by Barry, Mike
Wulff got back into the Continental, kicked the corpses away, started and floored it. He turned the corner just as the police car came around it wailing, almost swerving the damned junker into it. The shotgun in the police car looked at him with amazement and shook his fist. But one call could not be exchanged for another. Police procedure. They would take the plates, maybe issue a call, but not follow.
Wulff, bad suspension and all, wheeled the worthless Continental down the ave at fifty-five perilous miles an hour, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge.
XV
The ship had come a long way and now it yawed at rest. A thick pool of oil like blood oozed from underneath its edges and puddled in the grey waters of the Bay. From a distance the ship seemed indistinguishable from the commercial freighters at anchor around it, or making their way to and from the ocean but the two men who stood on the foredeck had an inexplicable nervousness which a telescopic sight might have detected. No one, however, had a telescopic sight on the boat. The two men were counting on it.
“How long?” one of them said.
The other, an oriental, looked at his watch and said, “I don’t know how long. I do know that it’s six o’clock. How long it might be through is out of our hands. We—”
“That means three hours,” the other man said. He had a beard and curiously dull eyes, ran his hand over a pistol in a pants pocket. “Three hours if everything’s on schedule.”
“We must assume that everything’s on schedule.”
“I don’t know if I can hold out,” the bearded man said.
The oriental raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think that you have any choice,” he said. He seemed to be a man who was accustomed to and functioned within larger circles of time than the other. There was, in fact, a hint of amusement in his carefully shaded eyes.
“I just don’t like it. I don’t like anything about it.”
“What is there to like? It is not a question of like, my friend.”
“I don’t trust any of them. Godammit it, Lee, I’ve worked too hard—”
“Ah,” the oriental said and walked to the rail, peered out through the mist to the Bay, “everyone in America works too hard. It is a fact of life. You should cultivate what we like to think of as a certain sense of resignation.”
“That’s easy to say,” the bearded man said bitterly. “All of this philosophy sounds so good.”
The oriental turned back to him. “You don’t think I’ve worked hard? You don’t think that this means as much or more to me than it does to you? Then you misunderstand everything, my friend.”
“All right,” the bearded man said, “all right, you’ve worked hard.”
“But there is nothing to be done. In a way, the matter now is out of our hands.”
“That’s what I can’t stand,” the bearded man said, and turned abruptly from the rail, took a napkin from his pocket and began to tear and fling it, bit by bit, into the sea, “the waiting and the knowing that it’s out of our hands.”
“Hazards of duty, my friend.”
“We bring it here and then we wait. We’re at their mercy.”
The oriental shrugged. “And they at ours. It is what you call reciprocal.”
“They call the shots. They give the where or when. And we take the risks.”
Lee said, “There are a lot of people taking risks. Their risks are great too.”
“I have a feeling,” the bearded man said abruptly, tossing out the last piece of napkin, “I just have a feeling that something is going to go wrong.”
Lee risked a little smile. “With half a million dollars involved, there’s a great deal to go wrong.”
“They called it off once before. And they seem nervous about tonight.”
The oriental said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for the other to go on.
“In fact,” the bearded man said as if passing on a confidence, “I think that they wanted to call it off. To postpone it one day.”
“That would be irretrievably disastrous.”
“And that’s what I told them. I told them we’re sitting out in San Francisco Bay already too long for this stuff, and it’s got to go tonight. How long can this go on? How long could we push our luck like this?”
“And what did they say?”
“You know what they said,” the bearded man said and looked out the long frame at the Bay, ships scuttling like rats on the oily surfaces of the water, “they said okay. We’re going ahead with it.”
“Maybe we could have given them their day.”
“And stay at anchor with this stuff? Don’t be foolish, Lee. I told you, we’re pressing our luck.”
The oriental looked at his fingernails. “One day more or less might not have mattered,” he said, “not in terms of the risks already involved.”
“We don’t know that.”
“You people are too impatient. Impatience is built deeply into your culture. You should cultivate that sense of resignation I mentioned. In the long run even ten thousand years is as nothing. The sparrow’s wing in the heart of flight.”
The bearded man twitched nervously. “Don’t give me that confucian shit.”
“It has nothing to do with confucianism.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I just don’t want to hear it anymore.”
“All right.”
“You work for me, do you hear that? On this ship I’m calling the shots.”
“I think we shall terminate this discussion,” the oriental said. He turned, walked briskly past the bearded man and toward the ramp leading below deck. “I will forgive that outburst because you are very nervous. Perhaps even understandably nervous although I am not sure.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“But,” the oriental said, his eyes becoming cold and white, “I will not tolerate many more outbursts of this sort and I wish to remind you that the risks, equally great, are equally apportioned. I stand to lose as much or more than you do.”
“I know that.”
“Remember it,” the oriental said in a level voice and went down the ramp.
