by Barry, Mike
Wulff took out his pistol and held himself against the door evaluating the situation. It looked fairly grim. They were going to have to shoot their way out of the building, that is if they got out at all. “Let’s go,” he said to Stevens. “Do you know where we can get to DiStasio?”
“I know where we can find him,” Stevens said. “If he’s still there. He may have already left the country. Wouldn’t you with the supplies he’s got now? He’s come into an inheritance.”
“He wouldn’t,” Delgado said, “he wouldn’t do that. He’d—”
Wulff looked at Delgado and then toward Stevens. He could see the desire in the pilot’s eyes. “All right,” he said, “kill him.”
“With pleasure,” said Stevens. He slapped Delgado once more in the face, almost casually, and backed off from him, levelling the pistol.
“Please,” Delgado said.
“Fuck you,” said Stevens and pulled the trigger. The shot tore, almost absently, through Delgado’s skull, taking out pieces of bone and hair. A little halo of fragmentation hung around the man’s head for an instant, then disappeared in the glow of the lights. The thing that had been Delgado rolled from the desk and hit the floor with a watery sound.
Stevens levelled the pistol and put two more shots into the neck. The corpse jumped; beyond life it was apparently not beyond pain. More blood exploded, lacing little strips of red on the carpet.
“Enough,” Wulff said.
“Son of a bitch,” said Stevens, “son of a bitch you just don’t know—”
“It’s over. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You don’t know what it means,” Stevens said and fired the pistol again. Wulff aimed, shot the pistol neatly from Stevens’s hand even before he had gotten off the next shot. Stevens’s pistol spanged against the wall as the man clutched his wrist, turned toward Wulff with the aspect of a man who was about to be killed.
“There’s no time for this shit,” Wulff said, “we’ve got to get out of here. We’ll never find DiStasio unless we get out of here.
“I wish that the son of a bitch was alive again so that I could kill him twice.”
“That’s all right,” Wulff said, “but one death is the most a gun can get out of a man.”
Not, however, drugs, he thought. Drugs could extract an infinity of deaths.
The voices in the hall were rising.
XI
They burst from the room together, heading toward ground as soon as they were out of the door, ducking into the low-fire position. Staying in there was no good, Wulff had decided, not two long flights up with no visible means of scaling down the wall. They could be burned or gassed out merely waiting; when in doubt, combat training had taught him, it was best to make a frontal attack. You had, at least, surprise on your side and it was possible that the enemy would fail in courage. You could intimidate them. Even forty men could be intimidated by two if you came at them in a certain way.
The hall was filled with noise and uniforms; guards had sprung from the lower levels to fire aimlessly without seeming direction and one of them, stupidly, threw a tear-gas cannister, probably thinking that this was a clever idea. It was not, however, the plumes of smoke choked and blinded the guards nearest it, the fumes dispersing harmlessly by the time that they had wafted toward Wulff and Stevens and crouched on the floor they offered poor enough targets anyway; they were even poorer without visibility. Down the hall women were screaming, the typists had come from their offices to stand in the corridors, then shriek for cover and Wulff, from the low position, fired a couple of shots above their heads, just to create further confusion.
It created more than confusion; it was total panic. The guards were trying to close in on them but they had no idea where Wulff or Stevens were. Also, the women blocked their passage, taking the guards, in the clouds of gas, to be the assailants themselves and the noise volume was rising, creating further panic. Wulff, using Stevens as a screen, got off a couple of careful shots, dropped two guards quickly, then reloaded while Stevens put fire ahead of them. The screams rose and then someone threw a grenade at them. It fell on the carpet, yards in front and went up in a sheet of flame but the flame too was protective. The attackers’ luck was not with them at all this morning; the flame merely walled off Stevens and Wulff from their assailants down the hall, setting up a protected area through which Wulff could pinpoint his fire and more guards dropped. He had lost count; there must have been seven bodies on the floor, half of the original force anyway. Stevens turned toward him, his face smeared with smoke residue and murmured, “I think we can get out now.”
