by J. B. Hadley
It was bright daylight when he awoke. His ears popped. They were in the mountains, about to enter a picture—postcard village. Mike saw that the signs above businesses were in French—he should have guessed Andre would locate himself westward in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The BMW pulled into a schoolyard. About thirty men stood about, next to their packs and weapons, stamping their boots to keep their feet warm.
Andre wasted no time on introductions. He outfitted Mike and himself in a green windproof jacket and pants, a peaked cap with earflaps and rubber-soled boots. Sausage, raisins, cheese and chocolate were stowed in their backpacks along with maps and a medical kit. In short time, the men were climbing single file up the steep slope behind the village. On the far side of the slope lay country with pitching valleys whose walls were too sharply angled to hold snow. The international set did not come here to ski. The army officer came down the line of men and spoke to Mike in slow, straightforward French.
“What would you like to see?”
Mike grinned. He knew that Switzerland had only a tiny regular army and that all these men were civilians putting in their three weeks of annual compulsory training. So far this morning he had not seen two men walk in step. There was something about the way the men slouched unwillingly along the mountain that reminded him of kids on a school trip. He would not be too hard on them. He’d ask for something vague and let the officer order what he thought the men could deliver.
Mike pointed across a shallow basin to a sharp ridge. “I see enemy helicopters make a surprise sweep over that ridge and land combat troops.”
The words were hardly out of Mike’s mouth when the officer shouted, “Helicopters landing enemy troops!” He pointed at rock outcrops. “There! There! There! And there!”
Rifles rattled. Mike could see rock being chipped by the live ammunition. A three-man team ran beneath the hail of automatic fire toward one rock outcrop. All three threw grenades and blasted chunks out of the rock outcrop. If it had been a chopper, it would now be twisted metal.
Another chopper was taken out seconds later with more grenades, but Mike’s attention was caught by a two-man team attacking an outcrop to his left. One man carried a rocket tube strapped to his back. He threw himself flat on the ground so that the rocket tube was aimed at the chopper, and his partner fired the projectile.
The outcrop exploded in a great orange ball of flame and showered down in fragments on all their heads.
“How was that?” the officer yelled at Mike.
Both were half-deafened by the gunfire and explosions.
“Very impressive,” Mike yelled back. “It would be a credit to an elite squad of full-time professionals.”
The officer nodded, pleased. He said, “I’m a chef in a hotel kitchen.”
Dwight Quincy Poynings left his office on Federal Street, in downtown Boston’s business district, punctually at seven minutes to five. He liked to give his executive secretary, through his absence, a few minutes for personal things before she left for the day at five. He strode briskly along Franklin Street, following his accustomed route into Bromfield Street, rounded the Park Street Church to continue along the edge of the Common to reach Beacon Street and then Walnut Street; and from Walnut it was only a matter of a few hundred yards to his house on Chestnut Street and the relative privacy and peace of Beacon Hill before the tourist season.
He had just entered Park Street, by the Common, when a short, dark person of foreign appearance accosted him.
“I don’t think I know you, sir,” Dwight Quincy Poynings informed him and hastened onward. One of the amazing things about some foreigners. Dwight reflected, was that they seemed to have no qualms about approaching a perfect stranger. Since Poynings was six-two and the stranger about five-eight and half his weight, the Bostonian was reasonably assured that robbery or assault was not the motive.
“Mr. Poynings, I have a message for you.”
The damn fellow spoke English with an abominable accent, Poynings thought, but it was undeniable he knew who Dwight was. It could be an urgent business matter. The man sounded Spanish. Perhaps he was related in some way to one of the Hispanic players on his pro baseball team, although they all had agents and managers, as he knew to his cost. He slowed just enough to allow the little foreigner to trot along beside his great strides.
“I’m from the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington,” the man explained.
Poynings was amazed. “I didn’t know they let your sort into Washington. Nicaragua, you say. Whereabouts is it?”
“Central America—”
“Dammit, man, I meant your embassy in Washington.”
“Sixteen twenty-seven New Hampshire Avenue,” the man said.
“I’ll look into it. The fact that you people frolic on the diplomatic cocktail circuit here in America might make a nice news item.”
Poynings noted that the foreigner had the insolence to smile at this. at was Boston coming to? Here he was being harassed by a smiling communist on a spring evening next to the Common!
“I wish to speak to you about the treatment of Marxist countries on news programs aired by your chain of television stations. Your extreme antileftist views”
“I have heard enough, sir!”
“—your extreme views may have to be modified now that your daughter Sally has joined the brave fighters in El Salvador’s glorious struggle for freedom.”
Dwight Quincy Poynings stood absolutely still for a long time. Then he started breathing again.
“I didn’t know…” Poynings’ voice trailed off.
“Your State Department hasn’t told you?” The foreigner clucked his tongue as an adult might over the behavior of a naughty child. “Those people can be so unreliable.”
“I don’t even know if this is true.” Poynings came back on the attack again. “Why should I accept your word for it?”
“You already have, W. Poynings.”
Dwight did not try to deny it. “And what’s this? Extortion? You want something in exchange for her freedom?”
