“There’s nobody in the truck,” shouted the other. “Something fishy here.”
The sound of Kerrivan’s boots punching at the metal screen was masked by the blare of the horn. The fastenings were starting to give.
From the corner of his eye, Kerrivan saw two huge swatches of herring net swirl through the air, weights tied to the sides. The netting fell on the guards, taking them off their feet.
Kerrivan got enough of the screen open to jam his body through, and he squeezed over into the front seat, still handcuffed, and somersaulted out of the passenger door, onto the road’s shoulders and into the ditch.
The guards were by now screaming panicky curses. Of the boys sliding out from behind the trees, Kerrivan could make no one out for certain. Their faces had been blackened by charcoal.
He saw headlights snap on by a side road. Two men raced up to the cruiser, and one yelled, “Where the fuck is he?” That was Bill Stutely.
“I’m down here, b’y,” Kerrivan called. “Getting some air.”
“And would ye be good enough to stay there, Captain, sorr, while I signal our radio man to send the word.” Stutely pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on and off three times, then repeated the signal. His companion, slightly built — Kerrivan guessed it was Tommy Hogan — got into the front seat of the jail escort car and began cutting out the wires to the ignition and police radio with a fish knife.
The guards were by now tangled hopelessly. Kerrivan’s rescuers continued to throw nets on top of them.
Kerrivan had no trouble recognizing the form that now came hurtling down the slope of the ditch towards him, high on his Harley 1600. Midge Tobin, built like a buffalo, and looking like Zeus in his full brown beard.
Kerrivan swung up behind him. “Where’s my helmet?” he said. “Isn’t no helmet against the law?”
“Ain’t against my law, Pete. Hang on.”
Kerrivan did. The bike spit gravel until sparks flashed, swinging deep into the ditch to avoid the top branches of the fallen tree, then it accelerated westward towards Gander.
A few minutes later, Dewey Fitzgerald’s bike pulled up alongside them. On the back, grinning at Kerrivan like a lunatic, was Johnny Nighthawk.
***
“The pressure can be enough down here to cave your face in,” Dr. Jan Bjarling, the team leader, warned.
“I know.”
“You may black out for a little while.”
“I can handle it. I’ve been down to five hundred meters.”
But this was seven hundred. Even Levontov of the crack Soviet Navy team had not been able to handle anything below six hundred.
It was starting to hit him. After fifteen minutes he would enter the cockpit of the bell jar. And then he would have maybe eighteen minutes to get the bell jar into the Ryuku Trench, perhaps seven minutes to dismantle the neutron device. No more.
O’Doull had to get back up. He had, after all, made that promise to Suzanne, the medical student, who was waiting up top. Suzanne, with the sea-green eyes. . . .
In the airport bar, O’Doull slowly plunged his swizzle stick into the deep recesses of a tall glass of rum, into the trench between the ice cubes, down, down, to where his face was about to cave in.
“Paging Sergeant O’Doull.”
He heard his name being called from someone up top. It was not the voice of Dr. Jan Bjarling.
“Paging Sergeant O’Doull of the RCMP. Would Sergeant O’Doull please go to the RCMP office near the west door.”
O’Doull, somewhat impaired, slid off the bar stool and found his way to the airport detachment where a uniformed man passed the phone to him.
Wegthorne, the analyst.
“All right, Wegthorne, I’m sorry. I just lost control of myself.”
“I did the analysis.”
“All I can do is apologize.”
“It took a little longer than I expected.”
“What took a little longer?”
“The analysis.”
“You paged me to tell me you did the analysis.” O’Doull looked hard at the receiver as if Wegthorne’s face might be seen there, and could be studied.
“Actually, Theo, to tell the truth, none of the samples analyzed out.”
“The samples . . . give me that again?”
“It’s all alfalfa. Hay. It took me a while to pin it down. Alfalfa smells like pot, especially when you burn it.”
“Alfalfa?”
“Alfalfa.”
