Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Brian Garfield Charlie’s Shell Game

By the end of the afternoon I had seen three of them check in at the reception desk and I knew one of them had come to kill me but I didn’t know which one.

Small crowds had arrived in the course of the afternoon and I’d had plenty of time to study them while they stood in queues to check in at the reception desk. One lot of sixteen had come in together from an airport bus — middle-aged couples, three children, a few solitary businessmen; tourists, most of them, and sitting in the lobby with a magazine for a prop I wrote them off. My man would be young — late twenties, I knew that much.

I knew his name too but he wouldn’t be traveling under it.

Actually the dossier was quite thick; we knew a good deal about him, including the probability that he would come to Caracas to kill me. We knew something of his habits and patterns; we’d seen the corpses that marked his backtrail; we knew his name, age, nationality; we had several physical descriptions — they varied but there was agreement on certain points: medium height, muscularly slim, youthful. We knew he spoke at least four languages. But he hadn’t been photographed and we had no fingerprints; he was too clever for that.

Of the check-ins I’d spied at the Tamanaco desk, three were possibles — any one of them could be my intended assassin.

My job was to take him before he could take me.

Rice had summoned me back from Helsinki and I had arrived in Langley at midnight grumpy and rumpled after the long flight but the cipher had indicated red priority so I’d delivered myself directly to the office without pause to bathe or sleep, let alone eat. I was famished. Rice had taken a look at my stubble and plunged right in, “You’re flying to Caracas in the morning. The eight-o’clock plane.”

“You may have to carry me on board.”

“Me and how many weightlifters?” He glanced at the clock above the official photograph of the President. “You’ve got eight hours. The briefings won’t take that long. Anyhow you can sleep on the plane.”

“Maybe. I never have,” I said, “but then I’ve never been this exhausted. Have you got anything to eat around here?”

“No. This should perk you up, though — it’s Gregorius.”

“Is it now.”

“I knew you’d wag your tail.”

“All right, you have my attention.” Then I had to fight the urge to look straight up over my head in alarm: Rice’s smile always provokes the premonition that a Mosler safe is tailing toward one’s head.

“You’ve gained it back. Gone off the diet?” Now that he had me hooked in his claws he was happy to postpone the final pounce — like a cat with a chipmunk. I really hate him.

I said, “Crawfish.”

“What?”

“It’s what you cat in Finland. You take them fresh out of a lake, just scoop them up off the bottom in a wooden box with a chickenwire bottom. You throw them straight into the pot and watch them turn color. I can cat a hundred at a sitting. Now what’s this about Caracas and Gregorius?”

“You’re getting disgustingly fat, Charlie.”

“I’ve always been fat. As for disgusting, I could diet it off, given the inclination. You, on the other hand, would need to undergo brain surgery. I’d prescribe a prefrontal lobotomy.”

“Then you’d have no one left to spice your life.”

“Spice? I thought it was hemlock.”

“In this case more likely a few ounces of plastique. That seems to be Gregorius’ preference. And you do make a splendid target, Charlie. I can picture two hundred and umpty pounds of blubber in flabby pieces along the ceiling. Gregorius would be most gratified.”

He’d mentioned Gregorius now; it meant he was ready to get down to it and I slumped, relieved; I no longer enjoy volleying insults with him — they cut too close and it’s been a long while since either of us believed they were jokes. Our mutual hatred is not frivolous. But we need each other. I’m the only one he can trust to do these jobs without a screw — up and he’s the only one who’d give me the jobs. The slick militaristic kids who run the organization don’t offer their plums to fat old men. In any section but Rice’s I’d have been fired years ago — overage, overweight, overeager to stay in the game by the old rules rather than the new. I’m the last of the generation that puts ingenuity ahead of computer print-outs.

They meet once a month on the fifth floor to discuss key personnel reassignments and it’s a rare month that goes by without an attempt being made by one of the computer kids to tic a can to my tail; I know for a fact Rice has saved me by threatening to resign: “If he goes, I go.” The ultimatum has worked up to now but as we both get older and I get fatter the kids become more strident and I’m dubious how long Rice can continue the holding action. It’s not loyalty to me. God knows; it’s purely his own self-interest — he know s if he loses me he’ll get the sack himself: he hasn’t got anybody else in the section who knows how to produce. Nobody worthwhile will work for him. I wouldn’t either but I’ve got no choice. I’m old, fat, stubborn, arrogant, and conceited. I’m also the best.

