The Detonators (7 page)

“You were not authorized to investigate further,” Mac said. “And you were certainly not authorized to employ outside help.”

“It did the job, didn’t it?” I said. “It broke your phony hippie into little squirming pieces. After a look at those two goons, he couldn’t stop talking. And he was so eager to write whatever I told him, true or false, that he’d have confessed to sinking the
Lusitania
if he could have figured out how he got that iceberg to the right spot. What the hell is wrong with Pac-Man, sir?”

“Pac-Man?”

“I mean, if you simply have to play games.” I faced him for a moment; when he didn’t speak, I glanced toward the bathroom door and said, “Well, let’s have the great resurrection scene. I suppose, since he’s officially defunct, our shy friend in there wanted to make absolutely sure it was the right man knocking on the front door before he showed himself; but he must be getting tired of sitting on the potty by this time.”

But apparently Doug Barnett had been standing by the door, listening to our conversation. Now he emerged from the bathroom and walked straight over to the dresser that held some glasses, an ice bucket, and a bottle.

I said sourly, “He moves pretty good for a dead man, doesn’t he, sir? And sees pretty good for a blind man.”

Doug Barnett, bottle in hand, glanced at Mac, who shook his head. Doug poured two stiff shots; dropped ice cubes into them, and came over and handed me one.

“If you want a splash of water—I seem to remember that you like your Scotch partially drowned—the faucet’s over there. Hi, Matt.”

“You bastard,” I said. “I suppose it was your idea to let me make a jackass of myself.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I recalled, from our long-ago foray together, that you’re an okay operative and a damn good shot, but a lousy actor. I figured you’d be more convincing if you didn’t know it was an act. Admiral Sanderson says you put on a hell of a show for him.”

“For him?”

“Well, for the girl.”

“For Amy? You went to all that trouble—we all did—just to make your daughter think you’re dead? Why?”

Mac stirred, glancing at his watch. “I have a plane to catch… Eric.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Abraham’s operation.” That was Doug’s code name, don’t ask me why. We’ve never figured out how he picks them. Mac went on: “He’s been on it for over two years; but it seems to be gaining momentum now and developing ramifications we never anticipated. You were brought into it, reluctantly, because you were on the spot and available and because you were eminently suitable in more ways than one. Abraham will explain. I flew down to make certain there would be no misunderstandings. The mission is his and you will take your instructions from him. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

That wasn’t true, of course. I had plenty of questions. I’d been on quite a few cooperative ventures where I’d had to defer to high-ranking stuffed shirts from other agencies, but this was the first time in a good many years that I’d been ordered to work under one of our own people; and as I’ve said, regardless of age, Doug Barnett was technically junior to me in our table of organization. Not that we pay much attention to technicalities. I realized that Mac was watching me closely. Perversely, I found myself a little annoyed that he’d felt the need to fly clear down here to give me the word, as if he didn’t trust me to take his orders unless they were delivered personally. However, it was also, I decided, his way of apologizing for putting me into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable situation, and maybe for the hoax that had been pulled on me. And maybe there were other reasons. I could think of one: When you have a kennel of good fighting dogs you’re careful to keep them from tearing each other apart.

I said, “Correction. I would like to ask one question, sir. The audio-visual effects out there in the Florida Straits. How were they rigged?”

Mac said, “Is that relevant?… Very well.” He looked at Doug. “Tell him.”

Doug made his report without expression: “After I’d picked up the Coast Guard one-hundred-ten-footer, or it had picked me up, and it was cruising along nicely in
Seawind
’s wake, I bore off a bit so the mainsail was between us and they couldn’t really see what I was up to in the cockpit. I pulled on mask and tank and flippers and dropped overboard, after starting the bang clock. I went deep; that ship came right over me. Even though I’d used a five-minute delay, which should have let the boat get well clear at the speed it was moving, I got quite a jolt when the charge fired. I surfaced cautiously and saw that
Seawind
…” Doug cleared his throat. “That
Seawind
was gone and the
Cape March
had stopped to search through the floating debris over there about half a mile away. Pretty soon they gave it up and got underway again and disappeared over the horizon. So I just inflated my vest and drifted with the nice warm Gulf Stream for a couple of hours until I heard the helicopter; then I used a dye marker to cue it in. The helo crew was in on it, of course, and the top brass and radioman on the
Cape March
, and Admiral Sanderson and the skipper of your boat; but we tried to keep the information circle as small as possible. Satisfactory?”

