The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  I grinned at him, unmoving, holding the Smith and Wesson hard against his side. "One of those Argentine greaseguns we saw the other morning, I suppose? The 9mm Luger Parabellum pistol cartridge, about thirty to the clip, right? That would really scramble a guy's brains, wouldn't it? Ramón, you're a fool. How long do you think you'll last after he pulls his trigger."

  Ramón licked his lips. "You are bluffing. Are you willing to die in order to—"

  I said harshly, "Hell, you've been trying to kill me for a couple of days. This way, at least I get to take you with me. Go ahead. Tell him to fire. Have you ever seen a man shot through the head, or anywhere else for that matter? He twitches, right? Do you know what the trigger pull of this weapon is, cocked? Barely two pounds. Just how many twitches do you think it will take, my dear friend and colleague? And you may have heard a lot of bull about the inadequacy of the .38 Special cartridge, but at contact range I guarantee that the bullet will blast a hole clear through your lungs from side to side, taking half your heart with it. If that's what you want, tell your gofer to shoot."

  There was a tense little pause. Ramón seized upon the unfamiliar term. "Gofer. What is that word, gofer?"

  "He's the man who goes for things," I said. "Things like beer across the street. Did the message get out, amigo? Did Amado manage to send word to Ernemann from Ciudad Constitucion, back there where you had us stop for gas, that Díaz will be landing his plane—well, O'Hearn's plane, complete with O'Hearn's pilot, and bodyguard—at Hotel Cabo San Lucas at eight tomorrow morning?" I grinned at him wolfishly. "Sure. I fed you the information hoping you'd pass it along to your imported hitman, and that's exactly what you did, isn't it?"

  His face told me I was right. "You won't live to take advantage of—"

  "I'll live," I said, I hope confidently. "You're playing in the wrong league now, Señor Solana-Ruiz. It's back to the minors for you. There was a time when I thought you were pretty hot stuff; but either I was mistaken or something's happened to you since we last met. I remember you using yourself for bait once, deliberately sticking your neck way out for your job and duty, but you wouldn't do that now, would you? Now you're trying to do things the safe and easy way. What happened? Did you get married and start a family? That's often the end of a good agent; suddenly he feels he's just got to keep on living for the wife and kiddies, and he can't face the big risks any longer. Is that the way it was?"

  "I am not married," Ramón said stiffly. "I do not know what you mean."

  "Sure you do," I said. "No, keep your hands right on the dashboard.... Sure you know why you're trying to get other men to do the dangerous work for you these days. Work like killing me. Hell, if you'd done it yourself, you could have had me the first day and never risked a thing. I suspected nothing from my good friend Ramón, the man who'd once saved my life, the man who'd just called out the troops to help me across the border.... But that's why you helped me, isn't it, so you'd have me in your hands all unsuspecting? But then you found you couldn't bring yourself to do it face to face, not with me armed and all hopped up from dealing with Euler, ready to take on all comers. I should have guessed something was wrong all along. You finally set up a two-man ambush on the beach; and when that didn't work you tried to trick a bunch of tough revolutionaries into doing the job for you." I regarded him bleakly. "No, no, my friend. You're not going to sacrifice your precious life now just to kill me, not a chance. I'm as safe as if I were home in bed. So tell your boy to lay down that toy ametralladora or fusil automatica or whatever you call it down here. Tell him to place it very gently on the hood of the truck and step away from it. Remember, as long as we sit here like this, you're two pounds from dead—that's less than a kilo by your reckoning."

  The actual trigger pull was four pounds. You don't generally hone it down to two on any weapon heavier than a .22 target pistol, but he didn't have to know that. I sat there and watched him—watched him die inside.

