The Revengers (32 page)

“There’s a man right behind you with a gun,” Serena Lorca said. “Don’t try anything. You’ve already shown what a hell of a violent macho type you are; don’t overdo it.”

She reached down and grabbed my arm and helped me up to the port settee against which I’d been lying. I had to cling to her for a moment to steady myself against the motion of the boat, almost getting myself blasted by the automatic pistol—9mm Browning Hi-Power, or reasonable facsimile thereof—held by the gent braced in the doorway that led out into the cockpit. Whatever a doorway is called on a boat. He was a husky, swarthy specimen in clean white pants and a blue-and-white-striped jersey. Looking around, I discovered that I hadn’t been lying in the cabin at all, to be technical about it, but in the deckhouse, with glass all around. It was a pretty fancy deckhouse with lots of teak, including a bar and table, elegantly upholstered settees, and wall-to-wall carpeting that had to be the indoor-outdoor stuff, since it was on a boat, but didn’t look it. There was no steering station down here, I noted. Somebody must be driving the bucket from up on the flying bridge. One up there and two down here made three, so far. It isn’t necessary to be a mathematical genius in this business, I told myself proudly, but it helps.

We seemed to be at sea with no land in sight. It was a fine sunny day with a light breeze. The sun was well up in the sky; the morning was well advanced. Or the afternoon hadn’t progressed very far yet. Of course it didn’t even have to be the same day. Well, when I felt strong enough to look at my watch I’d find out, if it was still running.

Serena Lorca said, “If you’re worrying about how long you’ve been out, don’t. You weren’t hit that hard. You started coming around almost right away, but I didn’t want to be bothered with you for a while, so I just gave you a hypo of some stuff we found in your suitcase. Injection A. Four hours almost to the minute, right?”

“How did you know which one?” I asked. “Assuming that you cared.”

“The girl told me. After I pointed out that if she didn’t let me know which one was harmless I’d just grab the first one handy and let you take your chances. One in three, correct? The other two kill, she said.” Serena Lorca jerked her head toward the boat’s bow. “And the answer to the next question is that she’s locked up forward in good shape.” She added with a hint of malice I didn’t like, “Well, pretty good shape.”

She’d freed herself from my grasp, with some signs of distaste. Stepping back now, balancing herself easily as the deck lurched under her feet, she gave a couple of touches to her crisp black hair and a pull to her elasticized bodice. The instinctive femininity of the movements seemed a little strange under the circumstances. She was a striking young woman if you like them compact and muscular; but she was obviously off limits, sexually speaking.

I always find it disturbing, which I suppose proves what an old-fashioned square I really am. I’ve explored the man—woman relationship, as Eleanor Brand liked to point out, with considerable interest and enjoyment; but I don’t really know what this man-man and woman-woman stuff is all about. I suppose it’s a gap in my education; but as long as it exists I can’t help resenting, slightly, a good-looking girl who’s completely unattainable. I don’t mean happily married—somebody else attained that one even if it wasn’t me—I mean quite out of bounds for the whole male sex. It seems a waste, even if the lady’s having her fun in other ways. Of course, that’s the selfish masculine way of looking at it

I became aware that Serena Lorca was watching me, her lip curling in an arrogant, contemptuous manner; the girl knew exactly what I was thinking. I reminded myself that her sexual attitudes were, after all, none of my business. I looked away at the white wake running straight toward the empty horizon astern.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” the girl said. “There’s nobody chasing us yet.”

“Neatest trick of the week,” I said. “Three shots and two dead bodies and nobody cares?”

She laughed shortly. “That little gun of yours didn’t make hardly any more noise than a back-firing motorcycle; and they’ve got lots of motorcycles in Nassau. There wasn’t much blood in the parking lot and we mopped it up a bit; in the taxi, too. And we had a couple of funerals at sea while you were out. Nobody’ll ever see those corpus-delictuses again, not with fifty-pound pigs of lead wired to the ankles. The Northeast Providence Channel goes down a thousand fathoms around here.” She frowned, watching me. “Now you tell me, what’s that black girl of yours going to do?”

“What black girl? . . . Oh.” I shrugged. “She’ll call Washington and do what she’s told.”

“And Washington? What will they do?”

