“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
This was the new battlefield now. Nothing dirty, no wild screams of terror or staccato noises of fast-firing guns. No sliding around in muck or taking high dives onto hard flats to get out of a field of crossfiring rifles. No knives or insidious poisons or wire garrotes nearly decapitating a human. Now it was quiet button-tapping sounds and lighted letters and numbers flashing on the screen, being rearranged, rechanneled for new information, positioning themselves into faraway circuits, then returning in seconds.
The general had entered his request for knowledge of the one called Penta. It was caught up in the wizardry of electronics and General Skubal sat back and let the machine take over. While it worked, he said to me, “In case you’re interested ...”
“General, I’m very interested.”
“My so-called retirement was not for very long. The idiots who pulled me were dumped at the next election and I was reinstated right where I wanted to be ... here, and at government expense. These machines are owned and serviced by federal funds and are state-of-the-art equipment. And believe me,” he added, “the government is getting their money’s worth ... and I’m living doing what I can do best.”
“Tell me, General, how secure are you here?” I looked around at the enormity of the project, knowing that this was the best of miniaturization.
He said, “There are eighty people billeted here. That placid landscape you saw outside is one huge deathtrap of a minefield, each charge being detonated electrically from inside here, or isolated to operate independently. With the electronic sensors we use, no dogs are necessary, no patrols needed, so we look indeed like a quiet retreat in the country.”
“How about power?”
“There’s a solar collector on the roof. Storage batteries can last two weeks at full power. Of course, this is in addition to regular power supplied by underground cable. Beneath the building is a deep well with reserves for fire-fighting supplies. Our food larder can last a month and if you’re a drinking man, those needs are supplied too.”
“That’s a siege condition, General.”
“Yes. But these days, you never know, do you? At least this is what we’re protecting.” His hand indicated his vast electronic battlefield.
Then the face of the screen that was blank lit up. The name Penta appeared, then the sketch story about the one who appeared as a will-o‘-the-wisp on the world scene.
Penta meant nothing. It was a code name assigned by the CIA. There was no physical description. Penta’s activities had been linked with the Stern Gang and the Red Brigade. His terrorist actions were noted by certain dictatorship governments, and it is suspected that he often worked on their behalf. Sixteen known assassinations were attributed to him, all of them with various forms of digital butchery done to the victims.
I said, “Digital butchery?”
“Newspeak for finger-chopping.”
“Great.”
“Interesting note here ... Penta is suspected of being a mole in the NATO organization. He had to have inside information to accomplish several of his kills. No proof offered, but circumstantial evidence is hard. Now look at this.”
Three CIA reports came on-screen with information compiled by Bennett Bradley. Twice he had almost cornered Penta when national police action of one foreign country stymied his move. The third time he was shot in the thigh by Penta and his quarry got away. There was a fourth item suggesting Bradley be removed from the assignment. Now I could understand his last-ditch attitude, wanting to grab Penta before his replacement got into the act.
The words stopped appearing. Two lines of dots went across the screen, then five groups of letters, six letters to a set, appeared, the last group flashing on and off regularly. The general grunted, took a key from his pocket and walked to a safe against the wall. He spun the dial three times, opened the thick door, then used the key on a box inside.
“What are the letters in the last group?” he called out.
“RTVW
Y,” I called back.
He closed the box, put it back and slammed the safe shut. When he sat down again he punched a key and the screen went blank. “This Penta person is over here on one hell of a high-level assignment.”
“To kill me, General?” Damn, it was starting again, right here.
“You worth killing?”
“Not to anybody I know.”
“How about to somebody you don’t know?”
I sat down and my teeth were grinding together. I took a couple of breaths, relaxed and looked at the old guy. There was knowledge and patience and wisdom sitting there, and somehow he knew what I was thinking and was trying to direct my own thoughts in a logical direction.
This was one direction that didn’t allow for logic. I shook my head. “No way. You can’t go through me and locate Penta. The road to that guy is through Bern and Fells. That’s the connection. Those two are looking for Penta and if we can run them down, we can get inside the reasoning behind all this. There’s a motive, General. It’s good enough to kill and destroy for and when we have that, we have Penta.”
“I can give you Fells and Bern,” he said simply. “You familiar with their history?”
“Somewhat.”
“Wild ducks, that pair. Unstable, adventure-some ... after they left the service, they laid down a pretty greasy trail. Three different countries hired them for covert work and they did a damn good job for them. Libya was their last employer.”
He wasn’t finished and I didn’t push him. “The last three jobs attributed to Penta—political assassinations of top personnel—were at the behest of some Arab organization inside Libya.”
“So the three were contemporaries in possibly related actions.”
“Possibly.”
“And now Penta and Fells and Bern are over here together,” I said, “only now they’ve lost touch. Bern and Fells want to locate Penta badly. They think I have a lead and try to squeeze it out of me. Question: How did they lose track of Penta?”
“I know a better question,” General Skubal told me. “Why were they looking for him in the first place? Penta is
not
an organization man. Penta is a loner, a total loner absolutely dedicated to his work.”
“Let’s go a step further, General,” I suggested. “He is here, so his work is here. His targets never were minimal, so his target
now
isn’t minimal, and so far he hasn’t nailed his intended target.” I saw the way he was looking at me and added, “Forget the crap about him going for me.”
“Who shot at you, Michael?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Okay, you have another angle too. I suspected that.”
“I only want Penta. After what he did to Velda, he is mine. Just mine. What else he’s here for won’t matter. When I meet him, everything else gets wiped out along with him and it will all be over. Now tell me about Fells and Bern.”
The general poured himself another cup of coffee and popped in a few cubes of sugar. “That pair are on FBI and CIA wanted lists, and that’s for starters. Unfortunately, they’ve been too well trained for our people to put them down. So far, nobody made any inquiries to me, or I might have steered them to a few points that might bear fruit with a stakeout.”
