Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong

by Kevin J. Anderson

  "Pedrito has to go and blow it up," Enrique said. "It's in his contract."

  Yaquita was surprised. She bent over to inspect the plans, making serious noises. "Blowing up CIA installations is always fun—but this one looks like a tough nut to crack."

  "Pedrito is good at cracking tough nuts," Ivan said, then lowered his voice, "and also good at driving people nuts."

  "Deliver him to the area, and then you will go wait for him at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mercy in Sangredios," Enrique commanded. "No questions—just follow orders like a good revolutionary."

  "Is it a nice cathedral to get married in?" Yaquita smiled wistfully, and both colonels nodded vigorously.

  With Yaquita gone and happy, Enrique and Ivan toasted each other with a fresh glass of vodka. "I told you she had nothing but marriage on her mind," Enrique said. "For an intelligent woman, she is so gullible for all that propaganda about what women are supposed to do with their lives. Ha!"

  "Well, Smith is one man she won't marry," Ivan said. "Even he isn't that foolish."

  "Unless she wants to marry a corpse." Enrique picked up the vodka bottle, but it was empty. He opened the desk drawer to get a fresh one. "CIA Centrale is a deathtrap. He'll never make it out alive. Not even the real Pedrito could do it."

  "Better send Felipe and Juan after him to make sure he actually attempts the mission," Ivan said. "After all this time, we don't want him getting smart on us."

  "No chance of that." Enrique eased back in the desk chair. "Would you like another cigar?"

  "Da. Would you like some more vodka?"

  Chapter 37

  THE FORMAL PRINTED CARD on the door to the New York apartment read Lt. (jg) Thomas G. Smith, USN. Not that he received many visitors anyway. Most people considered Tom Smith too dull to include in their social calendars.

  Joan Turner stood in front of the sign, primping her strawberry-blond hair and using a compact mirror to touch up her lipstick. Smith had, after all, promised to marry her, and so she had a perfect right to show up any time she wanted. She had already caught him spying on his country, so what could be worse?

  From inside the apartment, she heard muted shrieks of feminine laughter, a rumba beat pounding from a stereo, trumpets and loud Latin music. This wasn't what she expected to hear from mild-mannered Smith at all, but when she double-checked the address in her purse, she saw she had come to the right place.

  It sounded like a party was going on. Without her.

  She grabbed the knob and burst in.

  The bachelor apartment she had expected to find meticulously neat and clean was now overwhelmed by chaos. A thick-cushioned divan sat askew in the center of the room. Half-empty bottles of tequila and rum stood upright on the side table; three bottles lay on the carpet, spilled over.

  Pedrito sprawled on the couch half dressed and entirely drunk. Two naked women giggled next to him, also thoroughly inebriated. One draped herself over the back of the couch on her stomach, trying to dribble another drink between Pedrito's lips. Closer to the stereo, the second woman attempted to do the rumba with unsteady dance steps. She wore nothing but Tom Smith's naval officer's cap.

  Despite Joan's unexpected arrival, none of them paid any attention to her. "Well!" she cried, loud and censorious, crossing her arms over her chest. She wished she had thought of something more clever or wicked to say.

  Pedrito raised his head heavily and tried to focus on her. His hair was mussed, as if he had tried to comb it with a vacuum cleaner. Recognizing Joan after a moment, he waved his arm drunkenly to beckon her. "Well, if it ishn't Joan! Come on in here, you old bat, so theshe girlsh can show you how itsh really done! They're professhionals, you ssheee. Got them right down at the street corner—two-for-the-price-of-one sale."

  Clamping her purse under her arm, Joan stormed out. She slammed the door so hard that Smith's printed address card fell onto the floor. In a raging fury she stood there, trying to think, blinking back the red haze from in front of her eyes. Then she got a decidedly brilliant idea on how she could fix that lousy bastard.

  Out in the street she found the nearest telephone booth and dug in her purse for change. She attempted to put coins into the slot, but she was so furious her fingers missed, scattering quarters on the floor of the phone booth. By the time she managed to make the call, she was so coldly angry her words stabbed across the phone lines like ice picks. She enjoyed the sensation very much....

