Bombshell

by Allan, Barbara

  They shook hands; the two had spoken a number of times on the phone, previously about the planning and then cancellation of the Khrushchev visit, more recently—less than half an hour ago—about the situation here at the park.

  “How much do your men know, Chief?”

  “My Captain here, Ed Keenan, and Lt. Willits, have been fully briefed. The other men, not at all. We get calls out this way from time to time, you know.”

  “Yes, I understand there’s no security force at Disneyland.”

  “Not after closing, not even a night watchman. We keep a pretty close eye, though—park’s a real boon to Anaheim.”

  Harrigan had no time for small talk. “Gather everyone around,” he ordered.

  The chief seemed to have no compunctions about relinquishing his leadership to Harrigan—that, at least, was a relief. Wasting time jockeying for position, pissing on trees to mark territory, was out of the question.

  In a circle hastily formed in front of the locked gates of the amusement park—beneath a sign that read: To ALL THOSE WHO COME TO THIS HAPPY PLACE, WELCOME… WALT DISNEY—Harrigan quickly told the diversified group about the attempt on Khrushchev’s life, and Marilyn Monroe’s involvement.

  “We have good reason to believe they’re inside,” Harrigan finished. “And we have excellent reason to believe two assassins—probably Chinese—are inside, as well.”

  “One of them is Lee Wong,” Munson added, and showed around a picture of the angular faced, dead-eyed Chinese hit man. “He’s freelance—ruthless as hell. He will kill you in a heartbeat, gentleman—your last. We don’t know who the other one is, but it’s not unusual for assassins to work in teams.”

  The government agents took in all of this in stride, but the local cops, for the most part, looked like non-swimmers contemplating being thrown into the deep end. The chief and his captain, however, revealed nothing but a coolly competent manner.

  That mouth-breather lieutenant, on the other hand, responded by dropping his jaw further, an appropriate enough response to the critical state of things, but then the man belatedly stammered, “You… you mean, the Marilyn Monroe?”

  The captain stepped up, perhaps to draw attention away from his dopey crony. “Unless they climbed over, I don’t think anybody’s got inside this way,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the gate. “Lock’s intact.”

  Harrigan nodded. “Is there another way into the park?”

  “Uh, there’s a road goes around the back,” the lieutenant responded, attempting to redeem himself. “It’s a service entrance and some of the employees use it, too.”

  Harrigan dispatched Krueger to go in the back way and keep in touch via walkie-talkie; that efficient, burly captain—“I know this park inside out”—volunteered to go along, and the FBI agent and a carload of support headed off, just as Chief Coderoni slipped up alongside the State Department man.

  Speaking sotto voce, Coderoni said, “We may have another problem, Agent Harrigan.”

  “Which is?”

  The Chief grimaced, then whispered, “Mr. Disney was supposed to meet us here—to let us in… and there’s no sign of him.”

  Harrigan processed that for a moment, then got Krueger on the walkie-talkie and informed him of the stray movie mogul who was somewhere inside the park, along with two assassins, a sex bomb, and the premier of Russia.

  Harrigan instructed the chief to leave some of his men behind to watch the front gate. “They can raise us on this,” he said, handing Coderoni a spare walkie-talkie. “Gather ’round again!”

  The G-men and local cops did so.

  “We’re going in,” Harrigan said, “in four teams. Special Agent Krueger is already heading in, to take the back way—that’s Team Number One. The rest of us will split up at the end of Main Street. Team Number Two will head to the left, Team Three to the right, Team Four’ll continue on straight ahead. Place is set up like the points of a compass. We’ll converge at the rear of the park, at the midway.”

  “How about a password?” the lieutenant asked.

  “What?”

  “So if we run into somebody, splittin’ up like this, we don’t shoot their head off.”

  That wasn’t a bad suggestion, considering the source.

  “Make it ‘Armageddon,’” Harrigan said.

  Around back, Sam Krueger had discovered two parked cars in the bushes near the metal gate that half-heartedly barred further passage to Disneyland.

  The captain was the first to reach the abandoned cars: a blue Buick and a green Ford, both late models.