  He licked his gray lips. "You are crazy, Matthew. The advantage is all mine—"

  "No," I said. "It's all mine. Because I know that you want me dead to protect the man you hired to get Díaz for you. Maybe you even promised Ernemann you'd take me off his back if the bank account trick didn't work; maybe that was part of the deal. But you know I have no real reason to want you dead. Okay, so you tried to have me murdered a little, but I don't spend time on petty revenge when there's work to be done." I started to shake my head, but Amado's gun muzzle discouraged the gesture, so I just said, "No, I can't afford to give in. If I do, you'll shoot me right here, now that you know I know where you stand. But you can yield without anybody getting hurt. Be smart, Ramón. It's the only way either of us will get out of this alive."

  "If I give the order, how do I know you won't—"

  I said irritably, "You're not thinking, damn it! If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead now, wouldn't you? I'd have shot you while you were still picking yourself off the windshield, and then I'd have gunned this heap to hell out of here. Amado would never have got close, not with his feeble little Toyota six against my big Chevy V8. If I wanted you dead, if I wanted to go around killing Mexican agents, do you think I'd have deliberately put myself into this kind of a hairy standoff?"

  There was a lengthy silence. Motionless, the carryall was getting hot and stuffy in the desert sun. Another car drove by; the driver took a look, and blasted away in panic.

  "Amado." Ramón cleared his throat. "Amado...."

  The henchman's voice was expressionless. "What is the command, jefe?"

  "Lay it on the hood of the vehicle, Amado. Lay it down and step away from it...."

  It was no time for deep sighs of relief or the mopping of sweaty brows. There were still some tricky moments during which it helped me to be thought a nerveless human calculating machine, totally immune to fear. Under ordinary circumstances I'd have used a needle and a painless injection we have that keeps people asleep for about four hours—there are other injections with more permanent effects—but I'd left my drug kit way back in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fortunately I still had the big roll of tape I'd bought for another purpose.

  I got us off the road where we could work without being quite so much in the public view. I had Ramón tape up Amado, hands aft. I checked his work, and had him help his bound gorilla into the rear of the carryall. Then I taped up Ramón, hands forward, and put him into the passenger's seat. Finally, I went up to the Toyota and, after figuring out the manual gearshift, drove it off the highway and parked it out among the cacti where it would attract less attention.

  I was about to lock it up and leave it when the thought came to me that if Ramón had been in touch with Ernemann—as he apparently had been—he might very well have described my vehicle; he was less likely to have described his own. I sighed, and drove the Toyota over to the Chevy and, with considerable labor, transferred all passengers and luggage.

  Then I could afford, at last, to give that long-postponed sigh of relief and dry my face with my handkerchief as I drove us away. I could see, in the mirror, my large blue vehicle standing deserted by the roadside behind me. I wondered what my chances were of getting it back intact, assuming, of course, that I survived the next few hours, or days. Well, sacrifices are expected in the line of duty.

  Ramón was silent beside me. It was too bad, in a way. Even though it had saved my life more than once on this safari, it was too bad. I once knew a singer, a terrific baritone with Metropolitan ambitions, whose voice left him suddenly for no apparent reason. And there was the sports car driver I remembered, headed for the big time, who cracked up badly and, although his injuries seemed to heal all right, never quite managed to win another race. Something had gone and he could never get it back.

  "It was an ambush." Ramón's soft voice answered my thoughts. "The insurgentes were careless; they left me for dead, but I was not quite dead. But I could never afterwards.... I have often wished... He didn't finish. I didn't speak. After a while he asked, "How did you come to suspect me?"


  "You couldn't find anything," I said. "A well-known professional murderer and a pretty girl agent were both wandering through his country, and the efficient Señor Solana-Ruiz knew nothing, nothing. Hell, when the colonel and the marquis got on the horn just now, they had all the information about Ernemann they needed inside four hours; but you'd investigated for days and come up with zilch, or so you would have me believe. So what were you hiding from your old Yankee friend besides a revolution or two? Well, perfect frankness is rare between agents of different nationalities, and I didn't really suspect you of anything but an acute attack of security-consciousness until I got to those interesting dunes by Laguna de la Muerte. Again, inefficiency; you were supposed to cover me and I almost got killed. That wasn't the Ramón I used to know, particularly when you seemed more concerned about the men I'd shot than about my welfare. Of course, you made a brilliant retrieve with those IDs, proving that the Bureau of Internal Security was responsible; and you got a strong assist from Mrs. O'Hearn who obligingly went hysterical and tried to blast me full of holes—something you weren't slow to take advantage of. You'd been trying to throw suspicion on the lady all along to keep me from wondering about you. But there was one thing that didn't quite fit the BIS story you were trying to sell me."

