Crack!
Paul had laid a shot across the bow of Alaric’s canoe, but it failed to slow him down.
“Was that a gun?”
“That was Paul shooting.”
“Hard to hear you with that background noise. Hold on.”
The seconds ticked by like years. Gamay had no illusions about her call. Even with a position fix it could be days before someone came to their aid. At least Austin would know what happened to them. Austin’s voice came back on, calm and reassuring. “We’ve got a lock on you.”
“Good. Gotta go!” Gamay answered, ducking low as an arrow whizzed past like an angry bee.
With Gamay and Paul busy, their canoes had drifted sideways to the waves. They dug their paddles in and got the boats around. Both dugouts rocked dangerously, but they moved closer to the falls where the mists might hide them.
The Indians hesitated, then, sensing the end was near, began their strange ululation. The archers were kneeling in the bow. They could stand off and let arrows fly at their helpless targets.
Paul had lost all patience. He raised the handgun and took a bead on Alaric. If he killed the leader the others might run for it. Francesca yelled. He thought she was trying to spoil his shot, but the white queen was pointing toward the top of the falls.
What looked like a huge insect flew over the crest of the falls and descended rapidly through the rainbows and the cloud of mist until it was a hundred feet above the lake. The helicopter hovered for an instant, then swooped low and buzzed the war canoes. The archers dropped their bows, grabbed their paddles, and stroked madly for shore.
Paul lowered the pistol and grinned at Gamay. They began to paddle back toward the quieter waters of the lake. The helicopter circled around the lake, then came back and hovered above the dugouts. A smiling figure with a bushy silver mustache and deep-set eyes leaned out a side door and waved. It was Dr. Ramirez.
The phone rang. It was Austin. “Gamay, are you and Paul all right?”
“We’re fine,” she said, laughing with relief. “Thanks for sending the taxi. But you’re going to explain how you pulled this one off. This is something, even for the great Kurt Austin.”
“Tell you about it later. See you tomorrow. I need you back here. Be ready to work.”
A ladder was being lowered out of the chopper.
Ramirez signaled for Francesca to go first. She hesitated, then grabbed the lower rung and, as befitting a white goddess, began to climb into the sky from which she had descended ten years before.
26
SANDY WHEELER WAS getting into her Honda Civic when the strange man approached and asked in accented English how to get to the Los Angeles Times advertising department. Instinctively she hugged her purse close to her body and glanced around. She was relieved to see other people in the newspaper’s garage. She had grown up in L.A. and was used to freaks. But she was jumpy lately handling this crazy water story, and even the cute, pearl-handled .22-caliber pistol in her pocketbook wasn’t totally reassuring. The stranger looked as if he could chew the barrel off her gun with his metal teeth.
Wheeler had the reporter’s ability to take in people at a glance, and what she saw was someone who looked as if he played the bad guy for the WWF. He was her height and would have been taller if he had a neck. The dark green sweatsuit was a couple of sizes too small for a square, powerful body that looked as if it had been assembled from refrigerator parts. The roundish, grinning face framed by the Prussian-cut dirty blond hair reminded her of one of the monsters in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Only uglier. But it was the eyes that got her. The irises were so black that the pupils were practically invisible.
After giving the man hurried directions, Sandy got into her car and instantly locked the doors. She didn’t care how unfriendly the gesture looked. As she backed out of her space he seemed to be in no rush to go to the advertising department. He stood there staring at her with eyes as hard as marbles. She was in her thirties, with long chestnut hair, an athletic body from jogging and working out. Her nut-brown face was taut and angular but not unattractive, dominated by large sky-blue eyes. She was pretty enough to attract occasional attention from the odd characters who seemed to drop from the palm trees around town. She was street-smart and had gained a layer of emotional calluses working as a police reporter before being assigned to the investigative team. She didn’t spook easily, but this creep gave her the shivers. It went beyond appearances. There was something of the grave about him.
She checked her rearview mirror and was surprised to see that the man had disappeared. Easy come, easy go, she thought. She scolded herself for letting him sneak up on her. Growing up in L.A., she had learned early on to be aware of her surroundings at all times. This damned water story had preoccupied her, taken the edge off her alertness. Cohen had promised only a couple more days before they ran the story. Not soon enough. She was getting sick of taking the file disks home. Cohen was positively paranoid about leaving them in the building. Every night he cleaned the files off the computer and put them on backup disks. In the mornings he would load them back on.
Not that Sandy blamed him for being paranoid. There was something special about this story. The team had talked Pulitzer Prize. Cohen coordinated the work of the three reporters. Her area was the Mulholland Group and its mysterious president, Brynhild Sigurd. The other two reporters concentrated respectively on domestic acquisitions and international connections. They had access to an accountant and a lawyer. The secrecy was tighter than the Manhattan Project. The editor was aware of the story but not its scope. She sighed. The story would be out in a few days, and she could take that long vacation in Maui.
