The Intimidators

“DAMN YOU, MATT,” she said. “Damn you. Damn you. My friend will get you yet. And if he doesn’t, there will be somebody else. Somebody who’s wanted you dead for a long, long time. She’s an old friend of yours. She’s been waiting for the chance to strike back. You shouldn’t leave vindictive women behind you alive, Matt.”

THE INTIMIDATORS
—another action-packed tale of espionage, murder, and violent intrigue.

THE
INTIMIDATORS

Donald Hamilton

A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.

THE INTIMIDATORS

All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1974 by Donald Hamilton

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

Printed in the United States of America

March 1974

THE

INTIMIDATORS

It was a good day, until we got back to the dock and found the messenger waiting. I didn’t know he was a messenger when I saw him, of course. We seldom do, until they identify themselves. He was just an ordinary-looking man, for the Bahamas, black, rather shabbily dressed, chatting with one of the marina employees as he watched our captain back the fifty-foot twin-screw sportfisherman into its narrow slip, making the complex maneuver look as if it were so easy that even I could do it if I wanted to try, which I didn’t.

I was standing aft in the open cockpit beside the fighting chair, wondering if I was supposed to be performing some useful operation with the stern rope—excuse me, line—since the mate was busy forward. As you’ll gather, I’m not the world’s greatest nautical expert. Then the marina gent on shore stepped up and gestured toward the line in question. I handed it to him. As he dropped the loop over one of the big dock cleats, his companion caught my eye and made a small signal, never mind what.

That was all. The next moment, the unknown man was strolling away casually along the pier, stopping to talk with another black man near the marina office, and I was trying to secure the dockline I was holding, a duty from which I was relieved by the young mate.

As I said, it had been a pretty good day up to that point. We’d raised two sailfish and connected with a blue marlin in the three-hundred-pound class. Probably because of my total inexperience, we’d missed both sails, and the big boy had managed to wrap the wire leader around his bill, snap it, and get away. Nevertheless, I’d had him on for about fifteen minutes, all three hundred pounds of him, and for an ex-freshwater-angler, brought up on little ten-inch trout, the whole experience had been fairly memorable. You might say I was the one who was hooked.

I’d discovered that, for a man in my line of work, deep-sea fishing has considerable advantages as an off-duty sport. Trolling or casting on the average inland lake, you’re often within, easy rifle shot of shore; wading a brushy stream, fishing rod in hand, you’re almost always a beautiful target for anyone lurking in the bushes. On the ocean, on the other hand, you’re reasonably safe from hostile attention. Once you’ve checked out the boat, and sized up the crew, and your fishing companions if any, you can relax and forget about watching your back. Unless somebody considers you important enough to send a submarine after you—and I don’t flatter myself I’ve made anybody quite that mad—nothing’s going to sneak up on you unexpectedly on a small vessel ten miles at sea.

Besides, I’d just learned, fighting a truly big fish is a hell of a lot of fun; and the rest of the time you can lean back lazily in the fighting chair watching the baits skipping astern, soaking up the sunshine, and carefully forgetting about various things including a nice lady named Laura, a colleague who’d been called back to work some weeks ago after we’d spent a pleasant Florida interlude together. Well, I guess she wasn’t a nice lady by ordinary standards—there are no nice people in our business—but I’d found her an attractive and enjoyable companion despite certain strongminded Women’s Lib tendencies.

Now it was my turn to receive the summons to action. I reviewed the situation hastily. Loafing around the Florida Keys alone after Laura had left, doing a little desultory angling, I’d run into a fairly prominent Texas businessman and sportsman, a gent reputed to have a finger in various political pies, who seemed to think I’d done him a favor. I’d barely been aware of his existence when he approached me, and he must have had very good Washington sources of information—perhaps a little too good—to know about me and the assignment I’d recently completed, a job with political overtones. It had been a cooperative venture, anyway, with a lot of agents involved. Nevertheless, the success of our mission had apparently saved Big Bill Haseltine’s bacon in some way and he’d been aching to show his gratitude to somebody and I’d been elected. He’d insisted on arranging for me to spend a week learning about
real
ocean fishing at a private club. where, he’d said, the billfish were so thick you hardly dared go swimming for fear of being accidentally perforated by a passing marlin or casually skewered by a sail.

Walker's Cay—pronounced key just like in Florida—is the northernmost inhabited point in the Bahama Islands which, in case you didn’t know, were part of a foreign country or possession called the British West Indies, or B.W.I., lying at its nearest some forty-odd miles east of Miami. I hadn’t known, and it came as a big surprise to me. Somehow, never having been there, I’d had the vague impression that the Bahamas were located way down south of Cuba in the Caribbean somewhere, or maybe far out east in the Atlantic in the neighborhood of Bermuda.

Actually, Walker’s Cay, although off to the north a bit, turned out to be barely an hour’s plane ride from the airport at Fort Lauderdale, just up the Florida coast from Miami. The plane was a clumsy-looking and not very speedy flying boat, a private craft belonging to my hosts-to-be. Rather to my disappointment, it didn’t sit down on the water upon arrival but put down its wheels again and landed on the paved strip that took up a large part of the little island. The rest of the limited real estate was mostly devoted to the clubhouse with its grounds, swimming pool, cottages, and service buildings; and by the marina and its facilities. To let us know we were really landing on foreign soil, there was a black Bahamian customs gent to greet us; but we’d already filled out the simple entry form on the plane, and the pilot took care of the rest of the formalities... .