  “This one’s a rental,” the officer said, shining his flashlight on the back license plate of the Ford.

  “This is Marilyn’s,” Krueger said, kneeling beside the Buick, noting that the tires had been slashed. Clearly these assassins didn’t want their prey to get away.

  The captain assigned one of his men to stay with the cars, “in case the assassins return,” a tactic Krueger approved.

  The FBI man used the walkie-talkie to bring Harrigan up to speed.

  Harrigan took the info, and instructed Krueger to continue on into the park; right now the State Department agent was in the lead, the three teams—men with drawn handguns and flashlights and walkie-talkies—following him slowly up Main Street, a replica of turn-of-the-century storefronts, Victorian in a cartoony, postcard sort of way.

  At Harrigan’s side, the chief said, “No sign of Mr. Disney…. Thought he might meet us here, if not at the gate. He has an apartment right there, you see.”

  The chief was pointing to a mock fire station.

  Harrigan shuddered—a foreign agent murdering Walt Disney would be almost as bad as Khrushchev buying it on American soil; wars had been fought over less.

  They cautiously proceeded in, only the moon and a few security lights providing any illumination. Eyes darting from storefront to storefront, the former Secret Service agent felt he was going down a Hogan’s Alley, one of those academy training exercises where at any moment a cardboard gunman might “jump” into a doorway.

  But any gunman who leapt from these doorways would hardly be cardboard.

  In the meantime, Krueger’s group—the Anaheim captain, two Secret Service agents, one KGB, and a cop, also armed with walkie-talkies and flashlights, were fanning out from the rear of the park, jogging past a pagoda and park benches that sat peacefully among the rhododendrons in the moonlight.

  Then Krueger noticed a halo of light shining through the trees up ahead—could that be the sun coming up? No, too early for that…. He picked up his speed.

  The FBI man broke away from his group, running toward the light, finding himself on the midway, where various rides were shut down and dark, like slumbering beasts at a zoo.

  All, that is, but one….

  “Jack,” Krueger whispered urgently into his walkie-talkie, “I’ve got something over here… Toad’s Wild Ride. Lights are on like she’s open for business.”

  The communicator crackled. “Copy.”

  Krueger had just signed off when he noticed several dark splotches on the ground, ahead of him. He knew what they were even before he knelt and touched one—still damp!—and his heart sank even as his breath quickened.

  An out-of-wind Harrigan appeared at his side. “Jesus, Sam—don’t… don’t tell me that’s what I think it is?”

  “It’s not catsup off somebody’s hot dog.”

  They followed the blood trail with their flashlights, twin paths that led into the alcove of the ride. Harrigan splashed light on an empty Model T car.

  “Looks like the blood starts here,” he said.

  Krueger leaned in, having a closer look at the car. “Shit—Jack… there’s a bullet hole in the back of the seat….”

  Harrigan, noting the puncture in the car’s vinyl padding, said, “Armageddon is right.”

  “What?”

  “That’s our ‘password.’ Don Knotts back there insisted.”

  By this time, the others in Harrigan’s gro
up had caught up with them.

  “Watch where you step!” Harrigan said, flashing his light on the blood trail. “We’re trying to find where this goes.”

  Flashlights flickered across the ground like giant lightning bugs.

  “Looks like it goes back the way we came,” the lieutenant said.

  “No,” Krueger said. “The trail leads there….”

  And the FBI man pointed toward Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, silhouetted against the night sky like some gothic illusion.

  As the group headed off in that direction, Harrigan wondered who the blood belonged to.

  Khrushchev? Marilyn? One of the assassins?

  Or maybe Mickey Mouse’s daddy?

  It sure as hell wasn’t some kid who got a bloody nose on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

  He was pondering that when he began to hear the screams—the shrill screams of a woman in danger.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WILD FRONTIER

  A ROUGH HAND slipped gently over the mouth of the slumbering Marilyn, and an elbow nudged her, waking her from a deep sleep. Groggy and disoriented, for a moment—as on so many mornings, after swallowing too many Nembutals—she at first didn’t remember where she was, sleep having mercifully removed their peril. Then the moon face of Nikita Khrushchev—stern, determined—came into focus.

