Flashpoint

7

Jock McLaren admitted me into the office when I knocked. "Damn it all, Earl, you have all the excitement," he greeted me. He sounded wistful. "I got to the Picadilly when it was all over. Come on. Karl's inside."

Erikson was stoking a pipe at his desk when he entered the inner office. He nodded but was silent until he had the pipe drawing to his satisfaction. "Tell him your end of it first, Jock," he said.

"Well," McLaren replied, looking at me, "I found out from the bartender that a guy answering your description had blown the scene with the girl. So I figured I'd do the next best thing, and I trailed the police ambulance down to the morgue to check out the man we knew as Hawk. I identified myself and took considerable physical evidence from the body. We checked it out with sources we consider reliable, and we got a make. The man's name was Hakim Shukairat, age twenty-nine, a Jordanian. He held a rank roughly equivalent to captain in the fedayeen. He was the leader of a fanatical commando group that we're certain forced down a chartered American airliner near Las Vegas and also-"

"Earl knows that," Erikson interrupted him. I realized that Erikson, with his usual need-to-know security precautions, hadn't told McLaren that I was aboard the hijacked aircraft.

McLaren raised an eyebrow but continued. "Shukairat led or participated in the shoot-up of an El Al plane in Switzerland some time ago. It appears likely that he was brought to the U.S. for the same kind of work, and it's believed that he would have mounted similar operations."

McLaren paused for an instant. "So far we've been unable to tie him into any political, military, or financial contacts in this country that would make him anything but a bandit, although we're sure they exist. Our evaluation to this point indicates that he was an able field man but that he wasn't a planner. He probably received his orders from well-trained superiors. And he either got careless today or he was set up for the fall by the girl."

"I'll bet against the last one," I said.

"Do you think the two assassins were Israeli agents?" Erikson asked me. "Making a move on their own because they felt we weren't moving fast enough?"

"There was nothing to indicate it," I said slowly. "I imagine a man like Shukairat could have papered a room with his enemies. They didn't look any more like Israelis than they did any other Middle East nationality. Although come to think of it, the whole affair had kind of the look of an execution."

"I'm going to have a little talk with Bergman," Erikson said grimly. "If it was Israeli intelligence, and if Bergman can't keep his falcons leashed, we'll ship them out of the country. What about the envelope you mentioned, Earl?"

I unbuttoned my shirt, removed it, and tossed its bulk onto the desk. It was smudged and wrinkled, but the seal was still intact. McLaren hunkered down and peered at it from eye level without touching it at all. "Whose prints are on it?" he asked.

"Mine and the Turkish girl's that I'm sure about."

"I'd sure love to dust it for prints," he said in a regretful tone. "But if we're going to return it-" He didn't complete the sentence.

He walked to the back wall of the office and activated the concealed switch that operated the hidden wall panel. He returned from the equipment room, carrying a rolled-up leather tool case. When he unrolled it and spread it on the desk top, I saw numerous, blue steel drills with what I suspected were diamond tips, a small, but powerful drill motor, six-inch pipe lengths that could be screwed together and attached to a lead block or to interchangeable tips to make a mallet or a prybar, and numerous other familiar items.

"You must have gone to the same school I did," I said to McLaren.

"Not quite," Erikson said dryly. He had been watching my examination of the safe-cracking equipment.

I consider myself reasonably expert on small tools, but the narrow pockets of the tool case contained additional items the likes of which I'd never seen before. McLaren selected a pair of brightly polished, long-fingered tweezers with a hooked nose and picked up the envelope by one corner. He raised it gently and held it closer to the desk lamp, inspecting it from all sides. He seemed especially interested in the gap where the envelope's flap hadn't quite closed tightly after it had been sealed. He took a jeweler's loupe from the case, fitted it into his eye, and scanned the envelope.

"Well, Jock?" Erikson said.

"I can't be sure." McLaren removed the jeweler's glass from his eye. "I'd better 'scope it." He picked up the envelope with the tweezers again and carried it into the equipment room.