Mac glanced at his watch again. “Is that what you wanted, Eric?”

“Yes, sir.” I went on to explain: “I wanted to know that this mysterious operation, whatever the hell it may be, is important enough that Doug really sacrificed his precious boat to it instead of faking the explosion in some way. Well, if it’s that important, I guess I can sacrifice my precious pride or whatever it is I’m sacrificing. But I certainly wasted a lot of fancy speeches out there on the water. I even had the seagulls and pelicans weeping pitifully for my poor, brave buddy Barnett.”

Mac smiled thinly. “Well, I’ll leave you two to work it out. Good luck.” He turned at the door. “Incidentally, Eric, the
Lusitania
was torpedoed. It was the
Titanic
that hit the iceberg.”

The door closed behind him. We heard the smooth, nostalgic sound of the big V8 sedan starting up outside and moving away; a sound almost as obsolete, these economical four-cylinder days, as the clip-clop of a horse-drawn carriage.

“Well, now you know,” Doug said.

He whistled a few bars of the old
Titanic
song: “It was sad, it was sad, it was sad when that great ship went down.” Then his face changed and I knew he was remembering a not-so-great vessel that had just gone down, taking a lifelong dream with it. It seemed a large personal sacrifice for him to have made on the altar of his official duty. I couldn’t help thinking that he could have achieved the same result in a less costly way; but then Doug Barnett had always gone in for elaborate and meticulous operations with props and costumes and characters all as authentic as he could make them. Here he’d used a real boat, his boat, and he’d also employed an almost-genuine pot-smoking villain; he could have dispensed with both with a little finagling. I remembered that it had driven him crazy to work with me, since my style is just the opposite: I like to barge in heedlessly and just shake the tree hard to scare the monkeys out.

But still, he’d made a bigger and more expensive—to himself—deal of it than seemed absolutely necessary; and I reminded myself not to overlook the possibility that Doug Barnett had something driving him here in addition to duty that helped him resign himself to the loss of his boat. Furthermore, I warned myself, it seemed a hell of a fancy charade to put on for just one young girl…

I said, “A personal question,
amigo.
Since we’re going to be working together, I think I’m entitled to know what shape you’re really in. Should I carry along a few nice books in Braille to keep you entertained if things go bad?”

“We’ll be working on the same project, but if things develop as I expect we won’t be working together, thank God,” Doug said stiffly. Then he grinned. “It’s a legitimate question, I guess. Fifty percent loss of vision left eye, right normal. Occasional headaches that are real bastards. But no progressive deterioration has been noted as yet; if anything, my condition has improved over the past year. Okay?”

“So your airplane accident, if you want to call it an accident, wasn’t faked?”

“No, that was for real, dammit, but I was originally scheduled to go back on limited duty after I got on my feet again; only something came up that made it advisable for me to announce my retirement.”

“And when that didn’t convince somebody that you were harmless, it was decided to have you commit suicide.”

“Something like that. Now it’s my turn. How did you know it was a setup?”

“Know?” I said. “Who the hell
knows
anything in this racket?”

“You had a couple of syndicate thugs standing by.”

“There were a some loose ends, false notes, whatever you want to call them. Things didn’t quite jell, I figured if I squeezed that lemon hard enough—Ernest Love, for God’s sake!—I might get some useful juice out of him; and if I didn’t, then I could relax and figure it was just my suspicious nature acting up.”

Doug laughed. “You know why our mutual friend, just departed,
really
made that plane trip clear from Washington, don’t you? He had to bring us together for the job, and he knew that you’d be sore when you learned how you’d been used. He also knew that we aren’t true bosom buddies in spite of what you said out there when you thought I was dead, for which I thank you. He came because he wanted to be present when we met, so he could prevent a killing.”

It was the same thought I’d had earlier. I studied him for a moment. “Whose killing? Which way was he betting?”