  The premier’s frowning expression was not directed at her. Pointed ears perking like a dog’s, he stared intently at the square hole in the floor where the stairwell led to this upper landing in the rocket’s nose cone.

  She stiffened in his arms: had the assassin found them?

  Slowly, Nikita removed his hand from her lips, and together they listened. For a long, agonizing minute or more, she heard nothing other than their own shallow breathing. Then it came… faintly, but unmistakably, from below, as if that hole in the floor were speaking to them—the creak of a foot.

  Marilyn’s heart was a trip hammer. They were trapped, no way out, cornered without a weapon. Her eyes darted in panic around the small curved-walled enclosure, the dreary insides of a futuristic tomb.

  There wasn’t even a plank to pry loose.

  Trembling, Marilyn clung to Nikita’s arm. She looked at him and realized that the eyes in the otherwise resolute face glimmered with something that might have been fear. He had said, back in the teacup, that he too was frightened….

  What can we do? her eyes asked him, terror mounting.

  His eyes, however, turned suddenly hard and black, like the lumps of coal stuck in a snowman’s face. He slipped something in his pants pocket—she didn’t know what, and couldn’t exactly ask—and then he smiled at her, his expression seeming to say, I have idea.

  Gently, he withdrew himself from her, then reached along his trousered leg and began to untie one of his heavy, thick-heeled brown shoes.

  He whispered in her ear: “Distraction” was all he said. Then he looked significantly toward her bosom, and gave her a small smile and an arched eyebrow; Marilyn understood and smiled a little herself and nodded.

  Crawling quietly away from him, like a baby only quieter, she positioned herself directly opposite where the stairs emptied out. Re-staging one of her notorious calendar poses, she leaned against the wall, tucking her legs to one side, bringing an arm up to cradle her head, thrusting her ample bosom out. She looked at Nikita for his verdict.

  His head bobbed, but he mimed his fingers along the buttons of his pajama top, and she mouthed, Oh!, and unbuttoned her blouse, exposing most of her bosom in a teasingly provocative way. The moonlight conspired with her, streaming in from the little round window, providing her with a nice soft-focus key light. Too bad a photographer wasn’t around, to show just how sumptuous a pin-up girl Marilyn Monroe could still be in her thirties.

  Nikita—moving in remarkable silence for so large a man—positioned himself in the shadows to one side of the staircase opening; he got on his knees with a shoe in his right hand, poised to strike from the darkness.

  She shot him a look, as if to say, Well—how is this? And, briefly, as he glimpsed her posing there, he wore a stunned expression she’d seen countless times on many a man.

  Which made her think this strategy just might work….

  Nikita gave her an approving nod; and Marilyn gave him an encouraging wink, before half-closing her eyes, then breathing deeply, affecting slumber.

  Suddenly she was no longer frightened. It was as if a movie camera had started to roll, and the fear that clenched her before she was on set, and working, had vanished. She was doing what she did so well: acting out a scenario, playing a part…. She did not allow herself to realize this might well be the most important role of her life.

  Marilyn Monroe would be the first thing the killer saw, as he stealthily climbed the last flight of stairs, his head cautiously rising above the opening in the floor, eyes piercing the darkness in search of his victims… then—if she was any judge—those eyes would pop at the sight of the semi-nude Marilyn, her blonde hair shimmering in the moonlight, bedroom eyes seductively closed, sensual lips parted provocatively, white creamy skin inviting a man’s touch, full breasts half exposed under the open plaid shirt….

  He wouldn’t stand a chance.

  A thought jumped into her mind: unless he was gay!

  Long seconds ticked by, as wood below them creaked, the sound of feet on stairs soft, subtle, yet building as the party-crasher drew nearer….

  Through her slitted eyes she saw him, an Asian face on a head that sneaked itself up into view, a hand with a gun in it, a bulky thing, nosing up over the edge of the hole in the floor; then dark eyes fastened on her and opened wide, his mouth gaping, too…

  … and a shoe flashed out of the darkness and she opened her eyes wide as that brown hammer came around and smacked the intruder in the forehead, hard, and the open mouth yelped in pain and the eyes narrowed with the same thing. Nikita slammed the shoe down again, this time on a mostly out-of-sight gun hand, apparently knocking the weapon from the man’s grasp because she could hear it fall clatteringly down the stairwell to make a distant thunk at the bottom.

