Six Seconds to Kill

by Brett Halliday

  Two companies of paratroops had been airlifted to the Bayshore Country Club in Miami Beach, to back up the police if the Collins Avenue demonstration got out of hand. The remainder of the battalion was being held at the airport in reserve. Directly below the tower, in the ramp area and along the front of the International Concourse, four big troop-carrying Sikorsky helicopters waited. The soldiers themselves were dispersed in the departure lounges.

  Two Bell helicopters, much smaller than the Sikorskys, were parked on a grassy triangle near an intersection of a taxiway with the main northwest-southeast landing strip, several hundred yards from the terminal. These were to carry Crowther’s party into the city.

  “If they’re bound and determined to demonstrate, damn it,” Sparrow went on, popping a digestive tablet into his mouth, “why don’t they demonstrate where they were given a permit? Not that I don’t think it was a mistake to issue that permit, but that’s Miami Beach business. An airport isn’t a street. It’s a mechanism. We’ve got to run a regular schedule of arrivals and departures here, VIP’s or no VIP’s. What if we get a landing emergency and people are yelling so loud we can’t hear the announcements? Lives could be lost.”

  “I’m hitching a ride on one of the helicopters,” Shayne said. “Are you using soldiers to cover the transfer?”

  “That’s General Turner’s responsibility. He worked it all out on the telephone with Abe Berger.” He touched Shayne’s sleeve. “Mike, this is kind of unorthodox, but it’s an unorthodox situation. While you’re looking around, if you see anything about my dispositions I ought to change, I hope you won’t hesitate to tell me. I don’t have a hell of a lot of flexibility. I’ve still got to think about the warehouses and the cargo area, I can’t forget those. I’ve pulled as many men off routine duty as I dare.”

  “Nothing to worry about, Teddy,” Shayne said absently, scanning the crowd.

  “I certainly hope you’re right. I’ve got a case of indigestion I wouldn’t want to wish on Eliot Crowther himself. People have been running to me with rumors all morning. It’s the army’s responsibility to load Crowther into a helicopter, and it’s my responsibility to protect the airport facilities. But in case of a political outburst, whose responsibility is it to break it up? That hasn’t been made clear to me.”

  “We’re all going to be improvising,” Shayne said. Among the shifting mass of people on the deck, he saw a tall girl with long black hair, in a white sleeveless blouse. He nodded at Sparrow. Putting on a pair of sunglasses, he moved through the crowd.

  The girl was Adele Galvez, still as good-looking as she had been the day before. She seemed to be alone, but as Shayne approached he saw a look pass between her and a dark youth twenty feet away, leaning against the coping overlooking the aircraft apron.

  “Your uncle’s probably wondering why you’re not on the Beach,” Shayne remarked as he came up.

  She whirled. A quick look of dismay fled across her face, and then she closed with him and kissed him hard. “I knew I’d see you again sooner or later.”

  “It’s a small town.”

  She turned him away from the youth across the deck. “Everybody’s so impressed with you, Mike! The way you squashed poor Lorenzo Vega. But as for me! My standing’s way down. One of my friends wanted to know why I didn’t seduce you. All I could say was, I tried!”

  She hugged his arm.

  “Would you like to try again?” he said. “I can get a room at the hotel here. We’ve got twenty minutes.”

  She looked at him. “That might be nice, but you don’t really mean it, do you?”

  “That’s right, Adele. I don’t really mean it.”

  He moved to the right and cut back. Adele stayed with him. The boy she had signaled was being careful not to look toward them. Shayne bulldozed his way through the crowd and took his elbow in a firm grip. With a quick twist, he wrenched a shopping bag out of his hand. The youth grabbed for it, but Adele stopped him with a quick word in Spanish. Shayne set the shopping bag on the coping. There was nothing inside but a purple banner.

  “What’s it say?”

  “I’m afraid it’s slightly obscene,” Adele said.

  A circle of unoccupied space had opened about them. Shayne told the youth to hold still and let himself be searched.

  “Like hell. I don’t see a badge.”