O’Doull slowly put the receiver back on the hook. He stared at the floor, frowning, then walked to the Air Canada counter. “I want you to reroute me,” he said. “Miami. The fastest way I can get there.”
“You may be a little late getting out. They’re holding up all flights to eastern Newfoundland. There’s some kind of kafuffle up at Gander International.”
***
They hit a hundred and eighty kilometers an hour, the bikes thundering like an artillery barrage. Kerrivan had his arms around Tobin’s great belly, his eyes smarting from the whip of the air rushing by. They moved like bullets past cars and lumbering trucks, taking the curves with a list that made his stomach churn.
Tobin spun off onto the airport road east of Gander, glanced at his watch, and shouted back to his passenger, “We got two minutes. We ain’t gonna stop at no gate.”
The bike crashed through a wooden barrier and through the gate. The watchman rushed outside his guardhouse, yelling and waving, then leaped for his life as Fitzgerald’s hog came screaming through the gate.
There was chaos in the tower. The air controller was shouting through an airport-wide system. “Get those guys off the field! Alert all aircraft! Get those assholes out of there!”
“Oh, Jesus, there’s something coming!” his assistant yelled.
It was on the screens — and it was out there to the south — and it was all lit up and forty feet above the runway and coming down.
“Looks like a goddamn B-26!”
Johnny Nighthawk
We run for the plane as it brakes and wheels about, and we are up the ladder before Billy Lee has finished his U-turn.
The two-wheel boys are still running patterns on the runway, and there are so many sirens and flashing lights it is like a traveling carnival.
Billy Lee guns it, playing chicken with an oncoming police car. Billy Lee wins, the car goes careening away into the mud.
“Git up, sweet baby, git up! Git up, Mary Jane!”
His beautiful old bomber skims over the treetops and settles into an altitude no more than two hundred feet above them.
“Man, am I tired,” Billy Lee says. “I been flyin’ all day. On uppers, lid-proppers. Didn’t have no time to say hello to the folks back home. Jus’ put a couple of bladder tanks on the wings and flew like crazy.” He blinks his eyes and stretches.
“I worked this here out with one of your boys on the way out of here. Knew I’d have to time that little ol’ touchdown to the second. I mean I ain’t even stoned — I had to be that sharp, man.”
He lights a big joint that is sitting in the ashtray. “At last, man,” he says. He takes a deep draw on it, holds his breath, then blows out. “Ah, man, this here shit is just so fine. You guys know some friendly place over on the mainland where we can gas up?”
“Northern Maine,” says Pete. He picks up a chart and shows the spot to Billy Lee.
“And where do you reckon we should go after that, Pete?”
“Miami.” Pete says it ever so softly. . . .
***
Mitchell, alone in his hotel room, was on the telephone with Wegthorne. “Somebody did a switch on you,” he said.
“No sir, no way. I have the only key to the locker.”
“O’Doull has a key.”
“No, sir. Standard procedure — one key. Also, the init
ials of the members who took the samples were on the seals on the envelopes. What does it all mean, Inspector? What happens to Kerrivan now?”
Mitchell spoke slowly. “I guess he . . . goes free. We’ll get the conviction quashed.”
Mitchell let the phone slip into the cradle. He poured himself a large tumbler of scotch and water. Everything was in ruins.
The phone rang again. It was from the Gander airport detachment.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Jessica Flaherty leaned from the driver’s seat and smiled amiably at O’Doull from the passenger window. “You came all the way back down here just to see little old me? Nice.”
Flaherty did find him attractive. Gentle, perhaps a little too earnest. But attractive.
O’Doull slung his bag into the back, got in, and she drove off.
“If it’s not too much to ask, what’s up?” she said. “A mysterious call from the Miami airport. A quick clandestine meeting at Concourse B. A handsome Canadian Mountie. A sexy female narc. Now what — a little motel?”
O’Doull glanced at her. She was definitely sexy, sexy in a low style. She was in faded jeans, high leather boots, and a T-shirt a size too small. On it were the words “Blow it up your nose” and a comic face with straws sticking out of both nostrils.