“I am not here to bargain with you, Mr. Poynings, nor have I the power to do so. Your daughter has joined the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. She is not in Nicaragua, and has never been, so far as we know. Aware of the family bonds that must bind you together, the Nicaraguan government, out of simple humanity, is bringing you news of your daughter’s whereabouts—which is more than your own government is apparently willing to do. We have nothing to trade with you. This matter will remain confidential until you or your government chooses to publicize it, even though news of a nationally known conservative’s daughter joining the worldwide struggle for workers’ freedom would be, as you might put it yourself, a feather in our cap.”
“What is it you want?” Poynings insisted.
“Nothing more than a somewhat more favorable presentation of TV news on Nicaragua and Cuba, and less favorable treatment of the rightist Salvadoran and Honduran governments.”
“You and I become pals, right?” Poynings asked sarcastically.
“Sally is such a pretty young girl, Mr. Poynings.”
The little bastard turned out to have a better grasp of English than he had first thought, Dwight decided as he watched the foreigner hurry away. Dwight wondered if what the Nicaraguan had said about family bonds between him and his daughter was a deliberate insult. He hadn’t seen or heard from Sally in more than six months. Or was it a year?
Chapter 4
HARVEY Waller couldn’t go home to Remington, New Jersey, anymore. Some nights when he couldn’t bear the loneliness, he’d drive there and just slowly move about the streets he had grown up on, keeping the car windows rolled up in case someone recognized him. The FBI had made his life a nightmare: questioning people in the town who had known him, coming back again and again with more questions and blurred photos that might and might not be of him—no one could tell—giving them emergency phone numbers to call if they should ever see him again, in Flemington or anyplace else in the w
orld. Some of his friends had told him what was going on. He had thanked them and ordered them to do their duty as good Americans—phone the FBI and say they had seen him.
Harvey still had friends here. He knew what they said about him—that he had come home from Vietnam funny in the head. He could agree with them that he was now a different man than he would have become if he had stayed put in Remington, New Jersey. He had left as an innocent small-town kid and come back a hardened veteran with his eyes opened to what was really happening in the world. Harvey could see how ridiculous it must seem to someone who knew nothing but small-town life (although Remington was hardly the boondocks, being close to both Philadelphia and New York City); he could readily see how ridiculous it must seem in the eyes of such a person that the Soviet Union had agents and sympathizers in key positions at every level of American life.
His certain knowledge that the Soviets were on the verge of subverting America through their cunningly planted agents was what distinguished Harvey, in his own view, from the common herd. He might be one of the sheep, but he at least knew he was being driven and who was driving the herd or flock or whatever. Almost every day, he saw some other subtle thing that added to the evidence against the Russians.—
The patriotism of the vast majority of his fellow Americans was something Harvey did not doubt. They just did not see what was being done to them, and would not see what was happening till it was too late. Thus it became the sacred duty of the farseeing few to protect the many—and not by words alone but by action.
This was where Harvey Waller stood up to be counted. Where others hesitated and were lost, he strode forward bravely and took up arms against the enemy.
Chips Stadnick glanced at the photo in his hand and knew he had his man, Tuesday morning, coming off the New York shuttle at Boston’s Logan airport. Chips was big, had a flat face and a broken nose, knew he stood out in a crowd, so he hung well back and gave the man a very loose rein. The man took a taxi, and Chips followed in a hired Dodge Dart with a missing cigarette lighter, which meant he had to light one Marlboro off another since he had no matches. The taxi came out of the tunnel and headed toward the harbor along the Fitzgerald Expressway. It pulled up outside the McDonald’s near the Tea Party ship. Stadnick stayed in his car and waited.
He had found himself a nice source of work, a constant trickle at high fees that paid the rent and the child-support payments. And the liquor store. He could charge his expenses and no one gave a fuck, because this was TV and nothing was real anyway. Like they have these big show-biz lawyers, he was now a show-biz private investigator. He even had an appointment to meet the big boss at three that afternoon—the great Dwight Quincy Poynings himself. Chips had shaved and put on a tie for the occasion. He hoped he’d be done with this creep by then, otherwise Poynings would have to wait.
What was the weirdo doing? Flying from New York City to take a taxi to a McDonald’s in Boston! Maybe he should follow him in. No, he couldn’t risk that. If he was noticed there, he’d be spotted later when he tried to tail him. The banana had arrived at the airport with a shabby raincoat that looked as if it had been to a laundromat instead of the dry cleaner’s, a Wall Street Journal and a perfectly furled black umbrella that would have pleased the British ambassador. And ended up in McDonald’s at nine in the morning.
Of course, this crazy had already tried to kill one of the TV news investigative reporters last Tuesday. Which was where Chips came into the story. Poynings had lost a reporter at his Nevada TV station to some hidden interests in a Reno gambling casino. There had been a phone call from Chicago to explain everything, and they had never found the body. After that, when things looked dangerous, Poynings’ orders were that the newsroom hire outside help. This was liberally interpreted by some station news producers as meaning that when the job was tedious, call in Stadnick. Chips didn’t mind. He was paid good bread, and there were no kickbacks involved.
