The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

  “You’ll carry those bags,” I said. “I’ll carry the pack and the jacket. We’re going out to the loading area. A car will pick us up there, but we may have to wait for it. Please don’t get any ideas while we’re waiting. Don’t think I’ll hesitate to shoot because there are people around. The pistol is silenced. I’ll drop you dead before you can take two steps and everybody’ll think the poor girl just fainted.”

  “I will not give you the pleasure of killing again, you bloodthirsty fascist murderer!”

  “All right. Here we go.”

  I draped the jacket over my gun arm and hoisted the pack to my left shoulder. It wasn’t a real backbreaker, but I wouldn’t have wanted to tote it up any big mountains. We walked across the concourse and out under the flaring concrete roof that sheltered the passengers who were waiting to pick up their ground transportation from the bright sunshine beyond. It was a tropical view out there, complete with palm trees. I stopped the girl by a big round pillar near the curb and set down the pack.

  “You can sit on it again,” I said. “That’s an order, sweetie.”

  “I spit on your orders!”

  I didn’t know real people said that, either; but after saying it she settled down where she’d been told. I stood beside her, reviewing in my mind everything that had happened, very carefully. I’d missed that damn wig. I couldn’t afford to miss anything else. Like maybe a pretty female fanatic putting on a phony Spanish-spitfire act? “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I am La Margarita.”

  “That’s not a girl, it’s a drink.” I grinned. “Okay. A beautiful drink. A dangerous drink. Too much La Margarita makes a man helpless—with love or alcohol, same difference. Right?” She gave that elaborate Latin shrug again and didn’t answer. I asked, “Are you from Islas Gobernador?”

  “Ha, those two little spots in the sea!” she sneered. “They are not the only victims of Yankee oppression. I am a member of the FFPR.”

  “More idiot acronyms,” I said. “Translate, please. What’s an FFPR?”

  “You Norteamericario swine don’t even bother to learn about an island you claim to own! We are the Freedom Force of Puerto Rico. Like the liberty-loving people of Gobernador, we are being assisted in our fight for independence by the CLL. You do know what that is, I hope!”

  “Yes, I know. So the Caribbean Legion of Liberty has been helping you, and now you’re helping them. Helping them do what?”

  “We are helping them bring to revolutionary justice a government assassin guilty of brutal crimes against the people. You!”

  I laughed harshly. “That’s me, all right, sweetie. I’m guilty as hell. Guilty of brutal crimes against the people who murdered my son. Did they tell you that? Did they tell you how they blew up a restaurant full of innocent people, including my older boy?”

  She looked momentarily disconcerted, and licked her lips. “No, I didn’t know…” She caught herself, and made a quick recovery. “But there are no innocent Yankee people! You are all responsible for the oppression suffered by my poor, captive country!”

  I said, “Have it your way. If you’re going to hand out blanket responsibility… If we’re all responsible, then so are all of you. Responsible for my Matthew’s murder. All you two-bit pseudopatriots. What are you griping about, anyway? You got your big bang, or your CLL did. Do you expect it to be free? Do you think you can claim the right to blow up my kid with a bomb without conceding to me the right to come after you with a gun?”

  “But you are an agent of the imperialist Yankee government!”

  I said, “I was retired, baby; I’d quit. I was a peaceful citizen—and then your CLL friends set off that blast in West Palm Beach, and Washington called me back. And now I’m going to wipe out your fucking Legion, all of it that matters; and if any of your lousy FFPR members get in my way I’ll take them out, too… Here’s our ride. Be careful. Keep in mind that one way or another, directly or indirectly, I’ve already accounted for seven of your half-baked revolutionaries, eight counting your friend in the can. If you want to make it nine, just try to run. Or let your friends try to jump me or get the drop on me. You’ll be the first to die. That’s a promise.”

