The Intimidators (2 page)

I guess the prospect of going back to work after a couple of months of leisure was making me philosophical. There were no messages for me at the Yankee Clipper Hotel, a narrow, seven-story hostelry on a wide, white beach that was visible from the window of my third-floor room. I could also see a couple of sailboats far out in the blue Gulf Stream that I’d just flown over; and some powerboats closer to shore where the water was paler. The bellboy showed me the view and the TV set and the bathroom. I gave him a buck and a thirty-second head start, caught the next elevator down, and ducked into a lobby phone booth I’d spotted on my way in.

“Eric here,” I said when Mac came on the line.

“Pavel Minsk,” he said. “Reported heading for Nassau, New Providence Island, B.W.I. Find out why, and then make the touch. Mr. Minsk is long overdue.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I didn’t like it. It was the usual cheapie Washington routine, trying to get double mileage out of a single agent. It wasn’t enough that one of the other side’s big guns, a man we’d been after for a long time, had at last been spotted out in the open where we might be able to move in on him. That didn’t satisfy the greedy gents from whom Mac got his instructions, although they’d been screaming at us for years to do something drastic about this very individual—well, if it could be managed discreetly, that is.

Now that we at last had the target in view, or would have shortly, I was supposed to stall around playing super-spy and learning just why he’d come out of hiding before I moved in on him. It was kind of like going after a man-eating tiger with strict orders to determine exactly which native the big cat planned to make a meal of next, before firing a shot. I mean, there was really no doubt about
why
Pavel Minsk—also known as Paul Minsky, or Pavlo Menshesky, or simply as the Mink—was going to Nassau, if he was really heading that way. Outside his own country, the Mink went places for just one reason. The only question was
who.

I was tempted to ask Mac why the hell the high-up people who wanted information so badly didn’t send one or two of their own intelligence-gathering geniuses to handle that end of the job. They were supposed to be good at it, and information wasn’t exactly my business. They could call me in to exercise my specialty when they were through working at theirs. I didn’t ask the question, because I already knew the answer. Various intelligence agencies had already lost too many eager espionage and counterespionage types to the Mink. He hunted them the happy way a mongoose hunts snakes. The bureaus and departments concerned didn’t want to risk any more nice, valuable, well-trained young men and women in that dangerous neighborhood. Just me.

“Yes, sir,” I said grimly. “The British Colonial Hotel. Yes, sir.”

“You will be briefed on the background at dinner this evening,” Mac said. “Just keep the engagement arranged for you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t sound pleased, Eric. I should think that by this time you’d be bored with inactivity and happy to have some work to do.”

He was needling me gently. I said, “It kind of depends upon the work, sir.”

“If you don’t feel up to dealing with Minsk....”

I said, “Go to hell, sir. You know damned well the Mink rates just about as well as I do by anybody’s scoring system. We’re both pros in the same line of business, and if I may say so, pretty good pros at that. That means it’s a fifty-fifty proposition, or was. But if I’m supposed to snoop around playing invisible tag with him for a couple of days before I make the touch, the odds in his favor go a lot higher.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Those are the orders. You are at liberty to turn them down.”

“If I did, you’d send some other poor dope to do the same job under the same crummy conditions, maybe Laura, and I’d be responsible for getting them killed. No, thanks.”

“As a matter of fact, I did have Laura in mind as an alternate,” Mac said calmly. “She should be back in this country shortly.”

“Sure. And if my mother was alive, you’d use her, too.”

It was a rough game we played after years of association. He’d started it; now he ended it by saying: “The British Colonial Hotel, Eric. I’ve told you how and when to get in touch with our local people. Minsk arrives the day after tomorrow, according to our information, which may or may not be correct. You can use the time to familiarize yourself with the city. I don’t believe you’ve been there. And remember, we want no international incidents. Discretion is mandatory.”

“Yes, sir. Mandatory. Question, sir.”

“Yes, Eric?”

“Do I stop him or don’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, sir,” I said. There are times, even when dealing with Mac, that you’ve got to remember that bureaucrats are bureaucrats the world over, and you’ve got to pin them down. “Do I do my job before or after he does his?”