I shrugged. “Who the hell knows what they’ll do, ever?” I grimaced. “It was a simple bodyguard assignment, they didn’t want the Brand woman embarrassing us by getting herself killed right now, but then she got difficult and the way things are, maybe they’ll just write her off and me, too.”

“What about the Shitfuzz?” Serena Lorca asked. “Do you think they’ll be notified?”

“The what?”

She grimaced. “You know. The Kapok Kops. The Pot Pigs. They used to spend their time worrying about life preservers and drugs, but now it’s our crappers that are a matter of life and death. You’d think a Service that claims a lot of proud traditions would draw the line at investigating a bunch of stinking boat toilets, but I expect pretty soon they’ll have us all taking down our pants when they come aboard so they can inspect where it comes out of as well as where it goes into. . . ."

I grinned. It never fails these days, when you’re with yachtsmen of any kind. Just the thought of the idiot EPA regulations for seagoing plumbing will set them off. It made the girl seem more human and sympathetic, despite everything I knew about her.

“You don’t have to worry about the Coast Guard,” I said. “This is a very discreet operation, no uniforms invited.”

She frowned suspiciously. “Meaning that the helicopters are already airborne and you want to keep us feeling safe and happy until they get here.”

I shook my head. “There are very good reasons why the Coast Guard won’t be called, or the Navy or the Marines, either.”

“What reasons?”

I hesitated. “Tell me something first. Peterson rattled off a crazy story about the way that ship sank, the
Fairfax Constellation
. I know it was just something you fed him to pass along to me; you wanted him to have a plausible story to tell me so I’d think they really had interviewed Einar Kettleman, and so I wouldn’t suspect he was leading me into a trap to save Miss Brand. But how much truth was there in that yam, anyway?”

She studied me for a moment unblinkingly. “How much do you think?”

I said, “Well, I don’t believe Kettleman was blown off any ship’s bridge; his officer, Hinkampf, described the explosion quite differently. And I don’t believe Kettleman saw a lot of stuff while he was floating around on a hatch cover—I’m not much of a nautical expert, but floating wooden hatch covers went out with Captain Horatio Hornblower, didn’t they? They’re heavy steel nowadays and it takes a big steam winch to pick one up. In fact, I don’t believe in Einar Kettleman at all; I think he’s just a bunch of nice white bones on the ocean floor picked clean by the fish. Otherwise it was a very interesting and convincing yam.”

She hesitated. “What has all this to do with whether or not the Crap Cops are coming?”

“Everything,” I said. “Because you just think you sank that ship. . . .was you, wasn’t it? I figure the big shiny black thing that was picked up after the explosion by the mysterious motorboat without lights—I suppose this boat right here—wasn’t a man in a wet suit after all. It was a woman in a wet suit. You.”

Serena Lorca said, “Well, if you went to the address I told you, and saw those grubby kids, you know they never sank anything but themselves, in a sea of hash. The Sacred Earth Protective Force, for Christ’s sake! Just another bunch of parasites trying to cash in on . . . on somebody else’s work.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no indeed, lady. That’s where you’re so wrong. You don’t realize that that great law-enforcement agency, the Office of Federal Security, in a brilliant display of investigative genius, has just triumphantly tracked the terrorist evildoers to their sinister lair and recovered the extorted loot after a desperate gun battle in which one heroic agent died and the vicious political activists all met the violent ends they so richly deserved.”

Serena Lorca was staring at me, aghast and incredulous. “Oh, Jesus! You’ve got to be kidding, Helm!”

I said, “Hell, I was almost elected to be the heroic agent who got heroically killed. In fact I was elected but I refused to serve; I got another guy to volunteer for the honor. Well, he didn’t know he was volunteering, but it amounted to the same thing.” I rubbed my bullet-nicked arm reminiscently.

She licked her lips. “But goddamn it, that bunch of freaked-out space cadets would have peed in their crummy jeans at the sight of a gun. Not that it would have made much difference to the way they smelled.” She looked at me. “You mean, that smooth government bastard at the head of that outfit—what’s his name, Bennett?—sent a bunch of his guys to deliberately massacre . . ."

