The Rockabye Contract, page 10
Chapter 23
I need not have worried. Even before the little red bus got to the sentry house, two soldiers hurried out of it to raise the striped barricade. As I hummed into the outskirts of Cap Hispaniola, the procedure was repeated; everyone tried to get lost when they saw Johnny Matar’s vehicle approaching. Twice, police cars swerved away from me, and a Hispaniolan cop on a chopped Harley hog nearly took the rubber off his wheels leaning into a corner.
When I was back in the Legation courtyard, I parked and locked the red minibus and went up the back stairway. André Falaise was sitting in one corner of the den, almost in darkness, waiting. I told him what had happened, and stressed that in the red bus, especially with Matar’s body inside it, we had the hottest property in the Republic.
When I asked if we could have the bus locked away, out of sight in one of the Legation garages, Falaise nodded and got up. Also, I said, we needed to stash the body of the secret-police chief where it wouldn’t go bad on us. André nodded, and said that there was a large walk-in freeze room off the kitchen. He would put Matar there, for the time being.
“Okay. But for Christ’s sake hide it. I don’t want Mrs. Truscott to go after a ham, and find a corpse. I’ve already killed her dog, and first thing you know she’ll start thinking I haven’t got any manners.”
“That would never do,” said André, and went down the darkened hall. I had a double belt of Black Danid’s, and sat back of the desk. Frowning at the pool of lamplight, scrubbing the dark makeup off my face and hands. Fifteen minutes later, Falaise came back and said the bus was locked up, and Matar’s body hidden at the far end of the freeze room, under some burlap bags.
“I’ve got some news,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“The shipment of toys was on the Greek freighter. They are being unloaded now from the forward holds.”
I glanced at the baroque clock over the fireplace. It was four minutes’;til two in the morning.
“Phaedre’s route was out of Rostock, East Germany, to Hull, England; then Lisbon, Las Palmas in the Canaries, and Cap Hispaniola. The freighter is owned by the Livranos Brothers, but their Piraeus office has reported that the ship is currently under charter to the People’s Republic of China.”
I sighed, and reached for the bottle of sourmash. For once, we had come up with something that meshed with something else. Matar’s meeting with Angel in Havana. Angel’s return from exile to form a convenient Communist Party, with no interference from Dictator Malo …
“And Hester’s date with Malo is at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yes,” said Falaise.
Something was trying to take shape in my mind. “Don’t any of these demure virgins ever holler and scream, or try to keep their pants on when Malo taps them for the simples?” I asked irascibly.
“A few have,” Falaise said. “But when they do, unless they are able to get out of the country with their families, they usually wind up wishing they had consented. If their fathers work for the government, they get sacked. If their fathers have businesses, they soon lose them. In a number of cases, whole families have just disappeared.”
I took the two film rolls from my jacket pocket and handed them to the Frenchman. “Can you see what these are? Do you know how to use that darkroom upstairs?”
He nodded, and went down the hall again. I lounged behind the desk and wondered what we were going to do about the four people lying trussed up on the second floor of Matar’s villa. Other servants would undoubtedly be entering the house around dawn. I was meditating on the problem when André returned and said he had developed the films and hung them up to dry. They were six pages of typescript, in code, and he couldn’t do anything about that.
I said okay, and told him about the problem of the troublesome prisoners: Matar’s Mexican wife, the two maids, and the faggot, and asked if he could do anything about it. That I wanted them in the house, but not tied up, and I wanted an appearance of normality about the villa for at least another day. Perhaps longer.
He said he could arrange it, but that he would have to drive into town. That to keep the Matar villa isolated but in normal communication with the Palace would require at least twenty men. He would have to contact the rebel leaders to get that many dissident soldiers who were familiar with Hispaniolan procedures. Enough uniforms were available. After taking over the post before the villa, André thought he would have no trouble seizing sentry reliefs as they reported for duty.
I nodded, and after he had gone I went upstairs to the radio room. This time I set up the call to Washington myself, through the Valley Forge, and in a few minutes the agency switchboard was telling me that Mr. Pearsall was not available. I gave her my cover and operation numbers, said it was urgent and highest priority, and to see where I could reach Mr. Pearsall.
After a few more minutes, the operator came back on and said she was ringing Mr. Pearsall at a Mill Reef, Jamaica, number, which was also a “secure” line. Would I hold, please?
I held, and in a few minutes Neal’s deep voice said, “Yes?”
“Joe, here,” I said.
“Right. Go on.”
I went through it all for him. About Hester Prim’s assignation the next afternoon with Malo, and her intention to castrate and kill him…. (At the other end of the line, Neal groaned and cursed.) Angel’s return from exile, and his remarkable skill in openly building a Communist Party, overnight. The arrival of the Greek freighter, under charter to Red China, with the consignment of toys. Finally, my prowl through Matar’s house and subsequent dispatch of the intelligence chief.
“Holy Christ!” said Pearsall. “You have been busy. Where’s the corpus?”
