The Threateners

by Donald Hamilton

  Vasquez nodded. “I did not understand all the technical verbiage, but I gather that was approximately the way it was done.” He regarded her for a moment. “And now, Mrs. Steiner, let me repeat my original question. Why are you here?”

  Ruth licked her lips. “Mark’s manuscript was gone, burned to ashes. My home computer was destroyed with the disks that held my copies, including the backup copies. We were always talking about putting those in a safe place, but we never got around to it. But it occurred to me that you couldn’t know there weren’t any backup disks floating around, Mr. Vasquez, so I invented some and spotted them all around South America to make it easy for you. I was going to do it all by myself, but then I got hold of Matt’s organization, since I realized that I was out of my depth and I’d never reach you alive without protection. At least I thought I wouldn’t, although, as Matt points out, I do seem to be here, don’t I?”

  “I see,” Vasquez said. “So these imaginary disks—well, this carefully encrypted romance—were just a scam, if I have the right word, a scam to bring me out of hiding. And when your scam finally brought us face-to-face, what did you intend to do?”

  Ruth’s face was pale. She licked her lips once more. “Why,” she whispered, “why, I was going to kill you!”

  Vasquez nodded slowly. He made a signal to the big man behind the wheelchair, and Bo drew him back from his place at the table far enough to clear the immobilized leg, swung him around, and wheeled him around to Ruth.

  “Please to stand up, Mrs. Steiner,” Vasquez said. When she’d done so and turned to face him, he looked up at her from the chair and said, raising his hand, “Bo.”

  The big man took out a sizable automatic pistol—another .45 Colt or one of the many imitations—and placed it in his employer’s hand. Without looking down, Vasquez jacked back the slide to cock the hammer and feed a cartridge into the chamber. He reversed the weapon and held it out to Ruth, who hesitated but took it.

  Vasquez said, “I am here, señora. Do what you came to do. . . . Oh, just one moment. I am sure you are willing to die to achieve your vengeance, but you may hesitate on account of your friends. Hector.”

  “Sí, Don Gregorio.”

  “When I am dead, you will take no revenge on this woman or on the two American agents. You will transport them back to their hotel in the city and release them.”

  “Sí, Don Gregorio.”

  "The other woman is yours, of course, as you were promised in return for your word on the other matter. ”

  I saw Palomino glance toward Belinda, his poker face not quite concealing the fact that he was a man regarding a woman he found desirable, which was a surprise to me; I hadn’t considered him that impressionable. Belinda looked toward me; but how many women can a man protect at once, anyway? So far I hadn’t even done much for the one I was assigned to.

  “Sí, Don Gregorio.”

  Ruth was still holding the weapon in an awkward manner. I said helpfully, “The trigger is the dingus sticking out the bottom.”

  She didn’t deign to look at me. Her face was very pale. She drew a long, shaky breath and aimed the gun at Vasquez.

  “Very good, Mrs. Steiner.” His voice was quite calm. “As Mr. Helm said, the trigger is the dingus sticking out of the bottom. You have come a long way, and played many clever games, to pull it. I suggest you do so now.”

  You had to hand it to the guy, unflinchingly facing a loaded and cocked weapon in the unsteady hand of a white-faced woman whose family he’d hounded from continent to continent, a woman whose husband he’d had killed. . . . Of course there was always the possibility that the gun was gimmicked, but I didn’t think so. He was an old man and he was well aware that death would come for him soon; if now, so be it. . . .

  “Oh, my God, I can’t do it!”

  I saw a faint smile of triumph touch Vasquez’s face. Well, he’d earned it, gambling on his assessment of Ruth Steiner’s character. Then the triumph was replaced by shock as Ruth buried her face in her hands. Well, nobody minded her little display of emotion, but in the process she dropped the gun— simply let go of it, as if she’d forgotten its existence, and let it fall.

