“In front, Thompson,” he told Shayne.
CHAPTER 17
Two cars were parked beside a bulk-gas pump in front of a long wooden shed. As the truck careened onto an unpaved road running at right angles to the strip, Shayne saw two bound and gagged figures lying in the dust in front of the shed.
“I’m not Thompson,” he said. “Thompson had an accident in St. Albans and he missed the plane. They brought me in at the last minute and nobody explained anything. What’s this Liberation Front crap?”
Nikko laughed. “To throw pepper in their eyes, you understand? Where does she want us to land you?”
Shayne hesitated a fraction of an instant. “So long as it’s near a commercial airport.”
“That will be easy. Is there something the matter with Moss? He has a strange look.”
“The sauce head-he’s been hitting the booze all morning. We came down just in time. Half an hour more and he wouldn’t be able to navigate.”
“A crazy, that one. He steals gold. Sells it at seventeen dollars an ounce. Then steals it again. For the last time, I hope!”
The driver had been told to hurry, and he was doing sixty on the rough road. Bulldozed through the jungle by an American oil company, it ran as straight as a rule. When they reached the coast they passed rapidly through a fishing village and started west. Minutes later Shayne saw a modern hydrofoil launch drawn up on the sand between the road and the water. The driver swung off the road and kept going until he mired down in the sand.
In a moment the mail bag and the two luggage pods were loaded. Heaving together, they ran the hydrofoil down the hard sand into the water.
Ward pulled at Shayne’s arm as the motor started. “Now!” he said urgently.
Shayne counted heads. Moss and Sanchez, the Brazilian, had dropped onto the padded seats to enjoy the feeling of the wind in their face. They would be neutral. The three make-believe guerrillas still wore their tommy guns. Nikko, on the stern bench smoking a small brown cigarette, held his gun cradled easily in his arms, one hand stroking the trigger assembly.
When Ward gestured again, Shayne shook his head.
They were traveling very fast on their cushion of air. It was a smooth ride but a noisy one. Nikko pointed ahead after a time, and Shayne saw a big yacht, riding easily in the long swell. The gap between the boats closed rapidly. Soon Shayne was able to read the legend on the stern: the yacht was the Paladin, out of Monte Carlo.
Two sailors in striped jerseys waited at the rail, ready to drop the yoke as soon as the hydrofoil coasted alongside. After an exchange of signals, the smaller boat was hoisted aboard.
Nikko leaped down lightly. “It worked like a clock! Smooth. Easy.”
He yelled a command. Shayne ripped off his mask and tossed it overboard. Ward’s came off more slowly. The Greek’s smile faded as he noticed the Negro. He looked indignantly at Shayne.
“Nobody told me I would have a Neg-”
“You’ll have to bear up,” Shayne told him. “It’s in a good cause-money. Let’s have a drink.”
Nikko called to one of the sailors, who ran for a bottle and glasses. The sea anchor had been drawn in smartly and the yacht was heading east. The guerrillas peeled off their beards and jungle camouflage, emerging in the same striped jerseys and white shorts worn by the rest of the crew. Counting the unseen sailor at the wheel, the Paladin carried a crew of six.
Ward edged behind one of the men with the tommy guns and looked at Shayne. Again Shayne shook his head.
Nikko, without the beard and the dark glasses, proved to be a man of about thirty, with bronzed skin and dark, curly hair. In a jovial mood, he filled the glasses with a colorless liquor and handed them around, making a point of skipping Ward. They toasted each other and drank.
While the crewmen began manhandling the luggage containers out of the hydrofoil, Shayne moved to a spot where he wouldn’t be observed and smoothed out the slip of paper Naomi Savage had pressed into his hand.
It said: “Mike, she told Sanchez to kill you.”
Shayne wadded it up and flipped it into the sea. Again there was a swift reshuffling of friends and enemies. Christa had given Sanchez his orders in Portuguese. But could Shayne be sure that Naomi was telling the truth?
