Operation Breakthrough

by Dan J. Marlowe

  If the syndicate could get at Erikson in his jail cell or somehow remove him from it, the whole damned equation was changed.

  Nobody stands up under torture forever. If the syndicate got their hands on Erikson, my connection with the ranch wouldn’t remain a secret from the syndicate forever. Which meant that if the syndicate got the chance to bear down on Erikson, I had not only led them to the ranch, I had led them to Hazel.

  It didn’t seem a critical possibility. Or at least standing on a Nevada hillside in the bright, clean, morning sunlight, I didn’t think it seemed a critical possibility. Time was the essential item. It would take time for the syndicate to get at Erikson, assuming they didn’t have someone already bought and paid for in the Nassau detention setup.

  Erikson would assume that I had delivered the papers and they were safely in channels. He wouldn’t deliberately turn the dogs on me, but in syndicate hands it was only a matter of time before his partner’s name and likely hiding place became syndicate property. When a man cracks under torture, he tells what he knows and makes up what he thinks his torturers want to hear.

  Time …

  All of a sudden my options were reduced to one. I merely had to get Karl Erikson out of that Nassau jug before the syndicate did.

  I dropped the tire still in my hands to the ground, left the loaded chute as it was, and drove down the hill again. Hazel was in the kitchen at the ranchhouse. “Ham and eggs?” she greeted me.

  “Okay,” I agreed. She moved toward the stove. “How’d you like to take a trip to Nassau?”

  She turned, her expression the wide, beaming Hazel smile that makes the sun look like it’s under a cloud. “Before or after breakfast?”

  “After. How soon can you get someone in to look after things here?”

  “I can call Jim Dodman. He’s a retired career Army man and the handiest person I know looking after things and fixing things. I’m sure he could be here this afternoon.”

  “Call him.”

  Hazel started for the telephone in the front room, then stopped. “Why did you change your mind?”

  “You converted me.”

  She snorted. “A likely story. Do you think Erikson is in danger?”

  Hazel has a native shrewdness that is disconcertingly on target at times. “I think he wants to get out of there. Go make your phone call. What time does the mail get here?”

  “The mail truck usually drops it off at the box out on the highway around noon. Why? Oh. The laundry case.” She was silent for a moment. “What will you do with the material in it?”

  “Get rid of it.”

  She started to ask another question, then changed her mind. She went into the front room, and I could hear her speaking on the phone. “He’ll be here right after lunch,” she reported upon her return to the kitchen.

  I sat down at the table and watched her prepare a meal. We both worked our way through gorilla-sized portions of ham, eggs, toast, and coffee. “I’ll be out in the barn,” I told Hazel after my second cup of coffee.

  She nodded. “I’ll drive out to the highway for the mail as soon as I think it’s here,” she said.

  I knew what I was going to do with the material in the briefcase. In the barn I rummaged through the stock of new and scrap lumber that had been accumulated by Hazel’s deceased stepfather. The old man had been a crackerjack carpenter, which I was a long way from being, but I felt sure I could put together a box that would look like the crates I’d seen in the corridor of the Fifth Avenue office in New York.

  I took saw and hammer down from the pegboard array of tools on one wall and set to work. Hazel’s stepfather would have been horrified by the amount of lumber I wasted by measuring incorrectly twice, but I finally got the job done.

  I searched around in the catchall drawers of the work-bench until I found a half-empty can of encrusted black paint. I skimmed the crud from the surface, added some thinner, stirred the concoction with a stick, found a two-fingers-wide brush, and began lettering the crate. I didn’t have a stencil, but had no difficulty in printing clearly.

  I also had no difficulty in remembering the address. I lettered one side of the crate Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company, 28 Pendleton Street, Alexandria, Virginia. In smaller letters in one corner I put GSA — for Government Services Administration — 1234510. Then I repeated the performance on the crate’s other side. I wrote the fake order number down on a slip of paper and put the paper carefully into my wallet so I could use it to identify the crate when the time came.

