Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

  "Thank you," she murmured as I rose and handed her the glass of raki. Her eyes looked different, heavy-lidded and unfocused. I guessed that she had shot herself up while she was in the bedroom to quiet her jangled nerves. "Why don't we sit on the chaise longue and make ourselves comfortable?" she went on.

  It came to me suddenly what this production was all about. She was trying to freeze me in place until her boss could get someone downstairs to tail me when I left. I downed my drink quickly. She sensed my intention to leave and grabbed my hand. "Put it on ice, Talia," I said, backing away. "I'll see you tomorrow."

  She still clung to my hand. "Don't go," she protested. Her full lips pouted provocatively. "There is much of the evening left."

  "I've got to put out the word to people I know that I want the envelope intact," I improvised. "Your boss wouldn't pay me for it if it had been opened, would he?"

  "That's right," Talia said. She released my hand. "Tomorrow, then," she called after me as I went out in the corridor. "You won't be sorry."

  No one was in the lobby when I stepped off the elevator downstairs, but the threat would be outside in the darkness of the street. I couldn't detect anything unusual. I decided to walk the short distance to Chryssie's pad. I wanted to look in on her anyway since I'd left her locked in.

  I detoured into an all-night cafeteria on the Avenue of the Americas and called Erikson. "This is Little Boy Blue," I said.

  "I was beginning to wonder about you," he answered. "How did you get clear of the mess at the tavern?"

  "I was squiring our little bird home. You probably know that someone extinguished the large-nosed bum.

  And they put the steel to the girl once, before I got in on the action."

  "Badly?"

  "No."

  "I'd like to hear about it. Come on over."

  "It will be awhile. I might have company."

  "I see. Be sure you take care of that first."

  "Will do."

  ***

  When I left the restaurant, there was no tail behind me that I could locate. I remained inside behind the dirty panes of the double doors in Chryssie's old building for five minutes before I went upstairs. No one followed me inside.

  A single light was on when I let myself into the flat, and the familiar odor of Mary Jane was in the air. Chryssie still had a cache somewhere I hadn't found. She was sprawled on the bed in naked, childishly-smiling marijuana-euphoria. I had never known a girl with less use for clothes. I threw a sheet over her, locked her in the apartment again, and went downstairs to the street.

  A lifetime of looking over one's shoulder hones the senses. I hadn't seen anyone follow me from Talia's place, but I still felt vaguely uneasy. I'd stayed there too long after her telephone call. I checked the sidewalk from inside the double doors and saw nothing suspicious.

  Still, I had a feeling.

  I left the building and walked a block to a subway. I ran down the stairs to the train level and was lucky enough to catch a crowded downtown local. Once aboard, I walked through the cars until I came to the head of the train. I had seen at least fifteen other people board the train at the same stop.

  I got off at the first station. There was a crush of other people. I walked half a dozen steps toward the exit gate, then did an about-face. I had to sprint to get back aboard the same train. The closing, double doors almost stranded me. There was no question that I was the last one to make it aboard. And there was no question that if anyone had followed me to that point he was following me no longer.

  At the next stop I disembarked and caught a taxi at the surface. I gave the driver an address within a block of Erikson's office. To play triply safe, I punched the elevator button for the fifteenth floor instead of the sixteenth.

  I would have preferred to walk down instead of up, but I figured I had just enough juice left to do it by the book.

  7

  JOCK MCLAREN admitted me into the office when I knocked. "Damn it all, Earl, you have all the excitement," he greeted me. He sounded wistful. "I got to the Picadilly when it was all over. Come on. Karl's inside."

  Erikson was stoking a pipe at his desk when he entered the inner office. He nodded but was silent until he had the pipe drawing to his satisfaction. "Tell him your end of it first, Jock," he said.