Shading his eyes, the bearded man looked again out over the Bay. Now, from a great distance, he could see another ship heading dead on course toward them and with instincts he had long since learned to trust he knew that the ship was a tow and that it was directly involved with them.
The sons of bitches were going to bring them right up to port.
With a gesture of disgust, the bearded man left the deck to head toward the radio shack and pick up contact with this tow. Going into port was in a way crazy but on the other hand, as Lee had said, the matter was out of their hands. They had to go along. They had to presume that what the contact-point wanted was best.
At least, he thought, it would be over soon now.
XVI
Wulff got down to the bay long before sundown. The sun was still hanging high above the water, sneaking uneven rays through the fine mist; it looked clearer and brighter than it had all day. San Francisco in certain ways looked like the end of the world; as the sun got nearer to expiration it forced last little slivers of energy through the pollution and fog.
He got the Continental a distance away with a clear sighting of the wharf and there he could see it, his quarry, bobbing unevenly in the waters, at dock. As Severo had promised, they were bringing the ship all the way in, not risking the dangers of a transfer at sea. Then again there were concurrent dangers in bringing the ship all the way in, but he supposed that they did not have to worry about police interference, not with the kind of security they had, not with the preparations that had been made for the transfer. Besides, these things were generally taken care of in the overhead long before they got down to business.
Security they had. Wulff could see the little groups of men gathered in front of the wharf, all up and down the line there were singles who might have been longshoremen or sailors but were not, strolling with a kind of casual attention. He would not be surprised if they had a hundred men coverin
g this operation and he had a feeling that at least fifty of them, seventy five perhaps, were there because of Wulff. Ordinarily twenty-five would have been all the lookout and security that one would need but Wulff had the strong suspicion that they were aware of his knowledge of the transfer and were waiting for him to come on in. Severo was a weak man. He could perceive the weakness. If he had squeezed information so easily out of him then people on the other side might have done the same.
They would be waiting for him.
For just a moment that strange disinclination he had felt when the police sirens were bearing down on him hit again and he had to get through it with a sheer effort of will. It was going to be difficult and the plan he had set for himself involved the most complex of all the actions he had taken. He had no doubt that with what he had in the trunk he could demolish the ship, take out the security, make the delivery impossible. He even had a small chance, tackling it that way, of getting out in one piece if he was lucky, had set the thing up right, and could take advantage of the surprise and panic that would surely come on the heels of that surprise no matter how professional this operation might be.
But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to sink the ship, rip off the delivery. He would like, if possible, to get his own hands on that shipment and there were some people he would very much like to take out of this scene alive. He wanted to talk to them.
He sat there for a moment, motor idling. He was a good distance back and there was a lot of traffic around the pier; they weren’t going to notice him for a while. And the Continental was innocuous enough, it blended into the mist harmlessly. Sooner or later someone was going to get curious and wander out to take a look but he guessed that he could buy a little time.
He considered the situation. There was no time to attempt the kind of job he had perpetrated on Peter Vincent’s New York townhouse; he had neither the cover nor the equipment, much less the secrecy to run lines down toward the pier. Rather he would have to come in there with full arsenal from the start; use the grenades to scatter and then hit with the heavy stuff, all of it launched by hand. The ship would break open if his aim were good and it would go down, but if he knew what he was doing he would have enough time in between the first hit and the sinking to get in there and do what he had to do. About four minutes, he calculated.
Against almost a hundred men.
Oh well, Wulff thought, it didn’t matter. At least as between fifty and a hundred, a hundred and a thousand—it simply made no difference. The enemy did not understand that in terms of security, twenty-five men would have been as good as a hundred. On any reasonable basis, anything over a ten-man force really was overkill. But the enemy had not thought that way. They had, in fact, panicked. He allowed himself a distant smile at that. Panic could only work to his advantage.
Two men who were near the dock strolled out some yards and looked uprange. They seemed to have noticed the Continental. Even as he watched, one of them produced a pair of binoculars and focused on the car.
Under observation, behind the windshield, Wulff smiled. Posing for the pretty picture, looking nice. Underneath the dash his hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically as he allowed the tension to ease itself out along with the fear.
Then, very slowly and precisely, calculating his movements but using the slowness to waste not a motion, he got out of the car and went to the trunk.
He had clearance of a minute or so. That was all. He trusted that it would be enough.
In for a dime, in for a dollar.
It began.
XVII
Anthony had had no intention of going to the ship himself but at the last moment he decided that he had better. The orders came from nowhere but inside; within his territory Anthony was as supreme as Nicholas Severo had mistakenly thought himself to be. Anthony supervised, delivered orders, sat behind glass and sheet metal as his orders were carried out. The field was fifteen years behind him.
But for this one he decided that he had better show.
