by Nick Carter
"Scram… before he swallows his cigar."
She buzzed him through the massive oak doors, and Carter entered the walnut-walled inner sanctum.
The air conditioner hummed at full throttle, but it was fighting a losing battle with the brown rope wedged in the corner of David Hawk's mouth.
"Carter. Good, sit! Drink?"
"No, thank you, sir. It's a little early for me." He coughed, twice, and lowered himself into a huge leather antique. The chair was so soft that Carter could barely see the other man over the piled top of the huge mahogany desk.
"Good. You familiar with this?"
A stapled file folder flew across the desk and landed on Carter's lap.
"Yes, sir. I've kept up with the bulletins."
"Well, as of this morning they're outdated. We think we might have a link between the missiles and the disappearance of two men: Adam Greenspan and Lorenzo Montegra."
"Who are they?"
Two more folders found their way into Carter's hands. Instead of case files, these were dossiers.
"Look them over, N3, all of them, carefully," Hawk rasped. "And think about our recent soiree in northern Spain while you're at it. I'll get us some coffee."
Carter lit a cigarette, thought of Delores, thought of Ginger Bateman, and opened the first folder.
It was titled: MISSILE THEFT — EUROPE — TOP SECRET…
* * *
It had all begun on a clear but moonless night six months earlier, outside Enschede, near the Netherlands-West German frontier.
Because of increasing peace marches that had nearly developed into riots in The Hague and Rotterdam, NATO Command in Belgium had decided to remove eight medium-range missiles from the Netherlands.
It was not an earth-shaking decision. The missiles were practically obsolete and would have been replaced or removed soon anyway.
They were moved across the West German border in a caravan consisting of two sixteen-wheeler semi transports, a staff officer's car, and two armored personnel carriers.
In addition to heavy ordnance in the personnel carriers, four men armed with heavy-caliber machine guns rode on the top of each trailer.
From the standpoint of hardware, the caravan could have held off a small army.
Their destination was a NATO-leased factory outside Hamburg. Once there, the missiles would be broken down into components, deactivated, and sent on to Frankfurt in separate shipments. From Frankfurt they would be flown back to the United States and either destroyed or stored.
They never reached Hamburg.
Outside Bremen, the caravan entered a long runnel. Just before the far end of the tunnel, a large section of the roadway had been dynamited, making it impassable. Over the end of the tunnel, a huge polyethylene tent had been secured.
The officer in charge, sensing an attack on his cargo, ordered his men to the rear of the caravan. There, guns primed, they began to lead the vehicles back out the end of the tunnel they had just entered.
They never made it.
Another charge had been set at that end of the tunnel, as well as another airtight polyethylene cover.
Through the vents in the roof of the tunnel, a deadly gas was pumped into the semidarkness by a powerful generator.
Chaos reigned supreme in this sudden gas chamber, but it only lasted a few minutes.
They died to a man.
Runners were placed across the blown-out portion of the roadway, and the trucks continued on their journey… only now in the hands of hijackers.
From the time the missiles left the tunnel, it was ail speculation bolstered by the accounts of a few witnesses.
Their final destination inside Germany was evidently the northern port of Bremerhaven.
That same night, a Libyan-registered freighter sailed from Bremerhaven. She was the Star of Ceylon, and her first port of call was Malta.
She never arrived.
Rounding the tip of Portugal, thirty miles out and still some distance from Gibraltar, the Star of Ceylon radioed a mayday. There had been a massive internal explosion in the bowels of the ship. Fire had already spread from bow to stern.
By the time Portuguese and Spanish air-sea rescue units had arrived, the Star of Ceylon had sunk with all hands.
The lines between NATO headquarters and Brussels went wild. The Mediterranean fleet attempted exploratory dives, all to no avail.
The question hung like a leaden cloud over all concerned…
Had the eight obsolete but still deadly missiles gone down with the ill-fated Star of Ceylon?