  I hoisted the heavy pack to my shoulder again and herded La Margarita towards the little brown two-door that had just pulled up with Dana at the wheel. La Margarita! Maybe I should call myself El Vodka Martini, hey? I hoped I’d made some impression on her. You can go about it two ways: soft-spoken or loudmouthed. The soft-spoken menace bit is often effective, but you do run the risk of having them get the idea you’re as soft as your voice, incapable of really hurting anybody. Of course, if instead you choose to go with the blowhard routine I’d just used, there’s always a risk of overdoing it and causing them to think you might be bluffing.

  I hoped she wouldn’t. As far as I knew, she wasn’t on any list of ours, and I had nothing against her except the revolutionary clichés she kept spitting at me, not a capital offense. Well, as I’d tried to make clear to her, her survival depended on her behavior and that of her friends. I hoped they’d all done their homework and knew enough about our brand of government assassins—government counterassassins, we like to call ourselves—to know how we’re trained.

  On second thought, I did have something against her. Knowing how it was to be used, she’d supplied the weapon with which Blondie was supposed to kill me. But I still hoped she and her friends would be sensible and remember that I’d been at this business since long before most of them had learned to tell the boys from the girls. I hoped none of them would try anything stupid.

  28

  Dana drove the little brown car skillfully and smoothly—well, as smoothly as the automatic transmission allowed. It kept shifting on her unexpectedly, each time with a startling clunk, as the feeble engine asked its controlling gremlins for gear relief. She talked as she drove, following my instructions. There wasn’t really much to discuss, but there’s nothing more nerve-racking than somebody chattering away at a time when you want to contemplate your fears in silence, so she prattled compulsively for our prisoner’s benefit, ostensibly giving me information she thought I should have about Puerto Rico.

  She told me that the island had been discovered by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. She said that it was settled by the Spaniards under Ponce de Leon, presumably before he wandered off to Florida in the search for the Fountain of Youth that killed him. She informed me that it was taken over by the U.S. in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and that Puerto Ricans became American citizens in 1917. She said Puerto Rico is roughly a hundred and ten miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It has an area of approximately thirty-five hundred square miles and a population of a little over three million people, half a million of whom live in the capital city of San Juan. The smallest of the Greater Antilles, it lies just east of Hispaniola, which lies just east of Cuba, which lies just south of Florida. On the other side of Puerto Rico are the Virgin Islands and the rest of the long chain of the Lesser Antilles curving down to South America.

  The girl with whom I shared the cramped backseat said nothing, although some of Dana’s political observations must have offended her revolutionary principles. I had her on my left with the muzzle of the automatic pistol—actually the end of the silencer—touching her ribs, not the safest technique for transporting a prisoner, and I wouldn’t have used it on a strong man or a trained one, but she was a small girl and I thought I could handle her if she tried to make a break. She obviously had no doubts as to my intentions and she was sweating it out, her careful hairdo beginning to straggle a little, her face shiny, her elaborate makeup starting to melt with perspiration in spite of the car’s air conditioning.

  I’d asked Dana to find us a quiet place where we could stop for a while undisturbed. She brought us at last to a little seaside park, a green oasis surrounded by tall buildings, at least a couple of which were hotels. She found us a space at the curb of a park drive lined with other cars. I noticed that they were all in
pretty good shape, often quite new like our rental unit. There were none of the rattletrap automotive relics you find, for instance, in Mexico. From the stopped car, we could look out over a grassy expanse and see far out over the Atlantic Ocean, but we couldn’t see the nearby beach because of a raised retaining wall that kept the sand from encroaching on the shore road over there.

  It wasn’t an ideal place, but there wasn’t a great deal of traffic, automotive or pedestrian, and you learn to make do with what’s available. Dana had informed me that the agency maintained no interrogation teams in this area. With Modesto’s life perhaps at stake, there wasn’t time to have one flown in, so I’d have to do the dirty work myself. Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t performed similar chores in the past, but I prefer to use the I-teams, not because I’m particularly queasy, but because they’re more skillful than I am and have drugs that permit them to pump a subject dry without leaving him, or her, in too bad shape. If the kid beside me was a typical stubborn fanatic, ready to die for her cause, I might have to get very rough.