  “If you want to be busted instead,” Shayne said, “I can arrange it.”

  After a moment the boy spread his arms. Shayne gave him a quick going-over but found nothing of interest except a toothbrush in a plastic container. He recorded the number of the boy’s driver’s license on the back of an envelope. He hesitated for another instant because of the toothbrush, but the boy had probably come expecting to be arrested.

  “Have fun,” he told the young people, and walked away.

  In a ladies’ room in the Beach hotel next to the St. Albans, Camilla Steele shut herself in a booth and opened her shoulder bag. She had left herself plenty of time, but all the clocks she consulted today seemed to be behaving strangely. They would stop for a stretch, stop absolutely dead. Then she would blink, and fifteen minutes would pass.

  The gun was inside the bag, wrapped in a black scarf. She touched it lightly, and was reassured by its solidity. Much that had happened in the course of the night had been shadowy and unreal. But the gun was a fact, with definite dimensions and properties, a hard, smooth surface with curves and corners. She couldn’t understand now why she had been so unsure about using it. If a gun hangs on the wall in the opening act, it has to be fired before the end of the third—Chekhov said that, and Camilla entirely agreed. An assassination is impossible without an assassin.

  Smiling to herself, she took out the hypodermic syringe.

  It was charged with Adrenalin, precisely the thing she needed. She hated needles, as a rule. Her horror of injecting herself was what had kept her from going beyond pills. But of course people gave themselves shots all the time. All it took was courage.

  She waved her hand in the air until the blue map appeared on her forearm. Holding her breath, she plunged in the needle, hitting the right spot the first time—perhaps a good omen. Then, like a fool, she forgot to depress the plunger, and she actually pulled the needle out before she noticed. The next time she had trouble finding the vein, and she felt a spurt of panic. But finally she had it. She sighed deeply, and her thumb came down.

  Her heart began to rattle violently. She pulled out the needle and put it away.

  She had been given a half-tablet to swallow, and she managed to get it down without water. This was Dr. Jekyll—Mr. Hyde medicine, to change her appearance during her first few moments in the St. Albans. It was Antabuse, a drug prescribed for alcoholics, to make the taste of liquor acutely unpleasant.

  She put on an unbecoming pair of dime-store glasses with tinted lenses. She had cut her hair the day before, and dyed it in tawny streaks. She was wearing a too-large dress and a padded bra, shoes with thick heels. She left the booth, and with the Adrenalin racing happily through her veins, she was certain for the first time that this was really going to work. A surge of crazy optimism carried her into the hotel bar, where she ordered a bottle of imported beer. She was not only going to shoot the man, she was going to get away with it, and live to a pleasant old age. Everybody deserves to have one major secret. The fact that she had killed an attorney general was going to be hers.

  The bartender poured the beer. It looked insipid, and had a noxious smell. Her lip curled as she raised the glass. She was the only customer; the bartender had gone back to preparing mixes at the far end of the bar. She held her nose and drank.

  It was vile stuff, but she didn’t set the glass down until it was empty. She saw a dim reflection of herself in the back mirror. Her eyeballs pounded. Blood poured to her head, and she felt her features beginning to coarsen. But the mirror was too dark, and she returned to the one in the rest room.

  She found herself unevenly flushed, with patches of color high on each chee
kbone. Her eyes did seem to protrude slightly. She wouldn’t be looking her best when she shot Mr. Crowther, but needless to say, that wasn’t the object.

  A good-humored crowd had gathered along Collins Avenue. A line of police trestles, backed up by cops, confined the demonstrators to half the street, keeping the other half open. None of this concerned her. She had to show her lunch ticket before she was allowed through the police barrier. She passed clumps of soldiers. At other times she would have drawn admiring stares, but today, a dowdy, squarish middle-aged woman with a distracted air and some kind of skin disease, she was ignored.

  A triangle of beach in front of the hotel had been cleared as a landing pad for Crowther’s helicopter. She watched the preparations idly, starting for the entrance only when a taxi arrived with a party of guests. She moved uncertainly, and they overtook her. They all entered the lobby together, two men and three women. Inside, she stumbled against one of the men and caught his arm.