Or had the missiles been off-loaded from the freighter before her «accident» had taken place?
* * *
Carter closed the folder and dropped it on Hawk's desk. He rubbed the room's smoke from his eyes and heard a cup rattle against a saucer at his elbow.
"Cream or sugar?"
"Black," Carter replied.
"Finished?"
"Just the missile file. Not much I didn't already know, except the supposition about current whereabouts."
"Read the dossiers," Hawk replied, "and I'll fill you in."
Carter opened the first folder and read quickly.
Two weeks after the missiles' theft, Adam Greenspan, architect, arrived in Milan, Italy.
His intent was a few weeks of skiing at the Rapiti resort in the Dolomites near Bolzano.
After renting a Mercedes at the Milan airport, Greenspan supposedly drove north toward Bolzano.
He never arrived.
There was only one clue to his disappearance. Before leaving Milan, he had made one stop at the Hotel Excelsior Gallia to meet a woman. The doorman remembered putting the woman's bags into the trunk of the Mercedes.
The doorman usually remembered Mercedes. They went along with large tips. Adam Greenspan was no different. He had tipped the doorman ten thousand lire.
The woman had been registered at the Excelsior under the name of Carmen D'Angelo.
Normally, the disappearance of an American architect would not raise very many eyebrows. The disappearance of Adam Greenspan did.
Reason?
He was a genius in his field, one of the few experienced designers of concrete launching pads and storage silos for ballistic missiles.
* * *
Carter looked up from the Greenspan folder and whistled.
"That's only part of it," Hawk said. "Go on."
Carter took a sip of the coffee, chain-lit yet another cigarette, and opened the folder with MONTEGRA written across its top right-hand comer.
Lorenzo Montegra was a first generation Mexican-American from San Diego, California. His coworkers at Hughes Aircraft in L. A. disliked Montegra, but they admired his brains and skill.
Why the dislike?
Because Lorenzo Montegra had it all. At Stanford University, he had been one of the highest-ranking amateur tennis players in the world, as well as a Phi Beta Kappa in physics and math.
As an independent consultant to Hughes on systems and radar, he had made a small fortune.
And Montegra enjoyed his wealth. He had movie-star good looks and the athletic physique to go with it.
Women — even the wives of his coworkers — had a soft spot in their hearts for Lorenzo.
And he for them.
Two months after the theft of the missiles in West Germany, Montegra was seen almost constantly in the company of a woman from Olivera Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Her name was Maria Estrada, and no one was surprised when Montegra announced that he was spending his entire vacation at the woman's villa outside Ensenada, Mexico.
Indeed, they all sighed with relief. Maria Estrada was perfect for Montegra. She was darkly beautiful, as only Latin women are. She had breasts, hips, and thighs that would make the mouth of a corpse water. And she obviously had money: a home in Los Angeles and a villa in Ensenada.
Maria Estrada fit Lorenzo Montegra to a T.
Perhaps they would marry, and then all the married men who moved in Montegra's
circle could breathe easier.
But it didn't happen that way.
Four days after their arrival in Ensenada. the couple went deep-sea fishing. They, two deckhands, and the fishing boat's skipper were all lost in a freak storm.
The storm was a freak because it came up with no warning, not because it was a killer. It was no more than a light squall. Four other fishing boats had been out in it at the time, and all four of them had reached port easily and safely.
Carter tossed both folders on the desk and lifted the cup and saucer with hands that were now shaking visibly.
"What do you think?" Hawk asked through what had now become a heavy pall of blue-gray smoke between them.
"Heavy. If there is a connection, the missiles are alive and well, and somebody plans on mounting and firing them."
"It looks that way," Hawk said, nodding. He mashed the mangled remnants of his cigar, then immediately clipped and lit another. "Of course, if we green light an agent to go into the field and do something about this, we must assume that the missiles are not in a freighter's hull sitting on the bottom of the ocean."
