“Listen, Helm…” That was Tallman.
I said, “You’ve done a lot of talking, now let somebody else take a crack at it.” I looked at the four of them. “There’s a new Smith and Wesson revolver missing, and an old Colt automatic.”
One of the men on the bed, very cautiously, produced my weapon and, at a sign from me, walked forward to lay it on the low table. He resumed his seat beside his colleague. Vance groped in his coat pocket with a thumb and forefinger and gingerly brought out Sandra’s automatic. He leaned forward to place it beside the revolver.
I stepped over there, holstered my own piece, and checked the .380 ACP—chamber empty, magazine full, okay. I tucked it into Sandra’s purse, which was lying on the table.
Tallman said again, “Listen, Helm…”
I said, “We don’t see you, Tallman.”
“What?”
I said, “Not one of the people associated with me will recognize any of you again. That goes for Mrs. Helm and me, also. You’re perfect strangers to us from now on. Understood?”
Tallman said angrily, “No, I don’t understand! What do you mean, you won’t recognize…”
“You’ve had your break,” I said. “You should be dead now. What I’m saying is that next time you interfere in our operations you will be. We won’t know you, and we’ll treat you as hostile strangers, meaning that we’ll shoot you dead.” I looked from one to another of them. “In other words, stay the hell out of our hair from now on. You’ve probably loused up this part of our mission completely. The chances of the people we want coming in the way we wanted them to are nil, now that you’ve sprung our little trap and shown everybody out there that we’re ready for them, waiting for them.”
“Dammit, you can’t give me orders, Helm. My authority…”
“Let’s not go into that authority nonsense again,” I said. “Is your authority bigger than a bullet from a 9mm Luger cartridge? Because that’s what you’ll get, or a .38 Special, or any damn caliber that’s handy, if you try to barge in on my business again.” I stared at them hard. “Let me repeat myself so that there can be no misunderstandings. I’ve been given a clear directive: If anyone obstructs me while I’m carrying out my orders to break up this terrorist outfit, I’m to assume he’s involved with the opposition, and I’m to take him out, too. That goes for you and your bunch, Tallman.”
Tallman snorted. “You can’t sell that in Washington, Helm! You can’t hope to make them believe that I and my men were working on behalf of…”
“But you are,” I said. “You’ve already done the CLL a big favor and helped them avoid the deadfall we tried to set for them here tonight. I’m not going to let it happen again; and I don’t intend to risk my life every time I spot a threatening shadow, making sure before I shoot that it isn’t some eager cocaine chaser sticking his long nose where it doesn’t belong, instead of a dangerous, armed political fanatic. I’m not going to lose good agents because they hesitated before using their guns, checking that the target wasn’t one of you creeps. I repeat, we’ve never seen you; we don’t know you; and we’ll wipe you out for terrorists anytime you make nuisances of yourselves.” I turned my head. “Do you copy, Trask?”
“I’ll pass the word.”
Tallman protested, “Goddamn it, Helm, I’ve also got a job to do, stopping this dirty traffic…”
“There’s no dirty traffic around here except yours,” I said. “Don’t threaten me with investigation again. I have a full tape of what went on in here tonight. If that’s not enough, I have a hunch it isn’t the first time you’ve tried to use that kind of crooked pressure to achieve your purposes. We’ve got some pretty good investigators; you don’t want them turned loose on you to see what they can dig up… Trask.”
“Yes?”
“Are we holding any of Mr. Tallman’s people?”
Trask went to the connecting door. He spoke his name and gave an order. The door opened, and a couple of sheepish men marched in, shepherded by a submachine gun in the hands of another of Trask’s silent young heroes.
I said, “Give them back their toys and turn them loose. All right, Tallman, take your army to hell out of here.”
Tallman started to say something and thought better of it. His super-steely blue eyes glared at me murderously for a moment; then he turned sharply and marched out the front door of the room. His men followed. The motel unit seemed suddenly much larger with all of them gone. Trask started to tell his own team to withdraw.
