Angel of Destruction

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘So you reckon you can get close enough to Edel to do the job. It’s afterwards that matters.’

  ‘Afterwards always matters, more than before. There have been so many big crimes that have been meticulously planned and flawlessly carried out . . . and collapsed afterwards because of human frailty, human greed, human carelessness or just plain human stupidity.’

  ‘And none of those will be involved where you are concerned.’

  She smiled. ‘Not if I’m working alone.’

  ‘So you obviously have something in mind.’

  ‘Of course. But like I said, I can’t make any sort of concrete plan until I get there. Just let’s say, that living on this cay and using Fair Girl has given me a whole new perspective on life.’

  *

  Anna, Clive and her parents sat around the dining table after dinner. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow morning at noon,’ she told them. ‘Tommy and I will cross direct to Miami. That’s an eighteen-hour trip, so we’ll get in at dawn. There I will disappear, and Tommy will bring the boat back. He will have on board that extra gear we asked for, Clive. When I return to Miami, I will call you from there.’ She looked around their faces, which were all very grim.

  ‘Now,’ she went on, ‘supposing I don’t come back . . .’

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ Jane said. ‘Do we have to go through that again?’

  ‘I’m afraid we do, Mama. You and Papa may know the drill. But now Clive is involved, and the whole set-up is slightly different. Mama and Papa are my sole beneficiaries,’ she explained. ‘But I would like you to be, also.’

  ‘Of course I can’t muscle in on their inheritance,’ he protested.

  ‘I wish you to, and I am sure they will have no objection. The current income is something more than half a million dollars a year. It varies, because as I can’t spend even a fraction of that amount no matter how hard I try, the surplus is constantly being reinvested, so that the capital is constantly growing. In any event, my accountant, Paul Stattler, will be here in a couple of weeks. If by any chance I’m not back, I have left a note on my desk instructing him to give you all the gen and bring you up to date, and also instructing him that you, with Mama and Papa, will take over complete control of my investments and capital. However, I don’t recommend that you tamper with any of his arrangements, as long as the income keeps coming in. Now, I don’t have the time to see my lawyer in Nassau and make a new will, but I wouldn’t want to do that anyway; I would prefer to keep our private arrangements private. So, Mama and Papa, in the event of my death, I wish a fifth of my income to go to Clive.’

  ‘Anna!’ Clive protested. ‘You’re talking about a hundred thousand dollars a year!’

  ‘I hope it will be more than that.’

  Jane squeezed Clive’s hand. ‘We will do as Anna wishes. You have our word.’

  He drank some brandy.

  ‘Now for the potential problem,’ Anna said, ‘As you know, my capital and my income is managed by the CIA. I have no reason not to trust them, and certainly not Joe, as in normal circumstances, if I were to disappear it would almost certainly be as a result of working for him. This is different, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want Joe to know about the Edel business any more than I would. Apart from being top secret, it’s something in which he may feel he should be involved. So if I disappear, the conclusion must be that I paid a visit to Nassau and these heavies, whoever they are, got to me. That should at least put a load on his conscience. Incidentally, I am expecting him to come back to us with some info on these people, whoever they are. You’ll have to field that, Clive. Again, tell him that I’ve gone to Nassau for the day. Same thing if he calls again before I get back. If he gets the impression that I’m miffed and simply don’t want to speak to him, well, he wouldn’t be so far wrong.’ She smiled brightly at their sombre faces. ‘Now, I’m off to bed.’ She held out her hand for Clive.

  *

  ‘Come in, Luis,’ Don Giovanni invited. ‘You didn’t meet Mr Botten.’

  ‘My pleasure, Mr Ravanelli.’ Botten was a tall, cadaverous man, with matching features.

  ‘Mr Botten.’ Luis did not take the extended hand, sat in the chair before the desk.

  ‘Mr Botten,’ Don Giovanni said, ‘is looking for an update on the Fehrbach dame. This countess. I’ve been telling him how we worked out that she was responsible for that mass killing in Mexico City, and that gave us a lead. Now—’

  ‘We have her,’ Luis said.