Nikko shouted angrily. His men had opened several suitcases pulled at random from each luggage container. Shayne lumbered toward him, loosening his shoulders. “Anything wrong?”
“Indeed something is wrong. Where are the gold bars?”
“How should I know, for Christ’s sake? I thought it was some nutty political thing, the way everybody was shouting and giving away pamphlets. Don’t look at me! I’m getting a thousand bucks and some free transportation. I needed the transportation more than the cash.”
“Moss,” Nikko said.
“Hey? What’s bothering you, buddy?”
“Wait a minute,” Shayne said suddenly. “Where was this gold? In one of these luggage things?”
One of the sailors pulled out another piece of luggage and ripped it open with a knife. Plunging both hands into the gash, he pulled out a double handful of women’s underclothing and scattered it about the deck.
“Nothing.”
Shayne went on, “There was an explosion in one of the luggage compartments right after we left. Remember that, Moss? And then later they did some tricky flying when they came in over the coast. They rocked the plane-back and forth. And I’ll be damned if I don’t think-look out!”
Jaime Sanchez, the Brazilian, snatched up the knife the sailor had put down and took two dancing steps across the deck, screaming in Portuguese. But he was confused about his orders. Instead of going for Shayne, who had his forty-five out and was ready for him, he drove his knife at Ward’s stomach.
Shayne shot him in the head.
The knife passed under the Negro’s arm. Momentum carried Sanchez another step. He struck the rail and went overboard.
The action was over in an instant. Shayne came around with the recoil, but Nikko was equally fast. His tommy gun was already up, covering Shayne. Another tommy gun was pointed at Shayne from behind.
“Goofed up on something,” Shayne said in disgust. “I thought so. Now, is anybody going to tell me what this is all about?”
Nikko stepped closer and took the forty-five. Another sailor disarmed Ward. “Get inside,” Nikko said.
Moss said amiably, “Anything I can do for anybody?”
“Get inside,” Nikko repeated. “All of you.”
Herded by tommy guns, the three men from the plane were driven into the salon.
Ward remarked casually, “Any of those needles left, Mike?”
Nikko snapped, “No talking! I want three separate stories.”
He gave quick orders. Moss was locked in the head. Ward, with an armed sailor, was put in a bedroom. Shayne remained in the main salon with Nikko and another of his men. The room was furnished like a movie set, with a white llama-skin carpet, a Picasso, a well-stocked bar.
Slinging his tommy gun, Nikko touched Shayne in several places until he located his wallet. He flipped through the identification cards. He muttered under his breath and slammed the wallet down on a glass-topped table.
“Private detective. Private detective! And now I want to know what happened on the plane. No lies! No lies, Mr. Shayne!”
Breathing hard, he filled a small cup with coffee from a silver urn.
“No lies,” he repeated. “Tell me the truth about the gold and we may not kill you.”
“I’ve already told you I don’t know a Goddamn thing,” Shayne said, dropping onto the arm of an upholstered chair. “I had a fight with Thompson outside the St. Albans casino. He lost. In fact, he’s dead. That left the operation one man short. I didn’t want to hang around and stand trial for manslaughter. The lady asked me if I could use a thousand bucks.”
“What lady?”
“Let’s not quibble about things you already know,” Shayne said impatiently. “You’ll want to know why I
was in St. Albans. I was tailing Moss. I picked up a tip that he was involved in that gold job at LaGuardia. That puts me at the wrong end of the gun, I realize, but don’t tell your boy to blast me yet. There really was an explosion on the plane. You’ll want to check that with your own people, or maybe you won’t, I don’t know. Somebody’s trying to pull a switch here. Until you find out who it is, it might be a good idea to watch your step. The plan was-am I going too fast for you?”
“Go faster. The plan was-”
“To blow the door, then tip the airplane and dump the container where they could find it later. So I have something to sell you. I know exactly where it went in, give or take a couple of hundred yards. It’s between a wooded point and the mouth of a river. In a certain light, you might be able to spot it from the air.”
Nikko muddled his coffee vigorously with a little spoon. “Who was flying the plane?”