  "What was that one thing, amigo?"

  I said, "We've got a bunch of two-fisted shooters up in the States these days. They've forgotten that the pistol was originally designed for one-hand use; they're so accustomed to clapping that second hand around the revolver butt that if you tied it behind them they'd die of frustration. I watched a BIS man in action just the other day. It never once occurred to him that if God had meant us to shoot a pistol two-handed, He'd have put two handles on it. Yet one of those ambush characters caught me with an empty gun, he had time to set himself for a good shot, and he just stuck out his hand—his one hand—and fired. It made me wonder a bit. It wasn't quite the way our great Bureau of Internal Security does its shooting."

  Ramón hesitated. "But the identifications, they were quite genuine."

  "Sure," I said, watching the black road sliding towards me in the sunshine that made it gleam like silver where it wound through the hills ahead. "But of course I never got to compare the pictures with the faces. And then Norma turned up and told a very interesting story about how she was almost kidnaped by two characters in Tijuana. I started thinking: what if those had been Euler's men—we speculated that he might have taken the risk of sending somebody across the border after her, remember? And suppose you weren't as totally ignorant about our girl's wanderings as you'd claimed. Suppose you'd actually had her under surveillance in Tijuana, and you'd nabbed the BIS boys when they made their play, but Norma got away in the shuffle. There would be two nice authentic IDs for you to use as you pleased. What did you do with the bearers?"

  Ramón shrugged resignedly. "They are unharmed. They are being held in Ensenada, under arrest."

  I guided the Toyota out to the edge of the two-lane pavement to give room to a large oncoming semi with Carmelita painted on the front bumper in ornate letters.

  I said, "As for those mercenary military characters and stray aristocrats who'd somehow got the idea I'd been imported to shoot their pet general, it wasn't hard to sell them that notion by a handy informant, was it? Particularly after you left your muscleman hanging around conspicuously to 'protect' me, demonstrating how very important I was to you. A little tough on Amado, but as you say, he's got a hard head. Unfortunately, instead of shooting me as you'd hoped, or locking me up for the duration, they let me talk them around, and in the process I picked up some interesting information. I'd started asking myself a lot of questions. It had seemed a little strange that you'd be so eager to help us dispose of Ernemann, once I started to think about it. After all, the guy was doing exactly what you needed done. He was going to kill Díaz and thereby drop a big rock into the delicate revolutionary works. So why were you helping us stop him? Or were you?"

  "I can see how you might wonder," Ramón said dryly. "I was afraid the question would occur to you before I could... dispose of you."

  "There was just one problem," I said. "Where would a Mexican agent find dollars in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands, for hiring an expensive gunman and framing anyone who threatened to interfere with his work?"

  "I did not frame you," Ramón said. "That business you and your chief have mentioned, about the banks up in the United States, I know nothing about it."

  "Well, okay, say Ernemann did it on his own with money you gave him, that's still a wad of cash. Governments don't dish out that kind of dough happily for far-out and controversial projects like assassination, so where did it come from? Colonel Huntington gave me a clue. There are, apparently, a good many wealthy Americans who are already settled comfortably in Baja California Sur and like it the way it is. They want no part of the Sanctuary Corporation and its military schemes. It occurred to me that in your desperate straits, trying to stop a revolution almost single-handed, you might have approached these people for funds and other help. And I remembered that in Mulege you'd chatted with a gent who looked like an American but spoke Spanish like a native; a gent who was apparently helping you in some kind of intelligence capacity." Again his face told me I had the right answer. I said, "Just one more thing. In all this mess have you come across a Chinese gent called Mr. Soo?"