  "Well," McLaren replied, looking at me, "I found out from the bartender that a guy answering your description had blown the scene with the girl. So I figured I'd do the next best thing, and I trailed the police ambulance down to the morgue to check out the man we knew as Hawk. I identified myself and took considerable physical evidence from the body. We checked it out with sources we consider reliable, and we got a make. The man's name was Hakim Shukairat, age twenty-nine, a Jordanian. He held a rank roughly equivalent to captain in the fedayeen. He was the leader of a fanatical commando group that we're certain forced down a chartered American airliner near Las Vegas and also-"

  "Earl knows that," Erikson interrupted him. I realized that Erikson, with his usual need-to-know security precautions, hadn't told McLaren that I was aboard the hijacked aircraft.

  McLaren raised an eyebrow but continued. "Shukairat led or participated in the shoot-up of an El Al plane in Switzerland some time ago. It appears likely that he was brought to the U.S. for the same kind of work, and it's believed that he would have mounted similar operations."

  McLaren paused for an instant. "So far we've been unable to tie him into any political, military, or financial contacts in this country that would make him anything but a bandit, although we're sure they exist. Our evaluation to this point indicates that he was an able field man but that he wasn't a planner. He probably received his orders from well-trained superiors. And he either got careless today or he was set up for the fall by the girl."

  "I'll bet against the last one," I said.

  "Do you think the two assassins were Israeli agents?" Erikson asked me. "Making a move on their own because they felt we weren't moving fast enough?"

  "There was nothing to indicate it," I said slowly. "I imagine a man like Shukairat could have papered a room with his enemies. They didn't look any more like Israelis than they did any other Middle East nationality. Although come to think of it, the whole affair had kind of the look of an execution."

  "I'm going to have a little talk with Bergman," Erikson said grimly. "If it was Israeli intelligence, and if Bergman can't keep his falcons leashed, we'll ship them out of the country. What about the envelope you mentioned, Earl?"

  I unbuttoned my shirt, removed it, and tossed its bulk onto the desk. It was smudged and wrinkled, but the seal was still intact. McLaren hunkered down and peered at it from eye level without touching it at all. "Whose prints are on it?" he asked.

  "Mine and the Turkish girl's that I'm sure about."

  "I'd sure love to dust it for prints," he said in a regretful tone. "But if we're going to return it-" He didn't complete the sentence.

  He walked to the back wall of the office and activated the concealed switch that operated the hidden wall panel. He returned from the equipment room, carrying a rolled-up leather tool case. When he unrolled it and spread it on the desk top, I saw numerous, blue steel drills with what I suspected were diamond tips, a small, but powerful drill motor, six-inch pipe lengths that could be screwed together and attached to a lead block or to interchangeable tips to make a mallet or a prybar, and numerous other familiar items.

  "You must have gone to the same school I did," I said to McLaren.

  "Not quite," Erikson said dryly. He had been watching my examination of the safe-cracking equipment.

  I consider myself reasonably expert on small tools, but the narrow pockets of the tool case contained additional items the likes of which I'd never seen before. McLaren selected a pair of brightly polished, long-fingered tweezers with a hooked nose and picked up the envelope by one corner. He raised it gently and held it closer to the desk lamp, inspecting it from all sides. He seemed especially interested in the gap where the envelope's flap
hadn't quite closed tightly after it had been sealed. He took a jeweler's loupe from the case, fitted it into his eye, and scanned the envelope.

  "Well, Jock?" Erikson said.

  "I can't be sure." McLaren removed the jeweler's glass from his eye. "I'd better 'scope it." He picked up the envelope with the tweezers again and carried it into the equipment room.

  Erikson and I followed him. McLaren clipped the envelope to a sloping glass screen atop a box about the size of a one-drawer file cabinet. He flipped two switches, and a red light came on accompanied by a humming sound. Then the light went out, and McLaren pressed a concave button with his thumb.

  Bright lavender light surrounded the envelope, and I could see two metal objects in its lower left-hand corner in the fluorescent image. "I thought those might be the old Klienschmidt trigger device when I first noticed them," McLaren said. "But you can see it's only a couple of staples."

