The Detonators (24 page)

I said, “It sounds great, very charitable; but just where does a guy named Alfred Minister come in? Charity is not his big thing.”

She said, “That’s right, Amy told us. The fate of the world means nothing to you, does it? As long as you get the man you’ve been sent after.”

“Considering this man’s record,” I said, “and the idealistic pretensions of your PNP group, he seems like a curious choice for you to employ. He puts you into some mighty funny company: first he was hired by that bloodthirsty group of so-called Argentinian patriots, then by the PLO, and now by your beautiful People for Nuclear Peace.”

She laughed shortly. “Guilt by association, Matt? We’ll take that chance, thank you. And what’s curious about our choice? He’s the best, isn’t he? We wanted the best, and we were willing to pay his price, and we hired him. His past record doesn’t concern us, except insofar as it indicates that he’s good at his job. You managed to shake Amy’s convictions, rather cruelly, by confronting her with that poor maimed woman in Coral Gables; but that’s really ancient history and quite irrelevant, isn’t it? We’re under no illusions that Mr. Pope, as he’s calling himself now, is a nice man; but he’s what we need right now. A majority of the board of governors of the PNP voted in favor of employing him, myself included.”

I said, “Very democratic. Suppose the majority had disagreed with you, what would have happened?”

She smiled thinly. “I might have used my persuasive powers to convince them that they were wrong; but I didn’t have to. And where did you get the strange notion that we’re idealistic, Matt? We’re hard-headed individuals with a certain position in society who see our orderly and comfortable and rather pleasant world threatened by a bunch of madmen waving the ultimate weapon at each other. We’re trying to make sure that these maniacs are placed under some kind of restraint. In the immortal words of Mae West: ‘Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.’ Idealism has nothing to do with it. We’re not mushy sentimentalists like so many antibomb activists. The thought of all the little Japanese babies fried at Hiroshima doesn’t bother me in the least; they started
that
at Pearl Harbor, and we just finished it for them. But the thing is getting out of control now, and nobody else seems willing to do anything about it, not even the delegates to the forthcoming Nassau convention, not really, judging by the interviews and reports we’ve been studying very carefully. So it’s time somebody else took a hand, somebody who’s willing to take drastic measures to insure the survival of our way of life. Our world, if you prefer.”

“The PNP and Mr. Alfred Minister. Quite a team!”

“Opposed by one Constantine Grieg, dealer in chemical death, and one Matthew Helm, government assassin. Talking about guilt by association, what kind of a team do you call that?”

“Why does Grieg want you dead, Gina?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “I’m supposed to find a mystery harbor belonging to him. Apparently it’s down in the outer islands somewhere. Do you know anything about it?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said at last, “yes, as a matter of fact I do. That’s what the fuss is all about; that’s presumably the reason Connie Grieg is trying to have me killed, at least one of the reasons. And… and I haven’t thanked you for saving me, have I?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

She smiled crookedly. “I’m sorry, Matt. I’d never seen anybody die by violence before. I’d never heard the guns and seen the blood. All that blood! I guess I hadn’t realized until then just what I’d got myself involved in, naive and sheltered me. I had never known what it was like to watch people killed. I guess I just didn’t want to accept that I’d deliberately left my own world for a world where things like that could happen; I tried to make myself believe that it had nothing to do with me; that it was all on account of you.” She drew a ragged breath. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. And… and thanks!”

I said, “Sure. Can you thank me in a practical way, after we’ve visited Nassau, by taking me on to this smugglers’ hideout, this Hole in the Wall? Or do I have to find it on my own?”

She laughed abruptly. “Hole in the Wall! Very picturesque. Your invention? The only trouble is, there’s already a Hole in the Wall here in the Bahamas, a well-known anchorage at the tip of Great Abaco Island, northeast of Nassau. Probably a refuge for pirates and wreckers in the old days.”

“I guess great outlaw minds think alike, on the sea as well as on land,” I said. “And here I thought I was bringing a nice western flavor to the effete East! But whatever name we pick for Grieg’s harbor, or he does, can you take me to it?”