He said, “Venezuela is an OPEC country of course,” and waited to see if I would attend his wisdom — as if the fact were some sort of esoterica. I waited, yawned, looked at my watch. Rice can drive you to idiocy belaboring the obvious. Finally he went on, “The oil-country finance ministers are meeting in Caracas this time. Starting Thursday.”

“I haven’t been on Mars, you know. They have newspapers even in Helsinki.”

“Redundancies are preferable to ignorance, Charlie.” It is his litany. I doubt he passes an hour, even in his sleep, when that sentence doesn’t run through his mind: he’s got it on tape up there.

“Will you come to the point?”

“They’ll be discussing the next round of oil-price hikes,” he said. “There’s some disagreement among them. The Saudis and the Venezuelans want to keep the increase down below five percent. Some of the others want a big boost — perhaps twenty-five or thirty percent.”

“I plead. Tell me about Gregorius.”

“This is getting us there. Trust me.”

“Let’s see if I can’t speed it up,” I said. “Of course it’s the Mahdis—”

“Of course.”

“They want Israel for themselves, they don’t want a Palestinian peace agreement, they want to warn the Arab countries that they won’t be ignored. What is it, then? They’ve arranged to have Gregorius explode a roomful of Arab leaders in Caracas? Sure. After that the Arab countries won’t be so quick to negotiate a Middle East settlement without Mahdi participation. Am I warm?”

“Scalding. Now I know you’re awake.”

“Barely.”

The Mahdi gang began as an extremist splinter arm of the Black Septemberists. The gang is small but serious. It operates out of floating headquarters in the Libyan desert. There’s a long and tedious record of hijackings, terror bombings, assassinations. Nothing unique about that. What makes the gang unusual is its habit of using mercenaries. The Mahdis — they named themselves after the mystic who wiped out Gordon at Khartoum — are Palestinian but they’re Bedouins, not Arabs; they’re few in number and they’re advanced in age compared with the teenage terrorists of the PLO. The Mahdi staff cadre consists of men who were adults at the time of the 1947 expulsion from Palestine. Some of the sheiks are in their seventies by now.

Rather than recruit impassioned young fools the gang prefers to hire seasoned professional mercenaries; they get better results that way and they don’t need to be concerned about generation-gap factionalism. They are financed by cold-blooded groups of various persuasions and motivations, many of them in Iraq.

They had used Gregorius at least twice in the past, to my know ledge; the Hamburg Bahnhof murders and the assassination of an Israeli agent in Cairo. The Hamburg bomb had demolished not only a crowd of Israeli trade officials but also the main staircase of the railroad station. The Cairo setup had been simpler, just one victim, blown up when he stepped onto the third stair of his entrance porch.

Gregorius was a killer for hire and he was well paid; apparently his fees were second only to those of Carlos the Jackal, who had coordinated the Munich athlete murders and the Entebbe hijack; but Gregorius always chose his employment on ideological grounds — he had worked for the PLO. the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Rhodesian rebels, the Cuban secret service, but he’d never taken a job for the West Evidently he enjoyed fighting his own private war of liberation. Of course he was psychotic but there was no point dwelling on his lunacy because it might encourage one to underestimate him: he was brilliant.

Rice said, “We’ve got it on authority — fairly good authority — that the Mahdis have hired Gregorius for two targets in Caracas. Ministers. The Saudi and the Venezuelan. And of course whatever bonus prizes he may collect — bombs usually aren’t too selective.”

“How good is ‘fairly good’?”

“Good enough to justify my pulling you off the Helsinki station and posting you to Venezuela.”

“All right.” If he didn’t want to reveal the source he didn’t have to; it wasn’t really my affair. Need-to-know and all that.

Rice got down to nuts and bolts and that pleased me because he always hurries right through them: they bore him. He has a grand image of himself as the sort of master strategist who leaves tactical detail to junior staff. Unhappily our section’s budget doesn’t permit any chain of command and Rice has to do his own staff work and that’s why we usually have to go into the field with a dearth of hard information; that’s one reason why nobody else will work for him — Rice never does much homework.

“It could happen anywhere,” he concluded. “The airport, a hotel lobby, a state banquet, any of the official ministerial meetings, a limousine. Anywhere.”

