The Underground Cities Contract, page 1
The Underground Cities Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
“Thank God! Here comes another enemy.…”
Cyrano
Chapter 1
I first realized I was slipping out of gear during the guts Frisbee game. We were playing on the wide lawn beside my old, turreted, frame castle in the Ozark Mountains, and everything was jollytime until the lanky blond boy faked me out of my shoes twice in a row. He was a basketball player at the university a hundred miles to the south and had good moves. It was funny, I guess, so I joined in the laughter. Spread my hands and looked imploringly at the bright afternoon sky.
What none of them knew, not even the trim little leotarded redhead who had brought them to visit, was that I was a man who made his living out of his reflexes. The redhead was a ballet teacher in the university dance department, and we had been more than friends for several years. Whenever I drove down to fetch her.
The general laughter dwindled, and the game proceeded. The pro-model Frisbee disk went curving, climbing, and planing from one player to another across the fifteen yards which separated the teams. The other two girls, and man, were graduate instructors, old hands at winging the disk in confusing ways. But I was watching the basketball player.
When the Frisbee returned to me, I rocked back like a baseball pitcher taking a full windup. Thrusting my left foot toward the smiling basketball player. As my right arm swung forward in a blur, he moved instinctively toward his left.
That was wrong. He was keying on my right arm and never even saw the disk leave my low, dangling left hand. Steadied by the thumb and snapped end over end like a tumbling football, but with all the force my wrist could generate. There were no aerobatics involved; the Frisbee was flipping, not sailing, and he was still watching the wrong hand when it smashed the right side of his face.
The laughing shouts dwindled as the lanky boy dropped to his knees. When he shook his head, blood spurted from his cheekbone to his jaw, and he went on down to all fours. The others converged on him, and kneeling Marge, the redhead, turned to stare at me.
I walked toward the house, through the towering stand of pine, and was having a drink in the butler’s pantry (where have all the butlers gone? To join the plutocrats, one by one?) when Marge came in and said they would have to leave. Herb was bleeding too much; they couldn’t stop it. She also asked if I hadn’t dropped him on purpose.
“A variation on the old Satchel Paige hesitation pitch, luv. Take the stupid bastard home. I’ll pay for his hemstitching and dental work.”
She left while I was pouring another drink. I watched her join the Samaritan group coming down from the eastern lawn, followed their progress down through the pine grove. Herb was still bleeding, as advertised, and jelly-legged, being supported by his friends.
When they were nearly to the electrified front gate, I pressed the panel button which unlocked it. Saw them get in the two cars and drive off down the winding backcountry road.
Marge was incensed, but I didn’t give a fiddler’s frig about that. She was only an amiable little mare who serviced me when we both felt like it. And her friends were strangers; I hadn’t even known the boy’s name was Herb. I was, however, acutely aware that he had faked me out twice.
Going downstairs, I stripped to jockey shorts and put on bag gloves. Went barefooted to the speed-bag and started rolling an easy tattoo off it with alternate hands. The pear-shaped bag blipped in perfect rhythm as I stepped up the pace. Then, unaccountably, I faltered and the bag skittered sideways.
Beginning to sweat, I skipped rope briskly. Leaped off the floor and whistled the rope twice over my head and under my feet before coming down. No problem. Went back to the speed-bag and worked it with my hands held breast-high. Again, the rhythm faltered when the pace was stepped up.
Disturbed now, because that simple exercise had been a throwaway in my daily training for years, I showered and went upstairs. Had another drink of sour-mash Beam and selected a Kansas City prime porterhouse from my walk-in freezer. Spent half an hour preparing it on the butcher’s table and, when the broiler was hot enough, picked up the steak and walked out onto the western terrace.
The steak was heavy, two inches thick, and beautifully marbled. Using my best stiff-armed grenade movement, I threw it as far as I could. It cleared the near slope of my Edo Period Garden and the icy lagoon and thumped somewhere near the cluster of black bamboos. In the fading afternoon light, the life-sized limestone Bodhisattva statue I had brought back from Korea was motioning gently.
I went back into the house, through the kitchen to the control panel in the pantry. The butler still being absent, I flipped the master switch which turned on every light in the house and out on the estate grounds. Concealed spotlights and pin spots in the Edo Garden, the towering pine stand, and over the mandarin-red arching bridge, which led to the waterfall.
Then I returned to the western terrace. Master of all I surveyed, because I had spent years restoring the old clapboard mansion, creating its gardened grounds on the immediate slopes. Putting a high, electrified fence around my one hundred and six Ozark Mountain acres, most of which were still as wild as rain and storm could make them.
Frowning because I seemed no longer master of myself, I got a bottle of dark rum, sliced a lime in quarters, and had several drinks. Got the night-snooperscope from my study and went back to the terrace. Three raccoons were savaging at the steak I had thrown away.…
Two hours later, I had finished the bottle of rum and was opening another when the front-gate buzzer sounded in the pantry. I pressed the intercom button.
“It’s me,” said Marge’s voice.
“Okay, me.” I unlocked the front gate and was about to light up the path through the pines when I realized that all the lights were already on. When she came up to the wide gallery, I was waiting.