The news people had been tracking this present weirdo in Philly, New York and now Boston. They had seen him by chance at Logan airport one Tuesday morning, and he had shown up the next two Tuesday mornings also. This was his fourth known Tuesday arrival in Boston. He had given them the slip each time. The news department had definitely tied him to a bunch of mercenaries—some kind of kamikazes that the State Department didn’t want to hear about but hoped would die quietly in some dismal swamp far away from newsmen and cameras.
But this was only a part-time occupation for this one. The news people claimed he was assassinating communists as another of his sidelines—and not old folk-singing commies from way-back-when-in-the-dust-bowl, but big-time powerful bolshies that the FBI could pin nothing on. The guy’s source of information was near the top, so it was said. He had made some mistakes, wasted innocent people, but his batting average was high for hitting real spies in sensitive places. Come to think of it, the weirdo had taken out one of the Russkis with a baseball bat.
Harvey Waller chewed his Egg McMuffin and peered out the window at the Dodge Dart that had followed his taxi from the airport. This was his seventh Tuesday trip to Boston and he intended this to be his last. Jesus, if this went on any longer, the FBI could pick him up for loitering. Who had they got on him today? Only one? Some hotshot, he supposed. Maybe a dumb guy to distract him, take up his whole attention so the smart guy could succeed in staying on his tail this time. Harvey had put the fear of God into the little jerk who had been tailing him last Tuesday, nearly catching him between a wall and his car. He could have caught him, of course, but that was not what Harvey intended, because he admired FBI agents as good Americans who were doing their duty. He and they were on the same side! Fighting the Empire of Evil. Pity they couldn’t know it and work with him. But Harvey had been warned, a hero’s work is lonesome.
He didn’t even want to make these FBI men look foolish or feel bad because they lost him every week. He tried to let them down lightly. But they weren’t much good as field operatives, so far as he could see. This one seemed a real dodo—like those TV-series private eyes who are so goddam obvious they even hold their cigarettes in their mouths a certain way. This one chain-smoked. Nervous. Or stupid. Maybe both. Harvey wouldn’t hurt him.
Chips Stadnick had a list of thirteen known aliases for this guy, so he preferred to think of him by no name rather than a useless one. The guy came out of McDonald’s and crossed the bridge toward the Tea Party ship.
I can’t believe this shithead, Chips was thinking. Next he’ll be going to the aquarium and then maybe Paul Revere’s house.
The Tea Party ship was tied to a small wharf that was at right angles to the center of the bridge. The guy passed the entrance to the wharf and continued across the bridge. Stadnick hurriedly’ left the car and followed on foot.
The man walked around the southern end of the Federal Reserve Building, a huge metal box on metal legs that always reminded Chips of the walking fortresses in the second Star Wars film that they tripped with steel cables towed by those little flying saucers. He had taken his son … Enough of that. The weirdo was walking along Summer Street toward South Station—maybe he was going to take the train back to New York after his breakfast at McDonald’s! Instead, he ducked into the Red Line subway. Stadnick ran.
He stood on the platform in his rumpled raincoat, reading his Wall Street Journal, with his formal umbrella tucked under one arm. When the train came, Stadnick entered the same car as his quarry, at the other end. Bozo was too deep in his stocks-and-shares news to notice much. Stadnick was not greatly surprised when he got off the train at Harvard. He followed him as he walked hurriedly from the subway station to the Harvard Coop. He followed him inside the store. He looked around for him. He wasn’t there.
Once inside the Harvard Coop, Harvey Waller rushed to an alcove display of sweatshirts and T-shirts, pulling off his raincoat as he went. He dropped the coat, umbrella and newspaper behind a display case and rapidly pulled on a wig of wavy brown hair and stuck two heavy brown mustaches to his upper lips. He
heard a giggle behind him.
A young salesclerk at a cash register had seen everything, and she was very amused. Harvey grabbed a wine-red sweatshirt with a white Harvard crest on its front and brought it over to her.
“Your right mustache is crooked,” she said.
He looked in the mirror next to her and quickly adjusted his appearance.
“That’s a little better,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Harvey answered.
“It doesn’t look very real. And this sweatshirt has to be at least three sizes too small for you.”
“I’ll take it anyway,” Harvey said. “Can you wrap it in a hurry?”
She did and he paid.
“Do me a favor?” he asked.
She smiled.
“Gift-wrap my umbrella.”
She laughed and wrapped it in store paper when he brought it to her.
“Don’t forget your coat and newspaper,” she called after him.
“I’ll be back for them in five minutes,” he said. “I’ll tell you what this is all about then.”
“Okay.” She guessed it would be some corny joke, and this guy was old enough to be a professor. But she knew all about them.
Harvey deliberately strolled right in front of the poor dumb bastard from the FBI, who had lost his cool and was running this way and that searching for him. But Harvey was now a longish-haired, heavily mustached college type with no coat and two parcels. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes or more to while away.
Walking away from Harvard Square, along John F Kennedy Street toward the bridge over the Charles River, he turned down some steps into the Boathouse Bar. Crossed oars, racing skulls and insulting remarks about Yale hung about the place. A few solitary jocks sat along the bar, glowering into their beer. Maybe Harvard was having a bad year.
