The Detonators (28 page)

Then we were driving away in the taxi that, to my surprise, had waited patiently for us instead of returning to town. I wondered how much the bill was going to be. We’d been dealing in fairly astronomical figures in the ornate mansion behind us—well, Gina and Connie had—but now we were back on earth again; and I don’t like to put excessive cab fares on the expense account, it makes for arguments with the agency money-counters.

I reflected that it would be nice to be rich. If I want a few hundred bucks cash from my checking account, I have to wait until the bank opens and take it out myself; but apparently, if you want a few hundred thousand, and your account is big enough, like Gina’s, the banker will make a house call. Well, actually he’d sent the money in care of a neatly dressed young black gofer with a handsome attaché case. It had taken a while to arrange, of course. It was still night, but looking out the cab window I saw that a large orange moon, which hadn’t even been up when we arrived, was now setting in the west. Coyote rode with us through the gate and got out and sent us on our way.

“A Chinaman called Coyote, for God’s sake,” Gina said, glancing back as we rode away.

“I don’t think they like to be called Chinamen.”

“Frenchmen don’t mind. Englishmen, Scotchmen, Welshmen, Irishmen don’t mind. Why should a lousy chink be so finicky? To hell with what he likes or doesn’t like!” She hesitated, then asked curiously, “How did he know my purse had a gun in it, earlier?”

“That’s easy. You were holding it as if it had a gun in it.” I reached into my pocket and fished out the little weapon and handed it to her. “Just in case you feel like shooting somebody. Me, for instance. I wouldn’t want you to feel frustrated.”

“Hell, you probably took the bullets out of it.”

“You’re way behind the times, sweetheart. You don’t load modern guns with bullets. It’s a great new invention that’s going to revolutionize firearms, called fixed ammunition. Beats hell out of ramming those crummy lead bullets on top of all that loose gunpowder, not to mention messing with those lousy flints or percussion caps. You load a modern gun with cartridges. Or unload it. But I didn’t, you can check.”

She did, then dropped the weapon into her purse. She didn’t look at me. Something was on her mind, and she was obviously stalling when she spoke again.

“I wonder if that blond Amazon likes standing around like that in her high heels, or if it’s just that she can’t sit down without splitting those shiny pants.”

“I wouldn’t mind splitting her shiny pants for her.”

“Don’t talk so tough and dirty. Anyway, she’s out of your class, little boy. That one would wring you dry and hang you out with the wash. Matt?”

“Yes?”

“You’re curious, aren’t you? So ask your goddamn question.”

I shrugged. “If you insist. What’s with you and drugs? Or what was with you and drugs? I’d say you’re pretty clean now.” After a moment, when she didn’t answer immediately, I spoke carefully: “The information we got said you’d spent some time in an expensive sanatorium. Nobody could find out what for.”

“That’s why it’s expensive.” She sat beside me in the moving taxi, looking straight ahead into the night. “I woke up under restraint,” she said tonelessly after a little. “That’s polite for being strapped down like a crazy, which I was. They said I’d OD’d on the stuff, some stuff, I never remembered what. I was trying all kinds of weird crap back then. But they brought me back and kept me from hurting myself, maiming myself, killing myself, I was that crazy. I weighed ninety-two pounds. I jittered helplessly for weeks. I’d wake up in the night screaming. I cried for hours at a time for no reason. I couldn’t think straight; couldn’t think at all. When I could get out of bed at last, there was this sickening, stringy-haired skeletonlike thing in the mirror with a mouth that twitched uncontrollably in the dull-eyed skull face that didn’t belong to anybody I knew.” She swallowed hard. “It was a long way to come back, my dear. I’ve made it now, pretty much. They didn’t really think I could, I could tell; and maybe they were right in a way. There are still things lurking in the dark corners of my mind that shouldn’t be there. But you can understand why I hate the lousy stuff and the people who traffic in it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Like the fat girl, on a diet at last, hates the lousy dairy industry for having forced her to gobble all that lovely butter and gulp all that luscious cream that brought her to her awful, obese condition.”

Gina started to get angry; then she grinned. “Your sympathy warms my heart, you bastard,” she said. “All right, maybe what I really hate is myself for doing it to myself. Maybe that’s why I’ve got this lousy save-the-world complex now, to make up for the way I almost wasted myself for nothing, just a few lousy kicks. But I still hate the men like Grieg who made it so easy for me.”