  Dana opened the door on her side and cleared her throat. “I think I’ll take a little walk,” she said. She was still keeping up the act I’d asked of her, but it wasn’t entirely an act now. She looked a little pale. “I have a very weak stomach,” she said, getting out.

  “Stay within hearing,” I said. “Come back when I beep the horn three times.”

  “Check.”

  We watched her walk away, tall and slender in her wine-colored slacks and sweater. Then I switched hands on the gun and took out my little knife and flipped it open one-handed, quite legally. Like most of the laws that are supposed to protect us from inanimate objects, the switchblade regulations were soon circumvented by ingenious chaps who figured out how to open an ordinary folding knife one-handed. All it takes is an easy-opening knife like my Gerber, a little lubricant, and a flick of the wrist. It’s a handy stunt and it impresses people. The girl who went by the fool name of La Margarita stared wide-eyed at the small, pear-shaped, stainless-steel blade I’d produced so cleverly. She didn’t overlook the traces of blood on it. I’d given it a hasty swipe with a piece of toilet paper, but I’d missed a few smears.

  La Margarita licked her lips. “Where did you… He said you were unarmed!”

  “A real hero!” I said. “Carefully equipping himself with a gun to deal with an unarmed man!”

  She had no answer to that. She just gave her big Latin shrug again and said resentfully, “That woman of yours, she talks too much!”

  “These things always make her nervous. Sick to the stomach even. But my nerves and digestion are in great shape, sweetheart.” I poked her with the Ruger. “Where did you get this gun?”

  “It was given to me to give to Raoul.” When I frowned, she said, “Raoul Bonnette, the man you just murdered. I was selected to pass him the weapon because I knew him by sight. In fact I… I knew him very well, before he left for Montego to train with the army that will free Islas Gobernador from the Yankee yoke. It will be a beginning. Eventually we will liberate the entire Caribbean from the imperialist oppressors and their slavish puppet regimes and form a new nation, a great oceanic federation of free islands.”

  “Make up your mind,” I said. “They’re either slaves or puppets; they can’t be both.” She glared at me without speaking. I went on: “So the guy in the airport john was a friend of yours, after all. Sorry about that. Bonnette. That’s a French name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, we are all together in this, whether our origins are French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, or even American. We are cutting the umbilical cord of imperialism. The Caribbean will be a sea of liberty, not an ocean preserve for capitalist exploitation!”

  “Who’s going to organize this sea of liberty, the Cubans or the Russians?”

  “Ah, you Yankees see wicked commies under every bed! And if it should be Fidel, at least he is one of us, an islander like ourselves.”

  There was a certain amount of irony in the fact that Bultman, who’d lost a foot and his health trying to terminate Fidel Castro on contract, was now engaged in recruiting and training a military force for an operation that might just possibly lead to an island empire under the domination of that self-same gent with the beard. I remembered that Dana hadn’t thought much of Bultman’s chances, but the feasibility of the grandiose plan didn’t really matter. Terrorists and fanatic patriots are seldom in touch with reality. And if they kill you following an impossible political dream, you’re still dead. Like Matthew Helm, Jr.

  “Given to you by whom?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Who gave you this gun? All this is very fascinating, but I still want to hear how you got it.”

  “I have no more to say to you, you murdering Yankee Pig!”

  She faced me stubbornly in the cramped backseat of the little car. Next time, I reflected, I’d order a limousine. Awkwardly, I stowed the pistol away in the right-hand pocket of my coat, the side away from her where she couldn’t grab for it, and brought the knife up close to her face, remembering that I’d done the same menace bit before, quite recently. Talking about heroes, I seemed to spend most of my time frightening children: the Morelos boy in West Palm Beach, and now this young girl in San Juan. I watched her eyes cross in a way that might have been comical under other circumstances, as they focused on the sharp blade only a few inches away.

  I said, “One of the Indian tribes out west had a pleasant trick. The punishment for adultery was, they slit the squaw’s nose. Of course, in some other societies, I gather, they cut it clear off, but that seems pretty drastic and we’ll reserve it for a real emergency.”

