The Detonators (8 page)

It seemed to be my week for being wrong about people. He was talking about a girl I’d never met. I couldn’t visualize the tidy and controlled young woman I’d met screaming wild obscenities in a protest march and being knocked down by the fire hoses and hauled off to a cell all bruised and bedraggled.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“We learned quite recently, when the man was spotted in Cincinnati, that my daughter’s recently been shacked up with somebody whose record we both know, somebody I’ve actually been tracking for the last couple of years while I pretended to take up boatbuilding in my retirement. I don’t for a moment think they got together by accident. He knows I’m after him, and I think he sought her out specifically because she was my daughter; more specifically because she was my daughter who’d been taught to detest and despise me. And I don’t think she just happened to start looking for her dear old daddy by accident either, even though I did write her a note after her mother’s death. I think she was following the very careful instructions of her lover, Mr. Alfred Minister, and the organization by which he’s been hired.”

I whistled softly. “Minister? Our inhibited young lady sure picks her company!” Then I asked, “Hired to do what?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” Doug said.

Officially, our specialty may be called counterassassination, as opposed, say, to counterespionage, or counterintelligence. We’re the good guys with the guns who go after the bad guys with the guns when they’re too mean for anybody else to handle—although I’ve heard doubts expressed in some quarters as to just how good we are. Some folks just don’t like guns no matter who uses them. I don’t suppose they liked the club, the spear, or the bow and arrow, either.

Anyway, in the line of duty, we have to keep track of a lot of people, mostly dangerous people. Among them, Alfred Minister was easy to remember, because he had a quaint conceit: his aliases were always ecclesiastical. We had records of him operating under several different names reflecting the same theme, like Aloysius Pastor or Alan Priest. It was a proud signature of sorts, like an artist placing an identifying scrawl in the corner of his canvas.

Minister was very good at his art. He could blow up practically anything with practically anything. Give him a little acid and something for it to chew on and he’d cook you up a nice batch of nitro in the kitchen sink and show you how to set it off very simply; but for his own use he preferred more exotic explosives detonated in more complicated ways.

Driving back to Miami, I didn’t pay much attention to what was behind me after an initial check to make sure nobody’d managed to pick me up at the motel: Doug’s continued existence was still a secret. Beyond that, there was nothing to be gained by being fancy, since I was returning to the Marina Towers, where anybody could find me who wanted me. As I drove, I reviewed what I’d just been told; also what I hadn’t been told, like the real reason Doug Barnett had been officially retired to devote his time, almost two whole years, to the Minister case and nothing else. We don’t usually pay so much attention to a lousy dynamiter, even one who’s a virtuoso.

Doug had handed me a condensed dossier to look through as we talked:
Minister, Alfred M. Forty-four, five six, one eighty-five. Light Brown. Blue. Distinguishing marks: none known. Psychological characteristics: professionally obsessive, personally sadistic. No weapons training or experience. Expert explosives.
There was a long list of the man’s professional achievements ending with:
Buenos Aires 1981; Tel Aviv 1983.
The last, I remembered, was an El Al airliner that had been blown up right after takeoff by an ingenious pressure-sensitive device, killing all on board. The PLO had paid for the job and claimed credit for it, but the subsequent investigation turned up the fact that the actual work had been done by a certain Mr. Archibald Deacon.

I frowned at the rear of the inoffensive car ahead. It wasn’t easy to accept the fact that this was the man with whom pretty little nonsmoking, nondrinking, nonswearing Amy Barnett was deeply involved: a middle-aged, balding butterball who liked to demolish people publicly and torment them privately.

“And this outfit he’s working for now?” I’d asked Doug Barnett.

“You won’t believe it,” he said. “After doing his last job for a bunch of wild Arabs, our explosive friend has now gotten himself hired by a supposedly respectable pacifist outfit called the People for Nuclear Peace.”

“Weird,” I agreed. I hesitated. “Is Amy a member?”

