The Detonators (16 page)

And there we were, at the subject I’d been reluctant to bring up myself. I’d left Minister pretty well out of my recital, wanting his name to come from her in the natural course of events; she might have resisted the truth if it had come from me.

I said, “You’ve got it, baby. We’ve been looking a long time for the man you know as Albert Pope.”

There was a long silence. At last she licked her lips and said, “Just because… because he likes to be mean to little girls? It’s not very nice of him, but it doesn’t seem like a major threat to the world order.”

“What did he say he did for a living?”

She shrugged. “I think he said he was retired from some kind of manufacturing business. Small, but big enough to leave him reasonably well off when he sold out, so he could devote himself to important matters involving the survival of mankind.” She shook her head quickly. “The standard involved-citizen-of-planet-Earth speech. We get lots of those. Some are sincere, some are looking for publicity as noble public benefactors, and some, like me, are looking for beautiful martyrdom. I don’t mean to sound cynical, Matt, but I told you, after learning the truth about my own motives from that psychiatrist, I was getting pretty disillusioned with all these wonderful movements. It’s undoubtedly my fault, not theirs.”

“And Albert?”

She shook her head quickly. “I never did figure out what category Albert fell into, really. If any. After the first time—our first date, if you want to call
that
a date—his political opinions seemed quite irrelevant. It was not an intellectual relationship. After a while I found that I’d stopped thinking altogether. Thinking had become too much effort, too complicated. I lived in a simple, fuzzy, woozy world of… of exquisite pain and ecstatic pleasure. If you want to call
that
pleasure. That’s why I had to break away, while there was still a little of the… the thinking me left.” She looked at me across the cockpit. “Who is Albert Pope, Matt?”

“His real name is Alfred Minister,” I said. “He’s the man responsible for blowing up the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires when they were protesting U.S. support of Britain right after the Falklands business. An Argentine patriot group paid for it, but Minister did the work. The El Al airliner that exploded right after takeoff from the Ben Gurion Airport at Tel Aviv last year was also one of his jobs. The PLO claimed the credit there, but Minister rigged the fancy detonator. We have a list of several other definites, and a large number of probables and possibles that we haven’t been able to confirm.”

“Oh, my God!” Having allowed herself one of her rare blasphemies, she was silent for a little; then she swallowed and asked, “Is he doing… is he working on something special right now, that you know about? Is that why you’re so concerned about him?”

“We hoped you’d be able to tell us.”

She said sharply, “You mean you hoped you’d be able to trick me into telling you!”

I risked a grin. “You got it, sweetheart.”

Her anger faded. She smiled faintly in response. “Yes, of course. It makes sense. If you thought I was a… an accomplice, that would explain everything, all the elaborate tricks and lies. Using me to trap… Alfred Minister. Albert Pope to me. But… I’m sorry. He never said anything to let me think… I had no idea what he really was; what he really did. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

I studied her for a moment. She was a little too earnest about her ignorance, and her eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine. I didn’t think she was actually lying. What she was saying was true up to a point; she really hadn’t known what Minister was, and she had no information about what he was working on at present. But she was withholding something, waiting for me to ask the right question.

But this was not the time to lean on her too hard and risk losing her confidence. I merely said, “Keep thinking about it. Something may come to you.”

She said softly, “I always seem to wind up with no self-respect left at all! The fine idealist discovering that she doesn’t care so much about saving the world; what she really wants is the lovely humiliation of being beaten with a nightstick and thrown into a smelly cell with a lot of common criminals! The dignified young professional woman deliberately getting herself so plastered that a man has to peel off her filthy clothes and hose her off in a shower. And now the proud beauty who’d convinced herself that a certain male individual found her lovely body irresistible, even though he had a very funny way of showing it…” She grimaced ruefully, overdoing it slightly. “But Albert picked me for his… his strange pleasures only because he could use me against Daddy, isn’t that right?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But he never did. Why didn’t he?”