“Not through them.”
“No. Don’t have to.” His speech was coming in short, stricken puffs. “There’s a back way.” Stevens motioned behind them. “Direct to the street.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “give ground slowly though. Maintain fire.”
“Right,” Stevens said and got off another shot through the flame. Someone screamed. They had opened up an area in front of them now of at least several yards; through the dying flame they could see that the guards had retreated. Fire was only sporadic now. A clot of people at the end of the hall were wedging themselves into a staircase. “Keep it up,” Wulff said, “go back step by step,” and back-pedalled slowly then, holding the pistol level, imagining the guards to be pins set up in a long, flat alley, and he used the bowling ball of the gun to knock and scatter those pins, sent them sprawling one by one to lie in the refuse of that long alley. Stevens was already back-pedalling down the stairs, firing himself; Wulff held in close to one of the walls to cover from that angle, and then one of the guards, perhaps the last one standing, began to fumble inside his clothing, reached in there, took out something ominously shaped and threw it. Wulff found himself reacting before he was even sure what had happened; he caught the grenade on the fly and hurled it back at the guard, then turned, leaped down the full flight of stairs, sprawled down another, the dull whoomp! of this second grenade heard above him and then the upper level literally shook. Scars of fragmentation burst open above him and he heard the reverberating concussion. No dud this grenade: this would kill anyone standing within six feet of it and probably had, he thought, it probably had.
But better not to think of the destruction above. That was behind him. Wulff found himself on the first level, the door adjacent to him open. He went through it and was in what appeared to be a large convoy area to the opposite side of the building; here were a number of vehicles lined up in a huge, flat yard, some of them with engines idling. There was no one here; apparently the fury on the third floor had drawn everyone up there as spectator if not participant.
“Look at that,” Stevens said to him, gripping him by the arm. He had backed off ten to twelve feet from the building, was staring upward. “Son of a bitch, look at that.” His features were twisted in something approaching reverence; Wulff looked up and saw what was happening on the third floor.
Jets of flame like propeller blades were shooting from the building, arcs and circles of fire. The third floor had imploded, buckled in within itself and was now open to the air in a hundred ways, holes and jagged lines of destruction opening it up and it was through these openings that the fire sped. Even as they looked, the implosion was continuing, that level carried in upon itself like a smashed bag and within the heart of this forms which looked like ants seemed to be struggling around, black, shrivelled forms trembling in the wreckage. “Those are people,” Stevens said quietly. “My God, those are people.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Wulff said. He inhaled, the stink carrying deep within his gut. “That whole building is going to go,” he said.
“They must be evacuating the other side,” Stevens said, “but they’ll be back here any moment.”
Indeed they would. Wulff could hear the sirens dimly now. It was the international sound just as drugs was the international currency; the universal, recognizable point of connection. The sirens carried on the wind, approaching.
�
�All right,” Stevens said. He sprinted away down the line of vehicles, lumbered into a small jeep. Wulff watched him struggle with the clutch and levers and then the vehicle was free, rolling toward him. He put a foot on the running board and then with some difficulty got all the way in, Stevens helping him.
“We’ll have to make a run for it,” Stevens said. “There’s no other way. We’re going to have to drive right through them.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “you know your geography.”
There was a secondary series of explosions above and the roof of the building fell down. It was as simple as that. Staring up they could see the roof settle to a different level, diving five or six yards toward the earth, held up then by the beams themselves, the beams stretching upward almost like human arms for that laborious support and then, almost as if in slow-motion or freeze-frame the roof came all the way down, swooping through the building like a cookie-cutter, compressing the first floor.
Stevens was already rolling. His reflexes were still there if not his attention. He had the jeep in full flight before the swath of destruction had been cut, and bearing left, away from the building he sent them away at fifty miles an hour, the sheer discord of metal underneath them, the bolts and joints of the vehicle slamming at thighs and back with iron hands as Stevens carried them away: away from the burning capital, away from the sirens, away from the death and the terror, into the garbage-strewn back streets of Havana where the same empty faces looked at them as they whipped past … the faces so unchanged and unchangeable that if the burning building had been dropped on them they merely would have died without attention.