Erikson and I followed him. McLaren clipped the envelope to a sloping glass screen atop a box about the size of a one-drawer file cabinet. He flipped two switches, and a red light came on accompanied by a humming sound. Then the light went out, and McLaren pressed a concave button with his thumb.

Bright lavender light surrounded the envelope, and I could see two metal objects in its lower left-hand corner in the fluorescent image. "I thought those might be the old Klienschmidt trigger device when I first noticed them," McLaren said. "But you can see it's only a couple of staples."

He pointed to a dark panel covering most of the underside of the envelope's flap. "That's just as effective in showing evidence of entry, though. It's an oxidation detector, an atmosphere-sensitive surface, hermetically sealed to keep air out. If the flap is torn or pulled apart, as it would be if the envelope were steamed or pried open, the inner surface changes color and acts like a warning flag." He raised his thumb and the X-ray lamp went out.

We all returned to the office. McLaren removed from the tool case a thin steel rod about the size of a knitting needle. The rod was slitted from its tip to within three inches of its base. It looked something like an extremely slender tuning fork.

He set it aside while he tamped the envelope, flap-edge down, until he had driven the contents against the sealed flap. Then he inserted the needlelike tool into the envelope through the small gap between the envelope's folded edge and the point on the flap where the glue ended.

He rotated the needle patiently, turning the slitted rod as carefully as any safecracker manipulating a safe dial. Finally he withdrew the needle with a smile. Wrapped around it were two double-stapled sheets of paper whose ends had been caught in the needle's slotted aperture.

McLaren eased the ends from the slit and handed the curled-up sheets to Erikson. The envelope still remained bulky from other material remaining inside it. "I'll have another look at this since it's too big to extract via the probe," McLaren said briskly. "I'll be right back." He went into the equipment room again, carrying the envelope with the tweezers.

"What have we got?" I asked Erikson.

"It looks like an instruction sheet," he replied, scanning the first page rapidly.

I moved in beside him. At the tip of the typewritten page it said MOTOR FREIGHT CARGO, and there followed short paragraphs preceded by a series of three-digit numbers. I had to read only half the first paragraph to know what it was. "This is a plan for another hijack," I said. "What's on the second page?"

Erikson turned over the stapled page. The second sheet looked like a schematic of a complicated football play. Four small circles numbered one to four were inside outlines shown in various positions around a small square butted up against a rectangle. Above each group of circles was a three-digit number which corresponded to those listed on the first page.

The layout looked exactly like the detailed plans I used to buy from Robert "The Schemer" Frenz when I was knocking over banks. "It's a hijack," I repeated. "The rectangle is a truck, and the square is the place it's going to be knocked off. The second page shows the different positions of four men during various stages of the operation, and the three-digit numbers are the times for the step-by-step plan outlined in the first-page paragraphs. See how the numbers go from zero-zero-zero to eight-three-zero? That means the whole job is supposed to take eight and a half minutes."

"I went to the wrong school," Erikson said. He examined the two pages again. "But there's nothing here that indicates where the hijack is going to take place."

"There must be further instructions in the envelope. Maybe McLaren-"

"There aren't any more single sheets in the envelope," McLaren said from behind us. "But here's a stat of part of what's inside it." He showed us a weak black-and-white photostat. It was ghost-thin in appearance, but there was no mistaking that it was a photocopy of the cover of a New Jersey road map. I wondered how McLaren had obtained it without removing the multi-folded map from the envelope, but I didn't ask.

"This job was planned by a pro," I told Erikson while McLaren read the two pages he'd removed from the envelope. "I can tell you right now that even if we opened the envelope, the map wouldn't tell us anything. Someone has an overlay that fits on this map, and without the overlay the map means nothing. Either the overlay comes later, or the man who's going to lead the operation already has it. If that was Hawk, you know what happened to him."

"He wasn't carrying anything," McLaren said positively. "I checked him out thoroughly at the morgue."

"Then it could be in the hands of Talia's boss who seems so willing to put up cash to recover the envelope. Let me see the plan again, Karl."

He handed it to me, and I read it through completely.