I said, “He couldn’t afford to take them alive, could he? Not alive and telling everybody how they’d played him for a sucker with a terrorist fairy tale, a million dollars’ worth.” Serena Lorca drew a long breath and said, “Well, I didn’t really mean to set them up for a hit. Three hits.” Her voice hardened. “Not that it matters. Nobody asked them to butt in, the greedy little creeps.”

“It was the oldest one who did all the thinking; the other two just went along for the ride.” I glanced at her curiously. “How did you find them?”

She shrugged. “They used pot, didn’t they? They used other stuff; they had to get it somewhere, didn’t they? One of them even made a couple of runs for us. The organization keeps track of people like that, and notices when they start acting funny, it could mean trouble. All I had to do was ask a few questions around, when I heard somebody was trying to hold up the shipping companies for a lot of money. . ."

“Heard how?”

“Who’s asking the questions around here, anyway?” she demanded with sudden anger. Then she shrugged. “Naturally we’ve got connections along the waterfront; we hear what’s going on.” She frowned. “And I still don’t see what the hell all this has to do with whether or not your people are going to alert the Shit-and-Piss Police.”

I said, “Concentrate and it will become clear to you. The case is solved, solved, solved. Get it? You don’t think Bennett is going to ask the Coast Guard to sail out and unsolve it for him, do you? And leave him standing there with egg on his face and four dead bodies to explain? Right now the last thing in the world he wants is to find out, or have other people find out, what’s really been happening out here on the ocean. He’s just sweating it out, hoping that nobody ever does find out; and particularly that the Mad Ship-Sinker never strikes again. Or Mr. Bennett’s name will be Mister Mud.” I shook my head. “Oh, no. No matter what he knows about you by this time, he’s not going to send anybody after you or let anybody be sent if he can help it. Not even if it means sacrificing an unimportant operative from another agency and an insignificant girl journalist. Hell, if he sent somebody, they might catch you and then where would he be?”

“But you don’t work for this Bennett guy, really.”

I shrugged. “What difference does that make? You know the OFS; they’re the takeover boys in spades. When you work with them, you do it their way or else. My chief hasn’t held his job all these years by bucking a big agency like that.” Please excuse me, sir, I said silently.

Serena Lorca frowned at me. “But you don’t really think much of this Bennett character, right?”

“Now what would give you .that idea?” I asked. She was driving at something, and I didn’t know what it was; I just hoped this was the attitude she wanted from me. “I mean, all the guy ever did was set me up for murder and then let me be kidnaped without doing a damned thing about it, if that’s the way he’s handling it, and I’ll bet on it. So why wouldn’t I love him like a brother?”

She smiled faintly. It had been the right answer, although I had no idea why. But it would presumably become clear eventually, if I lived that long. She studied me carefully for several seconds; then she turned away from me and picked up a large red canvas purse from the opposite settee, and groped inside. She brought out a small photograph, apparently a color Polaroid shot, which she gently slipped out of its protective plastic sleeve and held out to me.

“This is what it’s all about,” she said in an odd voice. “Do you know who she is?”

I took the picture. For all its small size it was a very good portrait of a very beautiful young girl with blond hair that was so wonderfully pale and silky you could hardly believe it. It was worn quite long. The girl had delicate features and large blue eyes. I got the impression that there hadn’t been a great deal behind those big eyes, but that was a lot to read from a photograph.

I dredged up a name Brent had mentioned. “Ann Bergerson?”

“Yes,” Serena Lorca said. “Ann. My Ann. She was so young, so lovely, you can see how lovely she was, and they smashed her down and threw her into the cold ocean and drowned her. That great ship crashing through the dark without anybody looking. I turned on the strobe, I even fired a flare, but they kept right on coming; and Tumbleweed just wouldn’t go to windward fast enough against that chop, even with the motor running. And afterward, the hull all broken and sinking and the mast down, and her blood on the deck where it had hit her, but she wasn’t there. I looked and looked, all that night I looked, all the next day, rowing search patterns in that damned rubber dinghy, but I never found her. Now do you understand why I have to hunt them down and kill them as they killed her?” She didn’t wait for my answer, but snatched the picture back and said to the man with the gun, “Put him with the other one. Stay where you can see the door. Arturo will watch the foredeck hatch from the bridge; he’s got a gun up there.” She started to make her way out into the cockpit, and stopped. “Helm.”