  “Sorry. I always seem to trip at that exact spot.”

  They both held the same political opinions, or they wouldn’t have been here, and the man’s face showed his concern.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly,” she said. “Do you think they’re going to start on time, or will they give us a drink first?”

  The man laughed. “More than one, I hope, considering the speeches we have ahead of us.”

  They were asked to show their cards again before they were allowed into the elevator. They showed them again at a table in the eighth-floor corridor. After being told her table number, Camilla was issued a tag with a pseudonym on it—Doris Myerson. She exchanged a smile with her new friends, and asked the ladies at the table if they needed any help.

  The Jet-Star bringing Eliot Crowther from Washington came down on the number-one landing strip, slowed to taxiing speed, and rolled past the Delta Airlines building toward the International Concourse. The helicopters started their engines.

  Michael Shayne, in the lead helicopter, saw the young demonstrators at the edge of the observation deck break out their banner. Soldiers in a loose formation moved out of the ground-level gates. The Jet-Star, now headed directly away from the terminal, continued toward the concrete intersection where the transfer would take place. A cloud of red balloons rose suddenly from the observation deck, and a dozen or so youths burst out of the gates in Concourses 3 and 5 and raced onto the field.

  A command was shouted. The soldiers wheeled toward the demonstrators, who were carrying buckets of black paint, which sloshed out as they ran. Only two were able to break through the line of soldiers. They hurled paint at the helicopter Shayne was in. Some of it splashed against the windows. They were seized from behind and manhandled back to the terminal.

  Picket signs appeared above the crowd on the deck. They wavered and dipped, then vanished.

  A movable ramp was rolled into place against the forward cabin door of the Jet-Star. The soldiers formed a tight corridor connecting the bottom of the ramp with the helicopter.

  Abe Berger was the first man out of the plane. He conferred with an army officer and looked around carefully. Two more Secret Service men appeared at the top of the ramp. They were followed by Crowther.

  He was bareheaded, as usual, his shock of white hair stirred by the breeze. All the preparations had been directed against an anti-Crowther demonstration, and Shayne was surprised when most of the people on the observation deck began cheering and shaking small American flags. Crowther, too, seemed surprised. He stopped on the top step and broke into a wide grin, raising both hands over his head. His adherents cheered more loudly. Berger, below him, looked pained. Crowther was isolated for a moment, a marvelous target. Berger returned to his side and hustled him down the steps and between the two lines of soldiers to the helicopter.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” Berger snapped as he passed Shayne. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out and around, Abe.”

  Crowther swung up into the helicopter. The happy politician’s grin was still on his face, but it lost some of its luster when he saw Shayne.

  “Mike Shayne,” he said. “I’m told some people wanted to come out in the streets in support of the United States government, in support of my position, and you discouraged them.”

  “I had something to do with that,” Shayne agreed. “It wouldn’t have amounted to much.”

  Without warning, traces of his smile still showing, Crowther drove one fist hard into Shayne’s stomach. Shayne grunted. Crowther pretended he had injured his fist, holding it up with a mock grimace.

  “You keep in shape, don’t you, kiddo?”

  His laugh boomed out. He tapped Shayne on the shoulder and went on to his seat, where he began working on his hair, disarranged by the breeze.

  The helicopter filled rapidly. Berger came back up the aisle. His breath was sour and his eyes were heavy from lack of sleep.

  “I hope he pulled that punch,” he remarked to Shayne.

  “As long as it made him feel better.”

  “You’ve been kind of elusive, boy. Gentry says he couldn’t locate you either. He’s used to your lack of cooperation. I’m not. They still haven’t found the Steele woman?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  The door slammed. Through the closed door to the cockpit, Shayne heard the voice of the ATC ground controller in the tower: “Bell one-forty, cleared for takeoff. Change frequency for airways clearance.”

  The rotors clacked and they lifted from the concrete. Crowther, halfway back in the cabin, put on his half-glasses to go over his speech. He began making breath-marks on the manuscript in red pencil.