“You’re assuming that he’s coming to the Bahamas on official business?”

“The record says he never sticks his nose out of his Muscovite sanctuary for anything else.”

Mac hesitated. Then he said, “I think it would be nice, on general principles, if Mr. Minsk’s last job should be a failure. However, it is not of critical importance. Fortunately, we have no instructions to cover the point; and we are not a fine, humanitarian organization like the Salvation Army. I’ll leave the matter to your judgment, Eric.”

“Yes, sir.”

After hanging up, I realized that I’d forgotten something I’d meant to ask him. Earlier, I’d requested a check on William J. Haseltine, the Texas tycoon who’d been so anxious for me to go fishing at Walker’s Cay. I mean, it’s a nasty suspicious racket in a nasty suspicious world; and when a friendly person hands you a candy bar out of the goodness of his heart, your first act, if you’ve been properly trained, is to check it for cyanide. Big Bill might be exactly what he’d seemed, a wealthy
Tejano
who liked to pay his debts, but then again he might not. Well, if our research people had turned up anything interesting, Mac would have told me.

Or maybe not. It occurred to me that it was kind of coincidental, my being handy in the Bahamas, where I’d never been before, at just the time Mr. Pavel Minsk decided to pay a visit to Nassau, or somebody decided it for him. I don’t have a great deal of faith in coincidences like that. I warned myself that I’d better watch my step even more carefully than I normally would, dealing with a high-ranking fellow-pro, since it was possible that big mysterious things were afoot in that foreign island area just off the Florida coast; and that brilliant executive characters in Washington and elsewhere were surreptitiously shifting people like the Mink and me into striking position, like pieces on a chessboard.

At this stage of the game, if it was a game, everybody would be feeling very clever indeed, initiating supposedly infallible undercover gambits with sublime confidence. A little later, after a few unexpected reverses on both sides, everything would fall into hopeless confusion, and it would be up to the remaining pawns and pieces on the board to figure out what was supposed to be going on, and play out the contest on their own, judiciously disregarding panicky directives fired at them by rattled superiors totally out of touch with the situation in comfortable offices thousands of miles away.

I don’t mean to imply that Mac ever gets seriously rattled. He’s not that human. As far as I know, he never gets rattled at all. However, there are always political hacks in the upper hierarchy who have to change into rubber training-pants whenever the international going gets rough, meanwhile stammering out frantic, incoherent orders that Mac is obliged to transmit.

I was early for my seven o’clock dinner engagement, deliberately. I’d been given no indication who Mr. Jonas Starkweather was or what he looked like, and nobody’d arranged for us to wear white carnations in our buttonholes. Since I didn’t know whom I was looking for, and he presumably did, I wandered into the cocktail lounge adjacent to the dining room fifteen minutes ahead of time, ordered a martini, and sat at a window looking down at the beach seven stories below, and the blue Atlantic Ocean, and the boats.

The funny thing was, I reflected a bit grimly, that I was supposed to be kind of an expert on boats these days, having stumbled through a few assignments involving watercraft of one kind or another—generally with lots of help from real sailors who happened, luckily for me, to be involved. Actually, I’d been bom in the approximate center of the continent and hadn’t been formally introduced to salt water until, early in my present career, I was run through a quickie training course at Annapolis designed for agents who might have to know a little about getting on and off a foreign shore.

However, you get typed very quickly in this business just as in any other. Do a good job once or twice with high explosives or a submachine gun and you suddenly discover that you’re the resident big-bang or chopper expert. I had a hunch that, since my last watery assignment had turned out pretty well, I’d kind of automatically become Mac’s nautical specialist, the man to be called upon whenever action afloat could be expected; and that this was at least one reason why I’d been picked for this job in the Bahamas, which are mostly water. It wasn’t a reassuring thought, and I decided that if I had time in the morning before catching my plane to Nassau, I’d better hunt up a bookstore and get myself a copy of a large volume entitled
Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling,
which, I’d been told, is the basic reference work for all aspiring small-boat sailors....

“Matt! It’s been a long time!”