"Okay," I said. "It's simple enough. See these roads lettered A, B, C, D? The hijack will take place on Road A. Two minutes are allowed to jimmy the truck's rear doors; three minutes to find a small package called Item NUX, whatever that is, inside the truck; a minute to get to the get-away car, indicated by this small square; and two minutes to drive to Road D via Road B. Look at this note: Avoid Road C. It doesn't say so here, but I'll bet they intend to create a diversion at the actual scene, perhaps by setting the hijacked truck afire, and they expect the police and perhaps firefighting equipment to be arriving on Road C."

There was a moment's silence.

"Well, you said it was laid out by a pro," Erikson said thoughtfully.

"I still think it's a dope shipment," I said.

"And I think you're wrong," Erikson countered. "Everything the Treasury boys have ever told me indicates this would be the last way in the world to move dope. It seldom leaves the hands of the individual entrusted with it."

"What was that you said awhile ago about returning the envelope?" I asked McLaren.

"Since we've lost Hawk, the girl is our only link," Erikson answered for him. He gave me his smile-that-wasn't-quite-a-smile. "So all we have to do is send you back to the Turkish girl and have you follow through on her boss's offer to pay you to recover it."

"Me? It's your baby, Karl."

"The girl knows you," Erikson continued. "Who else could get close to her in a hurry?" He handed the stapled plan to McLaren. "Make photostats of these sheets, Jock, and then get the originals back into the envelope. Earl will sell it to the girl's boss, and then we'll know who the boss is."

"Let me point out to you the holes in that Swiss cheese," I said. "How do I account for the fact that the envelope is unopened? Shouldn't whoever took it have been curious about what was inside?"

"You'll think of something," Erikson said, unruffled.

"The envelope can't be opened, because then they'd change the plan. And when you talk to the girl's boss, haggle. Start high on the price you want. That may give us some idea of how valuable this Item NUX is. But regardless, get to this character and get a look at him."

"I told Talia that one reason I had to leave right away was to put out word that the envelope was worthless if opened," I said, thinking back over the sequence of events.

"Then that will do it, since you also said you had to shake a tail en route here," Erikson said. "You can tell Talia's boss you had to put a 'hold' on anyone thinking of opening the envelope, and the tail will confirm your maneuvering."

"I think there was a tail," I protested. "I don't know. You guys are taking a hell of a lot for granted."

McLaren handed me the repacked envelope, still handling it via the tweezers. He was smiling as if he had heard Erikson's brand of persuasion before.

Their attitude irritated me.

If I couldn't get a shot at recovering Hazel's money, the rest of this jazz meant nothing to me.

I decided I'd take an hour from my sleeping time to line up a speech giving Erikson the word that I'd abdicated.

But I didn't get any sleep that night.

I entered Chryssie's tenement with my mind still on Karl Erikson and Jock McLaren and their calm assumption that I would let myself be talked into doing their bidding.

I found myself in front of Chryssie's door, key in hand, staring at the door standing ajar with its lock shattered.

I think I knew what I was going to find inside.

I drew my.38 before kicking the door wide open to make sure no one was hiding behind it. There was no sound except the dull thud of the door against the wall. The living room was empty. I made a quick tour of possible hiding places before I went into the bedroom.

It was far worse than I expected.

The bloody thing was spread-eagled to the four corners of the bed by gray clothesline-cord on wrists and ankles, the wide-staring blue eyes fixed on infinity.

Chryssie was dead.

Almost unrecognizably dead.

I tried to tell myself that the pimp had come back and that this was his revenge for loss of face, but I knew better. A pimp doesn't carve up a girl with a knife until he's finished with her, not when he's trying to recruit her.

No, it wasn't the pimp.

It was me.

Despite my precautions, I'd let someone tail me from Talia's apartment. When I'd eventually double-doored him in the subway, he'd come back, and with his knife, tried to find out from Chryssie where I'd gone. Or if I'd said anything significant to her about recovering the envelope.

I could only stand there and hope that she'd been on a marijuana-high and hadn't known too much about what was being done to her. But looking at the mutilated girl-body, it was a forlorn hope.

Sure, the girl had been a loser.

She'd had no hold on life at all.

She'd been a natural victim, her bizarre manner of living almost a guarantee of some such departure.