Wulff’s hands clenched on the bar underneath the windshield as he held on for balance. His thoughts had already turned from the destroyed capital, had restlessly probed ahead—like blood through a sick artery—to the next point of interception.
He was thinking about DiStasio.
God help DiStasio now.
XII
When the panicked phone call from Delgado had come in DiStasio’s first impulse had been to seize the man, detain him to once. Certainly he had all grounds for reasonable detention simply based upon what Delgado was babbling. But on second thought he decided not to do this; detention was not the answer because it would put the transaction into official channels and he wanted that as little as Delgado would. No, everything had to be done sub rosa, worked out on a quiet level. Delgado was insistent about that himself. DiStasio could see the point.
So he had gone into Delgado’s office, verified for himself that the man was frantic but credible and had taken the valise from him. Delgado’s terms were a straight fifty-fifty split after he was able to make arrangements to leave the country and arrange for distribution. DiStasio had humored him in his heavy-handed way because he had already made another and better decision. Delgado was not going to get back those drugs. He was not going to get them back in any form or condition because he did not deserve them and furthermore, the man could not function under pressure of any sort. Already, just under the flick of the botched assassination, he was starting to come apart.
“You leave it to me,” he had said to Delgado. “You just let me take care of this and we’ll work out the final terms later,” and Delgado had nodded weakly, reluctantly: what, after all, could he do otherwise? By calling in DiStasio he had already ceded control of the situation. Delgado was no fool; he could see that. But there had been, as DiStasio left the room clutching the valise, just a hint, a brush of indecision in Delgado’s eyes which confirmed DiStasio’s original estimation: he would have to have the man eliminated. There was no room in this scheme for a partnership arrangement; Delgado would ruin everything.
He had taken the valise, given it to his chief clerk Alejandro Figueroa and told him to take it to his estate, turn it over to the garageman, return. Figueroa had taken the valise solemnly, without a word of comment and done exactly that. Figueroa would do anything that DiStasio asked and do it without comment; he knew that DiStasio could have him killed by whim, and that was sufficient reason and justification for a man like Figueroa. That was sufficient for all of them; DiStasio had worked himself through risk and difficulty to a position where he held that power over a number of people including all of his staff members. And, he understood, it was the only power that meant anything at all. It came down, at the end of it, to power, the ability to inflict pain and death and if that was the world in which he lived, unfortunate as it might be, it was how DiStasio would run things. There might be a different world, a little further down the line where things other than power were the ultimate authority but until he reached that point he would settle for this.
So he had the valise at his estate and a fairly good idea of how to move from there on, but there was still the problem of Delgado. Delgado would have to be eliminated. He had pondered this decision for a little while, giving it some minutes of concentrated thought, balancing off the fact of Delgado’s survival against the possibility of his death, seeing all of the implications and coming to the decision with hesitance. But once he had reached it, well that was the end, the one thing which DiStasio could not stand was uncertainty past the point of decision. Delgado would have to be killed because he was no longer necessary. From the moment at which the dangerous and valuable valise had been passed on he functioned only as a hindrance. It was not only that he would have to split responsibility, risk and income with Delgado—that was bad enough.
It was that Delgado was of an older breed, a generation back which in Cuba was a lifetime; he was of the revolutionaries who had spent time in exile and the trouble with these people was that their wasted years had burned purpose out of them and substituted a habit of thinking too much about too little. For every fragment of action which these people were able to cajole out of themselves they generated whole mounds of thought, of anxiety, of guilt and self-loathing … and these more than anything else made Delgado extremely dangerous. He was the kind of man who at one moment could turn over the valise and responsibility to DiStasio, beg him for assistance—and in the next his old revolutionary’s brain was apt to send out flashes which would illuminate all the circuits of fear, and in a torment of what he would call “conscience” he would renege upon the arrangement, take the full details directly to the premier himself … and DiStasio would then be in serious trouble. Not that the premier minded that much as long as the activities of his subordinates did not subvert the revolution, such as it was. But the premier could hardly ignore something like this, not with the amount of difficulty which Delgado was apt to cause. DiStasio would be in serious trouble. So Delgado would have to be eliminated.
