The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

“She says he was alive when she last saw him, but not in very good shape. I gather they’re saving him for further interrogation. They think, from the information that’s been compromised, that he must have accomplices elsewhere in the movement, a whole network. They hope to weed it all out, like crabgrass, with his reluctant help.”

  “But he still hasn’t betrayed his contact in Washington?”

  “Not yet, but they’re hoping.”

  “We’ve got to get him out of there!”

  “We don’t gotta do nothing, baby. And we certainly don’t gotta discuss it in front of a prisoner. If you tell her too much, you’ll have to shoot her. I promised I wouldn’t if she behaved, but I didn’t say anything about you.”

  “Tie her up and I’ll see if I can find a park bench where we can talk.”

  29

  Old San Juan is a walled city defended by several ancient forts. There have been numerous sieges, the first being the 1595 siege of El Castillo de Felipe del Morro, known as El Morro, by Sir Francis Drake. As we came up to the fort on the shore road, Dana was trying to remember whether Queen Elizabeth’s favorite sea rover—well, I guess Sir Walter Raleigh actually had the inside track there—had made it or been beaten off, she thought the latter. She said that, as I could see, the old city was located on a peninsula that was almost an island; causeways and bridges connected it with the mainland, if you want to call Puerto Rico a mainland.

  She said that “morro” simply means headland or bluff; and she hadn’t meant to take us clear out to the point on which El Morro was located, but it had been a while since she’d last driven here and she’d missed the turn for which she’d been looking. To rectify her mistake, she followed the shore around and then chauffeured us into a maze of very narrow one-way streets between shabby buildings several stories high, little urban canyons at the bottom of which the streets were only two cars wide. Parking was permitted on one side, leaving only one lane for traffic. When somebody stopped to make a delivery or chat with a friend on the sidewalk, everything came to a halt, but that’s par for the course in any Latin country. I’d lived long enough in New Mexico to know that it never occurs to a driver of Spanish descent that someone behind him may be in a hurry, since he never is.

  In the meantime, I’d bullied our prisoner into cleaning herself up a little better, telling her that if she insisted on looking like a battlefield casualty she’d have to ride on the floor where she didn’t show, with my feet on her. Fortunately, Dana had a couple of those little plastic-wrapped soapy washcloths in her purse. Even clean, La Margarita’s face wasn’t as pretty as it had been; there was a certain amount of swelling and inflammation. It wasn’t permanent, it would heal, given time, but it made me feel guilty nevertheless. I told myself to hell with it; chivalry was obsolete and these days they didn’t even want it, right? If she’d been a man, the state of her face wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, right?

  I made her struggle into the late Raoul Bonnette’s jacket and zip it up to cover her stained blouse. It was much too big for her, of course; but if they arrested women for wearing baggy clothes these days, half the female population would be in jail. Then I lashed her wrists with my handkerchief, and buckled my belt around her ankles, hoping my slacks would stay up without it.

  “All set back here,” I said to Dana. “Where are we heading?”

  “I’m looking for another park I remember, complete with benches,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s not too far from that address she gave us… There it is; and it looks as if a car’s just pulling out across the way. Let’s see if I can grab the space before somebody else gets it.”

  She could; and a couple of minutes later we were sitting side by side on a bench under the trees. All we needed was a picnic basket. The little oasis of green measured one long block in one direction, and two short blocks in the other. There was a small department store facing the park from one corner, and various other retail establishments all around including a hardware store and a dress shop. They looked very much like their smalltown U.S. counterparts. I wondered if the dress shop was the one, or one of the ones, owned and operated by Paul Encinias. It was called The Fashion and the window featured a skinny mannequin in a shiny blue jersey dress with an uneven hem that the designer probably hadn’t planned on, but that’s jersey for you.

  We didn’t speak at once. Instead we watched a lady policeman stroll by. She was quite handsome in her broad-brimmed hat and snugly fitting tan uniform; but you’d never mistake her for a male officer although she was wearing pants. A polished Sam Browne supported all the usual cop paraphernalia including a big automatic pistol.