  ‘Say, that’s great,’ Botten said. ‘You mean you’ve carried out the hit? You have the proof we want?’

  ‘We haven’t done it yet.’

  Botten raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Softly softly catchee monkey,’ Luis explained. ‘I have one of our best women on it.’

  ‘You sent a woman, after Fehrbach?’

  ‘I said, she’s one of our best. And she found her, quickly enough. She’s living in the Bahamas.’

  ‘In the Bahamas,’ Botten said thoughtfully. ‘You mean Nassau.’

  ‘If I’d meant Nassau, I’d have said, Nassau,’ Luis pointed out. ‘She has a home in one of the Out Islands.’

  ‘Of which I believe there are seven hundred.’

  ‘Sure. She owns one of them.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Luis gave a cold smile. ‘This is our job, Mr Botten.’

  ‘So it is,’ Botten said, equably. ‘So when do you reckon it’ll be done?’

  ‘Should be any day now. You understand that we have to move carefully. The Bahamas are a British colony. We don’t have any clout there, any pull with either the local police or the local politicians. So the job has to be slick. In and out. That means, a careful examination of the ground where we’ll operate.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Our woman made a positive ID on this Fehrbach six days ago. She telephoned me the next day to give me the gen. I told her to hire a boat and go out and look at this cay and report back on what she found and what she might need to complete the job. We don’t take risks, Mr Botten. We’re professionals.’

  ‘So what did she have to say?’

  ‘We haven’t heard from her yet.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, Mr Ravenelli. You told this woman to go and take a look at this cay five days ago, right?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘How long was this recce supposed to take?’

  ‘Only a few hours. The cay is quite close to Nassau.’

  ‘So she would have been there and back in a day.’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘So we’re talking about four days ago, right? And she hasn’t reported back. That doesn’t strike you as odd?’

  ‘Well, yeah. She should’ve come back to me by now.’

  ‘And you haven’t chased her up.’

  ‘We’ve been kind of tied up the last few days,’ Don Giovanni explained. ‘Family business.’

  ‘But you know where she’s staying, in Nassau.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you could call her now,’ Botten suggested.

  ‘What’s bugging you? I said, she’s one of the best.’

  ‘I’d take it as a favour. I need some kind of a progress report, for my principal.’

  Luis looked at his father, and received a shrug of the massive shoulders. He picked up the phone on the desk and put the call through. The three men waited, regarding each other with varying degrees of disfavour.

  ‘Hi there,’ Luis said. ‘You have a Miss Strezzi staying with you. I’d like to speak with her.’ He listened, a frown slowly gathering between his eyes. ‘Slow down, slow down. What d’you mean, disappeared? . . . Holy shit! Wasn’t there a search? . . . Look, pal, a boat can’t just disappear. What are the police doing about it? . . . The Bermuda Triangle? Don’t give me any of that shit . . . OK, OK . . . What? Why should I? She ain’t no relative of mine . . . No, I won’t give you my name and address. Piss off!’

  He slammed the phone down and glared at his father and then at Bott
en. ‘What a fuck-up.’

  ‘Do I gather,’ Botten said mildly, ‘that your young lady has gone astray?’

  ‘Like if she never existed, save that some of her gear is still in her hotel room, and the bill hasn’t been paid.’

  ‘So what exactly happened?’ his father asked.

  ‘Nobody knows. Seems she hired this fishing boat for the day last Sunday, went off in it, and never came back. The police went out to see if they could spot her, but they didn’t even know in which direction she’d gone. You ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle?’

  ‘It’s a legend,’ Botten said.

  ‘Yeah. Well, seems boats and planes do disappear around there from time to time. So . . .’ He looked at his father. ‘What the shit do we do now? Today is Thursday. Where the hell can she have got to? All she had to do was take a look at this island and report back. So where has she gone? What’s she doing?’

  ‘I can tell you where she has gone, Mr Ravanelli,’ Botten said. ‘In fact, I can tell you where she now is, give or take a few miles.’