Hawk rarely smiled. Now he was grinning like a cat about to make an easy kill.
"I take it." Carter said, "that we now have something that allows us to make that assumption?"
"You take it right, Nick, thanks to the Yucatan-Spain-Basque connection."
"What?"
If anything, the grin widened. Hard to do around a cigar, but Hawk managed it. His hamlike hands found yet another set of papers before he spoke again.
"Balikin Arms Limited of Amsterdam shipped — legally — a large consignment of light and heavy mortars, machine guns, automatic rifles, handguns, and ammunition out of Germany with an end-use certificate for Malta."
The hair stood up on the back of Carter's neck, and his knuckles gleamed white as his fingers gripped the coffee cup.
"The Star of Ceylon," he whispered.
"Neat as a pin," Hawk replied.
"I'll be damned."
"I don't think it's too much to assume that, if they offloaded a shipment of arms for use as barter material in a kill, they would overlook eight missiles."
Here Hawk leaned back and diligently applied a desk lighter to the end of his cigar. By the time it was boiling smoke, the smile on his broad face had been replaced by a studied frown.
"When all this began to dovetail so neatly, we dug back into the Greenspan and Montegra disappearances. It didn't take a genius or a computer to see how they fit."
"How was the connection made?" Carter asked, lighting a cigarette himself in self-defense.
"A woman." Hawk searched the mess on his desk for a moment, found what he wanted, and then continued. "We've pretty well established that the woman in Milan at the Excelsior Gallia — 'Carmen D'Angelo' — and 'Maria Estrada' in Los Angeles were one and the same."
"That's a little too much coincidence."
"You're damned right it is! We would have been stymied at that, however, if we hadn't dug a little further into Adam Greenspan's life."
"And…?" Carter sat up a little straighter in his chair now.
The missile theft was big, but for all intents and purposes, the military could take care of its own problems. If the problem had been passed along to AXE, with the kind of operatives the agency used and their methods of solution, then it had gotten even bigger and more dangerous.
"A little over a year ago, Adam Greenspan Finished overseeing the installation of six silos at a secret base in West Germany. He took a three-week vacation skiing in Gstaad, Switzerland. While he was there he met a woman named Armanda de Nerro."
Carter screwed his face into a frown of concentration. As fast as possible, he went through the computerlike memory bank of names in his mind, but he came up blank.
Hawk caught it and smiled.
"You wouldn't know the lady, Carter. In our line of work we rarely travel in her set. Anyway, we did a rundown, got some pictures, and did one hell of a lot of legwork."
"All three women are one and the same," Carter growled.
Hawk nodded. "Doorman and concierge in Milan nailed her straight. Italians don't forget beautiful women, particularly when they go along with big tips. A realtor in L.A. remembers renting the house to her as Maria Estrada, and a maid in Ensenada definitely identified de Nerro's photograph as her mistress at the villa that Estrada rented down there."
"Any way to tie her to Nels Pomroy as well?"
"Only by a roundabout connection through a Basque terrorist, Lupe de Varga. Her file can fill you in there later. De Varga had several connections with Pomroy… we think. Just how much came out of them, we don't know yet, but we're digging. In the meantime, the woman is the only real lead and/or link we have."
"And right now Armanda de Nerro is in Paris."
"No. How did you come up with that?"
"Bateman said I would be having dinner in Paris."
"You will, but not to meet de Nerro. What do you know about Andorra?"
Again Carter's mind switched into high gear, this time coming up with a winner.
"It's a principality nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France. It's small, about one hundred and eighty square miles. It's become known as the world's discount shopping center because of its lack of taxes and tariffs, and, lately, it's skyrocketed in popularity with the world's tax evaders."
"That's enough for now," Hawk said. "We've leased a villa for you in Andorra from a wealthy expatriate Englishman. Ever hear of Nicholas Carstocus?"
"No," Carter replied.
