Checkpoint Charlie (19 page)

*   *   *

M
Y HAND
belatedly whipped out of my pocket with the flat automatic pistol I'd concealed there. I leveled it at Stenback's profile. “Drop it. Now!”

He hesitated. His revolver was still aimed at Ross, who lay in an untidy heap. The woman sat wide-eyed, motionless.

I spoke quickly. “I won't kill you unless you force me to defend myself.”

It wasn't so much that he believed me; it was that I had the drop on him. By the time he could turn his gun through the ninety-degree arc toward me I could put two or three into him. He'd been a soldier; he knew that.

Slowly he lowered his arm to his side and let the revolver drop to the carpet.

“Smart,” I observed. “Kick it to me.”

When he complied I got down on one knee and picked up the .32 carefully by inserting my ballpoint pen into its muzzle. When I stood up I flapped the automatic toward him. “Sit down, sit back, relax.”

He sank onto the divan and leaned back warily. I dropped the .32 into my jacket pocket and sidled around toward Ross, keeping my automatic trained on Stenback and Myra Hilley; knelt by Ross and laid my fingers along his throat to test for a pulse. There was a good deal of blood. I removed my hand and stood, grunting with the effort. “He's dead.”

“Self-defense,” Stenback snapped.

“Sure.” I gave him a crooked smile. “Who's going to believe that?”

I saw realization grenade into Myra Hilley. She clutched his arm in fear.

I looked down at Ross. “Everybody knows you two had it in for the CIA. Now you've murdered a CIA agent. Man, you'll be a hundred and five before they let you out into the light of day again. Both of you,” I added, looking up sharply at the woman. “It's felony murder — she's as guilty as you are. And I'll testify to that.” Then I gave it a slow chilly smile. “Come to think of it you've done me a couple of favors. I never could stand the punk. I'm glad you've taken him out — they'll never stick me with him again. And you've done my job for me. The assignment was to stop you from publishing the rest of those names. You can't publish in a prison cell.”

Myra Hilley sat up straight. “But we can still talk. We can talk in court and we can talk to our lawyers and they can talk to the press. We can still make those names public. Then what happens to you, superspy? It's a black mark on your record, isn't it.”

I regarded her with suspicion. “Maybe you're right. Maybe the punk had a point. Maybe I've got no choice.” I lifted the automatic.

“Wait.” She stared at me.

Stenback seemed mesmerized by Ross's huddled body. Then he looked up at me, at my pistol.

Myra Hilley gripped his hand tighter. He didn't pull away. He seemed to have shrunk; it was the woman's strength that supported both of them.

She said, “You wanted to make a deal with us. All right — we'll take the deal.”

“Don't make me laugh, Myra. With the evidence I've got now? I've got Stenback's fingerprints on the murder weapon. Not to mention my own testimony.”

“But you still can't stop us from revealing the names of your agents. Only I wan and I can do that.”

I contrived an indifferent expression. I picked up Ross's unused revolver and dropped it in my pocket for safekeeping; it balanced the weight of the .32 in the other pocket. Then I went toward the phone, the guns dragging my jacket down.

She watched me pick up the receiver before she spoke.

“Wait a minute.”

“For what?”

“Let us go. We'll leave the country. You'll never hear from us again. We'll never publish those names.”

“How do I know that, lady?”

“If we ever reveal the names,” she said shrewdly, “you'll find us. Nobody can hide from you people. You'll find us and kill us, or you'll have us extradited and brought back to Australia to stand trial for murdering that man.”

I still had the phone in my hand. The dial tone buzzed at me. “It's not my habit to trust your kind.”

Stenback said, “She's right, Dark.” He seemed to have found his spine. “It's the only chance you've got of keeping those names secret. We're offering you the only way out. For you and for us. You let us go — we save our lives, or at least our freedom, and you get what you want. The paper stops publication.”

I spent a while thinking about it. Finally I put the phone down on its cradle. I squinted dubiously at the two of them.

