Dr. Death

Five

"And so that's about it, sir," I wound up my account an hour later. "The OAS almost certainly have Duroche. Whether he's with them willingly or not is another story."

"And where he is with the OAS is still another story," Hawk added grimly.

I nodded. I had already told him of my clues, the three words: Leopards, Pearl, Volcano. I had some more thoughts on the meaning of those words, but Hawk obviously wasn't in a mood to hear them now. He puffed somberly on his obnoxious cigar for a moment, staring into space somewhere over my left shoulder. His sharp-featured face, with the toughened old skin, and the surprisingly soft blue eyes, had the expression it wore when he was thinking hard — and was worried. Not only was Hawk a tough old bird, he was a smart one. If he was worried, so was I.

Suddenly, as if he had decided something, Hawk leaned forward and ground his cigar into a pulpy mess in a cracked twenty-five-cent ashtray.

"Five days," he said.

"Sir?" I said.

"You have exactly five days," he said coldly and clearly, "to find Fernand Duroche and get him away from the OAS."

I stared. He stared back, piercing me with those blue eyes, now grown hard as hammered steel.

"Five days!" I said. "Sir, I'm an agent, not a magician. From what I have to work with, it might take me five weeks, and then only…"

"Five days," he said again. The tone of his voice meant "no discussion." He gave his swivel chair a sharp nudge, and spun around so that he was facing away from me, staring out the dirty window. Then he told me.

"A few hours before you arrived in New York, we received a communication. From a Colonel Rambeau. I believe you remember him."

I did. He'd slipped out of our hands after his attempted assassination of De Gaulle and gone into exile. To Spain, it was suspected. But still a top man in the OAS.

"Rambeau has informed us that the OAS now has the power to turn the U.S. energy crisis into more than a crisis. A catastrophe. And if he's telling us the truth, catastrophe would be a mild way of putting it."

Hawk's tone was dry and cold. It always was when the trouble was bad.

"And exactly what is that power, sir?" I asked.

"According to Rambeau," Hawk said, drier and colder than ever, "the OAS now has the power to totally destroy every off-shore oil refinery and oil drilling rig in the western hemisphere."

My jaw dropped, in spite of myself.

"That sounds impossible," I said.

Hawk spun around to face me again.

"Nothing," he said grimly, "is impossible."

We faced each other across his desk in silence for a few moments, each uncomfortably aware of exactly what that threat could mean, if it was real. It would be bad enough if the oil drilling rigs were destroyed; that would cut off a substantial amount of oil right there. But the destruction of the refineries, which processed oil not only from the western hemisphere, but from the Arab countries as well, might cut down the supply of oil in the U.S. by as much as eighty percent.

Oil for essential industries, for gasoline, for heating, for transformation into other forms of energy, such as electricity.

The United States, as we knew it, would grind to a halt. Our country would be virtually paralyzed.

"Could it be a bluff?" I asked. "Do they offer any proof they can pull it off?"

Hawk nodded slowly.

"They claim that they will offer proof in five days. Proof that not only can they do it, but that even with advance warning, we can't stop them."

"And the proof?"

"In five days, the OAS will blow up and totally destroy the Shell Oil refinery off the coast of Curaçao. Unless, of course, we can stop them. And put them out of business."

"And if we don't? What's their price for not blowing up all the others?"

Hawk slowly drew another cigar from the breast pocket of his rumpled brown suit.

"They haven't informed us of that. Yet. They state there will be further communication after they've proved what they can do."

He didn't have to go further. If the OAS did prove they could make good on their threat, the demands they could make on the U.S. would be staggering financially, politically, and in every other way.

It was blackmail — extortion, if you please — on an undreamed-of scale.

Hawk and I looked at each other across his desk. I spoke first. One word.

"Duroche," I said.

Hawk nodded.

"The connections are too strong for coincidence. The OAS have Duroche. Duroche is a specialist — a genius — in underwater propulsion devices, the computerization of those devices, and their use with nuclear warheads. The OAS claim the ability to destroy every off-shore oil rig and refinery in this Hemisphere. Therefore…"

"Therefore, Duroche gave them this ability," T finished for him.

Hawk rammed his cigar between his teeth and lit it in short fierce puffs before speaking again.

"Correct," he said. "And therefore…"

"Therefore, I have five days to get Duroche away from the OAS," I finished again.

"You have five days to get Duroche away from the OAS and destroy whatever devices he's developed for them. And the blueprints for them."

There it was. Five days.

"And Carter," Hawk's voice was still dry and cold, "this is a solo. The OAS have warned that if we enlist the cooperation of any foreign police or officials at all, they will immediately destroy every off-shore oil rig and refinery from Caracas to Miami."

I nodded. That figured.

"You'll have to take the girl with you," he went on, puffing mechanically at the cigar. "She can give you positive identification of her father. We can't have you bringing out the wrong man. I don't like to involve her, but…"

"What if Duroche won't come willingly?"

Hawk's eyes narrowed. T knew the answer already.

"Bring Duroche out!" he snapped. "Willingly or unwillingly. And if you can't bring him out…"

He didn't have to finish. I knew that if I couldn't bring Duroche out, for whatever reason, I would have to kill him.

I hoped Michelle didn't realize that.

I stood up, then remembered something.

"The Chinese girl," I said. "Did the computer turn up anything on her?"

Hawk's eyebrows went up.