I said, “No, those jerks went out mad and trigger-happy. Give them plenty of time to get clear. We don’t want a replay of Tombstone’s O.K. Corral in the middle of Savannah.”
“We’re going to have trouble with that one, hero. He’s not going to pay any attention to your warning.”
I shrugged. “His choice,” I said. “However, I’ve got a little distraction planned that may keep him busy elsewhere. Have you got that tape handy?”
Trask gestured towards the young man who’d just come in from the adjoining room. That one took a cassette from his pocket and gave it to me. I was slipping it into my own pocket when somebody knocked on the front door of the unit. Trask stepped over there, asked a question, and got an answer. He opened the door a crack, cautiously.
A man’s voice said, “Somebody wants to see Mr. Helm. He says his name is Benison.”
I said, “Let Mr. Benison in.”
The man who came in was very pretty. He wasn’t big, a compact gent in his thirties with smooth brown hair and a smooth tanned face. He was wearing a smooth brown suit, all three pieces of it, a starched white shirt, and a maroon silk tie. His brown shoes were polished to perfection. If I hadn’t been used to looking for guns, I’d never have spotted his under the carefully tailored suit coat, high on the right hip and tucked in close to the body.
“Mr. Helm?” he said. “I saw Mr. Tallman’s forces withdrawing, so I thought you might be ready for me.”
“Mr. Tom Benison?” I said. “We’ve got it right? Not Mr. Denison?”
The man smiled thinly. “Thomas Benison is correct. Benison, as in blessing. A little identification is indicated, if these well-armed gentleman will permit.” When I nodded, he took a leather folder from his inside pocket and handed it to me. I opened it, glanced at it, and gave it back. He said, “The chief of your organization telephoned the chief of mine earlier today. He said you’d called in from somewhere along Highway I-95, saying that you had company astern which had been identified as belonging to people more or less in our line of business. Of course, we have no authority over a presidential task force, you understand that.”
“We didn’t expect you to pull them off us; we just thought you might want to know something about their operations.”
Benison gave me his limited smile once more. “As you said, we are in the same line of business as Mr. Tallman, dealing with the same problem, as well as we can with the funds made available to us. I will admit that we are not overjoyed when we see some of those funds thrown to a wild man who’s been disciplined several times for what a tolerant person would call overenthusiastic law enforcement efforts. We don’t feel quite so tolerant. We try to adhere to certain legal standards. We feel that drugs are a serious threat to our society; but so are ambitious empire builders who use that threat to establish themselves in positions of power, and proceed to abuse that power.”
I said, “I have a tape here that may interest you. I hope it’ll help you make trouble enough for Mr. Tallman to keep him off our necks.”
Benison took the tape and looked at it. “I won’t accept this under false pretenses,” he said. “While we do feel that Mr. Tallman’s antics tarnish the professional image we would like to present to the public, keeping him off your neck is not a high-priority item with us.”
I grinned. “Hell, take it. But watch yourself. Tallman knows it exists; and he’s not a very scrupulous character.”
Benison nodded. “I will keep it in mind. I have had some experience in dealing with unscr
upulous characters. Thank you, Mr. Helm. Good night.”
We watched him go. Trask closed the door and said, “A neat little fellow. I’ve met a few of those. They’re usually tougher than they look.”
I said, “I think the lady and I are pretty well washed up as decoys, at least for the time being. All the milling around tonight will have told the CLL we’re ready for them. They’ll either give up on us altogether, which we can’t count on, or they’ll pull back and wait for a better opportunity up north. You may as well dismiss your commandos for now. Just keep the phone manned and have somebody trail us around to keep an eye on the Porsche; I don’t want to have to search it for whiz-bangs every time we stop for coffee. People who’ve used explosives once tend to get hooked on them, just like heroin.”
“Check. Take it easy, hero.”