“Is that why you picked on him? His island? His ship?”

She shook her head. “We were looking for any old island in the right place; but that ingenious concealed harbor he’d built made Ring Cay ideal; We hadn’t planned on it; but we saw at once how we could make use of it. And as he told us just now, suitable ships are hard to come by these days. We wanted to be sure to get one we could get in there. We didn’t want to discover at the last minute, too late, that it was too long or deep or something. The
Saiz
had made deliveries to Ring Cay a couple of times. She was use-tested, you might say.” Gina made a wry face. “But maybe you’re right, maybe it gave me pleasure to make the bastard hurt a little, too, after the way I’d been hurt.”

I sighed. “Whatever happened to normal girls? Here I’m going along peacefully minding my own business; and I wind up with one practicing masochist and one detoxified hophead!”

“Oh, you sonofabitch!” Then Gina laughed softly. “Actually, it’s kind of nice to talk with a man who doesn’t feel he has to pussyfoot around it diplomatically.” Malice entered her voice. “Incidentally, your pretty little practicing masochist didn’t go home to Cincinnati after all. She heard her other lover calling and headed his way. Like a bee to a flower. I thought you’d like to know.”

Gina obviously spoke from jealousy, to make me feel bad; but I was glad to hear it. If Amy was traveling in Minister’s direction, and Doug Barnett was hot on her trail… But I’ll admit it wasn’t undiluted pleasure to think of her returning to the domination of the man she feared and had hoped to escape. I told myself firmly that it wasn’t really my job to watch over screwy little girls and make sure they associated only with nice people like me.

I said, “Your Mr. Pope must be getting close to the end of the job he’s doing for you.”

“How do you figure that, Matt?”

I shrugged. “Obviously he’s getting ready to disappear in his usual fashion—this time with selected company. He’s summoned Amy because he wants her right at hand, ready to vanish with him, not off somewhere where he’d have to waste time tracking her down.” I glanced at the woman sitting primly beside me without touching me. “Isn’t it about time you let me know what it’s all about, Gina?”

“I can’t.”

“You swore it was something I’d approve of, so why can’t I know about it.”

“I swear lots of things,” she said without expression. “I swear all over the place. Don’t ever take me seriously, my dear.”

I said, “Let’s study the basic ingredients of the situation. There’s a hidden mystery harbor. There’s a mystery ship to be concealed in that harbor, if it isn’t already. There’s a mystery cargo replacing the stuff that was previously in the ship’s hold, about which there was no mystery at all. To make use of this mysterious shipment of material, whatever it may be, there’s a mystery man who’s good at blowing things up. And running the whole operation, with some help from wealthy friends and associates, is a mystery woman with a lot of money and a dubious medical history who keeps telling me, and herself, how violently she’s against violence, meaning she’s probably got something pretty violent in mind that she finds hard to reconcile with her nonviolent principles—”

“Matt, stop it!”

I went on unheeding: “And finally, on an island not too far away, there is or soon will be an international conference of important people dealing with an important international problem. If you were
for
war and
against
nuclear disarmament, Gina, if you wanted the Nassau conference to fail, the whole thing would make a lot of sense. So maybe you are. Maybe it’s been a sabotage mission from the start. What about it?”

She shook her head quickly. “You’ve got to be kidding, Matt! Is anybody crazy enough to be for war?”

“Almost everybody’s crazy enough to be for a war that’ll gain them a lot or prevent them from losing a lot, like their freedom and national existence. If they think it’s at stake, whether or not it really is. And any prowar group would be bound to call itself antiwar, wouldn’t it? Just as every dictatorship calls itself a people’s democracy, and our honest old War Department has long since turned itself into the sneaky Department of Defense. So your People for Nuclear Peace could actually be the People for Nuclear War—rationalizing the original name by the fact that the radioactive ashes afterward would be very peaceful indeed, perhaps the only peace we’ll ever manage to find on this troubled planet.”

“You can’t be serious!”