  ‘How the shit can you know that?’

  ‘Let’s say that I can make an educated guess. Your young lady is at the bottom of the sea, together with her boat, somewhere between Nassau and this cay she was supposed to be investigating.’

  ‘You have got to be joking. She was taking Paolo with her.’

  ‘Paolo being one of your best men, I assume.’

  ‘Yeah, he is. And he used to be a professional seaman.’

  ‘Just as, no doubt, he used to be alive.’

  Luis looked about to explode. ‘Just what the shit are you trying to say?’

  ‘I wonder if you’d bear with me while I tell you a little story.’ He looked from face to face. ‘It concerns Anna Fehrbach. As you know, she used to belong to the SS. Actually, this was a branch of it, called the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the most secret of all the German secret services. Her profession was assassin, and she was the best they had.’

  Both Ravanellis were looking sceptical, but he continued urbanely. ‘You can forget what I told you about her collecting Jews for the gas chambers. Her work was more specialized than that. Just before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, she was in Moscow, her brief to assassinate Stalin. The NKVD caught her before she could bring that off, and locked her up in the Lubianka to await trial. She escaped, the only person ever to do so, and left behind her two very senior officials, dead. Later that year, the NKVD tracked her to Washington, and sent a squad of six to arrest her and take her back to Moscow for execution. Again she disappeared, and the six agents were all found, dead. They caught up with her again in Warsaw in 1944. This time they had a squad of twelve. She shot six of them, dead, before the rest got away, without her. When the Soviets were about to take Berlin, they caught her trying to escape. But they couldn’t hold her, and three more went the way of all flesh. After the war ended, she disappeared again, but they found her again, in Scotland. Four agents, four more dead bodies. Again she disappeared, but they located her in Brazil. Four more in the morgue. Next, she returned to Germany to collect some money she’d left behind at the end of the war. This time she had some friends with her, so that when the NKVD, who by then had become the MGB, found out what she was doing, they sent twenty-two picked men after her. That meant twenty-two more dead. Like I said, she had support on that occasion, so maybe she didn’t do them all herself, but no one has any doubt she did most of them. Then, only a couple of days later, when another four-man squad caught up with her in Geneva, Switzerland, they also went.’

  He paused to look at their faces, which were revealing total consternation. Luis was the first to recover; he had majored in Maths at college, and had been keeping count. ‘You telling us this dame has been responsible for fifty-one killings?’

  ‘No. I am telling you that this woman has killed fifty-one Russian agents, so far. God alone knows how many she’s put away besides those, not to mention the five in Mexico City.’

  ‘Shit!’ Don Giovanni commented.

  ‘And you sent a woman and an itinerant sailor to do the job,’ Botten said, contemptuously.

  ‘They were only supposed to check the place out,’ Luis said, defensively.

  ‘Well, they must’ve overplayed their hand. So we’re forced to conclude you guys just aren’t up to it. They said you’re the best in the business. Well, give me back my money and the photo and I’ll go elsewhere.’

  ‘Strezzi had the photo with her,’ Luis muttered.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! That’s the only one we had. But you have the name she’s using, and the address. Let me have it.’

  Luis looked at his father.

  ‘Don’t let’s be hasty about this, Mr Botten,’ Don Giovanni said. ‘OK, so we underestimated the opposition and fouled up. But now we know what we’re up against, we can handle it.’

  ‘You’ll need an army.’

  ‘We can raise an army. But . . . it’ll cost us, to bring in outside help.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Another ten grand should swing it. Can you manage that? If you want this dame badly enough.’

  Botten regarded him for several minutes. Then he nodded. ‘You’ll get your other ten thousand. But just remember, the whole lot is on loan, until the job is completed.’

  ‘We understand that.’

  ‘So when will it happen?’

  ‘We’ll need a couple of days to set things up.’

  ‘A couple of days.’ Botten got up. ‘The extra ten will be delivered tomorrow morning. And I’ll see you in a week’s time.’