  He pointed to a dark panel covering most of the underside of the envelope's flap. "That's just as effective in showing evidence of entry, though. It's an oxidation detector, an atmosphere-sensitive surface, hermetically sealed to keep air out. If the flap is torn or pulled apart, as it would be if the envelope were steamed or pried open, the inner surface changes color and acts like a warning flag." He raised his thumb and the X-ray lamp went out.

  We all returned to the office. McLaren removed from the tool case a thin steel rod about the size of a knitting needle. The rod was slitted from its tip to within three inches of its base. It looked something like an extremely slender tuning fork.

  He set it aside while he tamped the envelope, flap-edge down, until he had driven the contents against the sealed flap. Then he inserted the needlelike tool into the envelope through the small gap between the envelope's folded edge and the point on the flap where the glue ended.

  He rotated the needle patiently, turning the slitted rod as carefully as any safecracker manipulating a safe dial. Finally he withdrew the needle with a smile. Wrapped around it were two double-stapled sheets of paper whose ends had been caught in the needle's slotted aperture.

  McLaren eased the ends from the slit and handed the curled-up sheets to Erikson. The envelope still remained bulky from other material remaining inside it. "I'll have another look at this since it's too big to extract via the probe," McLaren said briskly. "I'll be right back." He went into the equipment room again, carrying the envelope with the tweezers.

  "What have we got?" I asked Erikson.

  "It looks like an instruction sheet," he replied, scanning the first page rapidly.

  I moved in beside him. At the tip of the typewritten page it said MOTOR FREIGHT CARGO, and there followed short paragraphs preceded by a series of three-digit numbers. I had to read only half the first paragraph to know what it was. "This is a plan for another hijack," I said. "What's on the second page?"

  Erikson turned over the stapled page. The second sheet looked like a schematic of a complicated football play. Four small circles numbered one to four were inside outlines shown in various positions around a small square butted up against a rectangle. Above each group of circles was a three-digit number which corresponded to those listed on the first page.

  The layout looked exactly like the detailed plans I used to buy from Robert "The Schemer" Frenz when I was knocking over banks. "It's a hijack," I repeated. "The rectangle is a truck, and the square is the place it's going to be knocked off. The second page shows the different positions of four men during various stages of the operation, and the three-digit numbers are the times for the step-by-step plan outlined in the first-page paragraphs. See how the numbers go from zero-zero-zero to eight-three-zero? That means the whole job is supposed to take eight and a half minutes."

  "I went to the wrong school," Erikson said. He examined the two pages again. "But there's nothing here that indicates where the hijack is going to take place."

  "There must be further instructions in the envelope. Maybe McLaren-"

  "There aren't any more single sheets in the envelope," McLaren said from behind us. "But here's a stat of part of what's inside it." He showed us a weak black-and-white photostat. It was ghost-thin in appearance, but there was no mistaking that it was a photocopy of the cover of a New Jersey road map. I wondered how McLaren had obtained it without removing the multi-folded map from the envelope, but I didn't ask.

  "This job was planned by a pro," I told Erikson while McLaren read the two pages he'd removed from the envelope. "I can tell you right now that even if we opened the envelope, the map wouldn't tell us anything. Someone has an overlay that fits on this map, and without the overlay the map means nothing. Either the overlay comes later, or the man who's going to lead the operation already has it. If that was Hawk, you know what happened to him."

  "He wasn't carrying anything," McLaren said positively. "I checked him out thoroughly at the morgue."

  "Then it could be in the hands of Talia's boss who seems so willing to put up cash to recover the envelope. Let me see the plan again, Karl."

  He handed it to me, and I read it through completely.