“Downstairs in the Legation refrigerator,” I said, and the line was silent for a few seconds. “And,” I added, “the only thing I got out of his house was some randomly hidden films. They’ve been developed, six pages of typewritten material, but we can’t decode them here. We’ve broken all Hispaniolan codes, haven’t we?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” answered Pearsall absently. He was smoking things over. “Look, you know where Kenscoff is? That headland over the sea, halfway to Ozama Fortress?”
“Yes.”
“Be up there in an hour for a helicopter pickup from the Valley Forge. When you’re aboard, hand both the negatives and your prints to Lieutenant Commander Farley. Got it?”
“Right,” I said. “Then what?”
“Then wait,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter 24
I had to bang hard on Truscott’s bedroom door before I could awaken him. He struggled out into the hall blinking with a sleepy Georgia civility. When I told him I had to get up to Kenscoff immediately, and needed a driver we could trust, he insisted on taking me himself. In another few minutes, he joined me in the back courtyard and we drove out of the compound in his sleek black Buick Riviera.
We hummed up the winding road in silence. It was cool now, and when we got to the Kenscoff turn I asked him to stop. Then I opened the door, stepped out, and thanked him. He nodded, but stared around at the deserted headland, wondering what in the hell was going on.
“Don’t want me to come back later?” he asked. “No bother. Any time.”
“No thanks,” I said, and slammed the door. As I watched, he put the car into the next turn, backed to turn around, and waved as he went back down the road. I was admiring the faint star-sheen on his car, thinking that the Riviera design was the only classic one left in America, now that Ford had screwed up the Continental.
The helicopter came beating in from the sea half an hour later. I went up the rigid ladder briskly, while the rotors thrashed at the grass, and the angle-bodied aircraft lifted again and swung away from the headland. It was one of the large ones, obviously an airborne Admiral’s Barge. While the polite crew chatted quietly in the front, I relaxed in upholstered comfort, staring down at the infinity of white-capping wave crests and the dark mass of the receding island.
In an hour, we passed over another island, the huge and darkened bulk of the U.S. Carrier Valley Forge, at sea. Cruising slowly outside the territorial waters of the Republic of Hispaniola. As the helicopter fluttered toward her stern, with the pilot calling the bridge for landing instructions, the huge ship briefly spotlighted a circle on her afterdeck.
We settled onto the illuminated circle without a jar, and the spotlight from the bridge snapped off. I went down the ladder again, thanking the crew, and was met by an officer.
“Commander Farley?” I asked.
“Right,” he said pleasantly. “Welcome aboard. This way please.”
I followed him, thinking zip-zip-zip, the Navy way, boy. Dimly-seen crewmen were around the darkened helicopter, preparing to move it to the elevator and below decks, and the flight crew went slouching off the other way, talking and laughing. The huge vessel was a mobile airfield and a floating city. Except for the slight pitch of the deck, it was like landing in a city of the future.
My past came back sharply, however, when the Commander led me through a bulkhead door, with a warning to watch my step. Two Fleet Marine Force guards had popped to attention, and stood rigid as we stepped past them. We walked for what seemed to be a mile, through labyrinthine corridors, and stopped before another bulkhead door which was painted warning red and bore the legend NO ADMISSION TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL!
Commander Farley went through the doorway, and stood waiting in a small antechamber while I followed. When he asked for the prints and negatives, I handed them over, and he asked me to sit down and wait. When he passed through the next, smaller metal door, I saw more Fleet Marine Force guards come to attention inside the larger room beyond.
There were two rung-sprung metal chairs in the waiting room, and a tiny circular metal table with a black ceramic ashtray on it. The ashtray had a Navy Seal in the middle, and its wide edge read U.S. Carrier Valley Forge. My kidneys had been shaken up by the’;copter ride but the ashtray didn’t seem a likely depository, so I got up and banged on the inner door.
One of the Marine guards jerked it open, and stood staring grimly at me while I explained the problem. He was all spit and polish, this boy, and he softened somewhat when I explained that civilians were not as hardy as sailors, and not nearly as hardy as Marines. He heard my short editorial out, jutjawed, with one hand on his sidearm, and nodded toward the other door.
“Head’s there,” he announced, and slammed the iron door again.
“Thanks a heap, Mac,” I said to the closing door. It was the same old Corps; not a brain cell working. The head was not commodious, but I hadn’t asked for luxury and was pleased to see that my urine was amber. Then I went back to the small waiting room, and hurried up waiting, as we gyrenes say.
Nothing happened. After an hour, I banged on the door and my brusque FMF friend jerked it open again. I asked to get a message to Commander Farley. I needed to get back to Hispaniola before dawn, and would like a copy of the decoded message as soon as possible. He nodded, touched his piss-cutter cap to a more imposing angle, and banged the iron door again.
Nothing happened. I waited another half hour, and was stubbing out the last of my small cheroots, wondering how I could find my way to Admiral country without getting shot, when the outer door opened. Neal Pearsall hitched inside, nodding to me. He sank down in the other springy metal chair carefully, favoring his prosthetic leg, and leaned across the little table to shake hands.
“I know you’ve got the red-ass, buddy, but just save it,” he said. “I folded up the first good party I’ve been on in weeks, after you called, and laid on a special jet flight. And in case you think I am goofing off, I will inform you that my sneaky little trip to Jamaica was the first vacation I’ve had in three years.”