I said, “Some years ago I encountered a group of rich folks very much like your organization, except that they’d bought themselves a Mexican general with the idea of taking over part of the Baja California peninsula as a defensible refuge to which they’d all retire when the world went to hell. Maybe this wealthy and exclusive PNP club of yours has a big scientific bomb shelter somewhere, designed and built for atomic survival by the best brains that can be bought or hired, from which you’ll all emerge to take charge of things after a nice little atomic holocaust that’ll wipe out most of us impoverished peons and make the survivors easy to govern. Instant population control. Instant dictatorship, only you’d call it benevolent world government, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re being perfectly ridiculous, you know that, don’t you?”

I went on calmly: “Let’s see how it would work. To take just one possibility: Say that secret cargo that took the place of Connie Grieg’s bales of pot is a tactical missile, maybe more than one. The usual ship-to-ship whizbangs like the French Exocet may not have the range you need, but the U.S. Tomahawk should do just fine and even the smaller Lance might work, depending on just how far from Nassau this secret base of yours is located. Maybe those particular missiles aren’t available on the black market, but the way arms are being passed around these days, I’m sure folks with the kind of money you have to spend could pick up something suitable. And since they’re all kind of portable, at least they’re designed to be hauled around the battlefield on special trucks, I’d be surprised if they couldn’t be jury-rigged for shipboard use. Certainly something could. And at the right time, when all the important people from all the important nations, and some not so important, are under one roof talking peace and nuclear disarmament more or less sincerely—”

Gina laughed shortly. “Sincerely? You know better than that! They’ve finally got together because they’ve been forced to by public opinion; but they’re about as sincere as a bunch of snake-oil salesmen!”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But they’re important symbols to their respective peoples at the moment; symbols of peace and hope. And when you’ve got them all located in one spot you’ll send your boom-booms on their way and blow all or most of them to hell, not only sabotaging the conference but causing all kinds of international accusations and recriminations, since nobody’ll know where the big birds came from or who fired them. Hell, the world went to war once because a nut shot an archduke nobody’d ever heard of; what’s going to happen when a whole peace conference blows up? You’ll have your World War Three, just as you’d hoped.”

Gina studied my face for a moment; then she drew a long breath and laughed again. “It won’t work, my dear.”

“What won’t work?”

“You’re trying to make me angry by accusing me of being a rabid, militaristic reactionary, plotting an outrageous crime against humanity. You hope I’ll get mad enough to try to prove to you what a pure and public-spirited person I am by telling you what we’re really up to.” She shook her head quickly. “No, darling, you can’t trick me that way. First of all, your theory doesn’t even make sense; if that’s what we were up to, we’d have hired a retired army missile expert, not Albert Pope. No, Matt, we’re not playing with any military hardware. And we’re trying—trying very hard—to prevent a war, not start one.”

I said, “Well, I hope to God you know what you’re doing. I haven’t seen too many signs of it so far. Anybody who’ll play tricks on a guy like Grieg, and then act shocked and hurt when he sends out the guns, just isn’t living in the real world.”

That did make her angry, and we rode the rest of the way to the marina in silence. When I asked the driver how much I owed him for the long ride out and back, and the endless wait, he shook his head.

“It is all taken care of, sah… No, sah, I appreciate your kindness, but it would not be wise for me to accept any of your money. Good night, sah.”

We watched him drive away. I grimaced. “Our big friend seems to carry a lot of weight around here.”

“Back during the Civil War, the blockade-runners probably had a lot of influence, too. Matt…”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

I looked at her standing there, slender and handsome in the darkness, in her little white dress. “Now what the hell do you want?”

She laughed softly. “Is that any way to respond to a humble apology?”

I said, “That’s just it. You’re not a humble girl, and you’re not an apologizing girl.”

She licked her lips. “I just… didn’t want us to waste what’s left of this evening being angry with each other. Come on, all this thinking and talking has made me feel sexy as hell!”

I carefully avoided looking in the direction of the building that housed the dark office, the johns, and the public phones, as she took my hand and hurried me past them, laughing—a couple of kids running out to play, or in to play. It was one of those times when you have to go by your instincts. I had some information to pass along; but my well-traveled instincts said I could be more useful by maintaining close relations with this girl and following her lead now than by stuffily rejecting her advances and insisting on making an immediate report to Washington. I’d also be taking more risk, of course; but that comes with the territory.
Spindrift
lay motionless and lightless in her rented slip. I jumped down and helped my companion down, and we paused in the cockpit for a lengthy and rather breathless kiss that soon threatened to get out of control.