But it had been me who had unwittingly stage-managed the gruesomely macabre finale. I'd involved myself with the girl because of her age. Involved myself in a half-hearted salvage attempt, yet I hadn't hesitated to use her for cover at the Alhambra.

Now there was this savage finale.

There was one small consolation.

After his failure to obtain information from Chryssie, the knife artist would station himself outside to await my return. He might report his temporary failure or he might not, but he'd be waiting. He'd be outside now to pick up my tail again when I left the tenement. If I didn't come out, his curiosity-and his orders-would bring him back upstairs to find out why.

So I waited for him.

I employed the next twenty minutes wiping my prints from every possible object I might have touched in the flat. And I made one other preparation. I wrestled open the usually-closed window overlooking the alley below, the alley-window I'd noticed the first night I'd accompanied Chryssie home. Then I stationed myself in a corner of the room, keeping an ear cocked for sounds from the creaking stairway, the only access to the flat.

When I finally heard the sounds, I was ready.

The knife-artist sidled through the partly opened door at a fast glide, curved knife-blade in hand. He was small, furtive, and foreign-looking. "Inside," I said to him from the corner of the room where I was standing.

He whirled, raised his arm to throw the knife, saw my.38 lined up on his head, and changed his mind. "Inside," I repeated, and motioned toward the bedroom in case he didn't speak English. He started toward it slowly, trying to watch me as I closed in behind him, gun at the ready. He didn't have a chance. I slammed the.38 against the base of his neck, and he pitched forward on his face.

I dragged the unconscious figure into the bedroom and over to the opened window. I boosted him up and part way through it, turning him so that his upper body was outside the window and he was hanging by the hinges of his knees with only my weight on his legs to keep him from plunging down into the alley below.

Then I waited.

I wanted him conscious before I turned him loose.

The rush of blood to his dangling head brought expected tremors as he regained consciousness. He started to struggle, then became rigid as his expanding awareness brought recognition of his situation. "Who sent you?" I said to him.

Silence.

I hadn't expected anything different. Even if he understood English, I hadn't expected anything different. There hadn't been an amateur connected with the operation yet. I watched the mouth of the alley until a wide-spaced set of headlights turned into its narrow passageway. A diesel snorted as the truck picked up speed.

I gauged the distance, then pushed at the legs I'd been holding.

Professional to the core, he went silently.

I heard the sound as he hit, the quick blare of a horn, and then another sound.

I closed the window and wiped my prints from it.

I went to the telephone, looked up the number on the scrap of paper I'd left in the night-table drawer, and dialed. "Yes?" a sleepy, Main Line-accented voice said after an interval. "Who's calling at this hour of the night?"

"Come and get your daughter, Mr. Rouse."

There was an instant during which the only sound was the faint humming of the phone receiver in my ear.

"She's-Cornelia is-" He couldn't complete it.

"Yes, she is."

I hung up the phone, wiped my prints from it, left the building, and headed uptown toward Talia's apartment.

I felt a sudden urgency about meeting Talia's boss.

He might not have wielded the knife, but he was the man responsible for Chryssie's death.

I didn't look for a cab.

I still had steam coming out my ears over what had happened to Chryssie, and I had to get myself in a sweeter frame of mind before I went up against Talia again to con her, so I walked.

The night doorman in the East Sixty-third-Street apartment building eyed me dubiously when I told him I was calling on Miss Talia Rhazmet. He looked at his watch and again at me. Finally he directed me to the house phone but kept an eye on me while I placed the call. "It's me," I said when Talia's drowsy voice came on the line. "I've got good news for you."

Her voice came alive. "You have? Wonderful! Where are you?"

"Downstairs in the lobby."

"Then come up right away."

"Tell the doorman. He doesn't like my looks."

I held out the phone toward the watching uniformed man. He walked toward it and took it from me, listened for no longer than it must have taken Talia to get out one sentence, then nodded to me. The self-service elevator whisked me to Talia's floor.

Her apartment door was open, and she was standing in the corridor. She took my arm eagerly as I approached her, smiling widely. She looked bright and alert. I wondered if she was on the same high she'd been riding when I left her, or if she'd loaded up again while I was coming up in the elevator.

