning to show it, although it probably wasn’t cancer. Of course, some of it could have been makeup and acting; but we’d suspected illness when he’d ceased operations after that Costa Verde business. Herman Heinrich Bultman, known as the Kraut, one of the best extermi-nators-for-hire in the business. The man who intended to change the map of the Caribbean because somebody’d machine-gunned the old German shepherd bitch he’d named after Marlene Dietrich.

It wasn’t my job to stop him. I’d refused that job. As far as I was concerned, Bultman was free to remodel or totally demolish the sovereign nation of Gobernador in any manner that pleased him, as long as he didn’t interfere with my job of demolition directed at the CLL. That was the deal I’d made with Mac: I’d only go after the Kraut if he came after me. But here he was.

I shook my head as Dana started to speak. “Drink up your coffee and act natural. Then pick up your purse and magazines and come along to the gate, chatting brightly all the way.’’

She drained the cup and slid off her stool. “That old man with the cane?” she asked, laughing as if it were a big joke.

“He’s the one, and a deadlier gent you’ll seldom encounter. Yours truly excepted, of course.”

“Modesty,” she said. “That’s what I like about working in that place. You meet so many shy and unassuming gentlemen. . . . But he didn’t look very dangerous.”

“It’s got to be mostly a disguise. I mean, at last report he was training a tough commando unit in Montego; he’d hardly be up to that if he were as decrepit as he looked just now. However, we know he was badly hurt on one of his last jobs and while he seemed to have recovered pretty well, aside from the loss of a foot, something else could be going bad on him. Now I’m saying something very funny, ha-ha.”

She laughed obediently. “Bultman?” she said. “That’s the name, isn’t it, Herman Bultman? I remember, it came up on the computer screen, several times in connection with that military nonsense in Montego to which the CLL has been contributing men, ninety-three the last I heard.” She glanced at me. ‘‘Funny, funny, funny. Your turn to laugh.”

“Laugh, laugh, laugh,” I said, and laughed. “Why do you call it nonsense?”

“What?”

“You don’t think Bultman’s invasion force is a real threat . . . ?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Haven’t you done any checking at all? Your friend the Kraut has only a few hundred men. Perhaps they’re very dedicated, perhaps he’s trained them well; but the President of Gobernador, that Yankee-lover whom they hate, has a home guard of several thousand, also well trained, with plenty of arms and equipment courtesy of Uncle Sam. And it’s not inconceivable, these aggressive days, that if he really gets into trouble, the U.S. Marines will bail him out. Washington considers the installations on Isla del Sur of vital importance.” Dana grimaced as we walked. “It’s nice to think that the heroic spirit of the patriots reclaiming their country will inevitably carry them to victory over the cowardly oppressors who have stolen it, and that the people will rise up to help them. It’s undoubtedly what Bultman’s men are telling themselves, but it didn’t happen at the Bay of Pigs, and it won’t happen here in miniature, unless Bultman has a secret weapon up his sleeve that nobody knows about. Otherwise he’ll simply be leading a lot of brave men—I suppose even the rabid CLL contingent doesn’t ltjck for courage—to their deaths.”

It was a new view of the situation, but there wasn’t time to consider it now. I said, “Here we go through the idiot scanners. Brace yourself. They’re going to scream as usual at my change and keys and belt buckle.”

“Well, if you weren’t so rich and didn’t wear those Texas-sized buckles. ...”

We went through the routine and stepped aside to let others pass while I threaded the belt I’d had to remove back through the loops of my slacks.

“The long-haired one in jeans and ripped T-shirt is our personal escort,” I said.

“Which long-haired one in jeans and ripped T-shirt? You’ve just described half the passengers.”

“The tall, dirty-blond one, male, carrying a denim jacket and a big paper bag that probably holds an UZI and half a dozen loaded magazines. The scanners wouldn’t worry about little things like that. Just belt buckles.”

Actually, the machines had seemed to be operating at fairly sensitive settings, and I’d sweated a little walking through the arch the second time with all my legitimate metal piled on the plastic tray.

“You think he’s with Bultman?” Dana asked. “Why?”

“No sign of annoyance when I held up the line; no expression of amusement or sympathy when he passed the funny tall man struggling to put his belt back on. Just deadpan, eyes front; and in spite of his hippie getup, if they still call them hippies, he couldn’t help showing that he’d had military training somewhere. Anyway, when you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you can kind of spot the killer types, even the young ones. That boy has homicide on his mind.” I laughed heartily. “Joke, joke, joke.”

She laughed a bit uncertainly. “Ha-ha, ha-ha. What do you think he’ll do?”

“Improvise. I don’t think he was meant to carry the ball. He was just a backup in case things didn’t work out inside the airport as planned. Now the responsibility is on his shoulders and he’s trying frantically to figure out what to do. Well, he knows what to do; he’s just got to come up with a way to do it.”

She shivered. “What do you mean, if things didn’t work out. . . ?” Then she frowned suddenly. “Aren’t we walking right into a trap? Once we’re on the plane . . . What if they’ve put a bomb aboard?”

“And sent a guy along to be blown up with us, just so we won’t lack for company?”

“A hijacking, then? They’ll just take over the plane and ...” She stopped talking as we entered the waiting room.

I said, “We’ll sit over there where he can keep an eye on us. No sense making things difficult for the poor fellow; he might think we’ve got him spotted.” Seated, I said, “This is where a cigarette would come in handy, or particularly a pipe, to help us look peaceful and unsuspicious. I quit way back when I was a half-baked photojournalist because it fogged up the darkroom, long before they made a religion of it; but there are still times when I miss being able to fiddle with the old pipe and tobacco and matches. You could really make a career of those matches. ...”

“Matt! Stop chattering like an idiot. What if they hijack the plane?”

I asked, “Did you ever really look at the seating plan of a DC-10?”

“No, why?”

“It’s a hell of a big plane. Sure, determined men and women could take one over; determined men and women probably already have, or other planes just as big. I haven’t kept track of which brands of flying machines have been hijacked and which haven’t, if any. But it’s a major operation, like taking over a good-sized theater full of people; and while Bultman’s quite capable of organizing it, what would he gain? He just wants two people, us; actually he just wants one person, me. And presumably Sandra, but she’s not here. If he grabs a whole DC-10 to get me, what’s he going to do with the other three hundred and some passengers, assuming a full load? Not to mention the crew?”

“He and his friends haven’t shown much regard for innocent bystanders so far, Matt.”

I shook my head quickly. “You’re talking about the Caribbean Legion of Liberty. Sure, they’re a bunch of ruthless publicity hounds, anything to intimidate folks and attract attention to their sacred cause. They seem to have concentrated on restaurants so far, as the public gathering places most suitable for bombing, but I doubt if they’d pass up a plane if it came easy. But Bultman’s a hound of a different breed entirely. He’s a pro, he’s got invasion on his mind, and the last thing in the world he wants at the moment is to be publicly connected with an air atrocity. That could make his sanctuary in Montego too hot to hold him and louse up his plans before he’s ready to make his assault on Gobernador. But your reaction is exactly the one Bultman was hoping for.”