It was just too risky, that was all there was to it. There was too much at stake, too much had been invested in the shipment, and beyond that there was this lunatic Wulff wandering around. The man was incredibly dangerous and he was capable of anything. It was one thing to meet the executive committee and deliver the word to them, then leave the room taking it as a fait accompli. Most men of his rank would have left the job at that level.
But Anthony, not so very long ago that he could not remember, had been in the field. He had worked his way up from a field operative and he had known what it was like, at least in the old days, when things weren’t as stratified as they were now. He felt that it was his obligation to be on the scene and at least supervise the job.
Then too, if something happened, which it could not possibly (could it?), there were people that he had to answer to. It was always a hierarchy, everything in rungs, little fish, big fish—and even at his position, Anthony could look up to another level and see, dimly inferred beyond, another level yet.
The captain’s room in the ship had been hastily if clumsily fitted out as some kind of executive quarters. There was a bottle of good scotch on a crude night table, a scatter-rug thrown on the floor; dust, moulding, the stink of sea had been ineptly scrubbed out. Anthony sat in a lounging chair by the desk, drinking a very small glass of scotch, straight, and looked at the oriental named Lee who had just come in.
“Everything is all right, sir,” Lee said deferentially. “The other parties have appeared.”
“Is the transfer being made?”
Lee looked at him calmly. “There is a question of completing arrangements.”
“Arrangements were completed on paper weeks ago,” Anthony said tightly. “Get that stuff moving!”
“Ah yes,” Lee said, “but it is not quite that simple. My men must be paid off, their own efforts must be compensated, we have our own expenses—”
“You want cash in advance?” Anthony said. “That was not in the arrangement.”
“I do not know with whom you made these arrangements, sir,” Lee said. “I can only speak for myself, and my policy has always been—”
“Son of a bitch,” Anthony said and then caught himself. This was no time for lapses of control. “All right,” he said, “have it taken care of.”
Lee remained implacable. “It is not that simple,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I have discussed this with some of your assistants and they appear unbelieving. I want fifty thousand dollars in cash,” Lee said.
Anthony held the scotch in his hand, looked at the man impassively. It had been a long time since anything had fractured his public facade; this Chinese son of a bitch was not going to do it. But the temptation was strong to throw the drink into his face and begin cursing.
“Fifty thousand is crazy,” he said.
“Overhead,” the oriental said blandly.
“Fifty thousand dollars worth of overhead?”
“We sailed this ship from the port of Spain to the Gulf of Mexico and then north. With certain stops on the way and attendant risks.”
“That was never provided for,” Anthony said.
“I believe,” Lee said smoothly, “that there is nothing in writing. It was understood that a fair price would be charged for fair services. The price is fifty thousand dollars.”
“We don’t have that kind of cash on hand,” Anthony said. He would have the son of a bitch killed. All right: he had not wanted it to be this way but he was offered no choice. He would have to do it. The bastard deserved it. That was the trouble with turning yourself over to what in effect were individual sub-licensees. It occurred to him that it was about time that an old idea of his were adopted: complete control of all facets of the operation, from the harvesting straight through to the supply. It was coming.
It was definitely going in that direction. But unless matters were somehow hastened along, they would be held up time and again by people like Lee.
“I a
m sure we can wait while you get the cash,” Lee said.
“You know we can’t. This has got to go off on schedule.”
“We would like it to go off on schedule too. Unfortunately my crew must be paid.”
“You could have warned us about this,” Anthony said bitterly. “You could have let us know—”
“We took it for granted,” Lee said. He stood there impassively. Finally he seemed to bow. “I am sure that you will work out something,” he said. “In the meantime, we will merely wait.”
“We can’t wait.”
“Do you see any choice?”
“Yes,” Anthony said, ponderously. “Yes, I see a choice.” He was trembling with rage. Really, he could feel the rage pulsating within him, rattling away like a man pounding into a woman. The rage had made a woman of him. He had the gun in his hand before he even quite realized what he was doing.
He showed it to the oriental. “Complete the delivery,” he said.
Lee looked at the gun unblinking. “That has no effect upon me,” he said.
“It doesn’t?”
“We have a different attitude toward death than you Americans do. We consider life to be a continuum of which death is merely another part. Believe me, I would welcome death.”
Anthony held the gun steady. “I mean it,” he said, “complete the delivery.”
Lee did not move. But there was a hint of expression in his eyes. “Besides,” he said, “it would not be worth your while to kill me. It would destroy all of your carefully-wrought plans.”
Anthony picked up the glass of scotch, looked at the glisten, downed the remaining inch. He had not shot a man for many, many years. It had been a long time since he had not been able to use intermediaries. But the feeling, he decided, came back. Like sex or playing the violin, once you got it, you never lost the sensation.
He shot Lee in the hand. The gun had a good silencer; the noise was no greater than that of a dropped cigarette butt.