I laughed. Pearsall had been valorous in the frozen Korean fields, and had gone far out of his way to help me when I was out of favor in the agency for warning the Chiefs of Staff and the White House against the Bay of Pigs invasion.
“Okay,” I said.
The big rumpled man took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “We’ve got a viper’s nest here, Joe. These films you brought in are a complete listing of all the children, under ten years old, of every American diplomat, attaché, or consular officer in Latin America.
“The list is up to date. It cannot be more than two months old, because I had it checked against our files. Every State Department employee and appointee south of the Mexican border …”
I wasn’t bored anymore. I stared at Pearsall, a shocking surmise growing in my mind.
“You got it, Bulldog,” he said. “A list of children’s names, with nicknames and diminutives included. Where they go to school, and where their families vacation.”
“Give me some orders,” I said.
“No, Joe.” Pearsall savaged at his sweating forehead with his right hand. “But I think we’d better stop this cat, don’t you? He may just be playing bogeyman, but he’s spending a lot of money on it. I think we ought to stop his clock.”
I nodded in affirmation. The one-legged bastard was about to leave, to fly back to Jamaica. He’d performed his patented trick of deprecating, and now was leaving me to come up with a strong-armed miracle. This one was too tough; a whole country was involved.
“Wait!” I said, and he settled back in the springy metal chair, that mulish look covering his broad face. “I can trip the sonofabitch in all the areas I know about. But as usual, you’ve got everything so compartmented that I amount to only a small fraction. The agency is backing the revolutionaries against Malo, isn’t it?”
“Joe, Joe,” he said chidingly. “The agency is backing Malo, and two sets of rebels. The patriots have been in place a long time, waiting for an opportunity to catch Malo on the road somewhere, and assassinate him. Once that is done, the whole dictatorship collapses. No problem.”
“All right. But Falaise and his handful of agents are compartmented from these two rebel groups, aren’t they?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. I’ll trigger the whole thing, on one condition.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. On condition that you get the rebel groups to move out into the open today, at four in the afternoon. And I mean from every town in Hispaniola.”
Pearsall considered me without enthusiasm; he was a massive, morose man with fatigue lines etched deep in his face.
“I want to coordinate them in, Neal, from a central observation post. You know how these Latin commanders are; if one brigade strikes deep, that commander will forget his flanks and go for the Palace like it was a bingo prize. Let me set the thing up, direct it by transceiver from a roof near the Palace. Simple codes are enough, and if I buy the farm getting in place, no problem. They’re back on their own.”
Pearsall did not comment, but his mouth worked as if it had a sour taste in it.
“It would mean,” I went on doggedly, “that André and I would have to meet a responsible representative from each group in a few hours from now. We don’t have much time.”
Pearsall held out his right hand, and I took it and levered him out of the chair.
“You could get thousands of Hispaniolan patriots butchered, Joe, if your timing was off.”
“You slip them the garbled word,” I insisted. “Tell them to come out.”
Pearsall stood looking at me for several seconds. I knew what he was thinking. It was a big deal for a minor contract agent to pop off about what he could do; if he failed, you just forgot him. But Neal was Number Three in the agency, and if I blew it, he was out, too.
“Go ahead,” he said, and pivoted to open the outer door. An escort of four Naval officers was outside in the corridor, waiting for him. They must have been there through our whole conversation. He walked away, flanked by his escort, limping slightly.
In another fifteen minutes, I was back in the VIP helicopter, trying to beat the dawn to Hispaniola.
Chapter 25
Pearsall’s communicattons inside Hispaniola were so immediate that the executive officers of the two revolutionary movements were waiting for me on the lonely Kenscoff headland when the helicopter put down. André Falaise was with them, and reported that the Matar villa had been invested, but probably could not be made to appear normal longer than one more day. I thanked him, and said if it took longer than that, it probably wouldn’t matter.
There were no cars parked on the highway beside the windy headland, but as I crouched with the rebel officers back of a rocky ledge and studied their maps by flashlight illumination I could see motionless sentries guarding us from the side near the road.
There was little argument. The rebel officers were immensely heartened by the news that I had killed Matar, and we worked out codes, routes, and fail-safe messages. It was the mortars I was most interested in, on the initial assault, and as I asked for information brown fingers stabbed unerringly at this vantage point, and that. When we seemed to be in thorough agreement, a tall cadaverous colonel named Rosas shook hands with me and asked for fifteen minutes to withdraw his patrol before André and I returned to the Legation.
I nodded, shook hands with all the rebel officers, and they vanished across the road into the gloom of the pine forest. There was none of the abrazo nonsense; they were all grim, tired, and ready to get on with it. When the fifteen minutes were up, André stood up and described two short arcs with his flashlight. In a few more minutes, the sleek Legation Buick came up the steep highway toward us.
Chapter 26
At a quarter to four that afternoon, I drove the red minibus across town. The body of Matar was in the back end, thawing rapidly under the burlap bags, and my carbine and the Swedish machine pistol were on the floor of the front seat. My face was pancaked tan, and I wore the peaked cap and dress uniform of a full coronel in the Hispaniolan Air Force.