She swung out of the garage and headed to her condo in Culver City. She stopped off at a shopping plaza and picked up a bottle of California Zinfandel. Cohen was coming over later to talk about wrapping up loose ends, and she had promised to whip up a pot of penne. As she was paying the cashier she noticed someone standing in front of the window looking into the store. It was that damned metal-tooth creep, and he was smiling. This was no coincidence. The jerk must have followed her. She glared at him as she exited the store, then strode purposefully toward her car. First she dug the pistol out of the purse and tucked it in her belt. Then she called Cohen on her cell phone. He had told her to report anything unusual. Cohen wasn’t there, but she left a message on his recorder saying she was on her way home and that she thought she was being followed.
Starting the car, she pulled slowly out of the plaza, then gunned the engine and shot through an intersection just as the light changed to red. The cars behind her all stopped. She knew the neighborhood well and cut through a couple of motel parking lots, then down a side street in a circular route to her apartment. Her heart was beating rapidly as she drove, but her pulse slowed to normal when she pulled up in front of the sanctuary of the condominium building. She buzzed herself into the five-story apartment building and took the elevator up to the fourth floor. She stepped out of the elevator and almost dropped her groceries in surprise. The creep was at the far end of the hallway. He stood there with that insane grin, staring at her. That did it. She put the bag on the floor, pulled her pistol from her belt, and pointed it at him.
“You come any nearer, and I’ll blast your private parts off,” she said.
He made no motion. If anything, the grin got wider.
She wondered how he had got there ahead of her. Of course. He must have known her address. While she was zigzagging in an attempt to lose him, he had simply driven directly to her apartment. That didn’t explain how he had got into the building. The management was going to get an earful about the lack of security. Maybe she’d even do a story on it.
Still keeping the pistol leveled, she fumbled in her purse for her keys, opened the door, and quickly shut it. Safe at last. She put the pistol on a small table, snapped the deadbolt and chain lock, and put her eye to the peephole in the door. The creep was standing just outside, his face distorted even mo
re grotesquely by the lens. He was holding her bag of groceries as if he were a delivery boy. The nerve of him. She swore lustily. She wasn’t going to screw around with Cohen this time. A straight call to 911 to report she was being stalked.
She suddenly had the odd feeling that she wasn’t alone.
She turned from the door and stared with unbelieving eyes, frozen with fear.
The man with the metallic teeth was standing in her way. Impossible. He was out in the hall. Then the answer came to her in a flash.
Twins.
The epiphany came too late. As she backed against the door he began to walk slowly toward her, his eyes glittering like black pearls.
• • •
Cohen sounded frantic on the phone.
“Joe, for Godsakes, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!”
“Sorry, I was out,” Zavala apologized. “What’s wrong?”
“Sandy’s disappeared. The bastards have got her.”
“Calm down for a minute,” Zavala said evenly. “Tell me who Sandy is and these bastards you’re talking about. Start from the beginning.”
“Okay, okay,” Cohen replied. There was a pause as he pulled himself together, and when he spoke again it was with his normal composure, although it was clear from the tenseness of his voice that panic lurked close to the surface.
“I went back to the paper. I just had a funny feeling. All our source material is missing. We kept it in a locked file. Empty.”
“Who had access?”
“Just the members of the team. They’re all solid. The only way someone could get them to open the files is if they had a gun at their head. Oh, God,” Cohen said as the implication of his statement sank in.
Zavala could sense that he was losing Cohen.
“Tell me what happened next,” he said.
Cohen took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. Sorry. Next I checked the computer disks. Nothing. You needed a password to get into them. Everybody on the team was aware of it. We backed everything up at the end of each working day. We took turns. Sandy Wheeler, one of the reporters, took the disks home with her today. I got a message saying some guy was following her. She was in a parking lot near her condo. We were supposed to have dinner tonight, go over some material for the first installment of the story. I called when I heard her message. There was no one home. I came over. Sandy had given me a key. The grocery bag was on the table. The wine was still in it. She always puts her wine into the rack. She’s compulsive about that.”
“There’s no sign of her?”
“Nothing. I got the hell out of there as soon as I could.”
A thought came to Zavala. “What about the other reporters on your team?”
“I tried to call them. No answer. What should I do?”
Cohen probably saved his own life by going to Sandy’s apartment and then leaving quickly. Those who were rolling up the investigative team had already been there, but they might check back.
“Where are you calling from? I hear music in the background.”
“I’m in a leather bar near Sandy’s condo.” Cohen nervously laughed through his fear. “I ducked in here when I thought someone was following me and wanted to be in a public place.”
“Anyone follow you inside?”
“I don’t think so. This is pretty much a biker crowd. They’d stand out.”
“Can you call me back in five minutes?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, but make it fast. There’s a tall transvestite giving me the eye.”
Zavala looked up the number Gomez had given him. Gomez answered the phone on the third try. Zavala brushed off the usual greetings.
“I’m in L.A.,” he said. “I’ve got someone who needs to be out of circulation. Can you help? No questions now, but I promise to fill you in as soon as I can.”
“Does this happen to have anything to do with the business you were involved in down here?”
“That and more. Sorry to be so mysterious. Can you help?”
Pause. Then Gomez’s voice came back, all business. “We maintain a safe house in Inglewood. There’s a caretaker there. I’ll call and let him know to expect a package.” He gave Zavala directions to the safe house.