She said cautiously, “Well, I can probably take you closer to it than you could get on your own, even if you didn’t get tangled up in a bunch of coral heads, poking around the banks in your landlubber fashion. It takes somebody who knows how to read that shallow water and figure the tides and currents… But what makes you think I won’t run you into a trap?”

I said, “Hell, I’m counting on it. Like you said, I’m the macho establishment warrior who’s sure he can bust out of any trap you and your high-society friends set for him, right?”

For a moment her face had a bleak look. “I’m not sure I like this game, my dear. Sooner or later one of us is going to get badly hurt.” Then she shrugged resignedly. “All right. I’ll play, if you’re nice to me and make me another drink… No, I’ll have it below, while I’m getting dinner ready.” A few minutes later, turning from the stove to take a sip from her glass, she looked at me shrewdly and said, “You really liked that little girl, didn’t you?”

I studied her face for a moment, wondering about her plans and motives: Was she going to guide me into a machine-gun ambush or just leave me stranded on a reef somewhere? Obviously, she’d been assigned—or had assigned herself, since she seemed to be pretty much in charge of things—to keep me busy, keep an eye on me, and take me out of action at the proper time, before I could interfere with Minister and the mysterious job he was doing for her and her PNP. For my part, I had no choice. We now had two leads to follow, and both of them were feminine. Well, Doug Barnett was presumably dealing with the Amy lead. It was up to me to stick with the Gina lead; and if it involved playing odd, schizophrenic, friend-enemy games with the lady, bluff and counterbluff, so be it.

“What brought that up?” I asked. “What makes you think I was so badly smitten?”

“She said so,” Gina said dryly. “Of course, she might have been deceiving herself, but your face says so, too. Right now you’re resenting my messing around in
her
galley, just like a grieving widower hating to see another woman working in his late wife’s kitchen. I’m surprised. I shouldn’t think a man in your line of work would be subject to sentimental attachments.”

“Oh, we kill and love with equal abandon,” I said lightly.

Gina threw me a glance that had a good deal of malice in it. “Actually, she told us quite a bit about you,” she said.

“Such as?”

“Well, of course she told us that you’d inherited her father’s mission, to hunt down the man we’d hired under the name of Pope, but we’d already guessed that. Then she told us how you’d lectured her on the proper use of firearms and warned her what a vicious and ruthless person you were. And how you didn’t seem to know too much about sailboats.” Gina paused, then said casually without looking at me directly, “And weren’t very good in bed.”

I had the normal masculine reaction of outrage at this intimate betrayal; it seemed like an unnecessary piece of data for Amy to have passed along. Then I realized, or thought I realized, why she’d done it.

“What else?” I asked.

“That’s about it, except for a few details.”

My anger was replaced by a sense of relief and gratitude. Amy Barnett had carefully told her associates everything she’d learned from me and had even offered them a description of our awkward lovemaking to show she was holding nothing back—that is, she’d given them all the facts except the most important one, that her father, Doug Barnett, wasn’t dead. She’d kept that secret as I’d asked her to. I was again aware of a sense of loss; and I wondered if I’d ever again see the smallish girl with the gray-blue eyes, the painful burden of guilt, and the intricate, tormenting system of loyalties… I became aware that Gina had changed the subject.

“I always feel that Spam is a challenge,” she said, steadying the gimbaled Shipmate stove to open the oven that neither Amy nor I had been brave enough to tackle. “I’ll try to pick up some fresh meat and vegetables in Nassau; but let’s see how this canned protein has turned out.”

It had turned out quite well; although I’ve eaten too many strange concoctions off my lap with a gun handy to qualify as a gourmand even when dining at a table. But she’d dressed up the meat with brown sugar and cloves and done some interesting things to the accompanying canned vegetables and stirred up an intriguing dressing for the remaining salad makings she’d found in the icebox. We had canned peaches for dessert.

Afterward, lacking a proper after-dinner liqueur, we retired to the cockpit and sipped White Label straight with our coffee, serenaded by the small waves of the anchorage expending themselves against the sheltering rock. The sun had set, leaving a luminous stairy blackness with a promise of later moonlight. There was apparently a small settlement up the inlet; we could see a couple of lights on the shore in that direction. Otherwise we seemed to have the Berry Islands to ourselves; but I’d turned on the anchor light anyway to alert any late arrivals to our presence.