She mounted the steps toward me, saying that Herb was patched up and that she was sorry she had accused me—I motioned her to silence, took her upstairs to my bedroom, and undressed her patiently, like a man shucking an ear of particularly nice corn. Had her twice, in controlled abandon, and told her to put her clothes back on.
She started to protest, but I said, “Right now.”
Going back down the stairway, I gave her three hundred-dollar bills and said it was to pay for the damaged basketball player. Turning at the bottom of the wide gallery steps, she stared up at me.
“My God! Just like that?”
“Lady, we had an implied contract. That I would titillate you when you were so inclined. That contract is terminated.”
Marge put both hands up before her mouth, forgetting that she was holding the hundred-dollar bills. Looking down, I had the thought that a pretty girl was munching lettuce. Weeping, she turned and went running down the lighted path.
I heard her car start and leave. Heard owls enquiring, cicadas thrumming, and wind freshening through the high pines. I addressed myself to the rum again, pausing to check on the raccoons with the night-scope. Only one of them was left, a female cleaning her face. She seemed to be waiting for another delivery from Kansas City.
When I tired of drinking, about an hour later, I switched off the lights and dropped myself with a jolt of chloral hydrate that would have immobilized the entire Andorran Army.
Chapter 2
The next morning I slept until nearly ten, which was unusual for me, but resumed my normal training program. It didn’t work. As before, the speed-bag faltered from both hands, and twice I tangled my feet in the skipping rope. Giving up, I went across the arching bridge and ducked under the side of the waterfall into the cavern. Sat sweating in the sauna hut there for twenty minutes and was brought out of it by the ringing of the bell inside the cavern entrance.
Someone else was at the front gate. Unhooking the inch-thick hawser, I swung through the waterfall and dropped into the chilled lagoon beyond. Thrashed out and toweled myself beside the stone-lantern and ran up the slope toward the house.
My visitor was an agency courier. A black one named Bob Sylvester, who had brought me contracts before. I met him at the steps and asked him to leave the attaché case with me, then go back in his rented car to the airport.
“Mr. Gall, I can’t do that. You know I have to give you time to read the file and make a decision. If you take the contract, I have to watch the papers being burned. If not, I have to return them to Washington.”
I told him things had changed. Just put the fucking documents down on the steps and depart.
Sylvester shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“Okay, then take them away again. Pronto!”
His intelligent black face was a study in puzzlement. “Mr. Gall,” he said slowly, “there’s a procedure for this kind of trouble, too.”
“Either leave them here and go, or take them back with you.”
He stared at me for a few seconds longer, then slowly unlocked the attaché case, which was linked to his right wrist by a small chain. Removed a large sealed envelope and put it down on the steps.
I moved down to get the fat envelope and went inside to unlock the front gate. Then into the kitchen and put the envelope on the butcher’s block table. Just what I needed. Another contract, another errand for the murderous butcher’s boy. Official, on business of the republic…
Lifting the envelope, I walked out on the terrace. The nooning sun was arrowing down through the pines, and all evidence of the raccoons’ feast was gone. The bulky file was about the same weight as the steak, but more unwieldy. Taking one corner with both hands, I whirled like a discus thrower and launched the envelope across the lagoon.
It fell short of the place where the steak had landed, so after I had cooked breakfast, I saved the bacon grease and took it in a cup across the arching bridge. Moved the top-secret envelope to the exact spot where the steak had been ripped apart and poured the bacon grease over it. Then pissed on the streaked envelope while the half-smiling Bodhisattva watched me.
My own odd little territorial imperative …
Chapter 3
For two more nights, every light on my remote estate burned on. Blazing inside the ornate old mansion, spotting the bridge and waterfall, and shafting from sources in the high pines. I had given up trying to punish my body into proper performance and was at work on my time-span. I couldn’t hold any subject rigidly fixed; after a brief period of concentration, anger and irritation drove me to something else, usually unrelated.
I tried to reread Burton’s Arabian Nights, a book I admired, but after I had turned a few pages, I threw it down. Remembering, as I stalked out of the house, to curse Burton’s fat-faced fool of a wife, who had burned all his notes and preliminary writing for the monumental work on erotica.
To further enrage me, a tawny whippoorwill banked overhead and landed on one of the high scrollwork towers of the house. The hill people know that such a visitation means impending death, so I hurried to my gun rack and got a twelve-gauge shotgun. As I ran out again, the bird curvetted away, and I had to stalk it for some time, lunging through brush and across rocky hillsides. When I finally blew it apart in a burst of feathers, my clothes were ripped and torn.
Too much gun, certainly, but I didn’t want the funereal bastard hanging around my house. Feeling more secure, I had a swim in the glacial lagoon and drank another bottle of rum. That made me sleepy, and I napped for a while with my head on the butcher’s table. What awakened me was a snarling cough down in the garden. I went back to the terrace.
Three white tigers were pacing before the black bamboos. As they always had, the two females were flanking and slightly behind the larger male. He stopped, stopping them, and his massive white head lifted. He was watching me, and his half-throttle roar quivered the arching fronds. Laughing with delight, I hurried to the walk-in freezer, searching for the chopped meat and the bags I kept to carry it in.