  In the local FBI office, a bored special agent sat at his desk, speaking with complete disinterest into the phone. He was bloated and mean, a promoted field agent, though it had been a long time since he'd been in the field. He held a pencil in his hand, scribbling on a notepad—but his notes were part of a grocery list and had nothing to do with the furious conversation the woman hurled at him from the other end of the phone.

  He talked out of the side of his mouth, mumbling in a squeaky, falsetto voice. "Who'ja say yer name was?" he said, trying to sound tough. He liked to talk like a hardened criminal. "Well, lady, I ain't takin' no dope from nobody what won't give dere name . . . uh, uh-huh, yeah ... okay." Now he wrote it down. "Joan Turner. Dat's better. Come clean now, kid. What'dja do?" He Ustened. "Okay, so what did yer boyfriend do? Is it a felony or a misdemeanor? Does it carry the death penalty? Does you got pictures?"

  A scarecrowish-thin agent came in, looking like a dried-up convict, as the bloated agent hung up the phone. "What was that. Fats?" the thin agent said. "Don't tell me we gotta work today?"

  "Aw, jus' some skirt blowin' the whistle on her boyfriend," Fats said. "Like always."

  "You're not supposed to call 'em 'skirts' anymore. It ain't politically correct," the thin agent said. "You're supposed to call 'em dames now."

  "Yeah, yeah. Lefty. I hear the bureau's issuing a guidebook for dat sort of thing." Fats made a raspberry sound. "I bet old J. Edgar is rollin' over in his grave."

  Lefty reached for the pad to read the doodled words mixed in with his grocery list. "She told you someone in the Office of Naval Intelligence is a Commie spy?"

  Fats peered at the pad. "How can you read this writing anyway? Where's it say that?"

  "You wrote it!"

  "Jesus Christ, I did!" Fats suddenly looked secretly delighted. He glanced up at his partner as he struggled to push himself away from his desk. "Lefty, dis is where you and I gets promoted!"

  Chapter 38

  IT TOOK HIM HOURS, but he finally reached Silo No. 13 ... and it was just like the previous twelve.

  Covering his delighted smile, Smith looked at the sign over the door as he and the Colodoran engineer exited the silo. At last he was doing real secret agent stuff. Another missile retargeted to save the Free World.

  "All in a day's work," Smith said, jingling the collection of keys he carried. "Got to make sure we do it all correctly, no mistakes."

  "It's so nice to have somebody trained in Russia verify my work!" The dark-haired engineer followed him like a puppy dog. "You didn't find any serious errors, did you? I'm usually very careful, but we've had the in-laws visiting, and there's the soccer-team bake sale coming up, and it's been so hectic."

  "Well, six of the guidance coordinates were off by a hair," Smith said. "But I corrected them. No need to worry."

  "You'll keep quiet about it?" The engineer pleaded with his eyes.

  "Oh, not a word from me." Smith smiled, then snapped his fingers with a brilliant idea. "In fact, I'll even keep the missile keys so nobody can foul you up." He tucked the keys in his shirt pocket, patting them firmly.

  "Oh, I'm so grateful. Thank you, Pedrito!" The engineer rushed back into his silos.

  Before Smith could figure out what to do next, Yaquita approached briskly, carrying a thick wad of plans. "We're leaving," she said. "On with the next mission."

  "But we just got here!" Smith said, rubbing his saddle-sore bottom and glancing at the setting sun. He didn't want to ride through the rugged Andes at night, and a soft bunk in the Wheat Company's barracks seemed more desirable t
han a drafty trail tent.

  She took Smith by the arm, pulling him away. "Duty calls. We'll take my car this time."

  "Whatever you say," he said. "Uh, long live the revolution, and all that."

  Yaquita's black Volkswagen tore along an Andes mountain road. Its bug-spattered headlights splashed on the black cliffs all around them. Yaquita kept the tires on the road most of the time. At every sharp corner, gravel and pebbles sprayed out into the long drop-off, vanishing from sight. Smith held his fingers over his eyes.

  "You have been ordered to blow up the CIA Communications Centrale in Colodor," Yaquita said, more interested in his reaction than the treacherous road ahead.

