by Buck Sanders
He had brought along a Hofmeister Box, a safecracking device often employed by the CIA to make the work quick and easy. It was a digital pocket analyzer with stethescope probes for attachment to the safe face. One complete twist of the dial on a standard safe would cause numbers to fly in red neon across the board face. As the dial passed each key number, it would lock in. The calculator aspect of the Hofmeister would then sort the numbers into sequence. On a more up-to-date, push-button combination, the connection could be made electronically.
Slayton worked efficiently, his hands covered with thin latex surgeon’s gloves. After priming the Hofmeister, he did a routine check of the apartment windows, starting with the side on which he had entered the building and working clockwise.
His time estimate had been off by nearly eighty percent. A threesome of men in topcoats were coming up the walk to the townhouse door, and from the look of them, they had keys.
He was already gone from the window.
6
“What about the alarm?”
“Mick’s got the cutoff key. Which one of these damn things is for the doors, though—is it the same key?”
“Naw, shit,” came a third voice through the closed townhouse door. ‘They never bother with stuff like that. It’s always ‘here’s the job, here’s the keys, hurry up…’ ”
Apparently, the men outside the door had the keys to the townhouse, but not the intellect to use them. Slayton had used less time—and made less noise. Now there was nowhere for him to run; he was three stories up. There was no time to jump the alarms on the windows and get out to the balcony, or the roof. For him, the only way out was past the trio presently on the stairs leading to the front door. The men outside were keeping up an almost constant patter of small talk and bitching.
“Okay, here we go,” said one.
Slayton had stationed himself behind a plastic portable bar, a gigantic, seashell-shaped eyesore on casters that occupied a corner formed by two thick, floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The curtains were open, and he dared not close them; the men coming in might see their residual motion. From the street, he was clearly visible, hunkered down behind the bar, his ass plastered against the window. The glass was so thick he guessed that it might be bulletproof, and he found himself wondering again just what kind of nut had this kind of taste.
He was in direct line with the door. If luck was with him, he might be able to end-run through it, down the stairs, and out—to hell with the alarm, then—while the men were still trying to collect their wits in the dark. Slayton took a quick slug of bourbon from a decanter behind the bar, held his breath, and waited as the door finally opened.
“And that’s another goddam thing,” one man said as the trio entered the room. “How come we have to do their work for them all of a sudden?”
“Hey, lights. Should we use the lights?”
“Naw,” said Number Three, seemingly the only one of the bunch with any wits at all. “Leave the lights off. Use your penlights. Don’t want anything to look fishy from the street.”
Slayton’s mouth dropped open in amazement. Burglars? He heard the sounds of them moving around, orienting themselves in the dark, catching their first view of the arrangement of things to keep from tripping over them.
“Classy joint,” one said.
“There’s gotta be a safe here,” said Number Three. Slayton waited for his liquid Bronx accent. “Look around; do the walls first. Cheever, put that fuckin’ gun away—you don’t need it.”
Terrific. They were armed, on top of everything else. They were searching the apartment. Slayton knew he had to make a move while surprise was still on his side.
The building was concrete through and through, which meant no creaking floorboards… which meant Slayton had to listen for the faint sound of footfalls on the lush shag carpet to let him know it was football time. At least one of these inepts was certain to hit the bar, even if it didn’t look as if it needed to be searched. Slayton strained to hear.
The plastic shell seemed thin, and useless for anything except hiding behind. One of the men stood on the other side of it, drumming his fingers absently on the Formica top. Slayton saw that the man was wearing surgical gloves similar to his own.
“Hey, Rudy—what’s your pleasure? Got a hell of a bar here. Looks like—”
The man never finished his sentence, because at that point Slayton emitted the loudest war whoop he was capable of manufacturing and put everything into a hard bicep-and-shoulder rush against his side of the caster-mounted shell. It took off like a rocket, lifting the man off the floor and boffing his chin on the way up. Dislodged liquor bottles flew in a dozen directions; several exploded against the hard stone wall, and the dark room was in stantly filled with the pungent aroma of spirits.
Slayton dashed beneath the carnage, tucking a cocktail shaker of frosted glass into the crook of his arm like a quarterback’s prize. The man was scrambling to shuck the hollow shell of the bar, which was no great feat, considering its lack of substance.
Slayton shouted, “Jesus Christ, you guys, there’s somebody in here!”
The men had come barrelling into the main room at the sound of the bar disintegrating. Against the light of the open windows all they could make out were silhouettes—the man scrambling madly under the bar, and Slayton, standing. They entered just in time to see Slayton break the cocktail shaker on the man’s skull. He uttered a little strangled cry and instantly went boneless and limp, spilled alcohol soaking into his cheap suit.
He heard Number Three shout at his companion, “Don’t shoot, stupid, it might be Marty!”
The other man was looking around helplessly in the dark, swinging his pistol recklessly around. “Marty? Hey!”
Slayton spotted the gun and dived to the floor. The idiot was so trigger-happy that his planned diversion was not going to work. As he hit the floor, Rudy put three .45 automatic slugs through the picture window.