“I’m undercover,” she said. “Do you think it’s too obvious?” She looked at his heavy tweed jacket. “You’re going to die in that thing.”
O’Doull shrugged it off and threw it over the seat. “I didn’t have time to change,” he mumbled.
They drove in silence. She took an aimless route, the expressway to the west, then Highway 27.
“What am I supposed to do to make you talk?” Flaherty asked. “Put splints under your nails?”
“We’ve been had, Jess. Duped and diddled. There’s an old con trick, the gypsy switch. That’s what Kevin was trying to say to Pete on the ship-shore phone — Meyers had done a gypsy switch on them.”
“Gypsy switch?”
“You buy a gold watch and they pull a switch on you; you open the package and it’s made of tin. Or you buy a gram of coke and find out it’s confectioner’s sugar.”
“Or you buy some grass,” she said smiling. “And you find out it really is grass. The kind the cows feed on.”
O’Doull looked at her quickly. She began to laugh.
“Suckers,” she said. “I told Mitchell he should call it Operation Crackpot.” She was laughing so hard that tears were beginning to come. She had to pull over to the side of the road and wipe her eyes. O’Doull just stared at her.
“Fifty tons of alfalfa,” she said, coughing, struggling to control herself. “So it took your brilliant police force this long to figure it out. God, I’d love to have seen Mitchell’s face. The poor schmuck.” She took a deep breath. “I hope you guys haven’t paid Meyers yet. But I guess you haven’t. He’s disappeared.”
“You’ve known all along?” O’Doull shook his head as if trying to clear one of his daydreams from his mind. “Do you mean you guys did the switch on us?”
Flaherty tried to settle herself down, but broke out in giggles after a few seconds. “No, no. What do you think we are — crooks? Meyers was using you. Rudy Meyers — your own hired agent.”
“And you were using us,” O’Doull said slowly.
Flaherty started driving again, looking over her shoulder, pulling into the traffic. “Nope. You’ve been double-diddled but not by me. Hell, I’m sorry, but it fell into place for us. When Mitchell originally came to me for help in finding a double agent, a drug mole, I figured: this is perfect — the best possible way to keep an eye on Meyers. I knew Meyers was looking for a skilled crew to carry a big crop owned by Paez. And I figured this was the best way to keep a watch on him. A controlled delivery, as we say. And, Christ, for Meyers, it seemed perfect, too. He could get his dope into the States under the protection of the Royal Canadian Mounties. The shipment of alfalfa hay would be seized and burned. Paez would be none the wiser.”
O’Doull slid back into his seat. He felt he was becoming unstuck.
“When we figured out that the dope was going to come in via Florida after all, Meyers became the big fish that we were trying to catch. Kerrivan and his band — they were just bait. Small fry wiggling on the hook.”
“And what were we?”
Flaherty glanced at O’Doull. Was he just squinting at her, or was he glaring? “You were his delivery service. The RCMP sea express.”
“Holy God,” O’Doull whispered softly to himself. After a while he asked, “How did Meyers do the switch?”
She avoided the question at first. “Ever been out to the Glades? It’s a pretty drive.” She turned west into Florida City, then continued along the highway to the National Park.
“Your Sat-Track device,” she said. “That was Meyers’s excuse for pulling the ship into Miami. The transmitter probably could have been installed while the ship was still in Colombia, but Meyers needed a way to get the pot into the States. So he convinced Mitchell to go along with all the bullshit — the arrest on the high seas, the phony courtroom act.”
She looked at him, wondering how he was taking this. She felt a little badly — he was a nice guy.
“How do we know all this?” she said. “I had a man on the inside, code name Alfredo J., who was keeping me posted. Told me about Paez’s big crop. Told me Meyers planned to do the switch in Miami. His Cuban guerrillas, the guys from the April Seventeen Movement, picked up a crop of hay somewhere, bagged it up in the standard sisal-wrapped bultos. They did the switch while Kerrivan’s ship was sitting in the marina getting a paint job.” She shook her head. “We missed it. Meyers is so quick, I can’t believe it.”