“Have you alerted Venezuelan security?”

“I didn’t have to. I’ve established your liaison out of courtesy.”

In other words the tip had come from Venezuelan security. And they didn’t feel confident of their own ability to contain Gregorius. Very astute of them; most small-nation security chiefs lack the humility to admit it when a job is too big for them.

Rice continued, in the manner of an afterthought, “Since we don’t know where he plans to make the strike we’ve taken it upon ourselves to—”

“Is that a royal ‘we’?”

“No. The fifth floor. As I was saying, it’s been decided that our best chance at him is to lure him into the open before the ministers begin the conference. Of course he doesn’t tempt easily.”

Then he smiled. My flesh crawled.

“You’re the bait, Charlie. He’ll come out for you.”

“In other words it’s an open secret that I’ll be in Caracas and you’ve spread the word where you know he’ll hear it.”

I brooded at him, hating him afresh. “Maybe you’ve neglected something.”

“Oh?”

“Gregorius is like me in one respect. He’s—”

“Young, fast, up-to-date, and sexy. Yes indeed, Charlie, you could be twins.”

I cut across his chuckle. “He’s a professional and so am I. Business comes first. He’d love to nail me. All right. But first he’ll do the job he’s being paid for.”

“Not this time. We’ve leaked the news that you’re being sent down there to terminate him regardless of cost. He thinks you’re being set up to nail him after he exposes himself by blowing up a few oil ministers. He can’t risk that — you got closer to nailing him than anybody else ever has. He knows if you’re set on him again you won’t turn loose until you’ve done the job. And he knows if he sets off a bomb while you’re in earshot of it you’ll reach him. He needs more lead-time than that if he means to get away.”

And he smiled again. “He’s got to put you out of the way before he goes after the ministers. Once the bombs go off he can t hang around afterward to take you on. He’s got to do it first.”

I said, “I’ve heard stronger reasoning. He’s confident of his skills. Suppose he just ignores me and goes ahead with the job as if I weren’t there?”

“He hates you too much. He couldn’t walk away, could he? Not after Beirut. Why, I believe he hates you even more than I do.”

Two years earlier we’d known Gregorius was in Beirut to blast the Lebanese-coalition prime minister. I’d devised one of the cleverer stunts of my long career. In those days Gregorius worked in tandem with his brother, who was six years older and nearly as bright as Gregorius. Our plan was good and Gregorius walked into it but I’d had to make use of Syrian back-up personnel on the alternate entrances to that verminous maze of alleys and one of the Syrians had been too nervous or too eager for glory. He’d started the shooting too early by about seven-tenths of a second and that was all the time Gregorius needed to get away.

Gregorius left his brother behind in ribbons in the alley: still alive today but a vegetable. Naturally Gregorius made efforts afterward to find out who was responsible for the ambush. Within a few weeks he knew my name. And of course Gregorius — that’s his code name, not the one he was born with — was Corsican by birth and personal revenge is a religion with those people. I knew one day he’d have to come for me; I’d lost very little sleep over it — people have been trying to kill me for thirty-five years

Just before Rice sent me to the airport he said, “We want him alive, Charlie.”

“You’re joking.”

“Absolutely not. It’s imperative. The information in his head can keep the software boys busy for eight months. Alive — it’s an order from the fifth floor.”

“You’ve already blindfolded me and sent me into the cage with him and now you want to handcuff me too?”

“Why, Charlie, that’s the way you like it best, you old masochist.”

He knows me too well.

I’d watched them check in at the hotel desk and I’d narrowed the possibilities to three. I’d seen which pigeonholes the room clerk had taken the keys from so I knew which rooms they were in. I didn’t need to look at the register because it wouldn’t help me to know what names or passports they were using.

It was like the Mexican Shell Game: three shells, one pea. Under which shell is the pea?

He had to strike at me today because Rice’s computer said so. And it probably had to be the Tamanaco Hotel because I had studied everything in the Gregorius dossier and I knew he had a preference — so strong it was almost a compulsion — for the biggest and best old hotel in a city. Big because it was easy to be anonymous there; best because Gregorius had been born dirt-poor in Corsica and was rich now; old because he had good taste but also because old walls tend to be soundproof. In Caracas the Tamanaco was it.

