I was in the library with Sam Kanton one morning when McTurk called me into his office. He’d just heard the news about the rebels. “What is this, Harry? Rebel armies at the outskirts of the city?’’
“It’s Rojo,” I told him. The night-duty officer had awakened me with the news before dawn. “He’s down from the hills with about two hundred followers. Not enough to take the city, but enough to make it damned embarrassing for Colonel Saks.”
Rojo had been a key member of Saks’s government until the previous year, when they’d had a falling-out. Colonel Saks had ordered Rojo arrested and Rojo had replied by killing a guard and fleeing to the hills with a handful of followers. Recently, stories had drifted back that the rebel was organizing a highly trained army, possibly with outside help, to return and oust Colonel Saks.
“Rojo! What’s your information, Harry? Are the Communists behind him?”
“No more than the fascists are behind Saks. I won’t swear he isn’t armed with a few Communist weapons, but things like that happen.”
Jason McTurk scooped up the phone and asked the operator to get him Colonel Saks. After a few moments’ wait, he barked into the phone, “Colonel, this is Jason McTurk! What in hell’s going on?”
He listened in silence, only grunting now and again to confirm his presence on the line. “All right,” he rasped. “Do you think I should speak with Rojo? He knows me from the old days.” A pause, and then, “I’ll be in touch with Washington.”
He hung up and I asked, “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough. Rojo’s forces have occupied the east bank of the river. Saks is ready to blow up the bridge if they start across.”
Only a quarter of the city’s land was located east of the Beney River, and much of that was a rundown slum. Rojo’s small force had met no resistance there, but crossing the single bridge to occupy our side of the city was another matter. We had the government buildings, police, troops, and citizens loyal to Colonel Saks.
I remembered another crossing, ten miles outside the city. “What about the South Bridge?”
“Saks had the army blow it up an hour ago. But he doesn’t want to destroy the city bridge unless he’s forced to.”
“All right,” I said. “What do we do?”
“Contact Washington. Explain the situation.”
I nodded. “Were you serious about meeting Rojo?”
“If it would do any good.”
I left his plush office and went down to the message room. It was always locked, with the only key on a ring in my pocket. I took it out now and opened the door, entering a tiny room jammed with electronic equipment. Within ten minutes, I’d encoded a message to Washington and sent it on our standard frequency. They acknowledged at once, but I knew it would be afternoon before we received a real reply.
As I opened the door to leave, I found Sam Kanton waiting for me. Sam was in his middle thirties, about my age, but he looked older. As our USIA man, he was in charge of the medium-sized library attached to the embassy. I liked him in small doses, but we’d never gotten really friendly. He has an odd way of staring at you with his pained eyes and, after a time, it could be unnerving.
“I just heard what’s happening,” he said. “Do you think he’ll get this far? Wreck the library or anything?”
“No reason to think so,” I told him. “Rojo is an enemy of Colonel Saks, but not of the United States. In fact, it’s to his advantage to stay friendly with us. Your library’s safe.”
“He doesn’t have to cross the bridge,” Sam Kanton pointed out. “There are plenty of boats.”
“He has a small force. The government troops would slaughter them if they tried to cross by boat. If he’s serious, he has to cross the bridge. But I’ll bet hell try to bargain.”
“Rojo bargain? For what?”
I shrugged. “His old cabinet post, maybe.”
“Things never go back to where they were,” Kanton said. “Maybe Rojo doesn’t know that.”
I drove downtown to see how the city was reacting to Rojo’s threat. The palace was ten blocks from the embassy, a great old relic of the pseudo-colonial days. As I neared it, the crowds seemed to grow thicker. Perhaps they thought the palace of Colonel Saks was the safest place to be, though certainly it would be Rojo’s prime target if and when he crossed the river.
Carol Lake was there, standing near the edge of the crowd by the gate. She was a blonde American girl who ran a gift shop in the lobby of Beneu’s largest hotel, and I’d had an occasional drink with her. She was pretty and fairly intelligent, and I liked her.
“I thought you’d be down, Harry,” she said. “What’s the real story?”
“You probably know as much as I do. Rojo is across the river.”
“Is he coming here?”
“With a couple of hundred men? I doubt that.”
She stepped back from the crowd and lit a cigarette, beating me to it. “There’s been talk, though, Harry. These people are still a superstitious lot, and they credit Rojo with magical powers.”
I knew what she said was true. Rojo played upon men’s ignorance and superstition. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to attack the poorer section of the city first.
“I doubt if Colonel Saks is worried,” I told her.
“Rojo talks of a magic bullet, one to seek out and kill Saks wherever he hides.”
“And Saks has a lot of unmagic bullets, marked for Rojo.” We’d walked a bit away from the others, down a quiet side street.
“Some people say you’re a CIA man assigned to the embassy.”
“I hear those things,” I told her, laughing it off.
“Are you?”
“Beneu isn’t Moscow. There’s no CIA man here.”
She smiled and dropped the subject. “Had lunch yet?”
“No, but it’s a damn good idea.”