  Mark should have taught her better, of course, but he shouldn’t have had to. You’d think, safety-minded as they are, they’d give high-school firearms-ed courses right along with drivers-ed so everybody would have sense enough not to bounce cocked automatics off tile floors. Clearly the gun was not gimmicked; Vasquez knew what was coming and so did Bo, instinctively swinging the wheelchair away as if he could beat a bullet. All I could do, still sitting at the table, was lift my feet hopefully.

  Then the automatic fired with a deafening crash, and I felt something tug at my pants leg; and all hell broke loose in the fancy dining room as if the ringing, reverberating report had been a signal for everybody to go crazy.

  Chapter 29

  They came bounding into the room like a troupe of acrobats, from both doors, the one that led to the living quarters where we’d been allowed to use the johns, and the one that presumably led to the kitchen, since that was where the food had been coming from. They were dressed in black like the attendants who’d served us—black seemed to be the uniform of the day—but the newcomers didn’t seem to like the five men already there, who quickly formed a defensive phalanx around the wheelchair while Bo steered it toward the kitchen door. Apparently, in addition to waiting on the table, these were Vasquez’s personal bodyguards.

  I got a startling freeze-frame image of Palomino, still at the door toward which they were moving, raising the gun he’d showed before and aiming it directly at Vasquez. But okay, it made sense: clearly El Viejo had overestimated his subordinate’s loyalty. Rather than be surrendered to the authorities for extradition to the U.S. in his chief’s place, only pretending to be Mr. Big, the younger man had summoned the Compañeros with whom he’d been working, men who’d become accustomed to taking his orders, even though Vasquez was the true high priest of the order. He was taking over for real. It wouldn’t be the first time in criminal, or political, history that a number two had moved himself up to the one spot by means of the dagger or the bullet—but the two men faced each other for an extended instant and again, as when Ruth had held the gun, the easy, point-blank shot was not fired. . . .

  Not that I was standing there just watching the show. I only caught that one vignette out of the melee as I made my own move. I didn’t bother with the gun on the floor, everybody knew about that and I figured it would be the most popular piece of hardware in the place. I avoided the pistol rush, therefore, and dove for the sideboard and got my hand on the husky, wedge-shaped knife with which Palomino had carved the roast to Vasquez’s directions. I was just in time— I could feel one of the Compañeros closing in on me from behind, and I heard the soft, familiar swoosh of a swinging scarf. I got the blade up, edge out, in the position that had worked before. The scarf whipped around both my neck and the knife; I waited for the man to give me enough pressure to cut against; then I sliced down, hoping that Palomino kept his tools sharp.

  He did. The keen blade parted the cloth easily, and I used the backhand swing I’d employed before, but the carving knife, while substantial, didn’t have the length or heft of the outsized bowie I’d used in Santa Fe, and maybe this man ducked a little faster than the one I’d had to deal with there. I just chopped him across his ear, but it was enough to shock him into momentary immobility. I finished the turn, and drove the blade into him and wrenched it free and stepped aside as he went to his knees. Now I became aware that the handsome dining room had suddenly become an untidy battlefield with chairs overturned and the tablecloth pulled halfway off the table and broken glass and china all over the floor. I couldn’t see Palomino any longer. The wheelchair contingent was holding at the kitchen door; but to hell with Vasquez, he’d keep. Or maybe he wouldn’t, and that was okay, too.

  At the moment I wanted two things: a girl and a gun, but there was no telling who’d retrieved the fallen weapon, so I
was probably going to have to settle for the girl, if I could even manage that. Ruth’s blue dress showed up well among the black costumes that filled the room. She was still where I’d left her at the table, but now she was trying to free her throat from a tightening scarf. Apparently the Compañero behind it hadn’t made a good swing in the confusion and she’d managed to get her hands under it, but although she was straining desperately, she wasn’t strong enough to loosen it. . . . A man came at me with a knife using the old icepick attack; I sidestepped the clumsy downstroke, went in over it, and slashed him across the forehead. Unable to see through the sudden curtain of blood, not quite sure he hadn’t been blinded permanently, he stumbled away. I drove the knife into the side of the man who was trying to strangle Ruth and pulled it free, ready to hit him again if necessary, but he released the cloth, falling. Ruth clawed the scarf off her neck and started to throw it aside, but I grabbed it and pocketed it. I never can understand these people who’re forever discarding perfectly good weapons that may come in handy later.

