The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

  I frowned as a question popped into my mind belatedly: What reason did I have for believing that Rita Bustamente was a simple little errand girl following other people’s orders? Or that her name was Rita Bustamente? I’d assumed the one and she’d told me the other. Ha-ha. Certainly she’d given a pretty good impersonation of a lowly, and slightly dumb, girl soldier of the underground army of freedom mouthing corny catch phrases from badly printed activist manuals, but I hadn’t really found her act convincing, any more than I’d believed in her abject capitulation to my threats. So what did I believe? Assuming that the little girl was more clever than she appeared, and more important, who was she really?

  “Oh, Christ!” I said softly. Then I glanced at the nearby statue and said, “Excuse me, padre.”

  I mean, dammit, how long does it take a man to wake up to what’s right under his nose? A smallish girl had been seen in Montego making contact with Dominic Morelos as a susceptible young tourist lady. A smallish girl had been seen in West Palm Beach helping blow up the restaurant called La Mariposa. Sandra had seen a smallish girl in a maid’s uniform leaving a bomb in her room disguised as a vase of flowers. And now a smallish girl had brought an assassination weapon to Raoul Bonnette, along with murder instructions, and allowed herself to be captured so she could feed me misleading information.

  We’d assumed in the earlier instances that the blonde girl in Montego had worn a dark wig in West Palm, and been her natural blonde self again in Newport; but it was high time I stopped making casual assumptions about people’s hair. One had almost killed me. We could just as easily be dealing with a dark girl who donned a blonde wig upon occasion. Angelita Johansen didn’t have to be blonde just because her name was Scandinavian. If it was her name. Maybe she was really Margarita Bustamente. Or maybe her true name hadn’t surfaced yet. It was no time to be wasting time on names, anyway.

  I was already hurrying back towards the little park where I’d left Dana—left an inexperienced agent to guard a prisoner who was much more dangerous than she knew. When I reached the place, the curb was filled with parked vehicles, but the brown two-door was not among them. I walked forward slowly. Something shiny lay on the sidewalk, a strip of silver duct tape, actually several layers, neatly cut through with a sharp knife. Another, similar strip lay in the gutter. Still retaining something of the shape of the wrists and ankles they’d bound, they put me in mind of the husk shed by an insect. A deadly insect.

  31

  I considered waiting until after dark to solve the tactical problem on Pacheco Street, but I decided against it. I didn’t have a clear picture of the enemy dispositions yet, and it was their city, not mine. In the dark, the advantage would be all theirs. Besides, I only had a .22 to shoot with, a gun with no knockdown power whatever. To compensate for the small caliber, accurate marksmanship would be required, hard to achieve at night.

  Furthermore, I didn’t want to wait for sunset. It was still a couple of hours away, and I didn’t want to wait at all. I had those scraps of duct tape in mind. As a matter of fact, I’d even found the roll itself discarded under the car that had taken the space formerly occupied by our rental. I remembered that, when I was immobilizing the girl, I’d cut off the last strip I’d needed with my knife and then smoothed down the remaining tape neatly for storage; but more tape had been ripped off since and the last few inches loosened and stuck themselves back onto the roll all wrinkled, with a ragged edge.

  All of which was a message to me from Margarita Bustamente, or Angelita Johansen, or whatever her real name might be. It read: I’ve got your woman all taped up, Yankee pig; did you really think a pretty lady like that could hold me?

  Well, at least Dana was still alive; nobody’d bother to secure a dead captive. What Rita/Angelita’s plans for her might be, I didn’t care to think about; nor did I waste time speculating about how the girl had managed to free herself and gain the upper hand. It happens when you leave untrained people in charge of dangerous prisoners, and it was entirely my fault. I’d been criminally slow in realizing who we had there.