I saw it when the silence began to rag their nerves. I let it grate for a bit. Then abruptly I said, “All right. Get out. I'll give you six hours to get out of Australia before I report his death. We'll keep the murder weapon out of it unless you double-cross me — in which case I'll manage to ‘find' it damn quick. You keep that in mind.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“We will,” he said.

“Get out fast now — before I change my mind.”

They fled. They looked as if they were holding their breath. I left the door open until I heard them enter the lift. Then I shut it and locked it, glanced down at Ross's bloody body and went across to the window; I parted the drapes and watched Stenback and Myra Hilley emerge from the canopy below me. They got into her white MG and I watched it squeal away.

Then I let the drapes fall to. Turning around, I said, “They're gone.”

Ross grunted and got to his feet.

*   *   *

L
OOKING DOWN
at himself he grumbled, “Do these phony blood capsules wash out? If not I've just ruined a good suit. Good grief, but I'm cramped. Couldn't you have done it faster? I think I bruised a rib when I fell. Incidentally I didn't take kindly to you calling me ‘punk' and ‘oaf' and all that stuff.”

“Are you about out of complaints now?”

He grinned at me. He was an awful sight. “Why, Charlie, I've barely started.”

“Look at it this way, Ross. You've got something to tell your grandchildren about. You've just assisted Charlie Dark in pulling a brand new twist on the oldest con-game in the world — the blank-cartridge badger game. Now doesn't that just fill your heart with pride and admiration?”

“I believe you are by all odds the most infuriatingly smug conceited arrogant fat old man I've ever met,” he said, “and I thank you for the privilege of allowing me to work with you.”

*   *   *

Passport
for Charlie

M
YERSON LIVES FOR THE DAY
I fall down on the job. I suppose he thinks it will prove I'm no better than he is after all. He keeps throwing impossible jobs my way; the only way I can get revenge is to bring them off and show him up. One of these days I will come a cropper — or I'll bring off a feat so incredible it will blow all his fuses. That's the nature of the tug-of-war between us.

Myerson said, “The van was hijacked between the printer's and the Atlanta office. The Bureau traced the shipment to Miami. A day too late.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Four thousand. Genuine U.S. passport blanks.”

“Uh-huh. Worth a bloody fortune on the illegal market,” I boseryed.

“Not if you recover them. That's your job. I don't think you can do it — I don't think anybody can — but it's in your ample lap.” He blew smoke from his noxious Havana toward my face and favored me with his barracuda smile. “Bon voyage, Charlie. Don't come back without the passports.”

*   *   *

T
HE
FBI Agent didn't resent the imposition; he was relieved to pass the buck and said as much — he was convinced the shipment had left his jurisdiction and that was fine with him; the headache was ours now.

“It was organized. They weren't two-cent stickup men. Two or three private cars were used to bring the passports to an assembly point here in Coral Gables. We nailed one of the hijackers, you know — blind luck but we've got him and he's willing to testify. A deal for a light sentence provided we give him protection. The Bureau's taken it to the Justice Department and I'm pretty sure they'll agree to it. Trouble is, he doesn't know enough to help you.”

“I'll talk to him anyway if you don't mind.”

*   *   *

H
IS NAME
was Julio Torres and he was a sad man — a Cuban, down on his luck. He was heavy, nearly as fat as I am but not so tall. I guessed his age at forty-five. He had a black mustache and calloused hands. In the interrogation cell we both overlapped our wooden chair seats.

“Who recruited you for the robbery?”

“He calls himself Obregon. I never heard his first name.”

“Cuban?”

“No. I think Puerto Rican.”

“What was your job?”

“To follow the van and drug the crew.”

“How?”

“They stopped for lunch in a truckers' café. I followed them in and put something in their coffee.”

“Chloral hydrate?”

“I don't know. Obregon gave it to me and told me to put it in the coffee.” He gave me a wry look. “I'm not a pharmacist, you know.”

“Then?”

“Then I drove the car. When we saw the van pull over we waited a few minutes to make sure they were asleep; and then Obregon drilled into the van and one of the others got behind the wheel and started it up, and we convoyed it to the hiding place at the farm.”