  When the crate was delivered to Lambert’s with the fake order number, I figured that governmental obstinacy would ensure that it be set aside and held until the presumably missing waybill showed up. And held and held and held. Not until hell froze over, perhaps, but surely until I could interest someone in government in taking a look at a crate bearing GSA 1234510.

  Hazel had come out to the barn to get the Jeep while I was still lettering. She returned with the mail, including the laundry case, while I was still admiring my handiwork. I took the case from Hazel, paused only to destroy the label with the local address, placed it in the crate without bothering to remove the briefcase from it, put the top of the crate on, and screwed it down with three-quarter-inch wood screws. “There,” I said with satisfaction. “That thing’s never going to come open by accident.”

  “Who’s the Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company?” Hazel wanted to know.

  “One of Erikson’s blind pigs. The equivalent of a dead letter office for spook supplies in transit from one area to another. Or part of it is. The damned place is so big I don’t really know what all they do there. Erikson probably — ”

  A bell began ringing loudly. “That’s the house phone,” Hazel said. “I don’t know why I’ve always been too cheap to have an extension put out here.” She sprinted up the path to the house with all her moving parts jiggling pleasantly.

  She was back in three minutes. I was bending over the crate again, making sure the paint had soaked into the wood and was dry. It had and it was.

  “Earl,” Hazel said.

  I spun around at the tension in her voice. “What is it?”

  “Bud just called from Ashworth’s Chevron station in town. Two men in a rented Chevrolet were just there asking directions to the Rancho Dolorosa. They wouldn’t state their business, although Bud said he hinted around. He thought I’d want to know.”

  “He thought right,” I said emphatically. “Put the man on your Christmas list.”

  “Who are the men, Earl?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest.” Syndicate henchmen, who else? Although how had they gotten to Erikson this quickly? “But we’re not waiting around to find out. D’you have any cash in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  It had been a rhetorical question anyway. Hazel always had cash in the house and not just change in a teacup, either. Every once in a while we’d pack up on the spur of the moment and fly down to Tijuana and take a belt at the Caliente racetrack’s 5-10. “Bring all of it. Don’t pack anything, not even a toothbrush. We’ll outfit in Miami. Move it!”

  Hazel headed for the ranchhouse again while I picked up the crate and loaded it into the back of the Corvette. Then I changed my mind and transferred it to the Jeep. Those two types at the service station might have inquired what kind of car Hazel drove, and what the people in town usually saw was the Corvette.

  I followed Hazel to the house, went upstairs and changed clothes, swapped my brown hairpiece for a red one, and performed a quick facial changeover from the tubes in my makeup kit, which resembled a woman’s small traveling case. I carried the kit downstairs. Hazel was in the kitchen. She had changed to a dress but was carrying only a large handbag. “I don’t like it nearly as well when you give yourself that semiprettyboy appearance,” she said disapprovingly when she looked me over.

  “You know I’ve got to gild the lily a bit, or they wouldn’t let me into the same hotel room with a gorgeous thing like you,” I said.


  She glanced at her watch. “We’ve missed the flight to Reno.”

  “Even if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t go near that airport,” I said. “Our visitors might know who they’re looking for.”

  “Then we’re — ”

  “We’re driving to Salt Lake City and flying to Miami from there,” I interrupted her. “Let’s go.”

  Outside I steered her to the Jeep. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. I wanted to get out of there. The one thing I didn’t want was to get pinned inside the ranch property by the two strangers reaching the gate before we did.

  I breathed more freely when we cleared the gate. I knew the visitors weren’t going to do themselves any good lining themselves up at the end of my .38, but I had Hazel to think about now, too.

  “The connections may not be as good in Salt Lake City,” Hazel objected when we reached the highway and I turned north.

  “There’s no sweat as long as we’re leading this parade,” I answered. I could have added that I was also instinctively following a life pattern that was a relic of my life-on-the-run days: never backtrack. You know there’s trouble in that direction. You just don’t know for sure what kind.