  He frowned quickly. "Soo? No I have heard no such...." He stopped, and glanced at me, and shrugged. "I suppose it makes no difference now. Ernemann was seen to make rendezvous briefly with an unidentified Oriental in La Paz. That is all I know, and I cannot tell you what it signifies." He hesitated. "There is one question you have not asked, Matthew."

  "What's that?"

  "You have not asked why I had to hire a gunman to remove General Hernando Díaz. After all, I am considered fairly proficient with firearms myself."

  I said carefully, "There could be political reasons. A Mexican general shot by a Mexican agent would be difficult to explain."

  "But by the time explanations were required, Díaz would be dead and his revolution would be stopped and my task would be accomplished. No, my friend, I thank you for being diplomatic, but that is not the answer. The answer is that if I had tried to shoot the general, my hand would have shaken so badly that I would have missed."

  That evening we were in Cabo San Lucas.

  twenty-three

  The little town of Cabo San Lucas is on the tip of the Baja peninsula, right at land's end. It boasts, on the rocky point behind it, an elaborate new hotel named Finisterra. There's a small harbor and a landing for the seagoing ferry that'll take you to Puerta Vallarta, some four hundred miles to the southeast on the Mexican mainland. I picked up a few supplies in the little store marked Abbarotes and hurried to return to the Toyota I'd parked some distance away, before my prisoners worked themselves free or a curious kid peeked inside and discovered them.

  Finding everything under control, I got in and headed towards the Hotel Cabo San Lucas, which is located ten miles back up the highway from the town and the cape from which it takes its name. I didn't drive all the way back there, however. The 4WD Toyota, while not as big or conspicuous as my Chevy, was fairly distinctive in its own right, and I didn't want to keep it shuttling past the place repeatedly in case someone was watching the road. Anyway, driving by on the way down, I'd learned every thing about it that could be learned from the road. I'd learned that the hotel itself was a handsome, rambling establishment clinging to the steep rocky shore below the highway. The airstrip was on the high ground on the other side of the road, almost invisible from a passing car. I might have had trouble spotting its exact location if a small plane hadn't come in for a landing just as we drove by.

  Now I swung left across the pavement before I could see the hotel ahead—or be seen from it—and eased the Toyota down the highway embankment. I proceeded across country, heading inland, dodging cacti and thorny bushes, following a stony ridge that wouldn't show much in th
e way of tracks in case somebody came looking. When things got too rough, I swung down into the wide, sandy arroyo to the east. Starting up it, I felt the rear wheels dig in—I'd forgotten that with this vehicle you had to make a conscious effort to get four-wheel drive. I pushed and hauled at the pair of levers sprouting from the floor until I thought I'd set up the right combination, but she still wouldn't go. At last I remembered, and got out and locked the hubs of the front wheels. That fixed it, and we proceeded up through the brush until the arroyo narrowed and the spiny vegetation got so thick it would have taken a tank or bulldozer to make further progress. The Mexican-style odometer said I'd come about three kilometers, or a little over a mile and a half.

  I put the blocky wagon under a small tree, switched off the ignition, and sat there for a little, listening. There were only the buzzings of occasional insects, and the distant sounds of cars on the highway behind us. So far, so good.

  I got out and went back and dropped the tailgate and looked at my passengers lying neatly side by side—I'd put Ramón back there, gagged, before parking on the outskirts of the town. I went forward and picked up one of the Argentine squirt guns and the bag of groceries, returned, and set the bag on the tailgate. I dragged Ramón a little to the rear; then, holding the chopper one-handed—it was heavier than it looked—I reached into my pocket and got out my knife and flicked it open.

  "Hold out your wrists," I said, and cut him free. "Now you can take your gag off, and Amado's, and you can free Amado's wrists, but the ankles stay taped. There's beer and bread and meat and cheese in the bag. There's also another of these pea-shooters up forward, and your personal artillery, in case you've got an uncontrollable yearning for firearms. I hope you go for one of the guns. I'm being stupid and sentimental, keeping you alive. Just give me one small excuse and I'll fix that. Okay?"