After the first turn I was in another world. The seemingly uncared-for roughage of the exterior became a carefully tended wildlife area that quicky ended at a vast lawn surrounding a brick mansion right out of the Roaring Twenties.
Even now the general was taking no chances. Any invasion of his privacy could be clearly seen from any angle of the house, and the floodlights that were spotted around the building could turn night into day instantly.
I stayed on the driveway, going slowly, making the two large S-turns that gave the residents extra time to survey their guests, then drew up under the portico and got out of the car.
Maybe I should have called ahead. Nobody came out to meet me.
Then again, this wasn’t the 1920s and the years of servants and butlers.
I walked up the stairs to the huge main door, pushed the button and heard a plain old-fashioned doorbell ring inside and then somebody appeared.
Some women can hit you with a visual impact you’ll never forget. There aren’t many of them, but there don’t have to be many to leave a trail of men whose minds will always be impressed by a single contact. They don’t have to be beautiful in any special sense, or with bodies specifically tuned to certain concepts, but to each viewer, they are the total thing that makes them woman.
This one had crazy electric blue eyes that could smile, as well as a full-lipped mouth, and when she said “Good morning,” it was like being licked by a soft, satin-furry llama.
She had on a suit. The shoulders were broad, but not with the padding that was in style in 1988. She was real under the jacket and the military cut. It was tailored around beautifully full breasts, but short enough to show the generous swell of her hips. And she had a dancer’s legs, muscularly rounded, but perfectly curved. They hardly make them like that any more, I thought. What she’s doing here has to be a story by itself.
I said, “Damn!” under my breath and grinned back at her. “My name is Michael Hammer, ma‘am. I’m an old friend of the general and I have something very important to see him about, and I’m hoping he’ll have time to hear me out.” I held out my wallet with the PI license and gun permit behind the plastic windows, wondering where the hell my city schmarts had disappeared to.
She let out a disconcerting laugh. “Well, Mr. Hammer, it is nice to see you. Please, come in.”
“Thanks.” I stepped up and walked past her. She was another big woman, with elfish grace, yet strangely athletic motion. She closed the door with a sweep of her hand, then thumbed open a panel and touched a red lighted button that went out momentarily and turned green.
“May I have your weapon?” she asked me.
I flipped out the .45 and handed it to her. She took it, slipped it inside a small wall closet and covered that too. “You didn’t ask me for a throwaway piece.” I said.
“That’s because you haven’t any.” She smiled back. “Keys, pocket change and possibly a penknife, but nothing more. The instrument is very sensitive.”
“Supposing somebody just comes busting in here—”
“Why talk of unpleasant things?” she said. “Now, I haven’t introduced myself. I am Edwina West, General Skubal’s secretary.”
“Hold it.”
She paused. “Mr. Hammer?”
“Let’s keep it simple and square, Miss West. No secretary garbage.”
“Oh?”
“You’re CIA, aren’t you?”
There was no hesitation at all. “Yes, I am. Why should you ask?”
“Women don’t generally refer to a gun as a weapon. You knew what a throwaway was.”
Her smile had real laughter in it. “I’ll have to remember that,” she told me. “Do you like me any less now?”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re some kind of doll, Miss West. You make a guy feel like he walked into a propeller.”
“Please, call me Edwina.”
“Okay, Edwina. Just tell me ... is it genetic?” She took my arm and folded it around her own. “My mother seemed to have some sort of attraction for men too. Don’t all women have that?”
“Honey, not the way you have it. You must have been a terror when you were growing up.”
“Do you know how old I am, Mr. Hammer?”
“Mike,” I told her. “And I’d say you were forty, forty-two.” Usually, when you lay that on a beautiful woman you feel the chill. A cold can come off them like a shore-bound fog and you get the thrust of mental death.
But not her. She said, “I am forty-eight. Does that disappoint you?”
I said, “Watch it, Edwina, you’re touching nerves I didn’t know I had.”
She squeezed my arm with her fingers. It was a long, gentle, but soft grasp and she said, “Don’t be surprised at what I know about you. I’ve read the profile the general has on you, the accounts the press have touched on and a lot of information you probably consider extremely personal.”
I stopped, turned us around and looked at the door forty feet behind us. We were in a big foyer, a generous room lined with expensive fixtures I hadn’t noticed until now. I said, “Kid, we just met, we walked about thirteen yards together and I could write a book about what’s happened inside three minutes. Does that happen all the time?”
The way her mouth worked when it was starting to smile was startling. Those incredibly blue eyes were almost hypnotic. “Only when I want it to,” she said. “And there is something else.”
“What’s that?”
She turned me around toward a pair of heavy hand-carved oaken doors, tugged very easily on an ornate brass handle and the door opened noiselessly and without effort. “That I will tell you later.”