They weren’t there, because the tigers had been dead for over two years. Since my contract in southern Georgia, when the black militants had followed me home, invaded my house, and wounded me. They had also slaughtered the blue-eyed tigers.… Well, what the hell. Nothing lasts.…
Back in the kitchen, sighing for old mortality, I leaned forward on the butcher’s block and dozed off again. Once, seeming to hear artillery bursts, I partially roused, but when I looked around, there was nothing but the lighted house and grounds. Empty as a stage set, actors departed … Reaching for the bottle, I poured out another double shot of the dark, rich rum.
And was lifting it when a voice behind me said, “I’d put that one down, old friend.”
I put it down.
Chapter 4
I didn’t have to turn because I knew the voice well. It inhabited a tall, bulky man in his late fifties, wearing Poole-tailored clothes which always looked rumpled. He would be holding his umbrella-cane in his right hand, and the artificial leg would not be noticeable under his somberly modish trousers. He was my boss, Neal Pearsall, director of the action division of the agency, and the only man in the world I trusted.
“How’d you get in?” I asked. He came forward into my line of vision and reversed one of the kitchen chairs. Sat on it after hooking his umbrella handle over the tea-towel rack.
“By main force, Joseph. Flew a demolition team in from Washington, and they knocked the generators out of that high-powered fence of yours. Had to use a torch on the front gate, even with the current off.”
“Have a drink.”
“No.” Pearsall shook his big shaggy head. “I’ve belted them down with you all over the world, Sporting Life. But we did it for pleasure, enjoying each other’s company. Now you’re using the stuff as a weapon against yourself. Worse than that, I offered you a contract, and you pissed on it and threw it away. Ran my courier off.”
“I can’t cut it anymore, pappy. My reflexes are shot, and I can’t concentrate. None of this elaborate dirty-trick crap means anything to me now.”
He nodded. “That may be. I suspect all of us have a give-up point. But unfortunately, Joseph, I can’t have you getting addlepated and stumbling into one of these little mountain towns, babbling like the village idiot. You’ve been too far in our service for that; got too much of our business locked up in your head.”
His voice was deep, reflective, almost idle.
“If you really have had too much of it, I’ll hustle your ass straight out of here. Under sedation, and restraint if necessary. We’ll fly you back to Washington and lock you up in the St. Elizabeth’s psycho ward.… And if you ever uncross your eyes, you might see some old associates there.”
Pearsall got up and went to open the refrigerator door. As he leaned to get a canned Coke, you could see the odd angle of the left leg. His beefy, weathered right hand ripped the light-metal ring loose, and he dropped it inside the can.
“I know,” he said gloomily, “it’s unsanitary as hell, but my eight-year-old nephew Brian says I have to do it. Part of the ecology kick. Joseph, there ain’t a fucking thing wrong with you physically. You’ve got the psychosomatic whips and jingles, kid.”
I didn’t answer, and he went on. I hadn’t known he had a nephew, or even a brother, and I had worked for him for years.
“If you weren’t the best shot in the locker, Joe, why do you think I would have taken all the crap from you I have? Many times, when I had a rough one going and fired you at it, I could sleep at night.”
I still didn’t say anything. What I wanted was a drink, and he said, go ahead and have it. I did, and he talked on.
He said that three radar technicians of ours, working on a new installation at the Unye Base, Ordu Province in Turkey, had been kidnapped four mornings before. The base was on the Black Sea, directly across from the Soviet Union. One of the men kidnapped was Bill Fitzgerald. I knew him, had worked with him in Australia last year. What they were working on was new and important, and Fitz was there to supervise the work.
“I remember him.”
“He’s the important one. The others, too, of course, but we’ve got to get Fitzgerald back. And the mechanics are complicated, with a time limit of only eight more days.”
“They’ve been taken into the Soviet Union?”
“No, Joseph. They were grabbed by terrorists from an underground movement called the Turkish People’s Liberation Army and are still inside Turkey. The same outfit kidnapped and murdered an Israeli diplomat in Istanbul last May. There was no attempt at bargaining then, but now they say we can have our three men back, put across the Iranian border, within hours after one of their leaders, Yana Cihan, is returned to them intact.
“Cihan is a Turkish university student turned terrorist leader, now under sentence of death in Sagmalcilar Prison in Istanbul. He is to be executed in eight days. The Turkish government has flatly refused a stay to help us bargain. The government is shaky; the generals are getting discontented.
“State thought we were in so solid that Ankara would help us swing a deal, but found out differently. So if they hang Cihan, our boys have had it. The three kidnapped at the Unye Base.”
I had been through Turkey several times but had never worked inside the country. Istanbul, only major city in the world on two continents … Three million people, grimed magnificence … And the prison, Sagmalcilar, was an ancient fortress. With no blueprints because they didn’t have such things when it was built, probably before Christ…
“Tough,” I admitted. “Cihan has to be taken out of the Istanbul can and delivered clandestinely to his people at a place of their choosing. Fitzgerald and the other two radar technicians have to be either shepherded across the Iranian border or met there. What’s so important about Fitzgerald?”