  Thinking this, leading her away from the table, I felt my foot turn on something, and there was the automatic. Apparently I’d given the locals too much credit, if credit is the proper word. Well, they’re not as firearms-oriented down there, but I’m still baffled by folks who can’t be bothered to keep track of the neighborhood artillery or pick up any stray pieces lying around. Still, there it was, and I scooped it up left-handed and got the knife up in time to counter another scarf attack from behind. This time I really leaned into that backhand stroke—Miss Weatherford would have been proud of me—and felt the knife chop through the neck meat and reach the spine. Still no decapitation, but it was a satisfactoiy job of putting the guy out of commission for so light a blade, and no finish blow was required. I set the safety on the heavy pistol and tucked it into my pants and looked around.

  Bo was still battling for an opportunity to retreat through the kitchen door with his crippled leader. He was using a dining chair to beat off the attackers. He was a big man and the furniture wasn’t up to the job; it was disintegrating in his hands. Only two of the bodyguards remained beside him, the others had been pried away from the phalanx and were either down or fighting for their fives elsewhere in the room. As I looked a concerted effort by the Palomino forces swept away Bo’s last allies, leaving him struggling alone. Then the old man in the chair, who’d sat watching the battle without expression, gave a short command. Bo hesitated, and stepped aside, lowering the shattered chair.

  Vasquez faced the black-clad Compañeros without speaking. I expected them to rip him out of the chair and stomp him into the floor, and they surged forward to do just that; then they stopped without touching him. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know what stopped them; maybe they won’t, either. Well, he was, after all, the high priest of their perverted religion. Maybe it was the habit of respect, or maybe it was just the admiration for courage that still persists in some societies although ours seems to have dismissed it as mere macho posturing. Whatever the reason, he remained untouched, until Bo spat contemptuously and swung the wheelchair around and pushed it through the doorway and out of sight. . . .

  Elsewhere, the battle still raged. I said, “Let’s blow this dinner party, ma’am, it’s getting to be a drag.”

  “Stop showing off and get us out of here!” Ruth’s voice indicated that after being choked like that, she was still a little behind in her breathing.

  I saw that on the far side of the table Ackerman was still on his feet, with blood running down the side of his face; he was going through some unarmed-combat routines and seemed to be pretty good at the Ha-Ha stuff. I caught a glimpse of Belinda’s blond hair and light gray dress; she was trying to wrench herself away from two men who were dragging her by the arms toward the door leading to the living quarters, presumably as a prize for Palomino. I hadn’t thought the guy was that human.

  Some of Vasquez’s bodyguards were still on their feet, struggling to survive. A machete waved over the fray by the windows and I guided Ruth that way, first checking to make sure I really wanted to go that way; but although in that part of the world all the better homes have broken glass on the walls and bars on the windows, there were no bars here. Of course. No burglar would have the temerity to break into the home of El Viejo. The gent with the machete was laying about him lustily when I slipped up behind him. It seemed a pity to grab his uplifted arm from behind and wrench away the weapon and let him face his enemies unarmed, but I wanted that blade; and whether he’d been on Palomino’s side or Vasquez’s—probably the latter since he’d been fighting alone—he certainly hadn’t been on mine.

  "Grab a chair and knock out that window," I said to Ruth. “Do a good job so we don’t slice ourselves too badly climbing out. I’ll try to hold them off; let me know when you’re ready.”

  It was the old Custer’s Last Stand routine, except that poor old Yellowhair had had no escape window behind him, and no lovely lady, either. Suddenly I realized that I was feeling good, very good, a strange feeling for a gent who was probably about to be killed, either in this shattered dining room or out on a rocky hillside I hadn’t even seen by daylight, in a totally foreign land, the natives of which were distinctly hostile. But I’d been cautious and conservative long enough-long enough to get me here at last, close to the target. Now I could forget about being clever, which wasn’t really my forte, and concentrate on surviving, which was. I heard glass breaking behind me. With the heavy machete in my right hand and the sharp carver in my left I established, shall we say, a defensive perimeter, and made them pay bloodily for encroaching upon it. . . .