After lunch, I left her and went down to the bridge. There were two guards at our end, armed with Sten guns. I knew one of them, a youth named Marto. He was staring across the bridge at three ragged men at the far end, as if daring them to start across.
“Any trouble, Marto?” I asked.
“None, I am ready.” He patted the gun. “We have armored cars in the next block, waiting. And the bridge is mined. They would never reach the middle.”
I offered him a cigarette. “Has anyone crossed this morning?”
“No one. Orders of Colonel Saks.”
That told me what I wanted to know. The ambassador would need permission of both sides to speak with Rojo. I headed back to the embassy under a cloudy sky.
“I’m going to see him,” Jason McTurk said, slapping the desk with a newspaper. “Someone has to talk with Rojo.”
I was standing against the wall, out of the way, while Colonel Saks himself paced the floor. It was the second time he’d set foot in the American embassy—the first visit since our Independence Day reception—and he was making a show of it. Saks was tall and just a bit overweight, with a broad chest suitable for medals. He was a minor-league tyrant, but he was the only game in town, and so we supported him. With Rojo, there was always the fear that he would become another Castro.
“I should talk with Rojo.” Saks was insisting. “Not you.”
“He’d kill you as soon as you crossed the bridge—and he wouldn’t need any magic bullet for it, either.”
Colonel Saks grunted. “I could bomb them to dust from the air.”
The ambassador looked pained. “Your air force is made up entirely of American planes and American-trained pilots. We would not look favorably on their use in crushing Rojo, especially if some deal is still possible between you two.”
“Very well,” Saks said at last. “But will he see you?”
“I think so,” McTurk told him. “If you’ll write me a pass to get through your sentries on this side.”
Colonel Saks sat at the desk and wrote a few words on a sheet of embassy stationery, signing with his familiar flourish. “Give this to my sentries.”
/> McTurk turned to me for the first time in the meeting. “Contact Washington, Harry, and tell them what goes. Then have my car brought around. I’ll drive.”
“You’re going now? And alone?”
“It’ll be dark in an hour. I want to arrive while they can still see me coming and recognize the car.”
“Washington won’t be happy about that.”
“Don’t ask them, tell them.”
But as I left the office, I confronted Sam Kanton. “All hell’s breaking loose, Harry!” he said excitedly. “There’s an American reporter in my library, and he wants to know the whole story!”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Fellow named Cranston.”
“Tell him there’s nothing now.”
I hurried past him to the message room. Kanton was in charge of information; surely he could find something to tell a wire-service reporter. Moving a bit too quickly, I yanked my key chain from its pocket and felt it snap. A half-dozen keys went flying. I picked up the message-center key first, then the almost identical key to my room and the rest of them. I dumped them in my pocket and threaded the message-room key back onto its ring, then inserted it into the waiting hole at the center of the doorknob. The door opened and I went in. The incident seemed nothing but a nuisance at the time.
I quickly encoded a message to Washington about the planned meeting. That would give them something to stew about. Then I left the room and went around to the back of the embassy where McTurk’s driver—a black man named George—was already checking the car.
“That’s all right,” I told him. “He’s driving himself.”
Actually, I wasn’t too worried about McTurk driving across that bridge alone. The official car was a big Caddy limousine complete with air-conditioning, power windows and a telephone link to the embassy. Best of all, the windows were of bulletproof glass, installed a few years earlier when the Beneu situation had become dangerously fluid. I attached the small American flags to the fender posts to show that the ambassador would be inside and stepped back, feeling reasonably secure. Rojo wouldn’t kill McTurk. And he just might talk to him.
Five minutes later, I drove the car out the embassy gate, with McTurk in the back seat with Colonel Saks. A slim young American yelled something that I couldn’t hear through the thick glass, and I guessed him to be the reporter, Cranston.
We dropped Saks at the palace, and I let McTurk take my place in the driver’s seat. “You’re sure you don’t want me along?”
“Not this trip, Harry. Thanks.”
The bridge was only a few blocks away and I trotted through the back streets in time to see the Caddy slow down for the two guards with their Sten guns. Then it shot forward onto the wide bridge.
McTurk was about halfway across the bridge when it happened. There was a muffled sound, more like a cough than a shot, and the big car suddenly seemed to waver on the road. It twisted to the left and bounced over the curb to a halt, looking like a great dead beetle which would never move again. Then I was running, past Marto and the other guard, who shouted and waved their Sten guns at me. I was running because something had gone cold inside me and I was suddenly terrified. At the far end of the bridge, Rojo’s men had sprung into action, and I knew at any moment I might be cut down by gunfire. But just then I didn’t care.
I reached the car and tried the door on the driver’s side. It was locked, and so were the others. The unbroken windows were all tightly closed. And Jason McTurk was slumped inside, alone, blood gushing from a jagged, horrible bullet wound in his left temple. Just at that moment, I began to believe in Rojo’s magic bullet.
It was already dusk, and they had to focus a spotlight on us while we used rifle butts to batter open a window and unlock the car door. Then we carefully removed the body and I leaned inside, shining a flashlight over the interior. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary.