The house was real enough, the kind you could get lost in, the kind they used for background in period motion pictures, or classic horror films. Edwina gave me a small tour on the way to see the general, but everything got lost in the throaty rich tone of her voice. There was music in it, low and demanding. There was a light touch of lust and overtones I could feel, but couldn’t describe, and when we got to the final door I began to wonder what the hell had happened to me. I was in some kid’s damn daydream acting like I had my head up my ass and enjoyed it. I finally let out a laugh and she knew I was laughing at myself, gave me one of those lovely grins back and knocked on the door.
A buzzer clicked and the door swung open. We stepped inside and the door closed automatically.
A light was on us, so bright it cut off all vision of anything behind it like a solid wall.
I heard a chuckle, and a voice that hadn’t changed at all with the years said, “Good afternoon, Michael.”
The light went off with a metallic ping and another came on that lit up the office. Back there at the same old desk, but now surrounded by rows and banks of electronic equipment, was General Rudy Skubal.
I said, “Hello, General.”
“What do you think?”
“Pretty damn dramatic,” I told him.
“You’re only looking at the surface.” He waved at us. “Come on over here.” He pushed himself out of his chair and held out his hand. I took it, enjoying the good grip the old man still had. “How long has it been, Michael?”
Hell, he would have known to the day, but I said, “Many moons, General. You still look pretty sharp.”
“Eyewash. I’m becoming enfeebled. It’s a pain in the butt, yet unavoidable.” He tapped the side of his head. “Up here I can go on indefinitely, and with the machines much can be accomplished, but the old physical thrill of the chase is gone. I haven’t popped anybody in the teeth in so long I hardly remember what it sounded like.”
“It never sounds,” I said. “They break off quietly. If you cut your hand on them, you can get one hell of an infection.”
General Skubal squinched up his face and shook his head angrily. “Hell, man, you see that? You remember? Damn, you still get to do those things and have the fun. You kick ass and get laid and I push buttons.”
“Don’t sweat it, General. It’s only fun when you live to reme
mber it,” I reminded him, “and with the security you have here you’ll live long enough.”
He ran his fingers through his mop of blazing white hair and let me see a small smile. “Don’t overrate Edwina here. She causes me more anxious moments than the enemy. You know she’s CIA, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You tell him?” he asked her.
“No, he knew,” she answered.
“See, that’s why I wanted to recruit this guy,” he said. “What an agent he would have made.” He paused, looked at the both of us a second, a wrinkle showing in his forehead. “He would have straightened you out, gal.”
She looked straight at me, a bright blue stare daring me to say it. So I said it. “General, you never straighten out lovely curves like that.”
I watched old Skubie frown again and look up at me from under his whiskery eyebrows. Finally he said, “Edwina, go rassle us some coffee and Danish, okay?”
She winked at us both, waited for the general to trip the door buzzer and left. “Crazy,” I said.
“I never had that when I was young,” the general muttered. “Now, Michael, I assume this is not a ‘just happened to be in the neighborhood’ call.”
“Pure business, General.”
“Our kind of business?”
“Right.”
He flipped a set of switches on a control panel in front of him, then leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. “One more assumption ... this has to do with the death in your office?”
The old guy was on the ball all right. “That’s how it started.”
“Okay, shoot,” he said. “Tell it your own way.” I gave it to him in detail the way it opened up, setting the stage with the way I found Velda and the mutilated body of DiCica in my office. He knew about the note, but when I mentioned the name Penta, his lips pursed, he took his hands down and wrote out the name on a pad, then sat back and listened again. I ran the whole thing down for him without bothering to tail off into DiCica’s initial role. Anything he could give me I wanted to point directly at the killer himself.
Halfway through, the buzzer sounded. Edwina came in with the coffee and Danish, put them down on the desk and went back out again. When we stirred the coffee up, the general nodded for me to continue.
I took him through the details Russell Graves had dug up, the data Ray Wilson had brought out of the computers and the events that led to Harry Bern and Gary Fells being mentioned as cadets the general had in his old unit.
When I finished, the general leaned on the desk and touched his fingertips together. “You’re stirring up old memories, Michael. The names you mentioned, I know those people well. Carmody has always been a good career man. If you remember, he was the one who grabbed that bunch hijacking trucks last year. Ferguson spent his early years in the European sector. Speaks four languages, I understand. The last administration brought him to this area. Bennett Bradley was always a good man for State. He had the makings of an operative, you know, but too conservative. His forte, as I remember it, was political science. Too bad they’re forcing retirement on him.” He stood up, pushing his chair back. “However, before we get to Bern and Fells, let me have a brief consultation.” He nodded toward a computer bank. “Want to watch?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
This was the new battlefield now. Nothing dirty, no wild screams of terror or staccato noises of fast-firing guns. No sliding around in muck or taking high dives onto hard flats to get out of a field of crossfiring rifles. No knives or insidious poisons or wire garrotes nearly decapitating a human. Now it was quiet button-tapping sounds and lighted letters and numbers flashing on the screen, being rearranged, rechanneled for new information, positioning themselves into faraway circuits, then returning in seconds.