“They know they’re wanted?”
“No doubt,” he confirmed. “But now they’re here, and there’s one thing they’ve probably forgotten about. Like any of the people in our work, they have safe houses to hole up in right in their enemies’ backyard. We establish these places for them, or when necessary they can make the arrangements themselves. Fells and Bern like to do their own work. They didn’t want
anybody
knowing where they had a safe house, including me. However, I realized that, and knowing the way their personalities were developing, I made sure I ran down the three places they had on the East Coast. They never found out and I never published the information because they were operating in Europe most of the time.”
“They came back often enough.”
“Sometimes it is better to watch the rats to see what’s happening than kill them outright. They didn’t make the high-priority wanted lists until fairly recently.”
“Where are the houses, General?”
“This I don’t bring up on the computers. Wait here. I want to make some phone calls.”
I sat there, made another cup of coffee for myself and finished a Danish before he got back.
He sat down and looked at the piece of paper in his hand. “One was in Freeport, Long Island.”
“Was?”
“It burned down a year ago. Another was in the Boston area. The city ran an expressway through the site. Forget it.”
“Damn, is this going down the tubes too?” I demanded impatiently.
“The last one’s in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, it’s in an area slated for demolition. I have an operative checking on the situation now.”
“Hell, can’t we just move in and ... ?”
“These guys aren’t amateurs, Michael. They’ll have everything covered. First we find out what the status is, then you can plan your move. My man is going to call back. He’ll leave one word as to the situation. If he says yes, then it’s a go. It’s all yours, my boy. There’s no help unless you ask for it and I doubt if you’re going to do that.”
“You doubt correctly, General. Just tell me one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“How come you invite me right into your super-world and let me peek at all the classified goodies and give me such undivided attention when all I am is a plain old private-style investigator?”
“Your personal profile, my boy,” he said cheerfully. “I remember every word of it. Besides, one more after Penta can’t hurt anything.”
“Baloney,” I said.
His cheerful smile disappeared and his face was flat. All of a sudden we were two nasties ready to go after the other nasties. “You’re a damn killer, buddy,” he told me. “We need people like you.”
“What are my odds, General?”
“Against Fells and Bern? I’ll give you the edge there. They have the training. You have the instinct on top of it.”
“What about Penta?”
He pushed a button on the desk, waited until Edwina answered and said, “I’m going to take my nap. I want no calls and no visitors. Mr. Hammer will stay until he gets his message. Please see that he is taken care of.” He wiped his eyes, moved his shoulders in a shrug, then peered up at me.
“You die for killing me,”
he said softly. “A riddle. A veritable riddle.”
“All riddles get solved,” I said.
When Edwina came into the room he handed her a slip of paper. “If the caller says yes, then give this to Michael here. It’s an address he’ll want to look into. Let’s not send him on a wild goose chase if it’s not necessary.”
She looked at the paper, went to a small machine, dropped it into an opening and pushed a button. A puff of smoke came out. She smiled and said, “Security,” holding out her hand to steer me to the doorway.
“Would you like to see the house?”
“I’d rather see the security systems.”
“That’s a negative, of course.”
“Let me tell you something, kid. My imagination is enough to figure out everything they have laid down. Frankly, I hope it’s the best. The only part I don’t like is the lack of manpower on the perimeter. Some wise guy can always figure a way to interrupt any kind of electrical system.”
She ran her fingers down my arm and took my hand. “That’s what they have me for. I’m supposed to distract them.”
We started walking toward the glass-enclosed veranda. I gave her a long, inquiring look. “That’s the other thing. Just
what
is a doll like you doing here anyway? You’re not a secretary.”
At the door she opened the panel box and flipped a switch, then closed it. “No, not primarily.”
We walked out onto the enclosed porch area and looked over the vast openness of the estate. It had a strange color of green, and I knew we were looking through one-way glass. “Don’t give me the bodyguard bit. Women can be good, but the strong-arm act goes to the men.”
“True,” she agreed.
I dropped her hand, took her by the shoulders and kept her back to me. She tightened a little bit when I ran my hands over her, under her arms, down her sides, then felt each thigh down to her knees.
When I stood up she said, “You forgot to look for a derringer between my titties.”
I did a gentle probe and said, “Satisfied?”
“How did you know?”
“You turned the alarm off, sugar. I’m clean, so that leaves you with some hidden metal that could trigger the gizmo.”
“Mike, you
are
clever. No wonder the general thinks so highly of you.”
“I’m curious, lady.”
She smiled at me. A damp, coy smile that was a ripe invitation.
Three brass buttons held the jacket closed and my thumb flipped them loose one by one, the last one almost springing away from the pressure of her breasts. She shrugged, and her jacket fell to the floor and she put her arms around my neck, her big blue eyes full of pleasure and adventure. Inside the sheer silk blouse she flowed like honey, not needing a bra to keep her breasts high and firm.
I touched her lightly again and she knew what I was feeling for. She made a little gesture with her head and didn’t try to stop me. But there were no scars from surgical implants or reconstruction work.
Around her waist she wore a three-inch-wide leather belt with ornate silver decorations in a flowing Mexican pattern. “That’s what would set the alarm off,” she told me.
I fingered the hand-tooled buckle anyway and tugged it loose. The belt was a beautiful piece of work, every bit of the leather touched by the artisan’s hand. Even the silver was embossed with intricate design work in delicate patterns.
All but two pieces. They weren’t silver. They were a dull-finish alloy and I opened the catches and took the .22-caliber shots out of the midget chambers, two little slugs that could rip far into your guts up close, enough to ring your bell for keeps.