  He left the office. ‘What an asshole,’ Luis commented. ‘Who the hell does he think he is, reading us the riot act? I’m surprised you let him get away with it, Pa.’

  ‘Dummo,’ Don Giovanni commented. ‘This guy ain’t no itinerant with a grudge. He’s working for the Russian government.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face. How do you think he got all that data on this countess’s record? Well, the last thing we need is a bunch of MGB heavies turning up on our doorstep.’

  ‘Well, say, can’t we hand the whole thing over to the Feds? They’re not going to look too kindly on a bunch of Reds muscling in in this country.’

  ‘Listen,’ his father said ‘If there is one thing I’ve learned from my years in this business, it’s that you don’t buck no governments. We’ve always got along fine because we get on with the cops. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us, and if the going gets too rough there’s always someone willing to take a backhander. If we ever get involved with the Feds, we’re done. And if we ever fall out with Stalin’s lot, we’re even more done.’ He pointed. ‘You get on to Solly.’

  ‘Solly? For Jesus’ sake, Pa. We don’t want to involve that asshole. He’s crazy. Look, I’ll handle the dame myself. I should’ve done it from the beginning.’

  ‘And you’d have got yourself killed.’

  ‘By a dame?’

  ‘This ain’t no dame you or I have ever come across before. What kind of muscle can you raise?’

  ‘A dozen good guys, with no trouble at all.’

  ‘The Reds had twenty-two at that shoot-out in Germany, and it didn’t do them too much good. You get hold of Solly and bring him in for a chat. He has men, he has a boat, and he knows the Bahamas.’

  *

  Despite what she had told Clive, Anna had, as always, prepared herself as meticulously as she could until she had actually seen the situation for herself, planning her wardrobe and her appearance down to the last detail. She went below as soon as they were alongside in Miami to change from her seagoing clothes. For travelling through the airport where it was still possible that the police were on the lookout for a good-looking long-haired and perhaps flamboyant blonde, she had decided entirely to reverse the pattern she had followed in leaving Mexico. Thus she wore a plain grey dress, and pinned up her hair beneath one of her slouch hats, no jewellery at all save for her crucifix, which was an
yway invisible, and her plain cheap watch. Her shoes were wedges, and she carried an inexpensive cloth coat slung on her arm; May/June was the depths of the Argentine winter, and although according to her encyclopaedia the temperature in the north never dropped much below fifty that was a lot colder than Miami or the Bahamas in high summer. Equally she wore no make-up and a cheap perfume. Her jewellery was all stowed in her shoulder bag, along with her pistol and two spare magazines as well as her gun belt and Baxter’s forty thousand US dollars, not to mention her four passports and her Fodor’s Guide to South America. She also packed her Italian sunglasses, and instead wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles; the glass was of course plain.

  She inspected herself in the mirror, slung her shoulder bag, picked up her suitcase, and went up the companion ladder. Tommy blinked at her. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘What do I look like, Tommy?’

  ‘Well, ma’am . . .’ He was embarrassed.

  ‘Say it?’

  ‘You remind me of a schoolmistress I had when I was a boy.’

  ‘Tommy, you are a darling; that is exactly what I wanted you to say. Now, I want you to wait for a couple of hours; I’m expecting some goods to be delivered to the boat. As soon as you receive them, head on back to the cay. Can you manage on your own?’ She knew he could, but she liked him to know she cared.

  ‘No problem, ma’am. I’ll put in to Bimini for the night, and be home tomorrow.’

  ‘Great. The goods will probably be in three boxes, which you will deliver to Mr Bartley.’

  ‘You got it, ma’am.’

  ‘And I’ll call you from here, when I’m ready to go home.’

  ‘No problem, ma’am.’

  *

  She stepped ashore, carried her suitcase across to the street, and hailed a cab. ‘Petersen’s Bookshop, please.’

  He made no comment, and she was there in a few minutes. She paid him and went inside. There were two customers, browsing. Anna went straight to the counter, where a man sat reading the Miami Herald. He was bald and had a big nose, and looked up without a great deal of interest. ‘Yeah?’