All that seemed longer ago than yesterday morning. After a day and a half on the water, I’d got into the swing of this angling existence, and all I’d had on my mind until a moment ago was fish. Now I had to figure out how to get out of here quickly without causing comment, and locate a moderately safe phone, and call Washington. What I’d just received was the “make contact at once” signal, which implies reasonable dispatch but also reasonable concern for security. There’s also the simple “make contact” signal, which says take your time and be absolutely certain you don’t attract attention and aren’t being watched; and then there’s the “make contact with utmost haste” signal, which means drop everything and grab the nearest phone regardless.

I went through the motions of thanking the captain and mate for a fine day, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I hoped they didn’t notice; they’d been very considerate to a clumsy beginner at the sport. Stepping ashore, I couldn’t help feeling a slight resentment. This was unreasonable. Certainly there had been times when I’d been snatched back to work unceremoniously after being promised a lengthy leave, but this wasn’t one of them. I’d had most of the summer free; I was in no position to complain. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wishing that I’d either managed to land that big marlin this afternoon, or that Mac had held off a day or two and let me hook into another one.

I walked along the pier and up the hill past the swimming pool to the main building, and went into the office to do a little research on the problem of communications. The telephone company does not, of course, run its wires to islands a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. I knew the club had radio facilities—you could see the mast far out at sea—and kept some kind of schedule. I knew they could probably, therefore, get me any number in the U.S. by way of the nearest marine operator on the mainland. However, since any radio-equipped boat between here and there could presumably listen in, it seemed like a hell of a public way of chatting with Washington on subjects that would probably prove to be very private indeed.

I was selling Mac short. He’d taken care of everything. The girl at the desk, a slight, friendly looking redhead with freckles, looked up quickly.

“Oh, Mr. Helm,” she said. “Any luck today?”

“We hooked a good-sized blue but I couldn’t bring him in,” I said.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “I mean, it’s really too bad, because I have a message for you from Mr. Starkweather, Jonas Starkweather, editor of
Outdoors Magazine.
It just came in. He’s going to be in Fort Lauderdale tomorrow night and he would like you to have dinner with him. He says it’s important, something about some pictures he needs very badly.”

At an earlier period in my life I’d made my living with a camera, with an occasional assist from a typewriter. It was a cover we still used upon occasion; but it was unlikely that any magazine editor remembered my name at all, let alone favorably enough to buy me a dinner. Nevertheless, I might have considered the possibility if the man at the dock hadn’t prepared me for some devious, secret-agent-type shenanigans.

“Damn!” I said. “There goes my fishing trip! Did he say where and when?”

“The rooftop restaurant of the Yankee Clipper Hotel at seven o’clock tomorrow night. He’s staying there and he’s reserved a room for you. I’ve put you down for the plane tomorrow, if that’s all right, Mr. Helm. You should be down here with your luggage a little before ten....”

Flying over the island the following morning, I could see the big white sportfisherman lying idle in its slip in the marina; and I knew a twinge of regret, which was ridiculous. Spending a lot of time and effort catching an enormous fish you weren’t even going to eat was actually an absurd sport, I told myself firmly. It wasn’t as if I needed the excitement. Mac would provide me with plenty of excitement, I was quite certain. He always did.

I didn’t speculate on what form it would take. I just sat and watched the subtle, shifting colors—all shades of blue and green, with an occasional touch of weedy brown—of the shallow water below. We were crossing the extensive Little Bahama Bank, so called to distinguish it from the even larger Great Bahama Bank farther south. There was a tiny islet or two, none as big as Walker’s Cay; and then we passed the tip of the much larger island of Grand Bahama. Although big enough that only a fraction of it could be seen from the plane—the fourth largest island in the Bahamas, I’d been told—it didn’t look very high, and I couldn’t help thinking that, judging by the little I’d seen, if the whole area should sink a few feet into the sea, there’d be nothing left but some nasty submerged reefs. On the other hand, if it should rise just a little, there’d be the biggest land-rush of the century, to a brand-new subcontinent just off the coast of Florida. Undoubtedly developers and promoters somewhere were already hard at work on the problem of jacking up all those endless, beautiful, lonely, useless, watery flats just far enough to turn them into valuable real estate on which to build their lousy little houses and golf courses.

Soon we were out over the violet-blue Gulf Stream—a thousand feet deep, I’d been told—and shortly we were landing at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Customs inspection was, for U.S. Customs, surprisingly fast and considerate, at least compared with the last inquisition to which I’d been subjected, returning from Mexico. Maybe nobody grows poppies or grass or coca leaves in the Bahamas. It was nice to know that returning to your native land could be made so simple and pleasant; but it kind of made you wonder if it was really a worthwhile endeavor, delaying and humiliating millions of honest, upright, martini-drinking Americans at their own borders, elsewhere, just to save a few people from one particular bad habit.