“What happened?” I asked Marto.
“Nothing, sir. He gave me this order signed by Colonel Saks, and we let him pass. He was all right then.”
I turned to the police captain who’d appeared on the scene. “I’m going back with you. Well take this car apart inch by inch, if necessary, to find the device that killed him.”
“There are no powder burns,” the officer pointed out. “He could not have been shot from inside the car.”
“No. But he couldn’t have been shot from outside, either.” I spent the next three hours convincing myself of the impossibility. McTurk was dead, murdered almost before my eyes. He’d been shot and killed instantly while alone inside a sealed car which no bullet had penetrated.
Finally Sam Kanton appeared at the palace where we’d taken the car. He seemed even more distraught than earlier. “Washington is going crazy, Harry! They finally called by overseas telephone. Said they’d been sending messages for hours. I heard the message-room bell ring, but I couldn’t get in. The door was locked.”
“It always is, Sam,” I said with a sigh. I didn’t bother to add that it was locked to keep people like Sam out.
“Cranston wired out the story of the killing.” He was actually trembling as he spoke. “Washington wants details.”
“I’ll handle them. Calm down.”
“But he’s dead, Harry! The ambassador’s dead!”
I knew our second in command was vacationing in Washington. That seemed to leave me in charge. “Secretaries?”
“Just George, the driver. It hit him hard.”
“It hit us all hard.”
I drove back with Sam because there was nothing more to be done with the car. For the next hour, I was busy on the phone to Washington, using the emergency scrambler. I told them all I knew, which wasn’t much.
“Did Rojo do it?” a crackly official voice asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“If Rojo is responsible, we certainly can’t support him...”
“You’re not supporting him now,” I reminded the voice. “Give me a day. Till tomorrow night.”
“This is very serious.”
“Murder usually is.”
I hung up the scrambler and went out to see George. He was staring at the dark earth as if he’d lost his best friend. Maybe he had.
“Did you notice anyone fooling with the car, George?”
“No, sir! I was polishing it all afternoon. Nobody came near it.”
I got out the other car and drove into the center of town. It was a little after midnight when I parked on a dark side street by Carol Lake’s apartment. She met me at the door, not really surprised.
“I heard the news, Harry. I thought you’d come.”
“I need a drink and I don’t want to be seen in public. A reporter is dogging me.”
She fixed me a taut scotch and curled up in the chair opposite, looking like a little girl. I told her what I knew, just to talk it out.
“He was a good man,” she said. “He got things done.”
I nodded. “And yet somebody wanted him dead.” I smoked a cigarette in the near darkness, watching the glow from hers.
“Are you CIA, Harry?” she asked.
“That again? Does it matter?”
I couldn’t see her face as she replied. “I like to know about the man I’m going to sleep with.”
Reluctantly I got to my feet. “That’s not an invitation I’d usually refuse, but I can’t stay. Not tonight.”
“Harry, I need somebody. It’s like that weekend when Kennedy was killed.”
I held her for a moment. “Another time. When we’re both a little more human.” Then I left her there, a glowing cigarette in the darkness.
There was another cigarette outside, waiting for me. It belonged to the slender American I spotted earlier in the day. He was leaning against my car, waiting.
“I thought you might be good for the night,” he said.
“I usually hit people for remarks like that.”
“I’m Cranston, with the wire service.”
“I know who you are.�
�
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Not too successfully. How’d you find me here?”
“The car has embassy plates. I knew it wasn’t Sam Kanton. He’s no ladies’ man.”
“What do you want?” I opened the car door.
“What’s your reaction to Colonel Saks’ statement?”
My hand froze on the door. “What statement?”
“He announced that his investigation shows Jason McTurk committed suicide. Could I quote your reaction?”
It was after one and I was tired, but not too tired to confront Colonel Saks in his office. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last few hours, and I had a fleeting sense of sorrow for the man. Only fleeting, though.
“Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” he growled.
“No, it couldn’t. What’s this crap about McTurk killing himself? You know damned well there was no pistol in the car.”
“Nevertheless . . .”
“Why would he kill himself on the way to see Rojo? And how?”
“You’re excited. Tired.”
“Damned right, I’m tired. But I’m not going to let you call McTurk’s murder a suicide.”
“Murder is impossible. It was a locked car, bulletproof.”
“So maybe it was Rojo’s magic bullet that did it.”
Colonel Saks sighed. “I must tell you. Rojo contacted me tonight, after the killing. He is willing to talk peace. Under those circumstances, I can hardly have my people say he killed your ambassador with a magic bullet, can I?”
“How come he’s so ready to talk peace?”
“McTurk’s death, of course. He fears Washington will blame him and approve the use of bombing planes against his forces.”
“But he denies the killing?”
“Of course. He says the Communists killed McTurk in an effort to widen the division here.”
“That’s possible,” I admitted. “But then let’s blame the Communists instead of calling it suicide.”
“We will see what tomorrow brings.” He rose from his desk. “But right now I must insist that you leave.”
Death Locked In Page 23