“Naturally,” he said. His voice was bitter. “If there’s any screwball save-the-world group around, my little girl will be on the list. Not that I’m opposed to saving the world in principle—we’re all working on that—it’s the half-baked way they go about it in practice.” He made a wry face. “The PNP is the brainchild of a wealthy Cincinnati dame named Georgina Williston who may or may not have all her marbles. We know she’s spent some time in an institution, but we don’t know what for. She’s got enough money to pull down the medical curtain and keep it pulled. We haven’t found a hole or a crack in it; and we can’t force it open officially, because we can’t afford to reveal our interest yet. The woman recruited Amy personally. Actually, the kid probably couldn’t have qualified otherwise in spite of her brilliant protest record. It’s a fairly restricted group of very wealthy citizens like the Williston dame. I guess they’re interested in preserving what they’ve got, since they’ve got such a lot of it. Well, you can hardly fault them for that. But when they hire a guy like Minister, you start to wonder.”

I asked, “Is your theory that this rich dame deliberately got Amy into her PNP outfit for Minister’s benefit?”

“It seems likely, doesn’t it? I mean, if they’re going to use the Preacher for something—God knows what—they’ve got to pick the ticks off him first, don’t they? Ticks like me. And now that I’m officially dead, ticks like you. After that brothers-in-arms act you put on, you’re the obvious candidate to replace me on the Minister job, aren’t you? And here’s the girl telling them you offered her your services in case of need; would they waste it? A spy in the enemy camp is always useful. If somebody else inherits the Minister assignment, tough. She thanks you for your help and goes home. But if you get it, there she is all tender and trembling, begging you not to leave her all alone in this big cruel world; you promised her poor dead daddy you’d look after her, didn’t you? And from then on she’ll stick to you so closely she’ll be able to report every move you make; and though she’s hardly qualified to take you out when it’s time for that, she’ll be in a good, trusted position to set you up for it. Shit!” He cleared his throat angrily. “I keep remembering her sitting on my lap when she was four years old. Cute as a button. And what’s that got to do with anything now?”

I said, “You’re making quite a dragon lady out of this daughter you hadn’t seen for some seventeen years until yesterday.”

He stared at me bleakly. “I’ve got to, don’t I? I’m running this thing. I’ve got to treat her like any other member of the opposition. I’ve got to figure out the very worst she can do, the very worst she can be, and plan accordingly. Hell. I can’t do her any favors at all, because I’m too damned involved; I won’t know if I’m doing them because they make sense or because I’m her papa. So any breaks she gets, any consideration she gets, will have to come from you. And then only because you think it’s safe, not because she’s my kid, damn you!”

“Sure,” I said. After a moment, I asked, “What’s the target?”

“Minister’s target? That’s what we have to find out, like I said.”

“No hints, no clues?”

“We only got onto this PNP outfit recently, remember, when the Preacher was spotted in Cincinnati.” Doug grimaced. “I said he and Amy were shacked up, but that’s a slight exaggeration due to paternal disillusionment. They weren’t actually living together, and they were very discreet about their meetings. Not to say secretive. They had a hidden little basement apartment where they’d get together. Considering Minister’s known habits, I don’t want to think about what went on there. They’d come and go separately. Our local man, keeping an eye on Minister after he’d been spotted while waiting for somebody with experience to take over—unfortunately I was in the hospital for my semi-annual checkup—only saw her coming there once; but he was smart enough to follow her and identify her. Smart, but maybe not the best shadow in the world. At least Minister seems to’ve realized, a few days later, that he was under surveillance; by the time I got there he was gone, and we haven’t managed to pick up his trail since.”

“But you figure Amy doesn’t know we’re aware of her Minister connection.”

“More important, we’re gambling that Minister doesn’t know we’re aware of his Amy connection. But he’d hardly have sent her here to pull the long-lost daughter act on me if he were.” Doug drew a long breath, dismissing the subject. “Back to the PNP. We ran the membership list through the computer and found that the Bahama Islands seem to be a very popular vacation spot these days for people from Cincinnati with antinuclear leanings.”

It seemed to be that, disturbed by his daughter’s behavior, he was being a little too hard on all protest movements.

“Practically everybody’s got antinuclear leanings these days except the Pentagon and the Soviet High Command,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a bit seeing the bomb stuffed back into its box myself; the world was a simpler place without it. But then, gunpowder complicated hell out of things, too, when it came along, a few centuries earlier. But we learned to live with that.” I frowned. “A lot of wealthy people visit the Bahamas.”