"Interesting," he said. "That is, interesting because there's nothing particularly interesting on her. No Interpol record. No reported involvement in any form of espionage. Her name's Li Chin. Twenty-two years old. Graduated very young from Vassar, top of her class. Graduate work at M.I.T. Then she went out to Hong Kong and spent a year there working in the family Import-Export business. Just returned to New York a few months ago. Hard to see how she fits into the picture, at this point."

It was. That was what was bothering me. But there was nothing I could do about it now. I returned Li Chin to her special little compartment in my mind.

"Any idea where to start?" asked Hawk.

I told him. He nodded. A cigar ash dropped to his suit jacket, comfortably joining a number of other smears and stains. Hawk's brilliance didn't extend to wardrobe or its care.

"I'll contact Gonzalez for you, in case you can use him. He's not the best, but he's knowledgeable about the area."

I thanked him and headed for the door. Just as I was about to close it behind me, I heard Hawk say:

"And, Carter…" I turned. He smiled and his voice softened a trace. "If you can't be careful, be good."

I grinned. It was a private joke between us. Only a careful agent had a chance to survive. Only a good agent did survive. In his day, Hawk had been more than good. He'd been the best. He didn't come right out with it, because it wasn't his style, but he knew what was in front of me. And he cared.

"Right, sir," I said simply, and closed the door.

I found Michelle sitting — slumping, to be more accurate — in a chair outside the drab little room used by McLaughlin, an N5, for debriefing her. He already would have put everything she said onto tape, and now that tape would be gone over meticulously by several other agents, then fed into a computer for any information I might have missed. But I didn't have time to hang around for the results. I leaned over and blew into her ear. She came awake with a jolt.

"Travel time again," I said. "Time for a nice plane ride."

"Oh non," she moaned. "Do we have to?"

"We do," T said, helping her to her feet.

"Where are we going now? To the North Pole."

"No," I said. "First we're going upstairs to Special Effects for our new covers, including some passports and I.D.'s. Then we're going to Puerto Rico."

"Puerto Rico? At least it's warm and sunny there."

I nodded, leading her down the hall toward the elevator.

"But why?"

"Because," I said, tapping the button for the elevator and pulling a fresh pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, "I've figured out the meaning of those last words of Akhmed's."

She looked at me questioningly. I put a cigarette into my mouth.

"I thought Akhmed said 'leopard. He didn't. What he said was 'leper. As in leprosy."

She shuddered. "But how can you be sure?"

"Because of the next word. 1 thought he said 'pearl. But it was actually 'La Perla. »

I lit a match and held it to my cigarette.

"I don't understand," said Michelle.

"The two go together," I said. "La Perla is a slum section in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. There's a leper colony in La Perla. Your father must have been taken from Tangier and hidden in the leper colony."

Michelle's eyes widened with horror.

"My father — in a leper colony?"

I puffed on my cigarette. It had gone out. I lit another match and held it to the tip.

"An ideal place to hide him, I'd say."

Michelle was white.

"And we are going to this leper colony?"

I nodded, then frowned in irritation. The cigarette just wouldn't light. I looked idly at the tip.

"If we're lucky, and he's still there, we can…"

I stopped dead in mid-sentence. A cold shiver went through me. With thumb and forefinger I pinched off the tip of my cigarette and shredded off the paper and tobacco.

"What is it?" asked Michelle.

"It's this," I said flatly, holding out the palm of my hand. In it was a small metallic object. It was shaped like a rod, no more than a half-inch long, and smaller in diameter than the cigarette it had been hidden in.

Michelle bent closer to examine it.

"A bug, to use the popular terminology," I said, and the self-disgust I felt at my carelessness must have shown in my voice. "A surveillance device. And this is one of the most advanced. A Corbon-Dodds 438-U Trans-ceiver. It not only picks up and transmits our voices over a range of more than a mile, but it also emits an electronic signal which anyone with the proper receiving equipment can use to determine our position to within a few feet."

"You mean," Michelle straightened up, looking startled, "whoever planted that not only knows where we are, but heard everything we've been saying?"

"Exactly," I replied. And that, I knew, was why the Chinese girl hadn't bothered to tail us. Not within sight, anyway. She could do it at her leisure, from a half-mile or so away, all the while getting an earful of our conversation.

Including my detailed statement to Michelle as to where we were going and why.

Michelle looked at me.

"OAS," she half-whispered.

"No." I shook my head. "I don't think so. We were tailed all the way from Tangier to New York by a very good-looking Chinese girl. She bumped into me on the plane from Paris. I had a half-empty pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, and an unopened one in the pocket of my jacket. She managed to substitute her pack for my full one."

And, considering that I smoke only my own custom-made cigarettes, with the initial NC printed on the filter, she had gone to a lot of trouble to do so. And had the use of some pretty extensive facilities.

"What do we do now?" Michelle asked.

I examined the bug closely. The front half had melted from the heat of my match. The complex micro-circuits were destroyed, and the bug had obviously stopped transmitting. The question was, which match had done it, the first or the second? If it had been the first, there was a good chance the Chinese girl hadn't gotten enough information to know where we were going. If it had been the second…

I grimaced, then sighed and ground the bug to a deformed metal mess beneath my heel. It gave me a certain amount of emotional satisfaction, but didn't accomplish much else.

"What we do now," I informed Michelle, as the elevator door opened and we stepped inside, "is to get down to Puerto Rico. Fast."

There wasn't much else I could do. Again I returned the Chinese girl to her own particular compartment in my mind. Again.

It was getting to be a pretty big compartment.

I wished to God she'd stay inside it.