  Smith took his hands from his eyes. "Why would I want to do that?"

  "The two colonels thought it was a good idea." Without slowing, she turned around and fumbled in the back seat for some papers she had stuffed there. The Volkswagen slued left and right on the narrow road, but she didn't seem to care. A terrified llama darted from the road, then leapt off the side, seeming to fly into the void like a reindeer. Smith grabbed the steering wheel to prevent them from following it off the cliff.

  "Ah, here are the plans," Yaquita said, hauling them into the front seat. "The base is hidden inside a hill. Very cleverly concealed, but destroying it shouldn't be too difficult. Just drop some dynamite down the air hole." She steered with her knee, holding the plans open with one hand and pointing with her other finger. "See, look here."

  Smith couldn't see, though, since he had covered his eyes again....

  By dawn, they had wound their way down to hilly country. The scenery was still rugged, but greener. A small town full of whitewashed adobe buildings with red tile roofs nestled in a valley, just like a postcard snapshot. Beyond the village rose a round grassy hill bristling with huge satellite tracking reflectors.

  "I hope they don't pretend those satellite dishes are for agricultural purposes," Smith said, "like the Hungry Mouth Wheat Company."

  "Satellite dishes?" Yaquita answered. "Those are umbrellas to protect particularly delicate crops from devastating hailstorms. Is it not obvious?"

  "Whatever you say." Smith picked up the plans as Yaquita pulled the battered black Volkswagen to a halt. She let the engine sputter while they inspected the landscape.

  "According to the secret plans," Yaquita said, "the air hole is right under those agricultural umbrellas on the hill. Just drop your dynamite down the shaft, and it'll blow up the whole installation—no problem. Then we can get to the cathedral of Sangredios in no time. I've already found us a priest."

  "How do you know the plans are accurate?" Smith asked.

  Yaquita smiled. "Some of the mapmakers on strike are really double agents. They draw up detailed blueprints of top-secret installations to earn a little spending money."

  The VW eased up to the entrance of a ramshackle adobe hotel. Smith climbed out, dressed in German mountaineering clothes complete with Tyrolean hat. He popped open the VW's front trunk and hauled out a canvas rucksack that smelled of mildew.

  "I'll be waiting for you in the cathedral at Sangredios, my darling." Yaquita pushed her face out the window, puckering her lips for a kiss. "It's just a few kilometers farther down the road. Meet me when you're finished."

  He looked around the little village, straightening the pheasant feather in his Tyrolean hat, and eyed the satellite dishes on the round hill. "I'm sure I can find the place."

  "Now don't get hurt," Yaquita called with a trace of worry. "Don't harm a red hair on your pretty little head."

  Smith leaned in and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "Nothing simpler."

  The VW puttered away. Smith watched it go, smiling and waving, then heaved a huge sigh of relief. Blow up the place? He didn't think so. All he had to do was report in on the CIA station radio, and then he could get back home to New York and be finished with all this mess.

  Chapter 39

  ITS ROTORS THRUMMING in the early morning air, an unmarked helicopter circled for a landing just in front of the hill covered with satellite reflectors (or agricultural umbrellas, if the propaganda was to be believed). CIA chief O'Halloran stepped gingerly out of the craft, carrying an attache case handcuffed to his wrist. He clapped his left hand on top of his head to keep his sparse hair from flapping in the prop wash as the helicopter departed back to another secret base somewhere in the Andes.

  As he started walking nonchalantly to the round hill, the CIA chief maintained the air of a traveling salesman. A trapdoor of sod-covered earth lifted from the side of the hill, and two machine-gun muzzles rose into view. The weapons tracked O'Halloran's movements with built-in motion sensors.

  The CIA man fumbled in his pocket to pull out a small box, trying to move faster than the automated machine guns. He turned a key on the gadget, and the weapons paused in their targeting, as if reconsidering. Then, with another whir, the gun muzzles dropped back down out of sight, and the trapdoor closed.

  "Just like the User's Manual says," O'Halloran chortled, then turned another key in his gadget box. A large rectangular section covered with Astroturf lifted up like a garage door, revealing the main entrance to the underground installation. From there, a lighted tunnel led deep beneath the hill. O'Halloran walked in, ducking his balding head, and the hidden door closed quickly, showering the CIA man with small clods of dirt.