It was not bulletproof glass. The entire window—and seemingly, the entire wall—blew outward into the night air. Rudy’s bullets perforated key stress points in the glass, and the whole shebang exploded into billions of shards and splinters, collapsing, shattering with an enormous grating din, showering down onto the sidewalk three stories below like deadly needles of petrified rain. The noise was incredible.
Slayton used the cacophony to move. Number Three was yelling uselessly at his impulsive partner, dashing toward the window as it crashed down and fell out. He clearly thought that Rudy’s shots had blown the intruder through the glass.
That left Rudy standing near the sofa, his right arm still raised and frozen in a professional fixing stance. He was staring straight ahead of him as Slayton came up on his left side. With a sharp, balletlike kick, Slayton put the toe of his shoe into the man’s wrist. The hand snapped open with the speed of a ‘jack-in-the-box, and the automatic somersaulted away to land with a thump on the floor.
Rudy turned, and Slayton waded into him, putting a foreshortened, hard package of knuckles into his solar plexus to double him over, then into his throat. The man shook off the force of the blows by dancing backward, stealing their impact. He successfully blocked Slayton’s straight shot to his face, and countered with a flurry of karate chops. Slayton fended them off with a scissors-motion of his arms, shielding his face and throat. Below, he saw the man’s right foot go back, preparatory to a more powerful blow.
Slayton dodged under the thrust. He knew the man at the window would be joining them any second, and Rudy had not proven to be the short work Slayton had anticipated. A different defensive tack was needed.
The defensive salvo Rudy threw up was almost classic, even textbook. Slayton held it off with equal expertise. Then he yelled as loudly as he could right into the man’s face. It was like a scream of pain, or the sound of a Neanderthal man ripping the lungs out of a fresh kill. It was not what Rudy expected.
It caused him to hesitate, for just a split second. Slay-ton had intended that it might.
There was no time to grope around in the dark for Rudy’s gun, and a run to the stairs was ridiculous, when the third man—the sharpest of the three, Slayton recalled—could pick him off with his own weapon halfway down. The man was still there, and he had to be taken, too.
He had wisely retreated from the almost sheer edge of the missing window, from the drop into darkness. For the first time Slayton could hear the alarm, wailing away into the night like a rabid police siren. Both men had the same thought—to rush for the door, to escape before the Gendarme men swarmed over the place.
But Number Three had no idea where Slayton was in the dark, and proceeded on the assumption that Slayton was armed. He made it to the door first, backing out, his gun protectively in front of him.
Security would arrive any minute. Slayton charged the door and slammed it brutally against the hand clutching the gun. Through the wood of the door, Slayton could feel the thin bones in the man’s wrist snap on impact. Outside, he screamed and staggered backward.
Slayton had been wrong. Number Three had not been so smart, after all.
Through the stained glass of the windows below, Slayton could see reflections of the flashbar lights. The cavalry had arrived, and he was trapped inside the townhouse.
He scooped the gun off the floor, and jerked the door open. Number Three was standing on the landing, holding his broken hand like a child about to burst into tears. Slayton pivoted sideways and kicked the man in the face. He went tumbling violently down the stairs, and crumpled at the bottom just as the security men got the front door open.
Slayton promptly aimed for the stained glass windows above them, and emptied the clip of the fourteen-shot automatic. Slugs ricocheted, careening wildly about. Glass blew out in multicolored fragments. And everyone outside hit the dirt, whipping out their own weapons.
He meant them no harm; the stunt was strictly to buy a handful of seconds. Slayton dashed toward the corner of the apartment where the floor-to-ceiling windows had been destroyed. He glanced out to the left and right: then, backing up against the far side, where the glass frame met concrete, he sprinted along the edge.
Where the bar had stood, he dived out into space.
The split-second view of the drop below him would have made his stomach heave if he had not been in motion. He elected to concentrate on his leap to the balcony railing instead.
His timing was good. On the ground, the jump would have been trifling. His hands caught the ornamental iron low, and inertia tried to fling his body beneath the stone lips of the balcony. Foreseeing this, he put the whole grip into his forearms to stop useless swinging around, and stabilized himself. His grip on the railing was solid, and he pulled himself up and over onto the balcony itself.
The next balcony was another leap away. A long row of them led, in diminishing perspective, to the far side of the building. Slayton figured that by now the Gendarme men below had regained their courage and would be thinking about trying the stairs again. He planned to be absent.
He delayed only a second before jumping to the next balcony; an easier leap, thanks to his being able to push off with his feet in a straight line from the first. It looked as if he would make it.
After he pulled himself onto the second balcony, he glanced up to see a svelte young woman with a lavish mane of billowing brown hair looking quizzically at him through her own locked, sliding glass door. His immediate reaction was a pang of panic in his gut, a feeling that the jig was up.
But the woman had no gun. There was no place to conceal any sort of weapon, since she stood naked on the opposite side of the glass. She simply stood there, arms akimbo on her coltish hips, her mouth drawn up into a tiny O of surprise. Her hair was magnificent, and streamed down to her waistline. She had high cheekbones and rather heavy breasts which fell naturally outward, but didn’t sag. Her trim legs were toned, much like a dancer’s, even down to the wide, hard feet. She had been engaged in some sort of calisthenic routine when Slayton had crashed into her balcony.