“Joe Lassiter. Pan American fired him for drinking and gambling and getting in trouble with too many women. All he had to do was heel over hard at a certain time. He’d do it for whiskey money, without asking questions.”
Nikko considered, his handsome dark face screwed up uncomfortably. Suddenly he cocked his head.
“Helicopter!”
He snapped a command to the sailor and ran on deck. The other sailors collected quickly and began pulling the luggage containers undercover. When the helicopter came over, the deck was empty.
Shayne, in the salon, indicated by gestures that he wanted a drink. The sailor warned him away from the bar with a shake of his head. Shayne waited a moment. Without asking permission, he helped himself to coffee.
The helicopter went over, hesitated, and came back. It was possible, though not likely, that Tim Rourke, at Maiquetia airport, had persuaded the Venezuelan police to send this helicopter, but Rourke had no way of knowing about Adam’s yacht or that it had anything to do with the DC-8’s unscheduled landing in the oilfields. And yet it was clear that the people in the helicopter were curious about the Paladin. As the yacht changed course, the helicopter followed, hanging several hundred feet above the stern, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.
Shayne began wandering about the room, trying to think of some way to call attention to the fact that the Paladin had prisoners aboard. Seeing his wallet on the table where Nikko had dropped it, an idea hit him. Ward’s remark about the needles had been picking at the edge of his consciousness, but Clancy had given him only two and he had used them both. As he arranged the identification cards that Nikko had scattered, his mind jumped back thirty-six hours.
Two nights before, an unknown person had planted a square of blotting paper in LeFevre’s wallet, with the obvious aim of implicating Shayne in a hallucination murder. To complete the picture, to make it totally convincing to the police, there also ought to be-
He ruffled quickly through the cards without finding anything. He checked the other compartments in the wallet: nothing. Finally, ready to conclude that the idea was more wishful then realistic, he pulled his Florida driver’s license out of its transparent plastic cover. A scrap of blotting paper fluttered to the floor.
The sailor with the tommy gun was watching closely, frowning. He was a strong young boy, with heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes. Shayne grinned at him. He returned the wallet to his hip pocket, buttoning it in, and picked up the blotting paper.
Tasting the thick, bitter coffee, he made a face.
“Cold.”
Shielding the movement with his body, he dropped the blotting paper into the cup. Again without asking permission, he poured the coffee back and turned up the heat beneath the urn.
After another moment, he refilled his cup, filled another for the sailor and took it across to him.
“Hell, let’s be friends,” he said cordially. “When this is over, we’ll all be rich.”
The sailor looked at him suspiciously, thought about it, and finally accepted the cup. Shayne gave him an encouraging wink.
“Nothing like coffee. I know we’re all worried about that chopper, but they’ll go away in a minute. Everything’s going to turn out all right.”
The sailor stirred in sugar and took a noisy sip, still without taking his eyes off Shayne.
“Greece,” Shayne said. “It must be a great place. I admit I don’t like the liquor much, and I can’t say much for the coffee, but drink up, will you? We don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”
He motioned with his cup and put it to his lips. The boy went on drinking, his eyes alive with suspicion. With LeFevre, Shayne remembered, a vague, foolish look had spread over his face when the drug took hold. It had happened suddenly, as though a switch had been thrown. The boy sipped his way through the coffee and tipped the cup to get the dregs at the bottom. Overhead, the helicopter fell away and came back.
Shayne was on the point of deciding that the blotting paper hadn’t been in the urn long enough to affect the coffee.
Suddenly the boy rose several inches in his chair. The look on his face was a duplicate of the one Shayne had seen on LeFevre’s. He drew a deep breath, and as he breathed out, all his tension left him.
“Nice gun,” Shayne said, pantomiming taking an imaginary tommy gun off his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”
He held out his hand. Without hesitation, the boy closed the safety and handed him the weapon.
Shayne snapped out the clip and cleared the chamber. He shucked the forty-five rounds into a drawer in the table, returned the empty clip to the gun, and clowned with it for a moment, wiping out imaginary enemies. He opened the coffee urn and stirred the coffee with the barrel, to the boy’s amusement. Shayne gave the gun back, dripping coffee.