  It was possible, of course, that Angelita, as I decided to call her, now expected me to proceed to the hotel where we had reservations—if she didn’t know our arrangements, she could learn them from Dana—and wait for her to call proposing some kind of deal; but we don’t deal. The hostage question is one every organization like ours must face, and Mac had found a simple, one-word answer: Disregard. We don’t play that game, ever, in any of its variations. However, we are permitted to try to liberate the hostage or hostages, preferably with maximum casualties among the opposing forces.

  But first I had to learn where. With my computer lady incommunicado, I’d have to get my CLL information elsewhere, say from the terrorists currently residing at 427 Pacheco Street. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to go there, and knock on the door politely, and ask the boys nicely where Angelita might have taken Dana.

  I found myself back at the little church. Passing the tall stone friar, or priest, or whatever the hell he’d been, I gave him a salute, thinking that it must have been nice, facing danger in a strange land, to know that God was right there beside you. My religion is as indefinite as my politics, but I’ve never been conceited enough to kid myself that, with a few billion other souls to worry about, the Deity takes a special interest in my affairs; although it sometimes does seem that the other guy likes to hang around making things difficult.

  I glanced down the length of Pacheco Street as I strolled along the church sidewalk. I could see the heavy traffic passing on the boulevard at the far end, five blocks away. It was a run-down street, mainly residential—I don’t know the exact point at which an apartment house becomes a tenement, but these buildings were getting close—with a couple of corner shops. There was also a small restaurant in the middle of the third block on the right-hand side, my landmark. I’d already determined that number 427 was right across the narrow street from it. Both buildings were three stories high. I moved along without pausing, but I retained the image of the shabby, distant doorway; the door Angelita had told me was kept unlocked; the door inside which, she’d told me, they’d be waiting for me.

  And if I believed all that, we’d have to try me next on the tooth fairy. If she said unlocked, the door was presumably not only locked but bolted. If she said inside, they were bound to be waiting for me outside. If she said in front, they were undoubtedly laying for me at the rear. Or were they? The old shell game. How clever was she; and how clever did she think I was? She’d told me the front was covered. Did that mean that she expected me to take her word for it and hit the presumably unprotected rear? Or would she think I’d think it was a double bluff and go for the front door she’d warned me against, on the assumption that she’d lied?

  I grimaced. A man could drive himself nuts trying to figure it out that way. So forget about Angelita’s information, true or false, forget about the walnut shells and the pea; use the brains. Remember that Bultman had been on the horn from New York, getting the boys and girls to set this up for my benefit. Well, if you had a tall, kind of stupid, but armed and dangerous, gringo to eliminate, and wanted to do it with reasonable certainty and safety, how would you go about it? You most certainly wouldn’t try to take him indoors, at close range, in a narrow dark hallway where your CLL gunners would get in each other’s way and he’d be bound to put a few bullets into somebody before he went down.

  There was also to be considered the welfare of the Yankee’s female prisoner, an important person, a member of the Legion and even of the Council of Thirteen. There was no possible way of ensuring her safety in a wild melee in a dusky corridor. Of course, this consideration no longer applied; but it had undoubtedly been a factor influencing the way the plans had been made. Even if the boys covering 427 had received notification of Angelita’s escape, it probably wouldn’t cause them to make any drastic changes in their arrangements now.

  The significant thing about what Angelita had told me, I decided, was what
she’d refrained from telling me. She’d given me a detailed description of the interior of the building, complete with front and rear stairs and padlocked closet. She’d practically taken me on a guided tour along San Remo Street in back of the place, and through the narrow walkway, and across the small rear courtyard to the entrance farthest to the right. But there had been no mention at all of the street in front, or the building across that street with its restaurant, or the street behind that…

  Having come a short block over, I found myself opposite the street in question. It was hardly better than an alley, a skinny, dark thoroughfare called Sebastian’s Lane. About to cross and explore it cautiously, I found myself continuing to walk straight ahead: There was something wrong. The little red light was flickering uncertainly at the back of my mind. The sensors weren’t getting a clear reading, but they’d picked up hostile emanations of some kind, and they were warning me that conditions down that alley might be unfavorable for survival. In retrospect, I realized that I’d got the same disturbing sensation looking down Pacheco. I kept on walking, therefore; I’ve been in the business too long to ignore that vague unease. It had saved my life too many times in the past. I decided that I’d better make a wide swing around the whole target area to get the feel of the neighborhood, and to see if everybody seemed to be acting naturally and if there was any significant concentration of parked vehicles anywhere.