The general had entered his request for knowledge of the one called Penta. It was caught up in the wizardry of electronics and General Skubal sat back and let the machine take over. While it worked, he said to me, “In case you’re interested ...”
“General, I’m very interested.”
“My so-called retirement was not for very long. The idiots who pulled me were dumped at the next election and I was reinstated right where I wanted to be ... here, and at government expense. These machines are owned and serviced by federal funds and are state-of-the-art equipment. And believe me,” he added, “the government is getting their money’s worth ... and I’m living doing what I can do best.”
“Tell me, General, how secure are you here?” I looked around at the enormity of the project, knowing that this was the best of miniaturization.
He said, “There are eighty people billeted here. That placid landscape you saw outside is one huge deathtrap of a minefield, each charge being detonated electrically from inside here, or isolated to operate independently. With the electronic sensors we use, no dogs are necessary, no patrols needed, so we look indeed like a quiet retreat in the country.”
“How about power?”
“There’s a solar collector on the roof. Storage batteries can last two weeks at full power. Of course, this is in addition to regular power supplied by underground cable. Beneath the building is a deep well with reserves for fire-fighting supplies. Our food larder can last a month and if you’re a drinking man, those needs are supplied too.”
“That’s a siege condition, General.”
“Yes. But these days, you never know, do you? At least this is what we’re protecting.” His hand indicated his vast electronic battlefield.
Then the face of the screen that was blank lit up. The name Penta appeared, then the sketch story about the one who appeared as a will-o‘-the-wisp on the world scene.
Penta meant nothing. It was a code name assigned by the CIA. There was no physical description. Penta’s activities had been linked with the Stern Gang and the Red Brigade. His terrorist actions were noted by certain dictatorship governments, and it is suspected that he often worked on their behalf. Sixteen known assassinations were attributed to him, all of them with various forms of digital butchery done to the victims.
I said, “Digital butchery?”
“Newspeak for finger-chopping.”
“Great.”
“Interesting note here ... Penta is suspected of being a mole in the NATO organization. He had to have inside information to accomplish several of his kills. No proof offered, but circumstantial evidence is hard. Now look at this.”
Three CIA reports came on-screen with information compiled by Bennett Bradley. Twice he had almost cornered Penta when national police action of one foreign country stymied his move. The third time he was shot in the thigh by Penta and his quarry got away. There was a fourth item suggesting Bradley be removed from the assignment. Now I could understand his last-ditch attitude, wanting to grab Penta before his replacement got into the act.
The words stopped appearing. Two lines of dots went across the screen, then five groups of letters, six letters to a set, appeared, the last group flashing on and off regularly. The general grunted, took a key from his pocket and walked to a safe against the wall. He spun the dial three times, opened the thick door, then used the key on a box inside.
“What are the letters in the last group?” he called out.
“RTVWY,” I called back.
He closed the box, put it back and slammed the safe shut. When he sat down again he punched a key and the screen went blank. “This Penta person is over here on one hell of a high-level assignment.”
“To kill me, General?” Damn, it was starting again, right here.
“You worth killing?”
“Not to anybody I know.”
“How about to somebody you don’t know?”
I sat down and my teeth were grinding together. I took a couple of breaths, relaxed and looked at the old guy. There was knowledge and patience and wisdom sitting there, and somehow he knew what I was thinking and was trying to direct my own thoughts in a logical direction.
This was one directi
on that didn’t allow for logic. I shook my head. “No way. You can’t go through me and locate Penta. The road to that guy is through Bern and Fells. That’s the connection. Those two are looking for Penta and if we can run them down, we can get inside the reasoning behind all this. There’s a motive, General. It’s good enough to kill and destroy for and when we have that, we have Penta.”
“I can give you Fells and Bern,” he said simply. “You familiar with their history?”
“Somewhat.”
“Wild ducks, that pair. Unstable, adventure-some ... after they left the service, they laid down a pretty greasy trail. Three different countries hired them for covert work and they did a damn good job for them. Libya was their last employer.”
He wasn’t finished and I didn’t push him. “The last three jobs attributed to Penta—political assassinations of top personnel—were at the behest of some Arab organization inside Libya.”
“So the three were contemporaries in possibly related actions.”
“Possibly.”
“And now Penta and Fells and Bern are over here together,” I said, “only now they’ve lost touch. Bern and Fells want to locate Penta badly. They think I have a lead and try to squeeze it out of me. Question: How did they lose track of Penta?”
“I know a better question,” General Skubal told me. “Why were they looking for him in the first place? Penta is not an organization man. Penta is a loner, a total loner absolutely dedicated to his work.”
“Let’s go a step further, General,” I suggested. “He is here, so his work is here. His targets never were minimal, so his target now isn’t minimal, and so far he hasn’t nailed his intended target.” I saw the way he was looking at me and added, “Forget the crap about him going for me.”
“Who shot at you, Michael?”
The Killing Man Page 15