  Meanwhile, in the shabby hotel room, Smith had unpacked his rucksack and strewn the wad of plans for the hidden installation on the wobbly table. He studied the plans carefully, though he had never been good at reading blueprints, not for missile systems and not for buildings.

  Dressed in the best three-piece suit he kept in his rucksack, he strolled out of the hotel like a dapper businessman. Smith walked along the cobblestone way near the satellite-dish hill as if he were an innocent pedestrian. He stopped to inspect a lump of llama dung that had clung to the heel of his shoe, surreptitiously scanning for the communication center's air shaft. Maybe he could just jump in and surrender. Then he could tell his story to the proper authorities. Admiral Turner would be so proud of him—he was a bona fide double agent!

  The small trapdoor of sod moved aside, and machine-gun muzzles protruded with a whir, targeting on him.

  Smith sang an old naval tune as he strode along, making sure he couldn't possibly surprise anybody.

  When the machine guns were fully extended, they fired a blaze of shots. The ground around Smith erupted with bullets. After a brief moment of staring. Smith ran like mad.

  He would have to reconsider this plan. Surrender wasn't going to be so easy after all.

  The CIA Communications Centrale was built over an old gold mine. Two centuries earlier, a Colodoran in search of ancient Incan gold had hand-dug a crazed collection of tunnels that wound over and under and around one another in an unfathomable maze. Over the years, countless Colodoran children had become lost in the maze, and their bones were scattered liberally along the corridors. In the 1960s, when the Americans came to Colodor, they had recognized at once that this was the perfect place to build a secret military base. So it was that the maze of tunnels through the sandstone twisted weirdly, as if dug by some alien insect, until they at last ended in the very deepest darkest depths—the central control room.

  Here the sandstone walls gave way to banks of glittering communications machinery, liberally interspersed with vending machines and racks of automatic weapons. Moles raced along the floors, searching for the bits of Twinkles and spilled Coke on which they thrived.

  Beside the aging banks of video screens and communication consoles, O'Halloran stood alert, eating a fresh banana. Hearing the sound of automatic weapons fire outside, he spun about.

  "What was that shooting?" he asked, trying to figure out which TV screen showed what he wanted to know. Many of the monitors were tuned to talk shows, sitcoms and Spanish-language shopping channels.

  Finally seeing the image from the hill installation's outside cameras, he pressed his face close to the screen. But the view
showed only bare ground peppered with fresh bullet tracks and clouds of dust.

  O'Halloran relaxed. "Probably just some damned goat."

  "Or a llama," said one of the operators.

  "Or a jaguar," said another.

  "I heard a giraffe got loose from the local zoo yesterday. That could have done it."

  "All right, all right," O'Halloran said impatiently "We'll just chalk it up to a false alarm. Why don't you go take a coffee break in town and leave me alone here."

  Smith stood on the balcony of his hotel room, trying to think of another alternative. He draped his now muddy suit coat over the rail and mopped sweat from his brow. He stared at the unreachable rounded hill, where the satellite reflectors turned gradually, scanning the skies.

  If that was a CIA installation, there must be some way to get in and tell them who he was. After impersonating Pedrito, he certainly had information his government would want. He turned to reenter his room, then stopped, so startled he almost staggered backward off the balcony. "Who are you?''

  Two rebel Communists relaxed in his sitting room, grinning at Smith. One lounged in a chair, while another stood by the door, picking his teeth with a chicken bone. "I'm Felipe, he's Juan."

  "I'm Juan, he's Felipe."

  "The colonels sent us to make sure you blow up the place, Pedrito," Felipe said. "Besides, someone has to be there to tell the story of your exploits."

  Juan laughed. "This should be a simple job after all your adventures! Remember the attack of the naked horsemen in the guava fields of Carabastos?"

  "And who could forget the revenge of the sisters of the Nunnery of the Pink Fountains?" Felipe said with a loud chuckle. "We know you'll do the job, Pedrito, but Colonel Enrique has his reasons for sending us. Colonel Ivan isn't a very trusting sort. You know how Russians are."