“Would you have let him?” I asked. “Okay, so you let him hurt you because you like being hurt; but would you have let him use you to hurt your father?” When she shook her head quickly, I said, “And Minister is pretty smart about people; he has to be. He discovered that in spite of the way you’d been brought up to hate your daddy, you didn’t. That made you useless to Minister—well, in a professional way, at least. He checked you out thoroughly, to be absolutely sure; and maybe he hung around a little longer than necessary for reasons of pleasure, if you’ll excuse the suggestion. Or maybe he thought he could overcome your filial devotion by getting you thoroughly enslaved, if that’s the right word; hooked on his weirdo rituals. But you kept resisting that final domination, you kept trying to escape; so in the end he gave up on you. That must be why he disappeared, as he seems to have done. You have no idea where he may be now?”

It was the big question, and I made it as casual as I could. Her response was almost right—almost, but not quite.

“No, Matt. If he isn’t back in Cincinnati, I have no idea where he is.”

It was the truth. But something in her attitude warned me that again I’d asked the wrong question.

“He never returned to Cincinnati as far as we know,” I said. Considerable experience at interrogation told me it was no use asking her directly what she was concealing; I’d have to get at it some other way. I went on smoothly: “We believe he just came to that city in the first place because you were there, recruited for him by the local chapter of the PNP. Minister knows we’re after him, of course. He knows your dad’s been after him ever since that Argentina business. I suppose he, and the people who’d hired him, figured that if he got Doug Barnett’s daughter secretly involved, on his side, he’d have a certain edge. But when it became obvious to him that you were useless to him—that you’d never allow yourself to be used against your pop under any circumstances—Minister apparently just cut his losses and went underground.” It was time to leave the subject, before she sensed that I knew she was still holding out on me a little. I said in a different tone, “You’re sure you want to stick, Amy? Remember, this isn’t a very safe operation. The people who tried it before us are missing, one known to be dead, two presumed to be. There are several flights a day from Freeport to Miami. You could be home tomorrow.”

It was the offer that would have been made by an honest agent, guilty and embarrassed about the way he’d treated this innocent girl and unwilling to expose her to further risks. I had to make it; but I hoped she wouldn’t take me up on it. I’d paid high for the information I’d already received from her; I’d given her knowledge that could wreck the mission and probably get Doug Barnett killed, if she passed it on. Since I’d paid the price, I wanted to get as much as I could for it; and there was still something to be gotten. I waited for her answer.

She smiled a little crookedly. She said softly, “You’re always waving plane tickets in my face, Matt. A sensitive girl might begin to think she wasn’t wanted.”

I said, after a moment, “Even a sensitive girl couldn’t be that dumb.”

She drained her glass and set it aside carefully. “I guess I’m not really an alcoholic; I don’t want any more. But that much was very nice. I think…” She’d risen to look down at me, very serious and unsmiling now. “I think we should go back downstairs now. There was some… some unfinished business.”

Now I was standing, too. I realized that I was being offered, among other things, total forgiveness. It made my tricky little maneuvers and machinations seem very cheap.

I spoke carefully: “You don’t say ‘downstairs’ on a boat. You say ‘below.’”

She was smiling again, in the semidark under the cockpit awning. “We always seem to talk around and around it, don’t we?” she murmured. “What makes us so slow?”

Then she was in my arms, her small body smooth and warm under the pretty nightshirt that didn’t stay on her very long after we reached the cabin downstairs. I mean, below.

The public transportation system of Freeport-Lucaya is simple but effective. It seems that anybody who wants to run a bus is allowed to do so, as long as he runs it more or less along the established route—there must be more to it than that, but that’s the way it looks to a visitor. Accordingly, independent buses of all sizes, some just ordinary little vans, some half a block long, in various stages of disrepair, wander at will along the pleasant palmy roads, mostly divided, with grass and trees between the opposing lanes. Since there are a lot of such vehicles, you never have to wait very long for one, but you may find yourself making a slight detour for a pit stop before you reach town. Price, sixty-five cents. American money cheerfully accepted.