I watched them file out of the room, feeling that a little speech of appreciation would not have come amiss. However, I’m not a great leader of men; and I don’t know how to tell a bunch of trained specialists that they’re good at their jobs without sounding patronizing. I locked the door behind them, and turned to the girl who’d been sitting quietly on the farther bed during the final proceedings.
“Okay, you can lose your temper now,” I said.
15
North of Savannah you get a lot of pine forests. You also get a lot of torn-up freeways—well, we’d already encountered those down in Florida. Apparently the whole U.S. interstate system is falling apart and they’re trying to stick it back together, causing innumerable single-file detours, all plastered with slow-down signs to make certain no opportunity is missed to create a mile-long traffic jam.
I found myself remembering a detour I’d hit in France some years ago when I was trying to travel inconspicuously, never mind why. I made the mistake of slowing down for the construction area like any good little defensive American driver, thereby incurring the wrath of the French gendarme on duty. Just how stupid could I get? Did I not comprehend simple logic? Clearly, when the road is reduced by half its width, monsieur, automobiles must proceed at twice the velocity in order to maintain the same volume of traffic! Vite, vite…
“What’s funny?” Sandra asked as we crawled around a culvert under construction, or reconstruction. “Please share the joke, Matt. I need a good laugh.”
We hadn’t been on very good terms since last night. She’d obviously been brooding over the insults and indignities to which she’d been subjected, and blaming me for not preventing them—or at least for not meting out dramatic punishment to those responsible, afterwards. Dinner had been a silent meal, after which she’d retired to her room, emerging for a wordless breakfast of bacon, eggs, and a sizable stack of hotcakes. My dad always told me not to worry about a puppy as long as it was eating well.
I said, as we inched our way through the last of that detour, “Well, the French have a different attitude towards these things.” I told her about my experience, finishing: “Fortunately, it didn’t jeopardize the mission, but it could have.”
I was glad to hear her laugh. “I won’t ask what your mission was; but we could certainly use a few gendarmes to speed things up around here. Instead of the characters we’ve got with the fluorescent vests and the red flags, who are just overjoyed whenever they can bring the whole U.S. highway system to a screeching halt. Matt.”
“Yes, Sandra.”
“I wanted to kill them. That big creep with the nasty blue eyes, and the little rat with the wandering hands.”
“I know,” I said, “but the whole point of the exercise was to get them off our backs without killing them. My chief’s got enough homicide-related public-relations problems with this assignment already, without my handing him a pickup-truck load of defunct presidential drug agents to explain away.”
Sandra made a wry face, and said, “Of course you know I’m just talking big. Even if you’d put my gun into my hand with a cartridge in the chamber and the safety off, I couldn’t have pulled the trigger.” She shrugged. “You did get that tape to where it would do the most good, I ought to be satisfied with that. I guess I just overreacted. Little Miss Modesty, that’s me. Dumb! So I’ve got a body and some men saw it, big deal!” She giggled abruptly. “But you’re really a devious monster, aren’t you?”
“Meaning what?”
“Your men all knew perfectly well who was in that room with us. They didn’t think for a minute we’d been taken prisoner by the Caribbean Legion, like you told Mr. Tallman.”
I said, “Sure they knew; they’re the ones who identified Tallman’s people in the first place, when I spotted them following us. But Tallman would have thought I was bluffing if he’d been aware of that. He wouldn’t have believed my men would attack if they knew whom they were attacking.”
“Would they have?”
I said, “Hell, yes. Trask wouldn’t have cared. He’ll take on anybody he’s told to take on: he doesn’t give a damn whether it’s the KGB or the CIA or points in between. His boys are trained to go for any throat they’re aimed at, without hesitation. Does a Doberman stop to ask silly questions when he gets the eat-’em-up command?”
Sandra shivered a little. “And they look like such nice boys—all except the fat man, he looked tough. And you look like such a nice man, too!” She gave me a sideways glance. “Matt, why did you bring me along, really?”
It was a complete change of subject, and it seemed to surprise Sandra as much as it did me.