  “Relax,” I said to Dana, who kept throwing apprehensive glances at our parked car. “The kid isn’t going to beat on the car windows and scream for help; she doesn’t want fuzz any more than we do.”

  “You keep telling me to relax.”

  “In this business, you’ll wear yourself out if you don’t. Just tell yourself it’ll all be the same in a hundred years. Okay, the council of war is now called to order. This captured clown Encinias, I suppose he’s our missing Modesto.”

  “Yes, but he’s not a…”

  “Not a clown? Any agent who lets himself be spotted making an important contact is a clown in my book. If he then lets himself be taken alive with important information in his head that can threaten the whole operation and endanger other agents, he’s a real comedian. Hell, even if he didn’t have a capsule, he had a gun, didn’t he?”

  She said hotly, “You can’t judge Paul by the brutal rules under which you operate! He’s not a trained agent, any more than I am. We’re both volunteers, Matt. The man who came down here to recruit us—your Mr. Trask, as a matter of fact—knew perfectly well that we knew very little about guns and violence; and I’m sure he never expected us to commit patriotic hara-kiri.”

  I said, “So Encinias/Modesto is our man inside the Caribbean Legion, and you’re his Washington contact.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then it’s a simple turncoat operation, after all? Where does all your well-publicized computer expertise come in?” I shook my head quickly. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. I’ll bet your Paul Encinias had his clothing business pretty well computerized, right? Rather than be entirely dependent on the hired help, he’d learned what buttons to push. So when he decided to come over to us, for whatever reason, it was arranged that he should use his office setup for transmissions, working after hours when nobody was around—he was probably in the habit of staying late, anyway; most successful businessmen put in a lot of unpaid overtime. He’d pass information through normal commercial channels, Compuphone or Telecomp or whatever they call it, using some kind of an innocent-looking code or cipher. Say he’d order from a certain supplier in the U.S., who happened to be you, so many pairs of panty hose for his stores, and so many pairs of jeans; and it would mean that the redcoats were landing on Omaha Beach at midnight. Then you’d send back Mac’s instructions the same way.”

  She smiled faintly. “Well, it wasn’t exactly like that, it was more complicated than that, but you have the general idea.”

  Something stirred in my mind. “What kind of instructions did you pass along? Did Mac ever order Modesto to use his influence to have the CLL bomb a specific target?”

  Dana looked shocked. “Heavens, no! Mac wouldn’t…”

  I said, “There may be something Mac wouldn’t do, but I haven’t come across it yet. If he needed somebody taken out, and didn’t care to make it official by using a regular agent, and had a bunch of gullible terrorists available, he wouldn’t hesitate to make use of them by pointing them that way.”

  “Well, he never passed any orders like that through me.” Then she hesitated. “I mean, that I knew about. Of course there was the B-code.”

  “What’s a B-code?”

  “Usually we used the A-code; and I’d encode the message for transmission myself. Once in a while, though, when security was very tight, the B-code would be used and
I’d be handed the message ready to go and told to send it off exactly as written and not to get curious.”

  “Did that happen often?”

  “Three times since we started operations. The last was a few weeks ago, I can’t recall the exact date.” She made a face. “I didn’t like it. It made me feel… untrusted, being bypassed like that, as if Mac and Modesto were ganging up on me.”

  “Join the club,” I said. It was time to drop what was, after all, pretty much a personal matter between Mac and me, and get to the business at hand. I went on: “How do you think I feel, learning that you’ve had a plain old human contact on the Council of Thirteen right along. Here I thought you were producing all that fine information out of thin air with that computer of yours.”

  She laughed. “I doubt very much that you really believed that, Matt.”