The fright in her eyes told Slayton that there was no way she would ever unlock the door and help to make his escape simpler.
“Pardon me,” Slayton said, catching his breath. “I’m just a transient fugitive, on the lam from the police!” He smiled winningly.
Her expression did not change. Neither did that of her boyfriend, shouting unintelligibly from the bed in the background.
“Ah, I knew you wouldn’t buy it,” Slayton shrugged. “See you.” As he leaped from the balcony, the woman screamed.
Snug in his coat pocket, as he mountaineered from balcony to balcony, was a ledger he had managed to snatch from the townhouse safe. Luckily, its loss would now be blamed on the burglars.
Ben Slayton had done his job, if a bit chaotically. He had no conception of the can of worms he had just opened up.
7
“Jesus Christ, Ben! Just what are we supposed to do about this mess!”
The report, which was in a pristine manila folder as usual, hit the polished surface of the desk and slid across, skidding to a stop between Slayton’s hands. He was standing, jaw working to contain his anger, leaning on the desk opposite the seated Winship.
“I repeat, sir, this all has to do with following up the only leads that exist in the Starshine case. This does still have priority, doesn’t it?” His voice was leaden.
“Breaking into the residence of the special executive assistant to a senator? My god, man—beating up three CIA agents?”
“There was no evidence that place belonged to a government official—other than the bad taste of the furnishings. And a senator’s involvement in this sweetens the whole damned investigation more than a little bit, don’t you agree, sir?”
Winship was torn, and he knew it. Obligated to rake Ben over the coals, thanks to the report on his desk, yet realizing that Slayton had uncovered lead elements that made the whole Starshine business much nastier than mere narcotics violations or moonshine running. Deaths were still tied to the stuff; now a senator, the CIA, and big business—courtesy of Pavel Drake II—were tied to the stuff. And Winship knew Ben Slayton would endure chastisement from him longer than from any other mortal. It was necessary, in a perverse way, but Slayton had already reached his limit.
In a more subdued tone, Winship said, almost helplessly, “But Ben—those CIA men… you wreaked quite a bit of damage there…” He was vaguely aware that the whole sequence would be funny if the three men were not in the hospital at the present time.
Slayton sighed, as though burdened. “As far as I was concerned, I was fighting for my life in there. I had no inkling that they were government men—although their bungling should have clued me in. Whoever assigned those idiots to investigate the townhouse must have been the only guy who escaped prosecution for the Watergate thing. Which reminds me, Ham, those men being in that town-house raises another question everyone would be a lot more comfortable just ignoring.”
“You suspect some kind of informational leakage as regards the Starshine investigation.” Winship steepled his hands.
“Yes, sir. Those men made the scene just minutes after I got the address from a Treasury-assigned tail on the Starshine delivery men. Somebody—it doesn’t really matter who—tipped off the CIA. So why is the CIA interested in the Starshine case?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“They aren’t. That’s just it.”
Winship’s hands made for a large-bowled, filigreed pipe. “And the connection is—?”
“Try this, sir. Let’s assume that the Starshine operation is overlorded by someone with government connections. The senator, the senator’s assistant—that doesn’t matter either, right now. What does matter is that our man has enough clout with the CIA not
only to catch wind of the Starshine operation, but to feed CIA resources toward protecting his own interests. The only people in the dark are the CIA boys. This person, or his operatives, tip the CIA that a clandestine operation needs to be carried out in the townhouse—he even supplies them with the keys. Could be a tax dodge, could be anything. The important thing was that armed agents were supposed to run across me there. ‘Me,’ to this person, was whoever was mucking about with the Starshine investigation—a vested interest, to be sure. Whether I was supposed to be arrested, implicated, or killed, I don’t know.”
“We can’t afford to compound that right now, if you’re right,” said Winship. “That’s why this is a one-way report. They have no idea it was you. Let’s hope your identity is secure, at least for the moment.”
“Assume that if you wish, sir. It’d be dangerous for me to.” Slayton was belaboring the point unnecessarily.
“It is an advantage, Ben.”
“I know that. But the whole Starshine operation will be compromised unless I move fast.”
“That brings us to your next lead.”
“I may not be around Washington D.C. long enough for the man to make me,” Slayton said. “It looks like a trip to Los Angeles is inevitable now, and I’d like to leave tonight.”
“It’s cleared, it’s cleared,” Winship said wearily. “But I want a briefing first. Understand this: if the people we think are involved in the Starshine operation really are involved in it, the flak will start soon enough. You know what I mean.”
“I can guess,” Slayton said. “A senator can apply a great deal of pressure to terminate an investigation—especially an investigation that’s costing the taxpayers money, and particularly an investigation with elements of scandal. And we’ve got scandal in spades. We’ve got covered-up deaths, we’ve got government officials’ names dredged through the cesspool, we’ve got sex, we’ve got violence… it wouldn’t be hard for Mr. X to kill off the Starshine investigation if he wanted to.”