  We made only one stop on the way to Salt Lake City. Hazel went off to powder her nose when I pulled up at a truck terminal in Wendover, Utah. The girl in the trucking office glanced casually at the printed address on the crate I’d carried inside and said it might be ten days before they had a full load going east. I said that was perfectly all right. I’d selected Wendover as the shipping point for the crate because it’s just a few miles away from the Bonneville Salt Flats where the automotive speed records are broken. The local truckers are used to handling all kinds of freight.

  I took my copy of the bill of lading and walked half a block to the Wendover post office. I purchased a stamped envelope, addressed it to Hazel at the ranch, marked the face of the envelope Hold at Post Office Box, stuffed the waybill into it, and dropped the envelope into the mail chute. The bill of lading would be at the Ely post office when I needed it. It was safer doing it that way than letting it go on to the ranch in case someone took an interest in the mail.

  Hazel gave me an I-told-you-so look at the Salt Lake City airport when I learned that we had a choice of a five-hour layover or a trip to Miami via the Great Circle route. Well, almost. She brightened up, though, when I opted for the layover.

  “With this kind of time on our hands the right kind of man would book us into the airport motel,” she suggested. “So a girl could manage a little mattress testing.”

  We checked into the motel at the half-day rate, and Hazel took charge. We gave the mattress a brisk workout, showered, and then indulged in an unplanned nap which resulted in us dressing like firemen and running through the terminal to catch our flight.

  Hazel slept again en route to Miami, but I didn’t. As a man who has never been positive that Wilbur Wright had the absolutely one-hundred-percent correct idea, I like to have long periods on the ground between flights. Hazel’s flight instructor at the Ely airport laughed when I confessed this to him. He said I’d get over it. Maybe, but it was one reason I’d gone for a chunk of extra cash to make Hazel’s plane a twin-engine unit. Single-engine planes in the mountains of eastern Nevada gave me a lump in the throat that wouldn’t go up or down.

  A thought that had been pebble sized when it first occurred to me at the ranch had grown to boulder-size now that I’d had time for additional consideration. If the syndicate had traced me to the ranch, they must have obtained the information from Karl Erikson. But if that were true, how could he still be in a Nassau detention cell? And if he wasn’t still in custody, what was I doing planning to go back there?

  There was a way to find out.

  I got rid of Hazel at Miami International Airport with the usual excuse. I found a phone booth near the men’s room and removed from my wallet the cheaply printed card the bellman Roy had given me with Candy Kane’s phone number on it. I called the number, hoping that Candy wouldn’t answer the phone. I wouldn’t get any useful information from him, but I might from the statuesque Chinese girl, Chen Yi.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator’s voice cut in after an interval, “but your party does not answer.”

  “Keep ringing, operator,” I said. “There should be someone there.”

  There was a click at the other end of the line finally and a faint “Hello.” It wasn’t Candy’s voice, and that had been my immediate concern. The voice was so low, though, that I thought I had a bad connection.

  “Can you improve the connection, operator?” I asked.

  “I can hear you,” the voice at the other end of the line said more clearly, and I recognized Chen Yi’s quiet manner of speaking.

  “This is someone you met recently,” I began.

  “I recall the voice,” she answered.

  “Is Candy there? Can you speak freely?”

  “He is not here.”

  “Can you tell me if the man in whom I was interested is still at the same location?”

  “I do not know.”

  The Chinese girl’s voice was lifeless with none of its usual vitality. “Has anything happened?” I asked.

  “There has been a — an incident.”

  “An incident? What kind?”

  “I do not wish to speak of it on the telephone.”

  I didn’t like what I was thinking. “Listen, can I come and see you?”

  “I do not advise it. Goodbye.”