“The computer says the statistics are out of line,” Doug said. “We haven’t had time to work it out in detail, and we don’t even have all the data yet, but indications are that Mrs. Williston’s well-to-do friends in the PNP don’t seem to go anywhere else, recently. No vacations to Paris or London or the lovely fiords of Norway. No tours of the mysterious Orient. No round-the-world cruises. Just the damn Bahamas. So if my daughter does make a play in your direction, as I firmly believe she will, that’s where I’m sending the two of you. Of course, you’ll swear her to secrecy, and you’ll have a fancy cover—we’re arranging it for you—and you’ll go through all the proper secret agent motions, very hush-hush; knowing all the time that she’s reporting your every word and move to her PNP friends.”

“The old decoy act, in fact,” I said. “And what will you be doing while I’m holding their attention by playing wooden duck out there?”

“You won’t be entirely a decoy,” he said. “At least there’s an odd situation out in the more distant islands of the Bahamas that seems worth investigating. The Coast Guard lost a boat that was snooping around down there a few weeks back. They were trying to get a line of the operations of a big drug dealer named Constantine Grieg. The funny thing is that the PNP also seems to be interested in Mr. Grieg, born Griego. Greek mother, Latin father. Headquarters, Nassau. Our antinuclear friends have been spotted in that vicinity.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What the hell kind of peace group is this, anyway, involved with a mastermind of drugs and a high-powered bang-bang expert?”

“When you find out, let me know,” Doug said. “Anyway, I’ll be playing dead and keeping you covered, and following any leads that turn up, in my ghostly way.”

I said sourly, “I suppose I’ll be sailing some kind of a boat; there’s no other way of poking around those islands except by plane, and I fly even worse than I sail. And keeping a small boat covered inconspicuously out in open water isn’t easy,
amigo
.”

“I know,” he said. “We’ll do what we can; the rest if up to you.” He hesitated. “What I’m going to say will sound crazy, Matt, but there’s a coincidence that keeps nagging at me.”

I nodded. “It popped into my mind, too, while you were talking. You’re thinking of the Nuclear Disarmament Conference that opens in Nassau in a very few weeks? But I can’t think of a single reason why these people would hire an explosives expert to sabotage an antinuclear conference. It makes no sense at all. After all, they’re sincerely dedicated to banning the bombs and nixing the nukes themselves, aren’t they? Or do you suspect the PNP of being a cover for something else?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what I suspect them of, yet, but our investigation has turned up no indication that they aren’t a perfectly genuine bunch of wealthy idealists.” Doug made a face. “But on the other hand I wouldn’t bet too high on the dedicated sincerity of most of the conference delegates, or of the nations they represent, particularly the big nations that already have expensive stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Public opinion forced them to hold this disarmament meeting at last, but I doubt any of them have major concessions in mind.” He shook his head. “But as I said, as far as the PNP is concerned, the conference may be coincidental. At least we certainly can’t commit ourselves to a theory that doesn’t begin to make sense.”

“So?”

“So we ignore the conference, at least for the time being, and just ask ourselves the general question: Why would a bunch of rich and respectable save-the-world idealists hire a man like Minister to blow up anything, and what would they pick for him to blast? And what the hell kind of interest could they have in a bigshot drug dealer? Not that none of them ever touch the stuff; but with that much money they’re bound to have their own sources.” He paused, then went on without expression: “It seems probable that my daughter knows the answers, or knows the people who know the answers.”

I said, “While I’m waiting for the Preacher to come out of hiding and take a shot at me so you can clobber him, I’ll see what I can do about finding out what she knows. Always assuming that she does make contact with me.”

“She will,” Doug said. “I wish I didn’t think so. I wish…” He paused again, and drew a long breath. “But she will.”

But after the big rush to get me back to Miami that day without lunch, it wasn’t until late the next day that she did.

When the telephone rang at last I was watching a television show that was attempting to make me laugh and not doing a very good job. That evening after dinner I hadn’t been able to find a single program that wasn’t supposed to be funny except the news, depressing as always—well, I should have been cheered by a segment proclaiming that the forthcoming Nassau Nuclear Disarmament Conference was going to save the world, but somehow I found myself unconvinced—and some rock-and-roll, which I’m too old-fashioned to understand even nowadays when they give you weirdo pictures to go with the text.