“Why do you do it?” Gina asked at last.

“Do what?” Then, seeing the searching way she was looking at me in the dark, I grinned, understanding. “You mean, how did a nice girl like me wind up in a job like this? My God, lady! The tacky old question every sport asks every whore! I’ll give you the tacky old answer: Just lucky, I guess.”

She shook her head quickly. “No, I’m serious. It baffles me. Why do you do this kind of work? You’re an intelligent man; and not unattractive—”

I said, “And if that intelligent and not unattractive gentleman had been a normal American male brainwashed from childhood to keep himself perfectly safe and smelling sweet, and never, never spill a single drop of sacred human blood, where would you be right now? I’ll tell you, Mrs. W., you’d be six hundred fathoms down in the Northwest Providence Channel, maybe with a spare anchor keeping your bloated body from popping to the surface.”

She winced. “Ugh! Don’t be so damn graphic!”

I said, “Don’t sneer at my profession, sweetheart. There’s got to be
something
out there smarter and tougher than punks like that fearsome foursome we encountered, or the world won’t be a very nice place for the dainty nonviolent people who can’t bear to get their hands gory. If I may flatter myself a bit, something like me. And I don’t in the least mind admitting that I do it in part because of the good way it feels when they come in like that, like ducks to the decoys, thinking it’s going to be easy because there are four of them and they’ve got guns. They’ve got to learn that they should be damn careful where they wave their silly popguns, no matter how many they are, because there are lots meaner people around who shoot lots better, too.”

She said softly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I wasn’t sneering.” After a moment, she went on: “But the lesson is pretty well lost, isn’t it, since those men are hardly in a position to pass the word.”

I shrugged. “Connie Grieg knows he sent out a fast boat with four supposedly dangerous soldiers. When they don’t come back, he’ll start to wonder and worry, and it’ll do him a world of good. And of course we don’t know a thing about it, not a thing. Who, harmless little us?”

“Yes.” She finished off the last of her whiskey, followed by the last of her coffee. She looked at me and spoke coolly: “Well, you probably know what’s supposed to happen next, my dear; the real reason I had us anchor here. Now, of course, I’m supposed to seduce you.”

I grinned. “You can’t,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “We’ll probably be spending a good many nights together on this cramped little tub. Why put off the inevitable? Amy didn’t say you were totally helpless in bed; and I’ve been told I’m not completely repulsive.”

“I’m not and you’re not,” I said. “But these cockpit seats are pretty damn narrow and very hard, and we can’t pull out either of the bunks below until we take care of all those dirty dishes so we can fold the cabin table out of the way.”

Gina Williston laughed softly. “Damn these toy sailboats!” she murmured. “Well, we’d better get at it, then, hadn’t we, darling? You wash and I’ll dry.”

Two dim little sticks poking out of the distant sea horizon were our first indications that New Providence Island lay ahead. They were the outlying navigational marks shown on the chart. Then the island itself began to appear beyond them: several low smudges way off where the water met the sky. The smudges gradually consolidated themselves into an un-even line of gray across our course, as
Spindrift
cruised along under sail at an easy three and four knots.

It was getting to be all in the day’s work. Having already discovered Grand Bahama Island and the Berry Islands in the course of my heroic voyages of exploration, I was becoming pretty casual about having land pop out of the ocean in front of the bowsprit. Anyway, there’s a considerable difference between doing it all yourself, as on our Gulf Stream crossing, and having somebody else responsible for the navigation. Here I was merely checking the Loran occasionally to make sure my handsome lady pilot wasn’t up to any navigational tricks.

The fact that, dishes done, we’d spent the night sharing a bunk very intimately was quite irrelevant, of course. The last agent I knew who trusted a woman because they’d spent the night in the same bed was buried young. But Gina Williston looked very good to me this morning, even in her old white jeans and the slightly grubby undershirt—excuse me, tank top—that revealed an odd bruise on one of her smooth brown arms and some peculiar scratches on one of her smooth brown shoulders. Well, I carried a few interesting battle scars myself.