We got out at the International Bazaar in Freeport, which is of course a tourist trap; but as tourist traps go it’s colorful and interesting, a gaudy rabbit warren of little ethnic shops. In some of the shops you can pick up fairly good stuff at fairly reasonable prices if you know what you’re doing. I stopped outside a jewelry store, larger than most, with the Oriental name of the owner painted in gold on black over the door.

“This is the place, if I remember right from the last time I was here,” I said. “I think you need a jade necklace the worst way, don’t you, darling? Go in and browse while I make my phone calls.”

“Oh, isn’t this cute and exciting?” My silver-blonde child bride rose on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek. “But don’t get lost, Johnny. I’d never, ever find my way back to that marina all by myself.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I watched her disappear into the shop, in her snug white sailor pants and the blue-and-white jersey with the big sailor collar; a real little Jack Tar, female gender. Our relations were slightly strained this morning, but we were both being nice about it. It’s only in the movies that all problems are solved the instant the hero and heroine hit the mattress.

Tired after a long overnight sail and a considerable emotional upheaval, not to mention one false start at love, we hadn’t really set that bunk on fire with our passionate coupling when we finally got around to completing the act. In fact, while the job had got done after a fashion, it had been a fairly clumsy and self-conscious performance on both sides; so now in the morning we were being very cheerful and polite with each other.

However, it had cleared the cobwebs of sexual frustration from my mind and, lying in the bunk, beside her afterward, I’d run through what I’d learned from her and realized that I’d probably found the answer to one question; Why had somebody been asking about us at the Marina Towers Hotel in Miami after we’d slipped away? It was, I decided, a hopeful sign. Even though Doug had completely misjudged his daughter, and the situation, the mission he’d set up around her might still work out.

Although last night had convinced me that Amy was quite innocent of any hostile intentions, she was still a member of the People for Nuclear Peace. If the other members of that well-to-do outfit were even slightly on the ball, they would know by this time that she’d flown to Miami to see her dad, and they’d know about Doug’s supposed suicide. They’d know that she’d got herself into alcoholic trouble and been rescued by me; they’d know that she’d spent a night in my hotel room and that in the morning I’d run some fairly intimate errands for her, like having her clothes cleaned and buying her filmy, undergarments. A potentially very promising relationship, from their point of view.

It seemed likely that although they hadn’t planted her on me in the first place, they were by now tracking her hopefully—we’d been careful not to make it hard for them. They’d want to make use of her in the strategic position she’d achieved, close to the man who, now that Doug Barnett was apparently dead, was the biggest threat to their demolition genius, Minister, and the project they’d hired him for, whatever it might be.

That was one answer that came to me as I lay in the rather cramped berth feeling the warmth of the girl beside me and listening to her soft breathing. It also occurred to me that while I’d made some progress in learning about one Barnett, the behavior of another deserved much more careful study than I’d given it. Just why had Doug Barnett, supposedly retired, spent a couple of years on the case of one lousy dynamiter?

As far as I’d been able to determine on previous visits, there was only one public phone in the whole sprawling bazaar area, in a little courtyard toward the rear. It was in use when I got there. The user was a rather handsome, moderately tall, tanned female in her thirties who sabotaged her lean body with tentlike khaki shorts in the name of current fashion. I spent my waiting time visualizing the lady in well-fitting Bermudas, a great improvement. Then it was my turn to do battle with the Bahamas telephone system, soon confirming what I’d already more or less known, that the only practical way to talk overseas from one of their pay phones is to call collect.

Unfortunately, there was no reason why the man I was calling should want to pay to talk to me. I gambled on the fact that he was a reporter who made his living by his curiosity; but first I had to get the number of the
Miami Tribune
, which took some doing. Getting through the paper’s switchboard wasn’t easy, either, but at last I had a harsh male voice on the line.

“Spud Meiklejohn here. Why should I be interested in what a guy named Helm has to say?”