  There was the click of a broken connection. I sat there staring at the phone in my hand before I hung up. I left the booth and went and collected Hazel. “We’ll check into the airport motel here, too,” I told her. “Then you grab a cab into town and get yourself outfitted at Burdine’s. You know — touristy. Get me a jacket, a couple pairs of slacks, and three or four sportshirts. Make one outfit black. Plus underwear and socks.” She knew my sizes. “And luggage to carry it in. Bring everything back to the motel.”

  “Why aren’t you coming with me?”

  “I’m going crosstown to pick up a couple of forgeries we’ll need to get through customs in Nassau.”

  She held out her handbag, and I helped myself from the thick wad of bills in it. We caught separate cabs after I registered us into the motel. I directed the cab driver to a back street address, a print shop. In half an hour I had suitably inscribed, suitably aged, phony birth certificates that identified me as Rufus Barton and Hazel as Ernestine McClanahan Barton.

  Miami was sticky hot. I saw an illuminated temperature indicator on a bank that said ninety-two degrees as another cab took me back to the airport. The humidity must have been close to 80 percent. I stopped at the Eastern flight desk in the terminal and booked two seats on the 9:00 P.M. to Nassau. In the motel room I stripped to my shorts and stretched out on the bed.

  Hazel arrived two hours later. She came in laden with parcels, and that was only the beginning. The motel porter made two trips to deliver the boxes resulting from her shopping. Then he made still another trip to bring the new, empty suitcases. Hazel had a grand time displaying and modeling her purchases for herself before packing everything. She locked the suitcases and handed me the keys. “What time are we leaving?” she asked.

  “Nine o’clock. I want to get there after dark.”

  A tiny frown creased her smooth forehead. “You’re not expecting a welcoming committee?”

  “I know I’ve changed my appearance, but I’d just as soon not have anyone looking at me in the daylight.”

  She didn’t pursue it. We rested, had dinner at the airport, and read magazines until it was time for our flight. I couldn’t concentrate on my reading. The short flight to Nassau was uneventful. After we stepped from the plane and went through the perfunctory identification and customs check with our forged documents, I steered Hazel toward the Paradise Island Hotel bus.

  If I had to be away from the hotel for extended periods, and at the moment I had no idea, Hazel could amuse herself at
the casino. Hazel has been known to derive quite a bit of amusement from a roulette wheel. The desk clerk at the hotel eyed me up and down when I admitted to having no reservations. “You’re fortunate that this isn’t the December-April interval, sir,” he informed me loftily. I barely remembered to use the name Barton when signing the register.

  In our room I took Hazel to the window and showed her the lights of the casino. “Does that mean you’re going sky-hooting off on your own now?” she inquired.

  “I’ve got to find out what’s happened since I left here,” I explained. “Don’t break the bank at the first sitting. It’s not considered good form.” I thought of something. “Don’t go broke, either. We’d play hell getting an infusion of fresh cash here under your current pseudonym.” I kissed the tip of her nose and left the room.

  I took a cab to Rawson Square. One of the oddities about Nassau at night is the absence of neon. What lighting exists is subdued, which didn’t make me unhappy as I walked to Eurydice Street. There was a light on behind the window lettered Chen Yi’s Massage Parlor as I approached it, but I tried the door leading upstairs to Candy’s apartment.

  It opened, and I slipped inside, then used the side door entrance to the massage parlor, bypassing its tiny waiting room. Female voices came from one of the curtained cubicles. I hesitated. I didn’t want to bother Chen Yi while she was at work, but I didn’t feel I had a lot of time to waste.

  While I was debating how I was going to get her attention, the curtain parted, and Chen Yi herself emerged. The tall Chinese girl was wearing a short-sleeved, short-skirted white uniform that gave her the hygienic appearance of a nurse.

  She stopped short at the sight of me. “No one is permitted back here without an attendant,” she said coldly.

  I had expected her to recognize me. I had forgotten my changed appearance. When she advanced toward me to emphasize her statement, I backed away rapidly, knowing that physically she was a match for me in any department. “It’s me,” I said.