Doug grinned. “It would be interesting to find out, wouldn’t it? Who’s the toughest boy on the block around here? Who’s the fastest gun in town? Kid stuff. And it wouldn’t get the job done.”

“Anyway, I don’t pick on senile, half-blind old men,” I said without expression. “And you were perfectly right. I did put on a better act because I didn’t know I was acting. So tell me about the job. And the girl. She seemed like a nice enough kid to me. Why is it important to have her think she’s fatherless as well as motherless?”

“They all seem like nice kids to you. That’s why you’re so eminently suitable for part of this mission, the part that concerns my daughter.” He frowned at me. “Did she make any arrangements for getting in touch with you again?”

I shook my head. “But I nobly offered her my strong right arm and my shining sword in case of need. Call any time. Sir Matthew is willing.”

“Ah, I knew I could count on you! Well, I think you’ll find the need will arise fairly soon, if we have Miss Amy sized up correctly. In fact, while I’d like to buy you lunch, I don’t recommend the room service here; and I think you’d better get back to Miami as soon as possible and wait for her call. Now that I’m dead, it’s fairly certain she’ll try to attach herself to you. We’re counting on it, in fact.”

I said, frowning, “This is still your daughter we’re talking about?”

“Don’t give me that blood-is-thicker line!” There was sudden anger in Doug’s voice. “Why do you think I picked you, anyway? I could have turned her over to one of those cold young Casanovas who hang around the office in Washington. But you’ve got a warm, sentimental streak where women are concerned. It’ll get you dead one day, but right now I’m making use of it. I’m not asking you not to sleep with her if the mission requires it. I’m not even asking you not to kill her if you have to. There’s a job to be done and we’re going to do it. All I’m saying is—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “All I’m saying is, don’t hurt her any more than you have to.”

After a little, I said, “I still don’t know what this is all about, but she didn’t look like much of a menace to me. Are you quite sure we’re thinking of the same girl?” He didn’t answer that, and I said, “Okay. The man says you’re the boss, so we’ll play it your way. But why send me back to Miami? Unless the airlines screwed up again, the kid’s in Cincinnati by this time.”

Doug shook his head. “No, she isn’t. She missed her flight, deliberately. At the very last minute, while everybody was milling around waiting to be sent aboard the plane in relays, filling it from back to front the way they do nowadays, she slipped out of the waiting room and disappeared, letting her checked suitcase travel to Ohio without her.”

“You had somebody covering her?”

He nodded. “Yes, but in the boarding confusion they lost track of her and didn’t realize she’d vanished until her section was called and she didn’t appear to present her boarding pass at the gate.”

I frowned. “So now she’s wandering around Miami with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing and the money in her purse, which can’t be much. At least she talked very poor when she described how she’d come to make the trip.”

“I wouldn’t be too concerned about my daughter’s destitute condition,” Doug said dryly. “If she really needs help, she has plenty available, I assure you. But we’re hoping that you’re the one she’ll turn to in her hour of need. It will be interesting to hear what her story will be. A sudden emotional crisis, probably.” He stared at me grimly. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m not sounding very fatherly, am I? But I’ve had a good many years to get over my original attack of paternalism, years during which my letters were returned and my bitch-wife told my little girl all about her evil daddy. And give me credit, Matt. I have made provision for her long-run security if she survives her present foolishness. It stands, even if she hates me so much she’s willing to be used against me. Also, I did pick you to deal with her, not because I like you but because you’re a softy in certain respects.”

“Yes, you said that,” I said. “Okay, I’ll beat her gently, if I have to beat her. Tell me why I may have to.”

Doug Barnett regarded me bleakly. “The fact is that whatever you think, my daughter is not a nice kid. Blame it on the divorce, blame it on her mother, blame it on me; it doesn’t matter. I know she looks pretty good, maybe a little too goody-good, that prim-and-proper act she puts on, but among other things she’s been arrested and she’s spent time in jail. Granted that the causes were all very noble, and that she doesn’t go in for shoplifting or fraud or arson; these kids never seem to know how to draw a line between legitimate protest and criminal activity. She’s been in on several pretty rough demonstrations that could have had her up on serious charges. To put it bluntly, she’s an erratic little screwball with idealistic pretensions and I’m afraid it’s got her into real trouble at last.”