  La Margarita licked her lips. “You should have worked in Auschwitz with the other Nazi animals! But you can’t make me talk…”

  They always say that unless they’re really tough, in which case they don’t say anything. In spite of her spitfire routine, she turned out to be not so tough. In fact I was surprised at how quickly she yielded. All it took was a little blood and some further threats, building up to the promise of nasal amputation. I’ll admit I was relieved. I have my sexual kinks like most men—I won’t venture to speak for women—but whittling on pretty girls isn’t one of them.

  Still, it bothered me a bit that, after all her brave defiance, she hadn’t put up a better resistance before breaking down and answering my questions tearfully. I reminded myself that I’d had another surprise today that had almost killed me; and that I’d better keep in mind the fact that things weren’t always what they seemed. Nevertheless, Dana hadn’t been gone a full ten minutes when I gave the recall signal on the horn. She came back across the park lawn and approached the car warily, gasping when she saw the red spots on the younger girl’s blouse, and the tear-streaked and blood-smeared face.

  “Relax, she’s just got a couple of little nicks,” I said. “You seem to be kindred spirits. She can’t stand the sight of blood, either; at least not her own blood. But don’t forget this is the same little girl who was perfectly ready to pass her boyfriend a gun so he could spill my blood. Give me some Kleenex so I can wipe her face a bit, will you?”

  “Don’t touch me!” That was the kid. Before I could start cleaning her up, she’d hauled up the loose front of her blouse and mopped herself off with it, making a gory mess of the ruffles. It seemed to please her in a masochistic way. “There, that’s good enough for a dead body, isn’t it?” she said triumphantly. “You’ve got what you wanted, now finish your filthy job. Kill me!”

  “You’re not going to die at my hands unless you behave stupidly, or your friends do,” I said. I handed her the tissues Dana had given me. “Here, hold this to your nose. It’ll stop in a little while. It’s all inside the nostril, in case you’re brooding about it; it won’t show. Now we’ll check to make sure the address you gave me is correct… 427 Pacheco Street,” I said to Dana. “Do you know where it is?”

  “No. Pacheco Street? I never heard of it.”

  “Tell her how to get
there,” I said to La Margarita, and listened to some Kleenex-muffled directions that meant nothing to me. Then we were driving away from there. After a while I spoke to the back of Dana’s head: “There seems to be a local businessman named Paul Encinias. Big in ladies’ clothing. A refugee from the current regime in Gobernador who managed to slip out with enough money to settle here comfortably some years back. Apparently Gobernador had a good reason to run him out, although they weren’t aware of it. He was secretly a member of the Caribbean Legion of Liberty, even a member of the Council of Thirteen. However, recently his terrorist colleagues have begun to suspect that he’s been passing information to someone in Washington. They don’t know to whom, but they’re trying hard to find out.”

  Dana didn’t turn her head. “Go on.”

  “Naturally, suspecting him of double-crossing them, the CLL has been keeping a discreet eye on Paul Encinias with the help of La Margarita’s people, the FFPR. Today an FFPR member shadowing Paul saw him make contact with a known American agent and receive a package. The FFPR checked with the CLL—God, their alphabet soup is as thick as Washington’s—and were told to grab the lousy traitor. They did, and found that his package contained a fancy silenced weapon complete with spare clip and ammo. They got out of him the fact that it was meant for a U.S. operative who’d soon be arriving in San Juan by air. Me. Then they received a phone call from the U.S. Kennedy International. Herman Heinrich Bultman on the line. Bultman said he had a man on my plane tailing me, Raoul Bonnette, who’d need a gun when he got here so he could deal with me permanently; meet him and arm him, please. ETA. Paper-bag routine. The kid, here, got the delivery job since she knew Bonnette by sight and vice versa. They gave her the weapon they’d just confiscated from Encinias to pass along. Guns aren’t easy to come by and why waste a freebie?”

  Dana continued to look straight ahead, driving. “What about Paul Encinias?”