The helicopter dropped away behind them, but Shayne could still hear the rotor thumping steadily in the distance. The sailor was still laughing when Nikko came in.
“You can’t laugh your way out of this, please believe me,” Nikko told Shayne. “You think you’re safe because of so many witnesses. Put it out of your mind. I take only relatives and fellow townsmen as members of my crew. This is my nephew Chris. If I say the word, he will shoot you like a rabbit and drop you over the side with weights fastened to your ankles. I am not talking big, just telling you the facts.”
Glaring at Shayne, he drew a cup of coffee.
CHAPTER 18
He stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar and began to drink without sitting down.
“Who is responsible for this helicopter?”
“Adam, naturally. You know that.”
Nikko’s eyebrows came down. “I see. Are you working for him?”
“I’m a free agent. But I’m always looking for this kind of situation. After the fighting stops, there’s usually something left over for me.”
“So the other story, about following Moss to St. Albans, that was a lie. I told you not to tell lies. You’ll regret it. What do you know about Adam?”
“Not enough,” Shayne said curtly. “But you couldn’t bring the Paladin across the Atlantic on your own responsibility. He must be somewhere around. His original idea was to transfer the gold to a helicopter and fly it down to La Guaira. That was before everybody started thinking up variations. We radioed Maiquetia before we landed. His obvious move as soon as he heard about the hijacking was to get the chopper in the air and come looking for us. Of course, he’d recognize his own boat.”
Nikko wet his lips. His eyes were worried.
“You’ve got a choice now,” Shayne continued. “You can throw the luggage overboard and head back to wherever you’re supposed to meet him, and pretend you were just out for a sail. Or you can cut back up the coast and dive for the gold in the morning. But you’re fooling with a dangerous man. A powerful man. Why not be satisfied with the million and a half you took him for last summer?”
Nikko sipped his coffee, examining Shayne. He didn’t react, so perhaps the drug was beginning to reach him.
Shayne went on, “You’ve been out of touch. Did anybody tell you that LeFevre’s dead
?”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. How did he die?”
“Murdered,” Shayne said. “I think your best bet might be to throw in with us and see if we can nail your boss for conspiracy. As far as I can see, that’s your only real out. I don’t think you can talk your way out of this. He probably suspects you already. I think he wanted to throw a little temptation in your way, to see how long it would take you to give in to it.”
Nikko sat down and said politely, “An interesting idea. You may very well be right.”
“I think so. Let’s kick it around and decide what to do next. I need a drink. Do you want anything, or are you going to stick with coffee?”
“I’ll stick with coffee.”
Shayne poured himself a cognac. “You were lucky last summer, weren’t you?”
“Because of the storm-I agree, very lucky. Otherwise, luck had no part in it. I was at Alexandria with the Paladin. I slipped down and picked up the gold and returned to Alexandria. It was arranged by LeFevre so no mention of the Paladin appeared in the Suez records. So why should this stupid Englishman think I had anything to do with the affair at all?”
“I see you don’t know him very well.”
“Quite true,” Nikko conceded. “He sends guests to the Paladin. He seldom comes himself. He’s too busy making money! Once, in eighteen months. And then only from Friday to Monday. To have a boat like this and never use it-insane.”
“Where have you been since summer?”
“In the Mediterranean. The Greek Islands, the Adriatic.”
The boy with the tommy gun leaped to his feet. He unslung his gun and gave it to Shayne. Then, in absolute silence, he began a violent mountain dance, leaping, whirling, slapping his ankles. Nikko ignored him.
Shayne opened the mail bag containing the loot from the plane and began sorting out passports.
“Nikko,” he said. “Nikko!”
The Greek looked up from his cup, which he was holding delicately in both hands.
“If we’re going to be on the same side,” Shayne said, “I don’t want to put my head out the door and have somebody take a shot at me. How about asking the boys in for a drink or a cup of coffee?”
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