“Thanks. Talk to you later,” Joe said.
“I hope so,” Gomez replied.
The phone rang as soon as he put it down. He rattled off the address Gomez had given him and told Cohen to take a taxi there. “Leave your car,” he cautioned. “It might have a transmitter on it.”
“Of course. I never thought of anything like that. Oh, jeez. I knew this thing was big. Poor Sandy and the others. I feel responsible for them.”
“There was nothing else you could have done, Randy. You didn’t know you were playing well out of your league.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“You had it right the first time we talked,” Zavala said. “Blue gold.”
27
THE BLACK RUBBER BALL was only a meteor blur, but Sandecker had anticipated the bounce, and his light wooden racket flicked out like a serpent’s tongue. The quick backhand sent the ball speeding with a sharp thwack against the right wall. LeGrand lunged, but he had misjudged the spin and his racket swiped clumsily at thin air.
“That’s the game, I believe,” said Sandecker, deftly scooping up the bouncing ball. Sandecker was a fitness and nutrition fanatic, and his strict regimen of jogging and weightlifting gave him a competitive edge over men much younger and bigger. He stood with legs wide apart, the racket resting easily in the crook of his arm. Not one drop of perspiration beaded his forehead. Nor was a single red hair out of place on his head or the precisely trimmed fiery red Van Dyke beard.
By contrast, LeGrand dripped with sweat. As he removed his eye protectors and toweled his face dry he remembered why he had stopped playing with Sandecker. The CIA director had the height and muscle advantage over Sandecker, who stood a few inches over five feet, but as he learned each time he stepped onto the court with Sandecker, squash was a game of strategy, not power. Under normal circumstances he would have put the admiral off when he called the day after the incident in New York State.
“I’ve reserved a court at the club,” Sandecker said cheerfully. “How’d you like to bat the little black ball around for a bit?”
Despite the genial tone there was no doubt in LeGrand’s mind that this was a command performance. LeGrand canceled his morning appointments and stopped at the Watergate complex to pick up his gear. Sandecker was waiting at the squash club. He was wearing a designer sweatsuit of navy blue with gold piping. But even in his casual outfit it took little imagination to picture Sandecker pacing the deck of a man-o’-war in a bygone day, barking commands to trim sail or unleash a broadside against a Barbary pirate. He ran NUMA the same way, keeping one eye on the changes in the wind and the other on his adversaries. Like any good commander he took a keen interest in his crew’s welfare.
When he learned Austin had been put in harm’s way by a cockeyed intelligence scheme he erupted in an explosion that would have put Krakatoa to shame. The CIA’s involvement added to the violence of his reaction. He was fond of LeGrand, but in Sandecker’s uncompromising view the Company was pampered and overfunded.
While he relished the chance to put the CIA director in the hot seat, he saw it as more than an opportunity to vent his spleen. Sandecker wasn’t above political chicanery. He was quite adept at it, in fact. One of his more valuable talents was the ability to stay ahead of his anger and use it to get his way. Targets of his rage had no idea that behind his laser-hot fury he was often serene, even joyful. His ability served him well. Presidents of both parties deferred to him. Senators and congressmen went out of their way to cultivate his acquaintance. Cabinet members instructed their staff to put through his phone calls without question.
LeGrand had readily accepted the admiral’s invitation for a match because he was drenched with guilt over the incident in New York and welcomed the opportunity to make amends, even if it me
ant being humiliated on the squash court. To his surprise, Sandecker had greeted him with a smile and hadn’t mentioned the incident throughout their play. He even offered to buy the first round at the juice bar.
“Thanks for the match on such short notice,” Sandecker said with his famous alligator smile.
LeGrand sipped his papaya juice and shook his head. “One of these days maybe I’ll beat you.”
“Your backhand needs some work first,” Sandecker offered. “By the way, while I have your ear, I’d like to thank you for averting a potential tragedy involving my man Austin.”
This might not be as bad as he expected, LeGrand thought.
Sandecker maintained his disconcerting smile. “Pity you didn’t get someone to respond more quickly,” he said. “You might have been able to save your asset.” He put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of the last word.
LeGrand groaned inwardly. It was obvious Sandecker was going to worry this one like a puppy with a bone.
Ignoring the play on words, the director said, “I’m sorry about that regrettable episode. The full extent of this, er, problem wasn’t apparent at first. It was a very complex situation.”
“So I hear,” Sandecker said lightly. “Tell you what I’m going to do, Erwin. I will forget for the time being that a screwball scheme hatched by the OSS and carried out by the CIA went awry, almost killing the head of the NUMA Special Assignments Team and an innocent bystander and placing the Speaker of the House in jeopardy.”
“You’re very gracious, James,” LeGrand said.
Sandecker nodded. “No details of this schoolboy spy prank will ever go beyond the walls of NUMA.”
“The Agency appreciates your discretion,” LeGrand said.
Sandecker raised a red eyebrow. “You’re not entirely off the hook,” he said archly. “In exchange I want a full accounting of this sordid affair.”
LeGrand knew there would be a quid pro quo. There always was with Sandecker. He had already decided to lay his cards out on the table.
Blue Gold Page 24