I couldn't help but notice as she ushered me inside that she had on a long-sleeved nightgown and robe so sheer that the combined lacy material could have been pulled through a man's wedding ring. "You have the envelope?" she asked anxiously when she closed and locked the door.

I took it out of my jacket pocket and showed it to her. She reached for it greedily, but I pulled it back. "You can look, baby, but you can't touch. Not until I get paid."

"It is intact?"

I turned it over and showed her the sealed back flap.

"Wonderful!" she repeated with a toss of her dark hair that settled it loosely on her shoulders. "But how much do you expect to be paid?"

"I'll negotiate that with your boss." I looked at the smooth, body curves within the semi-translucent material of her nightwear. "Although I remember you said you'd do anything yourself to get it back."

She appeared to have forgotten that. She glanced at the clock buried in the flank of the polished brass elephant. "I must call Iskir at once," she said, moving to the telephone.

"In English," I said.

"In English," she agreed, and dialed. "Abdel? I must speak with Mr. Bayak."

"Who's Mr. Bayak?" I asked.

"Iskir Bayak, my employer. He is an importer of Oriental rugs."

For a second I wondered if she were telling the truth. If the proposed hijack concerned only a shipment of Oriental rugs, then Erikson, McLaren, and I were barking up the wrong dogwood. Then I visualized Chryssie's nude, contorted, crimson-streaked body. No, Iskir Bayak was something more than a larcenous importer of Oriental rugs.

"Iskir?" Talia said at last. "I know it's late, but I have good-" She stopped as a tirade of abusive sounds reached my ear, even though she had the phone slightly shielded. "It's not possible," she said hurriedly when she could get a word in. "He is here with me now. With the envelope." She cut her eyes toward me. "Yes. Sealed." There was another torrent of sound from the phone. "I have seen it, Iskir!" she wedged desperately into the waterfall. "Yes. No. What?" She listened for a moment. "Yes, I can." She hung up the phone slowly. "Mr. Bayak will see us in an hour," she said without looking at me.

"An hour!" I barked. "After working up a sweat convincing the guy who had the envelope that it had to be returned unopened to be worth anything, now your Mr. Bayak wants me to cool my heels for another hour?"

I wondered if Bayak had already learned of the knife-artist's demise. There wasn't much else that could explain his abusiveness on the phone. Unless he was getting nervous waiting for a report which was never going to come? I inspected Talia's beautiful face. The fear that I had seen before was back again.

She slithered in my direction and stopped so close to me I could feel her body heat. "While we wait," she said coaxingly, "I will take care your needs."

"Okay," I agreed, knowing I had no choice but to wait to see Bayak on his terms. "The first thing I need is a shower." I took hold of her nightgown-and-robe covered arm. "And you can join me."

The smile she gave me was almost demure. "You Americans," she said archly. "You want to begin where other couples arrive after a day and a half."

I led her into the bathroom. All I'd really had in mind was removing her from the vicinity of the phone so she couldn't make any phone calls I couldn't hear, but I made no objection when she removed her robe and pulled her nightgown over her head. I really needed a shower after the exertion of dealing with the knife-artist, and I undressed quickly.

Talia pulled on a pink shower cap and tucked her dark hair beneath it, then came to me. She ran her fingertips curiously over the numerous scars on my chest and thighs from the skin transplants that had made me a new face, but she didn't say anything. I unfastened the tabs at my hairline and removed my wig. For an instant she looked startled at the unveiling of my hairless, serrated pate, but she recovered quickly. "Even when I was a little girl in Ismir, Yul Brynner was my favorite actor," she murmured with a smile.

There was a lot more to Talia's olive-skinned nudity than appeared possible in street clothes. Her breasts were large, slightly pendulous, and grape-nippled. I turned her around, and her silky-looking buttocks were almost chunky, with just a hint of the controlled, powerful action seen in a thoroughbred mare. Tattooed on one upstanding hind cheek was a fantastically realistic multicolored butterfly. Talia made no move to hide the needle punctures on her arm, evidently feeling that my eyes were busy elsewhere.