  Somehow the assassin managed to swivel toward Nikita, in a posture that suggested a martial arts move might be next; but the premier dealt firmly with the matter, Nyet!, whamming the shoe down on top of the man’s head like he was driving a nail, finally dislodging him from the stairs, sending him toppling down a flight, plunging out of her view, whumping to the landing below.

  Nikita was moving quickly, nimbly, amazingly so for such a corpulent man, and a wounded one at that; he was already out of sight, heading down to the landing below when she leapt to her feet and rushed to the stairs, and looked down. The assassin was sprawled on the landing, on his back, like an overturned black beetle, groaning in pain, a red welt the shape of a heel rising on his forehead.

  Nikita, finishing his two-stairs-at-a-time descent, seemed about to leap on the man, as Marilyn—halfway down the stairs herself now—saw a glint of steel in the killer’s hand, winking at her flirtatiously.

  She yelled, “Nikkie! He’s got a knife!”

  As Nikita jumped back, again with unusual grace, the assassin sprang to his feet, and smiled at his target, showing him a long, slender blade, threateningly thrust forward in an assured hand.

  Afraid for her friend, Marilyn—a bystander on the stairs—wondered desperately what she could do to help…. She remembered the assassin’s gun, but it had fallen somewhere below… and she could hardly reach it in time, even if she did get past the two men who faced each other now, like western gunfighters.

  Nikita withdrew something from his pocket—Marilyn wondered if this was the object he’d slipped away, before arming himself with a shoe, minutes before.

  “I do not want to kill you,” Nikita said conversationally. “Is better for trash like you to live… and talk.”

  But the assassin wasn’t talking; maybe he didn’t even understand English.

  Then the man did understand, obviously—as did Marilyn—wh
y Nikita was so unafraid: the premier, with a confident flip, threw open the blade of the straight razor, and now its sharp, glistening edge was doing the winking… and nothing flirtatious about it.

  The two men with blades circled one another on the landing, waiting for the right moment to attack—the assassin, small but nimble, skilled in hand-to-hand combat and wielding a knife, wore a confident smirk, Nikita’s weapon not seeming to give him any worry… and Nikita—determined, armed himself now, but tired, wounded—made a very big target.

  Marilyn refused to play the damsel in distress, hovering helplessly on the periphery… she had to do something!

  The actress ran back up the stairs and went to the small round window in the cone of the ship, and—using one of her own shoes—knocked out the glass on the first try. She leaned her head out through the jagged teeth of the broken window and began to scream—big, blood-curdling shrieks that could summon someone, anyone, who might be at the park.

  Soon Marilyn was growing hoarse, her voice cracking with each new scream, realizing that she couldn’t keep yelling much longer, when finally a figure below—running down one of the curving pathways—revealed itself.

  Then came another figure… and another… racing down the path.

  Marilyn cried out again, managing one last shriek, but this one was tinged with joy.

  “We’re in here!” she yelled. “Hurry! Hurry!”

  And the men—Agent Harrigan, and policemen, Secret Service, and uniformed KGB—streamed toward the spaceship like ants to a picnic.

  Marilyn extracted her head from the window and rushed back down the stairs, onto the landing where the two warriors were on the floor now, locked in a deadly embrace, the man in black on top.

  The assassin was trying to stab Nikita in the throat, Nikita holding the man’s hand back with one hand, his own blade in the other hand, wrist pinned to the floor by his adversary. They grunted and squirmed and then the killer kneed Nikita in the side, and the pain-wracked premier lost his grip on the razor, which the assassin swept away with a hand releasing itself from Nikita’s wrist, sending the razor skittering into the darkness, even as the blade of the knife drew closer to the premier’s throat. But this allowed Nikita, his hand freed, to deliver a short yet powerful blow, a fist to the chest that sent the assassin reeling back, off of the Russian….