As his friends in Saigon were going to pay him now.
Bygraves had kept one part of the affair secret from Tillingham, Bellini, Von Litz, Tornier and Igor Dorkin.
The five slips of paper.
Not even he himself knew what they meant or why they were important. He only knew that Rogers Endore was carrying them and that it was his secondary mission to acquire them. One way or another.
No matter how it turned out, tonight was the night that Rogers Endore must die.
Benjamin Bygraves thought of Switzerland and the six keys to safety deposit boxes and the money waiting for him. He had also lied about that. His five accomplices would get their one hundred thousand plus amounts but he was in for a far fatter goose.
Saigon had thrown a half million dollars in the pot for Benjamin Bygraves. That and a generalship in the Red Chinese Army. Not a general with battalions and armies to lead but a set of stars that would allow him to follow his life’s work even above and beyond solitary, individual assassination.
He would step into the command of a special executioner’s unit responsible for underground political solutions to internal government problems. The heavily walled, guarded compound at Hap Thong in North Vietnam. A plum for any assassin.
For Benjamin Bygraves, a fine place for a killer to stretch his wings and work, able to employ the greatest and most terrible tools in the spectrum of slaughter, torture and death.
Red China would rule the world one day and Benjamin Bygraves fully intended to be an integral, important part of that empire.
The Governor’s car, the limousine with the twin flags of state and country, flanked by motorcycle escort front and rear, cruised quickly through the streets of Honolulu, heading out toward the University of Hawaii. A conga line of lights, a blaze of neon, marked the way.
In the tonneau, the Governor and Rogers Endore sat side by side. Resplendent in white dinner jackets and knotted black ties. Both men were thoroughly impressive looking as befitted their important stations in life. A red carnation gleamed from the left lapel of each man.
“What did you think of McGarrett?” the Governor asked.
Rogers Endore flicked a forefinger at his strong nose.
“A bit short in the tooth but I liked him.”
The Governor smiled. “He’s a rebel, a man with a temper. But the only man who could run an organization like Five-O.”
“Yes. That’s readily apparent. I do hope these men of his will be all right. Nasty business, cars smashing together. Anything in it, do you think, Governor?”
“Hard to say. But that’s McGarrett’s department. He’ll get to the bottom of it. It could have been an accident.”
“But you don’t really believe that?”
“No. I’m afraid I can’t. It’s too coincidental.”
Rogers Endore pyramided his hands, staring straight ahead as if trying to count the hairs on the back of the uniformed driver’s head. Beyond the windows Honolulu-after-dark glowed changelessly. The car picked up speed, roaring ahead. The motorcycle escort, neat moving lights, set the pace and kept it. The moon seemed to tag along.
The Governor changed the subject.
“Anything specific planned for your talk tonight? You’ll have to shake a lot of hands, I warn you. Businessmen, faculty people, the Chamber heads and the usual army of autograph hunters.”
“I’m used to it,” Endore chuckled softly. “Yes, rather. I plan to discuss the potential of Hawaii. This last of the U.S. Organized Territories to join the Union, and second noncontiguous state. Being British, I should think I’ll know what I’m talking about. Thanks to the American Revolution when you Yanks left us.”
The Governor joined him in a mutual laugh.
“Sorry Miss Endore couldn’t come, sir. I’d like to have made her acquaintance.”
“You know women, Governor. Especially the young ones. Mind of their own. She’s pouting in her room, I suppose, mad as a sulky child because I’m packing her back to London in the morning.”
“It’s better that way,” the Governor said quietly. “All around.”
“I quite agree.” Rogers Endore said. “Still, it would have been amusing watching my daughter lock horns with your Mr. McGarrett. She liked him very much, I can tell. She always admired most the men who wouldn’t put up with her tantrums and moods.” Suddenly he erupted with mirth, his tanned face creased in a thousand lines. The Governor was startled. Rogers Endore patted the knee next to him.
“Forgive me, old boy. I just had a mental picture of McGarrett putting Myra over his knee and giving her ten of the best. By God, I know he would.”
The Governor nodded grimly.
“You could count on it.”