  Sebastian’s Lane; and who the hell was Sebastian and who cared? They couldn’t have all the manpower in the world, I told myself. Concentrating on the Pacheco Street place, front or rear, or both if they belonged to the belt-and-suspenders school of assassination, they probably wouldn’t have people to spare for guarding all the nearby streets and alleys. Not just for a simple ambush. And still… and still, when we’d been riding through Old San Juan on the way here, I’d got an impression of bustling vitality; but this part of town felt dead, dead, dead. The few pedestrians visible had a frightened, scurrying look, as if they wanted to get away from the area as fast as possible. In a city like this, at least in the less well-to-do sections, the people would have their own early-warning signals, and apparently the quiet word was going around: Stay indoors or get clear!

  It was what had alerted me, of course, although I hadn’t recognized it at once: the emptiness of the streets I’d been looking down, and the electricity in the air; the eve-of-revolution feeling. Everybody was waiting for the guns to start firing. It would have been flattering to think it was all for me; but it seemed unlikely that a whole section of San Juan was holding its breath waiting for one lousy little murder, even mine.

  I made a wide circle, completing it four blocks in back of the church. Then I closed in a little and circled again, zigzagging through the little alleys and walkways cautiously, working my way around the address on a radius of roughly three blocks. Two vans parked together, one new and blue, the other old and white, held my attention briefly, maybe because the blue one reminded me of Dominic Morelos’s elongated heap; but if they were getaway vehicles, they’d be guarded, so I stayed clear. I didn’t know what I was really looking for until I found it: a familiar little brown two-door sedan backed into a narrow space between two buildings. Angelita hadn’t driven very far with her prisoner. Apparently she’d come right here to report her escape, so the boys would know that when I appeared they could fire at will without endangering one of their own.

  The area was still unnaturally quiet. I moved forward cautiously with the usual feeling, down there between the buildings, of having eyes watching me from above and maybe even cross hairs steadying on my spine. I consoled myself with the thought that the CLL had exhibited no long-range expertise to date. They’d used their homemade minicannon at point-blank range to deal with Varek’s armored Mercedes, and Morelos had brandished a handgun without much skill; aside from that they’d stuck strictly to high explosives.

  I kept those explosives in mind as I approached the rental car, and made no attempt to open it. I didn’t even touch it. I simply determined by looking that there were no bodies inside—it was one of the new ones without a real trunk. There was just a space behind the rear seat, cover missing. The only blood I could see was a few spatters resulting from my interrogation of Angelita… A sound behind me made me whirl with the silenced Ruger in my hand.

  “Matt, no! It’s me. Don’t shoot!”

  I stood staring at the sturdy young woman facing me, dressed in white slacks and a big blue shirt belted outside the pants. Blue high heels gave her a little more height than she was entitled to, but she was still a short girl. Although it had only been a day since I’d last seen her, the shorn black hair seemed to have grown significantly, so you were hardly conscious of the fading scar; but now she had her left arm in a sling. I seemed to recall that the right was the one that had been immobilized when I’d first met her. Accident-prone. But an attractive young lady nevertheless.

  I could allow myself to appreciate how attractive, now. I no longer had to keep telling myself firmly she was just a chunky little kid, bright and pleasant but not really very pretty, and my daughter-in-law. Another woman had ensured that there was no longer any danger of my making an awkward mistake in that direction.