“And how was the switch made?”
“Remember the rusted old trawlers that were sitting beside the Alta Mar when it was in the ship hangar? When we guessed what had happened and went out there, we found the trawlers had been towed away. Yep, all that fancy electronic equipment, the new paint job — all that was just a smokescreen while Meyers’s men worked all night moving bales from the Alta Mar to the holds of the trawlers.”
“Jess, I was on board the next day, checking out the Sat-Track, making sure it was functional. There was a bag of marijuana on the deck, open, spilling all over the place. It wasn’t alfalfa.”
“Oh, yeah, well they left that one bale on board the Alta Mar. A Coast Guard guy had ripped it open with a knife. They left it there so Kerrivan wouldn’t get suspicious.”
Flaherty pulled into a picnic area and killed the engine. She picked up a handful of cassette tapes from under the dashboard. “What kind of music do you like? Streisand? Willie Nelson? Rolling Stones? Everything for every taste. I’ve got Johnny Mathis singing ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.’”
“I don’t care. I’m not interested in music.”
“Something a little erotic? Here’s something, like the disc jockey says, that I know you’re going to enjoy.” She dropped a tape in.
There was nothing for a minute, just some rustling. Then a male speaking Spanish in a husky voice.
“Translated,” Flaherty said in a flat tone, “it means: ‘No, my darling, take everything off. My God, how beautiful you are.’ Let’s move it ahead to the juicy parts.” She pushed fast forward.
A heavy male groan. A woman’s voice: “Come inside me. Oh, please come inside me.” It was Marianne Larochelle. O’Doull’s stomach turned over.
Again the man spoke in Spanish. Flaherty translated tonelessly, like a first-grade pupil reading from a primer: “‘Let me kiss it first. Let me reach inside you with my tongue.’” Flaherty’s voice then became inflected with anger. “That bastard! That handsome, beautiful bastard! Here I am, sitting in a dark room, staring outside at a glorious moon, recording all of this, listening to it.”
Then her voice became mournful. “You know, I really liked him.
”
Heavy groans of sexual hunger came from the cassette. O’Doull wanted to scream at Flaherty to turn it off.
“Got to assume she isn’t carrying the test tube of coke in there right now,” Flaherty said. “I imagine they’d been snorting it earlier.”
Larochelle’s voice rose rapidly in pitch: “Oh yes, oh yes. Oh please God, please don’t stop. Mon Dieu! My God!”
O’Doull was swamped by an ugly wave of déjà vu.
“Dios!” the man shrieked.
Larochelle’s voice: “Oh, Augustin, what have you done to me? I feel so strange. It’s never been like this. Oh, God, I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Flaherty loudly clapped her hands in mock applause. “Bravo! What a powerful performance.”
“Hold me,” Larochelle’ voice said. “Stay inside me.”
“Forever,” said the voice of Escarlata.
Flaherty took no notice of the fact that O’Doull’s face had turned white. She merely sighed and sped the tape again. “Gets to you, doesn’t it? We had enough wire in that penthouse to stretch a line to L.A. All legal, too.” She pushed the stop button. “Okay, next scene: Kevin Kelly comes to the door about ten minutes later. He had been out getting stoned with some hippies in the park. Marianne and Augustin scramble out of bed. There’s some awkward conversation among the three of them. Then Colonel Escarlata blurts out to Larochelle: ‘Don’t go back to Canada. It’s dangerous.’”
Flaherty found the right place on the tape after some switching back and forth.
“Mi vida, don’t go back to Canada. Stay with me. It’s dangerous, and you can be arrested.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have been — how do you say? — set up.”
Flaherty said, “She’s really done a number on him and he is out to save her skin from the Mounties — and her friends’ skins, too, for that matter.”
“I will go back to Cuba. Please come with me.”
“What in the name of the good Lord is going on?” Kelly’s voice.
“There is a transmitter on the ship which Rudy and the police have put there. It is to track the ship by satellite.”
High Crimes Page 30