As the State limousine sped toward the University of Hawaii, and while Bellini, Von Litz and Tillingham drove back to town and Benjamin Bygraves put away his black leather bag until one o’clock, and Danny Williams and Chin Ho Kelly slumbered painfully in their hospital cots, and Myra Endore fumed in her room trying to drink herself into a state of no nerves, and Igor Dorkin picked up a slant-eyed Chinese lovely in a seedy bar on the back streets because sex was now uppermost in his killer’s mind. Steve McGarrett walked out of the squad car at seven o’clock and stalked up the stone steps of Iolani Palace. The lights were still on in the building so he knew that Kono and possibly May, were still on deck, holding down the fort. Worrying.
His timing was delicious.
He ran smack into Tornier the Frenchman running swiftly through the main revolving doors.
Tornier whose shining stiletto was gleaming like a star from the curled glove of his right hand. The Frenchman had been just on the verge of shoving it out of sight under his light jacket.
McGarrett and Tornier met just at the revolving doors. In that lightning instant of one enemy recognizing another, both men came at each other head-on. The cat does not have to have the rat fingered for him.
McGarrett went for the .38 nestling in his left shoulder holster.
Tornier flashed the stiletto.
In a tick of the clock, a sweep of the second hand on a wrist watch, the battle royal was on.
The one that was to become a timeless legend in Honolulu police history.
6. HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT
The fight started swiftly, the way fights do, but not even McGarrett or Tornier could have guessed it would take so long to reach a conclusion. A man goes for his gun, another his knife and at the end of the movement had to lie death for one. Or both. In either case, a climax. Of some kind.
Or even a draw. Stalemate.
Yet, even that was not to be.
Tornier came plunging through the glass doors, the stiletto raised high. Not for a throw but a swift dart into McGarrett’s chest. The Five-O head coming up with his long arm holding his .38. might not have gotten a quick shot off. He would never know. Tornier’s stiletto arced down and in. McGarrett jerked the barrel of the .38 up. Gun and knife met, like two swords in a duel. There was a fiery clank of sound, a striking of sparks. McGarrett felt a flash of agony travel a zigzag course of vibration up his right arm. It was a paralyzing blow. And Tornier, caught in the same unique chain reaction of collision found the stiletto falling from nerveless fingers. His entire right hand was numbed. Baffled, surprised and shocked, both men took only a second longer to reassess their positions. Then, weaponless they closed in on each other. The armament had been taken out of their hands by a freak accident of nature and physics.
Tornier let out a street oath and butted out at McGarrett, continuing his forward charge past the doors down toward the wide stone veranda fronting the palace. McGarrett dodged. The Frenchman went by but McGarrett felt a clawing hand clutching his coat front and taking a fistful of fabric, buttons and shirt and tie with it. Tornier’s huge weight added momentum, tearing the coat from McGarrett’s torso, before he checked his flight a few steps outward. He whirled and came back. McGarrett tensed, right arm temporarily useless, and flung up his left arm in a feint.
&n
bsp; He had not reckoned with Tornier. The Frenchman suddenly halted on a dime, reversed his body and his large left leg shot upward and outward in a murderous kick. McGarrett didn’t get out of the way completely. A booted heel, heavy and hard, cannonaded against his shoulder and more waves of pain joined the bruised muscles in his arm. He bobbed left and right, measuring Tornier, rapidly pistoning his good arm in a series of short powerful jabs. But Tornier, determined to use la savate, the killing French art of foot fighting, was not to be reached with a fist.
There was a full moon now, washing the steps with silver, and the main traffic along the thoroughfare was a background of racing lights, moving shadows, gleaming windows. Neon hummed and flickered. But no one was in walking distance or view of the fight. The tall palm trees, the lateness of the hour, the gigantic squat shadow of Iolani Palace was an arena for two combatants, unannounced and unheralded. It was between McGarrett and Tornier. With no one to take sides or root from the sidelines.
The lumpy-faced Frenchman, his peasant’s look more than amplified by his big shoulders, calloused red hands, bristling hair, had begin to circle warily, sure of his triumph, legs perfectly executing a combination of left and right thrusts of his feet. McGarrett was being driven back, forced into a crowded stone corner of the veranda from which there would be no turning. The .38 pistol and the stiletto lay somewhere on the stone floor, lost in the half-gloom of the veranda.