  “Sandy, you’re supposed to be in the hospital. What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  32

  Young Mrs. Helm led me two blocks over and three and a half blocks back, meaning away from the target area. The door at which she paused looked no different from any of the doors I’d passed elsewhere in that rather downbeat area, but a small dark man in grimy jeans and a torn T-shirt was squatting against the wall nearby, smoking a cigarette. I didn’t know him; but I knew that he wasn’t the local bum he was trying to impersonate, and I sensed that he was armed. He had that look. Sandra glanced his way, he gave her a nod; and we went up two steps and inside.

  “It’s the third floor,” she said over her shoulder, leading the way up the stairs.

  “I think I can make it if I get to stop and pant occasionally,” I said.

  “I hope I can,” she said. “I don’t seem to have got much strength back yet.”

  “You’re doing well to be standing on your feet at all,” I said. “It’s only in the movies that people get shot and go rock-and-rolling next day.”

  “Pulling on my pants one-handed is the really hard part,” she said.

  I hadn’t asked where she was taking me and she hadn’t volunteered the information. Of course she could have been leading me into a trap. There are ways of putting pressure on just about anybody, to do just about anything. But I didn’t think there was any way of turning this girl into a good enough sneak to make it convincing. Besides, hell, you have to trust somebody.

  “In here,” she said, opening a door.

  The hallway had been shabby, but the apartment we entered, while far from new, looked clean enough if a bit cluttered. There was a man guarding the door whom I recognized.

  “Willard,” I said, to let him know I remembered his code name. We’d worked together once, quite a while ago.

  “Go on in, Eric,” he said. “The living room. The door to the right.”

  It wasn’t a bad living room, if you went in for strong colors and statuettes of Mary and Jesus and lots of knick-knacks and ornate, overstuffed furniture. I’m not being ironical. It wasn’t my taste, but it looked like a lived-in room in which people had been happy and comfortable among their souvenirs and mementos, and might be again, as soon as somebody removed the compact walkie-talkie, antenna extended, that rested on the bathtowel that had been spread to protect the low shiny table in front of the sofa, and the two machine pistols beside it, and the four extra twenty-round magazines. In order to be really happy and comfortable, they’d also have to get rid of the man on the sofa. He’s one of the least comfortable characters I know.

  The weapons were the smallest of their type I’d seen. I like to keep up with the new ones, and I’d read up on the Yugoslav Skorpian when it made its appearance years ago. Howev
er, although its compactness has made it fairly popular, I’d never met one before. I remembered that, while it’s offered in several calibers, the best-known version, which this seemed to be, shoots the .32 ACP cartridge, a gutless old round that has only about a third the muzzle energy of an ordinary police .38. The revival of this weak and obsolete cartridge is in line with the modern weapons theory stating that with a fully automatic firearm you don’t need a powerful cartridge for short-range social functions since you can put several of the feeble bullets into the target. If you just keep plugging, pun intended, the multiple impacts will eventually add up to a greater shock factor than can be achieved with a single powerful slug.

  The truth is, of course, that nowadays they pass out these squirt guns just so they won’t have to be bothered with teaching people how to put one bullet where it counts.

  “Be careful, Eric,” Mac said as, entering the room, I brushed against a flimsy little table by the doorway that held some souvenir ashtrays, a tricky vase with artificial flowers, and a small statuette, perhaps a saint. “Don’t knock anything over. The nice people just lent me this place to use as a temporary command post. I don’t want any of their treasures broken.”

  I looked at him for a moment. I suppose I should have been surprised to see him, since he doesn’t get out into the field much. However, nothing he does ever really surprises me.

  “What’s a B-code, sir?” I asked. “Our B-code?”

  “We have no such thing as a B-code,” he said.

  “I was told differently.”

  “Then you had better check with your informant.”

  “I will if I can reach her,” I said.

  I had no idea whether or not he’d given me a truthful answer. He hadn’t seemed surprised by the question; but he doesn’t give much away. I regarded him a moment longer. We’d never really been friends in spite of working together so many years; but there had been times when we’d been friendlier than now. I found that, rather to my surprise, I regretted this. I remembered that it had all started with an argument about a dog, for God’s sake! How ridiculous could you get? I turned and pulled up a chair for Sandra.