It was making it easy for him, sitting in plain sight in the lobby.

Earlier in the day I’d toured the city with Cartlidge. He looks like his name — all gaunt sinews and knobby joints. We’d traced the route in from the airport through the long mountain tunnel and we’d had a look at the hotel where the Saudi minister was booked in; on my advice the Venezuelans made a last-minute switch and when the Saudi arrived tomorrow morning he’d be informed of the move to another hotel. We had a look at the palace where the conference would take place and I inquired about the choice of halls: to forestall Gregorius, the Venezuelans had not announced any selection there were four suitable conference rooms in the building — and indeed the final choice wouldn’t actually be made until about ten minutes before the session began. They were doing a good job. I made a few minor suggestions and left them to it.

After lunch we’d set up a few things and then I’d staked myself in the Tamanaco lobby and four hours later I was still there.

Between five and six I saw each of the three again.

The first one spent the entire hour at the pool outside the glass doors at the rear of the lobby. He was a good swimmer with the build and grace of a field-and-track contender; he had a round Mediterranean lace, more Italian than French in appearance. He had fair hair cut very short — crew cut — but the color and cut didn’t mean anything; you could buy the former in bottles. For the convenience of my own classification, I dubbed him The Blond.

The second one appeared shortly after five, crossing the lobby in a flared slim white tropical suit. The heels of his beige shoes clicked on the tiles like dice. He stopped at the side counter to make a phone call — he could have been telephoning or he could have been using it as an excuse to study my abundant profile — and then he went along to the bell captain s desk and I heard him ask the captain to summon him a taxi, as there weren’t any at the curb in front. His voice was deep: he spoke Spanish with a slight accent that could have been French. He had a very full head of brown hair teased into an Afro and he had a strong actorish face like those of Italians who play Roman gigolos in Technicolor films. He went right outside again, presumably to wait for his taxi. I dubbed him The Afro. If he’d actually looked at me I hadn’t detected it he had the air of a man who only looked at pretty girls or mirrors.

The third one was a bit more thickly muscled and his baldness was striking. He had a squarish face and a high pink dome above it. Brynner and Savalas shave their heads; why not Gregorius? This one walked with an athlete’s bounce — he came down about half-past five in khaki Bermudas and a casual Hawaiian tourist shirt; he went into the bar and when I glanced in on my way past to the gents’ he was drinking something tall and chatting to a buxom dark-haired woman whose bored pout was beginning to give way to loose fourth-drink smiles. From that angle and in that light the bald man looked very American but I didn’t cross him off the list; I’d need more to go on.

I was characterizing each of them by hairstyle but it was useless for anything but shorthand identification. Gregorius, when last seen by witnesses, had been wearing his hair long and black, shoulder-length hippie style. None of these three had hair remotely like that but the sightings had been five weeks ago and he might have changed it ten times in the interval.

The Blond was on a poolside chaise toweling himself dry when I returned from the loo to the lobby. I saw him shake his head back with that gesture used more often by women than by men to get the hair back out of their eyes. He was watching a girl dive off the board; he was smiling.

I had both room keys in my pocket and didn’t need to stop at the desk. It was time for the first countermove. I went up in the elevator and walked past the door of my own room and entered the connecting room with the key Cartlidge had obtained for me. It was a bit elaborate but Gregorius had been known to hook a detonator to a doorknob and it would have been easy enough for him to stop a chambermaid in the hall: “My friend, the very fat American, I’ve forgotten the number of his room.”

So I entered my room through the connecting door rather than from the hall. I didn’t really expect to find anything amiss but I didn’t want to risk giving Rice the satisfaction of hearing how they’d scraped sections of blubber off the ceiling.

Admittedly I am fat but nevertheless you could have knocked me over with a feather at that moment. Because the bomb was wired to the doorknob.

I looked at it from across the room. I didn’t go any closer; I returned to the adjoining room, got the Do Not Disturb placard, went out into the hall, and hung the placard on the booby-trapped doorknob. One of the many differences between a professional like Gregorius and a professional like Charlie Dark is that Charlie Dark tends to worry about the possibility that an innocent hotel maid might open the door.

Then I made the call from the phone in the adjoining room. Within two minutes Cartlidge was there with his four-man bomb squad. They’d been posted in the basement beside the hotel’s wine cellar.