I said, “Hell, we went all through that a couple of nights ago. You’re bait for the trap.”
“But Tallman spoiled the trap yesterday, and it seems unlikely they’ll fall for it again very soon. That’s what you told Mr. Trask last night. But you haven’t said anything about sending me home. Sure, you kind of promised to take me along when you interview those people in Newport, but you’re not running a guided tour for young ladies, and I’d probably let you out of your promise if you asked nicely.”
I said, “Maybe I don’t want to send you home because I don’t think you’d be very safe at home.”
She was watching me closely. “But why should you care, Matt? I mean, you’re not in the bodyguard business, you’ve got important work to do, and there’s no real blood relationship or anything. If they blow me up again, or shoot me down, what’s it to you, really?”
I glanced at her. “What are you plugging for, small fry, a declaration of undying love?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Please stop that. I get a very strong impression, not a very flattering impression, that you have no designs on my… my affections or my young white body, even though you weren’t above ogling it when you got the chance. It’s some kind of a lousy sense of responsibility, isn’t it, although there’s absolutely no reason why you should feel responsible for me.
“You’re wrong there,” I said. Then I said, “Oh, God, here we go again. Another detour.”
We were silent while I guided the car into the proper lane, as the freeway traffic piled up for another bumper-to-bumper procession between the big red plastic hats indicating the part of the roadway we were permitted to use while they beat the other part to death with jackhammers. The vehicle ahead was a large motor home the rear of which let us know that it was the rolling residence of Dot and Harry from Duluth. There was also a sticker reading: GOD SAVE AMERICA—and he’d better hurry up!
“How am I wrong?” Sandra asked. “Ex-father-in-law isn’t much of a relationship. There’s no real obligation, Matt.”
“Maybe not to you,” I said. “But I have an obligation to my son. I didn’t do much for him when he was alive. From what you tell me about him, he wouldn’t have appreciated being avenged, so that’s something I’m doing just for myself. But he loved you very much, and I can do one thing for him that I’m sure he would have liked: I can do my best to see that you make it okay, that nobody kills you, and that you get all the help you need to see you through to a good life, even though it has to be a life without him. You’re an independent kind of gi
rl, and I didn’t tell you this before because you might have objected to having a nursemaid; but I hope very much that you’ll accept me as a kind of beat-up guardian angel until things settle down.”
She was silent for a little, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Some guardian,” she murmured at last. “Some angel! The first thing he does is let me in for an involuntary striptease!”
Then she grinned at me, and I knew everything was all right. We made it through the detour, and some other detours, and spent that night in Richmond, Virginia. The following day we battled our way past Washington, D.C., and made an end run around New York, taking the Garden State Parkway to one of the upper bridges crossing the Hudson, and then cutting east and south to pick up the Connecticut Turnpike which is no longer a true pay-as-you-go turnpike. The big trucks kept misjudging their brakes and crashing into the cars lined up at the toll-booths and killing people. You’d think they’d do something about the trucks; instead they tore down the tollbooths. Who says we aren’t a permissive society?
“Old Saybrook ahead,” I said at last.
“What?” Sandra sat up beside me, making the standard feminine gesture of pushing her hair into place, even though she still didn’t have enough hair to worry about. “Oh. I must have been asleep. You must be dead after all this driving. Old Saybrook?”
“Next exit.”
“Do you mind just taking me past the house? It’s not very far.”
I switched on the turn signal and cut over to the right; a few minutes later, under her direction, we were driving along a shady street—well, it would have been shady in the summer. We were far enough north now, in New England, that most of the leaves were off the trees. The houses were smallish and set back from the roadway on grassy lots; there were no sidewalks.
“The white cottage on the right. Can we stop?”
“Better not,” I said.
“I know, it’s getting late.”
“It’s not that. Somebody may have found out that you own it. They could have figured you’d be checking it out about now if you were heading for this area. They could have prepared a welcome for you.”
The Demolishers Page 14