“Whose farm was it?”

“I don't know. Some sharecropper. I think it must have been abandoned for years. The driveway was all overgrown. Anyway I followed the van in my car and Obregon drove another car and there was a third guy in a third car. We transferred the cartons to the trunks of our three cars and drove away separately.”

“So that if one of you were caught, it would only cost one-third of the shipment.”

“I guess that was the idea, yes. I delivered my car in Coral Gables last night.”

“To where?”

“A private house a couple blocks off the Tamiami Trail. I gave the FBI people the address, they already checked it out. I don't think they found anything. It was just a drop, you know, I guess Obregon or one of the other guys picked up the car from there. I left the keys under the mat and walked away after I collected my money, which was in the mailbox like they said it would be. Then the next day I was arrested because one of the van drivers saw me on the street and recognized me from the truckers' café — see, I tripped against one of the drivers in the café and spilled a little root beer on him, that was how I distracted them when I dumped the drug in their coffee, so the guy noticed me then and he recognized me the next day. An unbelievable stroke of bad luck, you know, but that's been my life. But I guess you don't want the story of my life, do you.”

“Who does Obregon work for?”

“I have no idea.”

“Describe him.”

“Well, he's thin, let's see, sort of bald, no chin. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. A mustache — not bushy like mine, a thin neat mustache. He looks like an Indio.”

“Did he speak to you in English?”

“Spanish. His English is poor.”

“Puerto Rican accent?”

“Yes. I think he must live over there. Something he said, I can't remember what it was, it made me think he only came over to the mainland for this job.”

*   *   *

I
CHECKED
into the Condado Beach in a rainstorm and had a big meal in the Sheraton's Penthouse restaurant with a lovely view of the sprawled urban lights of San Juan. From twenty stories high at night you don't see the poverty.

In the morning I went through the ancient walls into Old San Juan down to the harborfront Federal Building and met for half an hour with FBI and customs men after which we trooped over to police headquarters and I went through mug files with the help of a San Juan detective lieutenant. We turned up a sheet on a man named Jorge Ruiz Orozco, a/k/a José Raoul Obregon, a/k/a Juan R. Ortiz, so forth; his picture met the description I'd had from Julio Torres in Miami and his rap sheet seemed to fit: he'd been arrested several times for smuggling and receiving stolen goods and had taken two falls in prison, once in Florida and once in Mexico.

We sent a bulletin out via the Burea and Interpol and the Agency. There had been no public announcement of the Torres arrest and there was a chance Orozco-Obregon-Ortiz might not have gone to ground; if he felt he was safe he might be out in public somewhere. The Puerto Rican police had copies of his mug shot in their cars but when he turned up four days later it was over in Charlotte Amalie and I went there to visit his cell before they extradited him to Florida.

He was sullen and not very talkative. I had to make a few threats. We can be testy about that sort of thing because the Agency doesn't concern itself with courts and appeals; I didn't care if they convicted him or not — I wanted information from him. He had a sister in Ponce and a brother in Mayaguez and an elderly mother in San Juan. I mentioned a few things that might start happening to them: the sister could lose her driver's license, the brother could lose his taxicab in an accident, the aged mother could learn that her social security payments and Medicare were being discontinued because of irregularities in her records — a thousand little harassments like that. After a while Obregon gave me a name.

*   *   *

F
ROM
St. Thomas I flew back to San Juan on a twin-engine Islander and made the connecting flight to Washington with an hour to spare — time to eat a fair meal between planes. I was in Myerson's office by half past four.

I said, “Obregon was hired for the job by Parker Dortmunder.”

Myerson blew Havana smoke at me. “Obregon actually gave you Dortmunder's name?”

“No. Dortmunder wouldn't be that stupid. Obregon gave me a description and a name. The name's one of the aliases Bertine has used before and the description fits Bertine. Bertine works for Dortmunder, or did last time I heard. I think if we find Dortmunder we find the passport blanks.”