"You wouldn't have. He always operated very quietly under the international code name 'Bluebeard. »
"Bluebeard I've heard of," Carter said, his mental antennae now on full alert.
In one way or another, Bluebeard had been involved with fifteen or more high-level assassinations in the last ten years. He was a master craftsman, and no one had been able to get a line on what he looked like or his identity.
Carter said as much to Hawk.
"Not until about three months ago. The French secret service, SDECE, not only got a line on him, they uncovered him."
Hawk did a quick scan of some notes on a paper before him then spoke again.
"Carstocus was the son of Greek immigrants. He was born in New York and, as a child, had every advantage. His family clan were very wealthy restaurateurs. When the father passed away, young Nicholas took over the family business, and he prospered. When his mother died, he sold the business and started making the jet-set scene as an international playboy, but he kept a fairly low profile."
"But the French put something together?"
"Right," Hawk said, nodding. "About two years ago Carstocus moved to Paris, and Bluebeard's operations stepped up. A couple of months ago, the SDECE got enough proof to nail him."
"Where is he now?"
"Dead. He was very quietly killed while resisting arrest and now resides in an unmarked grave outside Paris."
"And I'm to take his place," Carter said. "Did he have anything to do with the stolen missiles?"
"Nothing. Evidently assassinations — the planning and execution of them — was all Carstocus cared about. It was his idea of success, proving to himself that he was just a little bit better than anyone else in the world. The money was secondary."
"Nice guy," Carter drawled.
"Paris SDECE has agreed to set you up with everything they have on Carstocus. From Paris you take off for Andorra.»
"Why Andorra?"
"Two reasons. The first is just theory, a wild guess. Andorra is at the opposite end of the Pyrenees from Basque country, around San Sebastian. Spanish Guardia Civil do not cross the border into Andorra."
Carter nodded. "So if the Basques were behind the missile heist and they are moving them into Andorra…"
"Exactly. The second reason you're going to Andorra is because Armanda de Nerro lives there."
Two more thick files were passed across the desk to Carter.
; "One," Hawk said, "is the life of Armanda de Nerro. It makes interesting reading. The other is a background file on the ETA — the Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna."
"The Basque terrorist network," Carter said, hefting both of the files at once.
Hawk nodded. "That will be your homework on the flight from Dulles. You leave in two hours."
Carter checked his watch and frowned. "The last commercial flight has already left for Paris…"
"You're not flying commercial. The Vice-President is meeting day after tomorrow with the heads of the Common Market countries in Paris. I've managed to sneak you aboard Air Force Two as an Amalgamated reporter. Disappear right after you land at Orly, and check in with SDECE as soon as possible."
A last question popped into Carter's mind as Hawk stood. "Why Carstocus?"
"Because of his trade," Hawk barked, softening it with a lopsided grin. "We're going to leak the fact that Nicholas Carstocus is Bluebeard. That should make nice bait, don't you think?"
Five
Nick Carter managed to lose himself with the elite of the press corps on Air Force Two.
When the plane was airborne and he was fortified with three fingers of expensive scotch, he gravitated away from the others and found a solo seat.
Then he started on the files, beginning with Armanda de Nerro.
She was quite a lady.
The de Nerro clan was Basque to the core. They were wealthy landowners, and their presence in the Basque state of Navarra near Pamplona went back years.
Armanda's grandfather, Don Pepe de Nerro, had fought with all his heart on the Loyalist side against Franco. Later, when the Fascist dictatorship became firmly entrenched in power, his son Luis carried on the fight as the leader of an underground guerrilla organization.
Eventually, Luis was unmasked. His lands were confiscated, and he fled to France and exile, taking the now aging Don Pepe with him.
That was in 1951, the same year Luis's daughter, Armanda, was born in Carcassonne, France.
Though his lands had been lost, Luis had managed to flee with enough money to retain his life-style in exile and carry on his fight against Franco.