He would do it as quickly as possible and third-hand. Then he would take the valise himself and arrange disposition. He might even leave the country, try a new life elsewhere. The valise would give this to him. The drugs were very pure; DiStasio had had that much experience. The drugs were of the purest variety he had ever seen, and distributed in the proper channels might be worth far more than the million dollars which Delgado had conservatively estimated. DiStasio, the head of intelligence, had been watching the regime from one vantage point or another for almost a decade now. The regime was not going to last forever; they could not change the landscape as much as they insisted that they could. Sooner or later the landscape was going to erupt on them.
At that time the regime would fall.
An intelligent man would be better off making provisions.
So DiStasio had already arranged in his own mind for Delgado’s murder, had arranged it so efficiently and with so little potential difficulty that it came almost as a shock to him when the disaster of September 15th occurred. (He knew that however long he lived he would always think of it in those terms; already the broadcasts were framing it that way: the disaster of September 15th). Delgado was not supposed to be assassinated, the building destroyed, fifteen people killed in the explosion, another seventy-five injured, none of this was supposed to happen. Delgado had already had another kind of de
ath prepared for him and so complete was DiStasio’s conviction within himself, so deep was his faith that he found that his primary response to the events was one of absolute fury that matters had been taken out of his hand. DiStasio was the head of the intelligence division; he controlled everything in the country. Nothing which occurred could be unexpected because he set in motion almost all of the events.
Nevertheless, there was the building destroyed and Delgado murdered. And nothing to be done about it.
How could this be done to him? Yet, almost immediately after this first reaction coming on top of the conveyance of the news, then the hurried series of phone calls through which he was able to verify that all of this was true.
Almost immediately after that, DiStasio succumbed to a different and older emotion and that was one of fear. He did not need extended analysis or any amount of reports to make clear to him exactly why Delgado had been killed and all of this had happened. It tied in with the drugs. The drugs were the key and the key to that was the man who had brought them into the country, Martin Wulff. Wulff was responsible for this. If the fools at the upper levels could not see that immediately, then it was their problem and stupidity, but it was obvious, should be obvious to the rankest fool exactly what was going on. Now Wulff would be coming to DiStasio in search of the valise. He understood felons of this sort. He knew their thought processes as well as he knew (or thought he knew) the internal workings of his body. Somehow, before the September 15 disaster, Wulff would have tortured from Delgado information on the whereabouts of the valise and he would be coming to retrieve it from DiStasio. He could see it all clearly. He could see everything clearly. That was one of the virtues of being chief of intelligence; your mind worked in clear, preordained channels, and there was no sense of mystery. None whatsoever. Everything fell into place.
DiStasio was home when it happened. Reports came to him over the telephone of the wreckage, the fire, the deaths. He listened to all of them impassively, managing to control his hands, his voice. No one would suspect his reaction. He was entitled to be home on that day; it was his certified leave time. Everything had been cleared through the highest levels. Ha said that he would immediately take over the processes of investigation. The country was in a state of emergency alert, of course. That would make it easier for the intelligence arm to function without interference. DiStasio said that he would get right to it. They wanted him to come to the capital of course but he said that he did not think that this was necessary. He would be able to assume control of the situation at home and would be in tomorrow. Certainly if a state of guerilla siege was starting (this was what the premier thought; he had no idea of the true meaning of the events, of course), it would make more sense if the government was scattered; if high officials were not seen as being concentrated in a specific area where they could, one after the other, be attacked. The caller agreed with this. He praised DiStasio’s judgment and said that he would be in touch.