  “Well, it was the impression you and Mac were working very hard to put across, wasn’t it? That you were some kind of a mad electronic genius who just had to play a few tunes on the keyboard to come up with a detailed picture of what the opposition was doing. It made a cover of sorts, and it may actually have kept some people from getting too curious about your source of information; but I kind of figured there had to be an input somewhere to make an output in Washington. Computers don’t construct information from nothing. As they say: shit in, shit out.”

  Dana said primly, “We prefer the word ‘garbage.’”

  “I know. GIGO.”

  Dana said uneasily, with a glance at the car, “While we’re talking, that girl could be freeing herself.”

  “Stick to your computers,” I said. “Let me worry about the kid; that’s my line of work. But talking about feeling untrusted: If Modesto is a member of the Council, he must have given you the names of the other members, unless they meet wearing masks and using aliases. Like Señor Primo, Señor Segundo, Señorita Tercero… Tercera?”

  Dana laughed. “She’d hardly call herself that. It’s slang for madam, as in whorehouse.” She shook her head. “No, they don’t go in for that kind of conspiratorial nonsense much. Just the explosive kind. What makes you feel untrusted, Matt?”

  “If Modesto knows all the names, and you know all the names, and Mac knows all the names, why don’t I know all the names? I’m supposed to be the guy who’s going to take care of the guys who wear them; but you’ve been hoarding them like the last cup of drinking water in a lifeboat drifting under the tropical sun. I twisted your arm once and got Dominic Morelos out of you, and Angelita Johansen and her two fellow bomb-freaks…”

  “Angelita is a Council member, but the two men were just rank and file.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Actually, you never did give me their names, but apparently you entrusted the information to Sonny Varek since he managed to make the hits successfully. Then you reluctantly fed me Galvez and Koenig, later removed by Louis on my orders. But why hold back any of them if you know them all?”

  She hesitated, and said reluctantly, “I’m afraid you have the reputation of being something of a hothead, Matt; and after all, they did kill your son. It was feared that if you had all the names, you’d lose control and charge off blindly to hunt them down, one by one. That didn’t seem very efficient; there were better ways of doing it. So it was decided to give you enough names so you could put pressure on the Legion, to be sure; but only enough to make them take you seriously and call a meeting of the Council to figure out how to deal with you. Not enough to make them scatter and take cover. Not enough that they’d suspect a leak in their own ranks.”

  “Complicated,” I said. “Scare them enough to bring them together; not enough to blast them apart. I know where that intricate idea came from; I’ve seen enough of his ideas. But when their people started falling by the wayside, wouldn’t those fanatics inevitably figure that somebody’d fingered them? Outfits like that are paranoid as hell.”

  Dana shook her head. “The names released to you were carefully selected. Young Mrs. Helm had got a good look at Angelita and her gofers, or it was spread around that she had, so anything that happened to them could be blamed on her, not Modesto. We picked Arthur Galvez and Howard Koenig to give you because they were heavy drinkers who frequently talked too much in the wrong places; if they were killed, the other members of the Council would assume they’d simply betrayed themselves while drunk. And you were smart enough, as expected, to let Dominic Morelos come to you instead of going after him. That gave the CLL no reason to suspect a traitor. But if we’d given you more names, if more Council members had died, the survivors would have started looking at each other warily, wondering which one was the snitch. We didn’t want that. Modesto had to stay in place, unsuspected, until he could give us the date, time, and place of the proposed Council meeting. So you were left to investigate the Newport bombing and follow the dynamite trail to Puerto Rico by easy stages. As it turns out, your timing is perfect. You’re here just when you’re needed. We have to get Modesto out, wherever he’s being held.”

  I said, “He’s still a clown to me, but okay, tell me about this Marvelous Modesto. God, he sounds like a circus aerialist!”

  She didn’t speak at once, and I went on grimly: “Come on, let’s have an end to all the mystery, Dana. Who is this guy you have such faith in, such tender concern for, your husband, your father, your brother, your lover… Oh, I see,” I said, watching her face.

  She said stiffly, “I don’t think you do, Matt.”