I turned on the water in the shower stall and adjusted it to lukewarm. I led her into the tiled enclosure, and when we were both wet I soaped her from neck to heels. The luxuriant female flesh was delightfully pliable under my palm.

Then she did the same for me, with embellishments. "You must be a very strong man to have survived this," she said quietly as her fingertips again traced my scars.

I'm not the easiest man in the world to arouse at any time, and the thought of Chryssie's end was still in the back of my mind; but Talia's skillful hands turned me on standing in that steamy enclave. I had to breathe shallowly to avoid spontaneous combustion.

We dried each other off with huge, fluffy towels, and Talia dusted us both liberally with perfumed talcum powder. "It prevents friction except where it's wanted," she assured me with a doe-eyed smile. I had suffered a diminishment during the drying-off process, and she dropped to her knees and restored me with a facile tongue.

We went into the bedroom. Talia stripped off the coverlet, disclosing black silk sheets. She dusted these with still another kind of powder. Attar-of-roses wafted itself to my nostrils as she put me on my back on the huge bed and for ten minutes indulged herself and me in exercises which convinced me I was a sexual amateur.

Considering my on-again, off-again track record with women, I hadn't really expected to make it with this girl, despite her good looks and manifest availability. When she finally turned me loose, though, I rolled over her and plowed her wheat field with no thought of failure. Her expert, quick-darting hands encouraged the harvest.

She patted my shoulder lightly when I slid off her. She rolled from the bed, and I raised my head to watch her lush, highlighted ivory nudity as she went to the dressing table, struck a match, and lighted two candles. The smell of a musky incense drifted through the room, pungently fragrant.

She returned to the bed and resumed her role of domestic stimulant. I started to tell her she was wasting her time, then quickly found out that she wasn't. To my surprise I found myself reaping a fresh crop and enjoying it.

"You're something better than an empty box stall," I told her when I had back the breath lost during the second session.

I could see that she didn't know the meaning of the racetrack expression, but she didn't mistake my meaning. "Americans are little boys," she informed me gravely. "They start too late. They should begin at the age of ten. With their sisters."

"I'll see if I can peddle your idea to Good Housekeeping." An arched eyebrow indicated that she didn't know what Good Housekeeping was, either. "Never mind."

She rolled away from me and looked at the bedside clock. "We can leave now," she said, and slid from the bed. Her manner was subdued. All her sexual sparkle had left her.

Her attitude reminded me that I was going to meet the man responsible for Chryssie's death, even if indirectly. I went into the bathroom, removed my Smith & Wesson from its shoulder holster, and taped it lightly to the back of the calf of my leg with two strips of adhesive taken from Talia's medicine cabinet. The classic frisk is a from-the-back job which concentrates on shoulders, armpits, chest cavity, rib cage, waist, buttocks, and thighs. It takes an unusually thorough searcher to proceed lower.

"Where are we going?" I asked when I rejoined Talia.

"It's only two blocks," she said. "We can walk."

On the street, she turned right, toward the river. We went left at the first corner, right at the next one, and then she turned in under a green-and-white marquee. I followed her into a high-ceilinged lobby lined with bronze mailboxes. For sheer luxury the lobby resembled a Hollywood set. No one was visible.

Talia headed for the nearer of two side-by-side elevators. I boarded it behind her after noticing there was no floor indicator on the wall above it. A single button on the wall of the elevator cab confirmed my guess that the elevator served only the penthouse apartment.

I still had one thing to do, and now was the time to do it. The instant Talia pushed the button and the doors started to close, I snapped my fingers. "Cigarettes," I said, squeezing through the closing doors. "Be right back," I called over my shoulder as the doors shut behind me. I removed the envelope from my pocket as I crossed the lobby, found the name Bayak on the lineup of mailboxes, and dropped the envelope into it.

I was recrossing the lobby when the elevator doors opened again. "Doesn't seem to be anywhere close by to get cigarettes," I explained.

"I could have told you that if you'd asked me," Talia said sharply.

I stepped aboard the elevator again, she punched the button, and we ascended silently.