  "Okay," I said. "It's simple enough. See these roads lettered A, B, C, D? The hijack will take place on Road A. Two minutes are allowed to jimmy the truck's rear doors; three minutes to find a small package called Item NUX, whatever that is, inside the truck; a minute to get to the get-away car, indicated by this small square; and two minutes to drive to Road D via Road B. Look at this note: Avoid Road C. It doesn't say so here, but I'll bet they intend to create a diversion at the actual scene, perhaps by setting the hijacked truck afire, and they expect the police and perhaps firefighting equipment to be arriving on Road C."

  There was a moment's silence.

  "Well, you said it was laid out by a pro," Erikson said thoughtfully.

  "I still think it's a dope shipment," I said.

  "And I think you're wrong," Erikson countered. "Everything the Treasury boys have ever told me indicates this would be the last way in the world to move dope. It seldom leaves the hands of the individual entrusted with it."

  "What was that you said awhile ago about returning the envelope?" I asked McLaren.

  "Since we've lost Hawk, the girl is our only link," Erikson answered for him. He gave me his smile-that-wasn't-quite-a-smile. "So all we have to do is send you back to the Turkish girl and have you follow through on her boss's offer to pay you to recover it."

  "Me? It's your baby, Karl."

  "The girl knows you," Erikson continued. "Who else could get close to her in a hurry?" He handed the stapled plan to McLaren. "Make photostats of these sheets, Jock, and then get the originals back into the envelope. Earl will sell it to the girl's boss, and then we'll know who the boss is."

  "Let me point out to you the holes in that Swiss cheese," I said. "How do I account for the fact that the envelope is unopened? Shouldn't whoever took it have been curious about what was inside?"

  "You'll think of something," Erikson said, unruffled.

  "The envelope can't be opened, because then they'd change the plan. And when you talk to the girl's boss, haggle. Start high on the price you want. That may give us some idea of how valuable this Item NUX is. But regardless, get to this character and get a look at him."

  "I told Talia that one reason I had to leave right away was to put out word that the envelope was worthless if opened," I said, thinking back over the sequence of events.

  "Then that will do it, since you also said you had to shake a tail en route here," Erikson said. "You can tell Talia's boss you had to put a 'hold' on anyone thinking of opening the envelope, and the tail will confirm your maneuvering."

  "I think there was a tail," I protested. "I don't know. You guys are taking a hell of a lot for granted."

  McLaren handed me the repacked envelope, still handling it via the tweezers. He was smiling as if he had heard Erikson's brand of persuasion before.

  Their attitude irritated me.

  If I couldn't get a shot at recovering Hazel's money, t
he rest of this jazz meant nothing to me.

  I decided I'd take an hour from my sleeping time to line up a speech giving Erikson the word that I'd abdicated.

  But I didn't get any sleep that night.

  ***

  I entered Chryssie's tenement with my mind still on Karl Erikson and Jock McLaren and their calm assumption that I would let myself be talked into doing their bidding.

  I found myself in front of Chryssie's door, key in hand, staring at the door standing ajar with its lock shattered.

  I think I knew what I was going to find inside.

  I drew my.38 before kicking the door wide open to make sure no one was hiding behind it. There was no sound except the dull thud of the door against the wall. The living room was empty. I made a quick tour of possible hiding places before I went into the bedroom.

  It was far worse than I expected.

  The bloody thing was spread-eagled to the four corners of the bed by gray clothesline-cord on wrists and ankles, the wide-staring blue eyes fixed on infinity.

  Chryssie was dead.

  Almost unrecognizably dead.

  I tried to tell myself that the pimp had come back and that this was his revenge for loss of face, but I knew better. A pimp doesn't carve up a girl with a knife until he's finished with her, not when he's trying to recruit her.

  No, it wasn't the pimp.

  It was me.

  Despite my precautions, I'd let someone tail me from Talia's apartment. When I'd eventually double-doored him in the subway, he'd come back, and with his knife, tried to find out from Chryssie where I'd gone. Or if I'd said anything significant to her about recovering the envelope.

  I could only stand there and hope that she'd been on a marijuana-high and hadn't known too much about what was being done to her. But looking at the mutilated girl-body, it was a forlorn hope.