  Berger had to raise his voice so Shayne could hear him. “A hell of a place to talk. What happened last night after I left?”

  “Not that much.”

  “Mike, Mike,” Berger said impatiently. “Level with me, please. My radar’s picking up some funny blips. I don’t like secrets. You’re involved in something you don’t want to let me in on.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Instinct. When this much is going on, you don’t go to bed and take a pill so the phone won’t bother you. Did you talk to her?”

  “Camilla?”

  “Yeah, yeah!”

  “No.”

  They crossed the river, a thousand feet above the East-West Expressway, heading east toward Miami Beach. The tangled spaghetti of the 7th Avenue interchange lay ahead.

  “I’m supposed to be in charge here,” Berger said savagely. “I don’t like people who duck my phone calls, and I’m making a note. But the hell with that now, we don’t have time. I get the feeling you don’t think this is quite as serious as you did last night, which means you know something I don’t, because it still looks goddamn serious to me.”

  “He got a nice round of applause at the airport.”

  Berger shook his head shortly. “Maybe I know something you don’t, Mike, has that occurred to you? I woke up a few people in Washington. I got an absolute denial from the CIA—this is not a public relations denial, it’s the real one, and I had to go as high as the President to get it. None of their people or anybody they deal with had anything to do with any of these demonstrations or counterdemonstrations. The Mr. Robinson who talked to Vega told him Gil Ruiz is in this country. The CIA is supposed to know things like that, and they didn’t. Ruiz, as a matter of fact, has a special reason for being sore at our boy.” He nodded at Crowther. “This is goddamn secret stuff, and I shouldn’t be shouting it in a helicopter.”

  One of Crowther’s aides came up the aisle. Berger waved him to a stop. “This is private.”

  When the man retreated Berger went on, “Crowther’s been arguing in cabinet meetings for tougher action in support of the Caldera junta against the insurgents. Diplomatic muscle, money, weapons—the works. To be specific, you’ve heard of the M-16, the new lightweight automatic rifle? All our own infantry divisions haven’t been equipped with it yet, and it hasn’t been pedd
led abroad. Crowther carried a vote in favor of letting Caldera have ten thousand M-16s to see how they work against guerrillas. The assumption is that they’ll work goddamn well.”

  “Have they been shipped yet?” Shayne said quickly.

  “You’re awake, good. No, they’re here in Miami, waiting for clearance. At the airport, as a matter of fact. There’s still some high-level lobbying going on, people who want to reverse the order. If Ruiz and his people can get public attention with some kind of action against Crowther, maybe they’ll stir up enough of a stink so the deal will be canceled.”

  A few more pieces of the puzzle snapped into place. Biscayne Bay was beneath them. They began to glide in for a landing.

  “They wouldn’t need many men to burn a warehouse,” Shayne said. “That could be it.”

  “And a shooting or an attempted shooting would make a nice diversion. Mike, do this. Stay with us. If you see anybody who looks remotely like Camilla Steele, yell. Let’s get Crowther into the ballroom. That’s the first thing. Then I’ll call the airport and have Turner move one of his companies into the warehouse area. Here’s a direct question, and I have to get a direct answer. Do you know of any reason to change our arrangements for getting Crowther in and out of the hotel?”

  Shayne met his eyes. “He doesn’t smoke or drink. I think he’ll outlive everybody.”

  The helicopter was hanging above the cleared stretch of beach in front of the St. Albans. Using binoculars, Berger checked the beach and then swept the hotel façade. He said mildly, “And if you’re holding out on me, Mike, for whatever reason, I’m in a position where I can do some damage. I can lift your license, for openers.”

  “That’s happened before, Abe. I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation.”

  “This could be a long one.”

  Berger tossed the binoculars on an empty seat. “Take her down,” he called.

  The helicopter descended slowly. He waited until the second helicopter, bringing the rest of the entourage, settled alongside. He swung down, conferred with the officer in command of the waiting escort, then gave the signal to dismount.