  “All right, it’s ready. The ground is only some four feet down.” Ruth’s voice was still hoarse from the scarf.

  “Go on out, I’ll be right after you.”

  I heard her scrambling out and swearing in an unladylike manner as cloth ripped somewhere. “All right, I’m out, most of me. . . . Come on, Errol Flynn, stop playing Robin Hood or whatever! Let’s get out of here!”

  I passed the carver back. “Hold this for me.”

  It was pistol time now; and I shot one of them left-handed and the rest backed off. I handed the machete out to Ruth. The sights and sounds of combat were diminishing. Belinda was gone from the room and Ackerman was either gone or down where I couldn’t see him. Somebody, presumably a

  Vasquez guard, was still putting up a tough resistance in a comer, but he was the last. The place was a wreck, but at least we’d got a good meal out of it.

  I spoke to the Compañeros facing me: “The first one who comes out this window after us is dead. Muerte, get it?”

  I spoke in English, but they seemed to get the general idea. Covering them, right-handed now, I backed myself out through the opening, groped for footing, and found it only a little way down. I stood up incautiously, tearing hell out of my seersucker jacket, that had hung up on a nail or something. I yanked it free.

  “Ah, you found it, too,” Ruth said, a dim figure in the darkness beside me, but not so dim that I couldn’t see that something drastic and unfortunate had happened to the skirt of her linen dress. “Can we go now?”

  “I’ll take the machete. You keep the knife.”

  We seemed to be at the rear of the house with a steep hillside above us. I took us about thirty yards up the slope and glanced back. Nobody showed at the lighted window from which we’d come, but that wouldn’t last.

  “I want you to keep going,” I said to Ruth. I looked around for a landmark. “Head for that big white rock way up there. Find a hole nearby and crawl into it and stay there. Don’t move, don’t breathe, as they say in the X-ray room. Just stay there. If somebody tries to crawl in with you, use the knife. Well, unless it’s me.”

  “What . . . ? Oh, why do I bother to ask? You’re going hunting.”

  “We call it creating a diversion.”

  She touched my shoulder lightly. “Just don’t let them divert you, darling.”

  Then she was gone. There were silhouettes
at the window now. I laid aside the machete and took out the gun again, and found a steady two-handed rest on a rock, and fired once. Somebody screamed down there. I set the safety and put the gun away, picked up the machete, and climbed on after Ruth. It was easier going now that my eyes had had time to become adapted to the night and I could see the dim shapes of the rocks and brush. Somebody else was on the hillside, hurrying after Ruth, who, less accustomed to moving in the dark, was making more noise than I was. Crouching behind a bush, laying aside the machete once more, I let him go past, intent on his female quarry. I rose up and whipped the liberated scarf, the one that Ruth had been about to discard, around his neck, from behind—and the damned thing didn’t work. Well, sure, it cut off his wind all right. Any garrote will do that, but I couldn’t seem to apply the right wrenching strain to the cloth to crack the vertebrae. I’d seen Palomino do it and had the armorer demonstrate it to me, but it simply didn’t work for me; I had to pin the guy down and choke him to death. Clearly, Thuggee was not my religion. I started to hide the body, which was stupid; instead I hauled him over to a big light rock and draped him across it.

  I picked up the machete again. Ruth was a pale shape above me, working her way up the hillside—mountainside, rather. With my vision still improving, I could see the distant top now, high against the night sky. The stars were very bright at this altitude, whatever it might be; they reminded me of home, where we also got some pretty fair celestial displays at night.

  Below me, the hunt was getting under way. I’ve never quite understood the standard movie chase scenes where the pursuit goes on endlessly and nothing happens to anybody except perhaps a few harmless bullets bouncing off the landscape. Why doesn’t the jackass hero ever ambush his pursuers and discourage them by taking out a few of them, instead of forever running ahead of them witlessly like a rabbit, dragging the breathless heroine with him?