I looked around quickly. Two men stood above me. The one I didn’t know was the one who’d spoken: a tall, thin, stooped individual with hornrimmed glasses, obviously—maybe a little too obviously—an editor bent by years of labor at desks full of manuscripts. Actually, he was probably a good man with a gun, at least a fair hand with a knife, and maybe even something of a judo or karate expert. The tweedy, intellectual look was, however, quite convincingly done. I got up and stuck out my hand.

“Jonas!” I said. “My favorite skinflint editor! What’s got you buying dinner for indigent photographers?”

The man going by the name of Starkweather, for the moment, grinned. “To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t my idea. I came down to arrange to do a piece on Bill Haseltine, here, and he said he’d just run into you down in the Keys, and you’d seemed like the kind of man he could work with.” While I shook hands with Haseltine, Starkweather went on: “I don’t know how much you know about this guy, Matt, but he’s a great yachtsman and fisherman; and he just set a world’s record for tarpon in the new six-pound-line class. He’s got several other big-game-fishing records on the books.
Outdoors
wants to do a story on him in action with a lot of color stuff.... Well, let’s find our table and get some drinks in our hands. Bring yours along, Matt.” He ushered us toward the nearby dining room, still talking: “I don’t think a tarpon is quite the fish we want for the piece, too close to shore; and tuna don’t jump worth a damn. There aren’t many of either available right now, anyway. Sailfish and white marlin don’t run big enough as a rule, although either will do in a pinch; but a big blue marlin would be better if Bill can get one on and keep it there long enough for you to get the pictures. Let’s say that, for our purposes, Bill is now trying for the world’s record blue marlin on six-pound line. Of course, if it’s anywhere near normal size for these parts, it will probably break that silly little thread and get away, but we can make that the point of the story, showing that the problem of setting big-fish records with this ultra-light tackle is really a matter of finding one small enough to handle.” He was talking loudly enough that if anybody around didn’t know the subject of the conversation, he just wasn’t listening. Now Starkweather glanced at his watch and went on: “The trouble is, I’ve got a plane to catch; I can only stay a few minutes longer. Sorry, Matt, this just came up; dinner’s on me, anyway. I thought if I brought the two of you together you could work it out between you. You’ll need a good-looking fishing boat for as long as it takes, and maybe a chase boat for a day or two, but don’t break the bank, please....”

It was quite a performance. He left ten minutes later without having stopped talking once. For some moments of silence, Haseltine and I each drew a long breath of relief, simultaneously, and grinned at each other.

“Well, how did you make out at Walker’s?” Haseltine asked.

“Never mind that,” I said. “We can talk about fish later.”

“Sure.” Haseltine hesitated and spoke softly. “What do you know about the Bermuda Triangle, Helm?” he asked.

There are two kinds of rich Texans, the lanky cowboy type that made it with cattle, and the chunky truck-driver type that made it with oil. Scientifically speaking, the varieties are not distinct. There’s been a certain amount of interbreeding, and you will occasionally find a lean Gary Cooper specimen with a pasture full of oil wells, or a massive gent with the build of a wrestler and a pasture full of cows—the pasture, in each case, being approximately the size of Rhode Island.

The Haseltine stock, however, had apparently bred true ever since the first recorded beefy roughneck of that name brought in his first wildcat gusher and named it the Lulubelle #1 or whatever his wife’s name—or current girl friend’s—happened to be. If I sound a little snide it’s because, although born elsewhere, I was brought up in New Mexico, a proud but impoverished state that tends to look askance at the antics of its gigantic, wealthy neighbor and the drawling, well-heeled citizens it exports in overpowering numbers. Call it jealousy if you like.

Big Bill Haseltine was at least six feet tall and weighed around two hundred and fifty pounds, not much of it fat. He had the smooth brown tan of a man who’s taken pains to get a smooth brown tan; an altogether different complexion from the leathery, squinty look of the man who’s actually been obliged to work outdoors and accept whatever the sun and wind dished out. He had wide Indian cheekbones and thick, straight, coarse black Indian hair that retained the marks of the comb. His eyes were brown. They were friendly enough at the moment, but I didn’t trust them to stay that way if the man ever got drunk, or thought that he’d been double-crossed, or that somebody hadn’t treated him with the respect due the name of Haseltine.