  I said, “That’s why you cried in the night after doing me a great big favor. It was necessary to keep me happy because I’m a handy guy with a gun and you might need me—as you need me now—but it broke your heart to think how you’d betrayed your wonderful man in San Juan.”

  “It wasn’t like that!” she protested. “I cried because… Oh, forget my silly tears. I seem to have turned into an ever-dripping human sponge lately: Matt, hadn’t you better take a look at that girl, it’s been quite a while?”

  I said irritably, “Don’t teach me my job and I won’t tell you yours. The kid will keep, take my word for it. The subject is still Modesto, Miss Delgado.”

  She said, “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Modesto…”

  “I mean I’m not Miss Delgado. I’m Mrs. Delgado. Mrs. Roger Joaquin Delgado. I look a little Hispanic, but I’m not really. My maiden name was Dana Kingsbury.”

  I looked at her for a moment. “I see. So you were married to Delgado but slept with Encinias.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.

  “Well, it happens. It’s an immoral world full of immoral people. But you gave me the impression Modesto was a little, dumpy, middle-aged gent…”

  “I didn’t say dumpy. And while you may find it hard to believe, at your altitude, there are some nice men who don’t have to duck to go through doors. As for his age, well, after being married to Roger too long, I was ready for an older man, a grown-up man who knew how to be tender and considerate instead of… Oh, God, this is getting to be a real encounter session, isn’t it?”

  “The usual line is that you committed adultery because your husband was a brute.”

  She shook her head. “I could have endured being married to a brute, if he was an adult brute. But instead I found myself married to a little boy. A peevish little boy, if I didn’t mother him properly. Oh, he was good to look at, and pretty good in bed if he was humored and flattered and given the adoration he felt entitled to. And he was good at selling things; we weren’t poor. An ideal husband by some standards. We got along reasonably well as long as I understood clearly that I existed only to serve him, as his mother had. But if I showed signs of independence… Well, for instance, I’d been very good at mathematics at the university. When I decided that I wanted to learn more about computers, when I said I might even take a job as soon as the baby could be left with somebody, when I did get a good position after I’d finished my courses… How would you like to spend several years with an advanced case of the sulks, Matt?”

&nb
sp; “There was a child?” I asked.

  “Yes. The only good thing to come out of my marriage. Dolores. I hadn’t wanted to call her that, think of condemning a girl to spend her life being called Dolly, but it was his mother’s name and that was that. A sweet and wonderful child; and after I started working, he retaliated by staging a deliberate campaign to alienate her from me, spoiling her rotten and telling her what a meanie I was to insist on a few house rules. Telling her how I neglected both of them and it was him and her against the world. Making a point of taking her to church and proving what a heathen I was, pretending to be so tired I had to stay home after merely playing at my silly job all week. That was how… how it happened.”

  “It?”

  I was beginning to have a pretty good idea of what she was leading up to, but she needed a little help to get there.

  Dana licked her lips. “It was some kind of a special religious observance, I still don’t know exactly what. I’m supposed to be a Catholic, but I don’t work at it, except around Easter and Christmas. You know. But they got all dressed up for whatever it was and Dolly was happy and excited because there was going to be a lunch party after church, children and parents, at… at…” She faltered.

  I said, “At the restaurant of the Howard Johnson Hotel?”

  She nodded dumbly. There was a little silence. At last, she said, “It’s open on Sunday and it was handy, I guess. Anyway, they didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. At last somebody called to tell me…” She drew a long, shuddering breath. Then she went on mechanically: “Later, after I’d gone to… to identify, but there wasn’t really anything to identify except a little party shoe and a little purse, and a man’s wallet, later I took a big knife out of the kitchen of our apartment, and it wouldn’t go into my purse so I fastened it to my leg with some tape, under my slacks, and went to kill him. Paul. My lover. My tender, considerate lover. A big shot in that wonderful, patriotic organization that blows up children!”