Another foot lashed out and McGarrett was caught a glancing blow across the forehead. He went down to one knee, raising his arms in a feeble effort to protect his face. Tornier over-read the move and came dancing in for the kill. McGarrett, his numbed arm slowly returning to normal, was waiting for him. When Tornier’s foot came up, McGarrett suddenly activated like a wound-up toy, reached, grabbed the heel and spun savagely. Tornier went down on his rear end with an explosion of sound, his face crumpling. Air whistled out of his lungs. McGarrett followed through, roundhousing both hands in a locked mass of ten fingers and thudded them into the side of Tornier’s brutish skull.
Tornier received the full force of the blow and still it wasn’t enough. It was as if he was made of iron and steel. He shook his head, coughing and snarling, lowered it and then butted forward again. In a corkscrew of arms and legs, McGarrett and the Frenchman, locked in a fantastic wrestling hold rolled along the stone veranda like two insensate dogs at play. Only this was no game.
Tornier’s horned, rigid fingers dug into McGarrett’s spine, a crushing embrace meant to break bones, snap cartilege and tear any muscles that got in the way. McGarrett arms pinned to his side, could only kick and use his chin to batter away. Tornier kept his own face down and to one side as he applied all the pressure he had. McGarrett’s face contorted. The oxygen was being driven from his lungs. The lights of the night began to swim, reel and coalesce in a sudden alarming loss of vitality and consciousness.
The smell of Tornier, man-smell in conflict, brutal, savage, reeking with perspiration and the salt of violence, was the only smell in the universe. McGarrett gritted his teeth, let himself go limp and waited, hoping against hope that the overconfident Frenchman would once more misread the attitude of his victim. Tornier did. And for men like McGarrett one break is all they need.
Tornier shifted his arms, meaning to reinforce his hold, and jubilation shot through McGarrett like a cavalry bugle sounded for a besieged wagon train. He was able to ram an arm up and outward breaking the prison of Tornier’s arms. Before the Frenchman could rectify his mistake, McGarrett had sliced a downward, forty-five degree angle karate chop with all the strength he could summon. Right for the thick tendons that joined the head to the torso. Again his arm felt ready to fall off. But Tornier had let go of his hold, fallen away, and once more both men had reached a stalemate in the battle.
The outside world of palm trees, big moon, neon, jet flights, car horns, liquid sunshine, had all pushed away. Out of the conscious. There was only the terrible now. The awful here. The incredible fight. Both men had been born thousands of miles apart, lived out their different lives, careered, loved, hated and chosen their separate roads—but here on the stone face of the environs of Iolani Palace, the wheel had come full cycle to that point where both were now trying to kill each other. Or at least, keep from getting killed himself.
McGarrett had lost his cool, completely.
Tornier had forgotten even the reasons for his profession.
The battle code was as old and set in its rule of order as the first fight among cavemen for property, pride and territory.
Spent, breathing hard, utterly incapable of stopping, McGarrett and Tornier closed once again. Their movements were less lithe and quick than before, but the same amount of intent and purpose was visible. Tornier was panting like a wolf, spittle forming on his thick lips. McGarrett, jacket and shirt shredded, was breathing violently. Now, the death dance began. Both locked together, arms and legs striving for a decisive grip. And then the break came. The one that decides all things both great and small.
Tornier’s left foot came down on McGarrett’s abandoned .38 and he lost his footing. His body caved down on one leg. McGarrett, still on his feet, swept around him like a whirlwind, inserted an arm under the Frenchman’s right arm, traveled the arm up and around the strong brown neck and pressed down. The hammerlock. A killing hold, if carried through. Tornier cursed again, a rising, cut-off imprecation of sound. McGarrett’s face was as rigid as a steel mask. Tornier’s own arm was cruelly crushing his own neck in a savage stranglehold of fury.
McGarrett’s eyes glazed over.
His fingers were closed like a vise on Tornier’s wrist.
The Frenchman’s fingernails raked at the stone floor helplessly. His toes thudded fitfully against the ground. McGarrett was remorseless, pressing his weight down on Tornier’s shoulders, the hammerlock hold making use of all of his weight. There was a brief, straining, angry spurt of silence. Tornier moaned. McGarrett did not relent. And then finally, as the locked mass of their figures shifted slowly, it came.
A hideous, rending splinter of bone and muscle. Tornier cried out. A short, terrible scream. For a second longer McGarrett held him and then let him go. The Frenchman slipped full-length to the ground. He was inert, his right arm twisted at a crazy, distorted angle that couldn’t have been right.
McGarrett swayed above him. Ready to pass out. To collapse. He fought to keep his feet, sucking in great lungfuls of the night air. The breeze was now audible, rustling across the façade of Iolani Palace. He shuddered, feeling the pain and the aches of a thousand new areas of torment, making his entire body a throbbing mass of hurt. He shook his head quickly to clear it. He didn’t move until the world was on an even keel again.
Then he did one final thing. He groped in his back pocket for the set of handcuffs he always carried. He bent over Tornier’s limp body, ran the man’s left trouser leg up and snapped one cuff around a hairy ankle. He pulled the leg toward him, dragging Tornier until he was able to encircle the remaining cuff around the stanchion upright of one of the nearest iron railings. It took him more than five minutes to accomplish this small task. When he was done, he took one more deep breath, a last contemptuous glare at the lighted, noisy boulevard that Headquarters faced and turned back to the building.
He walked slowly into Five-O, without looking back.
There was no place for Tornier to go.
No place he could hide.
Not with an arm in that kind of shape.
The battle of the titans was over.
When he got back upstairs, it was as if all hell had broken loose. The peaceful, orderly world of Five-O had tilted alarmingly. It was the mixture not as before. Same orderly desks and files, gleaming wooden furnishings, not a paper clip out of place. But as with the troubling events that had seemed to pile up once the Governor had tossed Rogers Endore at him, trouble had moved into his very own bailiwick. Running into Tornier might have given him some clue as to what now greeted his eyes but he had been too busy kee
ping from getting killed to do much constructive thinking.
For one thing, May was lying on the leather lounge under the windows that faced the avenue. There was a damp compress on her forehead and she was staring up at the ceiling, looking small and helpless. Her dress was well past her knees as if she hadn’t moved once she had flopped down to rest.
For another, Kono was at the mike transmitter in front of the radio equipment, barking a stream of commands and directions into the thing. Kono’s usually serene face was less serene than usual. Also, a long, nasty-looking wound tracing a jagged line of blood along his left forearm was still bleeding, though Kono’s bronzed right hand was damming the flow with a white handkerchief.
“What are you doing?” McGarrett said crisply, the old authority back in his voice. “Get off that thing and take care of that cut. And that’s an order.” He marched into the center of the outer office and May jerked erect like a jack-in-the-box, wincing. “You lie down, too. I can’t run this organization with all of you in sick bay.”
“Steve!” Kono blurted. “A man just ran out of here about twenty minutes ago! He threw a knife at me. I’m sending out an APB. Now. Did you see—?”
“I saw him. I also saw he got his knife back. Forget about him. He’s outside on our front porch, chained like the beast he is. What happened?”
May started to babble out about being hit from behind and Kono couldn’t keep from adding his part of the narrative. In the end, McGarrett got a full picture, even if the details were a little hazy, as to the actual raid on Headquarters. The Frenchman had slipped up behind May, found the right nerve centers, and put her to sleep. Then walked in on Kono with his calling card. Kono’s reflex action of throwing up a hand and arm to protect his face accounted for the ugly knife wound. Tornier had had time to retrieve the weapon while Kono was busy trying not to bleed to death. Again, complete extermination of Five-O didn’t seem to be the main order of business with whoever was out to sabotage McGarrett’s organization. Kono wasn’t going to be much help with an arm in a sling, either. Two hospital cases and one walking wounded. And May was close enough to hysteria to need a day or two off. McGarrett fumed silently and inwardly. Damn all the VIP’s in the world who stopped off in a man’s backyard and took up all his valuable time!
Hawaii Five-O - 2 - Terror in the Sun Page 7