The crew went to work in flak vests and armored masks. Next door I sat with Cartlidge and he looked gloomy. “When it doesn’t explode he’ll know we defused it.” But then he always looks gloomy.

I said, “He didn’t expect this one to get me. It’s a signal flag, that’s all. He wants me to sweat first.”

“And are you? Sweating?”

“At this altitude? Heavens no.”

“I guess it’s true. The shoptalk. Charlie Dark has no nerves.”

“No nerves,” I agreed, “but plenty of nerve. Cheer up, you may get his fingerprints off the device.”

“Gregorius? No chance.”

Any of the three could have planted it. We could ask the Venezuelans to interrogate every employee in the hotel to find out who might have expressed an interest in my room but it probably would be fruitless and in any case Gregorius would know as soon as the interrogations started and it would only drive him to ground. No; at least now I knew he was in the hotel.

Scruple can be crippling. If our positions had been reversed — if I’d been Gregorius with one of three men after me — I’d simply kill all three of them. That’s how Gregorius would solve the problem.

Sometimes honor is an awful burden. I feel such an anachronism.

The bomb squad lads carried the device out in a heavy armored canister. They wouldn’t find clues, not the kind that would help. We already knew the culprit’s identity.

Cartlidge said, “What next?”

“Here,” I said, and tapped the mound of my belly, “I know which one he is. But I don’t know it here yet.” Finger to temple. “It needs to rise to the surface.”

“You know?”

“In the gut. The gut knows. I have a fact somewhere in there. It’s there; I just don’t know what it is.”

I ordered up two steak dinners from room service and when the tray-table arrived I had Cartlidge’s men make sure there were no bombs under the domed metal covers. Then Cartlidge sat and watched with a kind of awed disgust while I ate everything. He rolled back his cuff and looked at his watch. “We’ve only got about fourteen hours.”

“I know.”

“If you spend the rest of the night in this room he can’t get at you. I’ve got men in the hall and men outside watching the windows. You’ll be safe.”

“I don’t get paid to be safe.” I put away the cheesecake — both portions — and felt better.

Of course it might prove to be a bullet, a blade, a drop of poison, a garrote, a bludgeon — it could but it wouldn’t. It would be a bomb. He’d challenged me and he’d play it through by his own perverse rules.

Cartlidge complained, “There’s just too many places he could hide a satchel bomb. That’s the genius of plastique — it’s so damn portable.”

“And malleable. You can shape it to anything.” I looked under the bed, then tried it. Too soft; it sagged near collapse when I lay back. “I’m going to sleep on it.”

And so I did until shortly after midnight when someone knocked and I came awake with the reverberating memory of a muffled slam of sound. Cartlidge came into the room carrying a portable radio transceiver — a walkie-talkie. “Bomb went off in one of the elevators.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“No. It was empty. Probably it was a grenade — the boys are examining the damage. Here, I meant to give you this thing before I know you’re not much for gizmos and gadgets but it helps us all keep in touch with one another. Even cavemen had smoke signals, right?”

“All right.” I thought about the grenade in the elevator and then went back to bed.

In the morning I ordered up two breakfasts; while they were en route I abluted and clothed the physique that Rice detests so vilely. One reason why I don’t diet seriously is that I don’t wish to cease offending him. For a few minutes then I toyed with Cartlidge’s walkie-talkie. It even had my name on it, printed onto a plastic strip.

When Cartlidge arrived under the little dark cloud he always carries above him I was putting on my best tie and a jaunty face.

“What’s got you so cheerful?”

“I lost Gregorius once. Today I’m setting it right.”

“You’re sure? I hope you’re right.”

I went down the hall. Cartlidge hurried to catch up; he tugged my sleeve as I reached for the elevator button. “Let’s use the fire stairs, all right?” Then he pressed the walkie-talkie into my hand; I’d forgotten it. “Fie blew up one elevator last night.”

“With nobody in it,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange? Look, he only grenaded the elevator to stampede me into using the stairs. I suggest you send your bomb-squad lads to check out the stairs. Somewhere between here and the ground floor they’ll doubtless find a plastique device wired to a pressure-plate under one of the treads, probably set to detonate under a weight of not less than two hundred and fifty pounds.”

He gaped at me, then ran back down the hall to phone. I waited for him to return and then we entered the elevator. His eyes had gone opaque. I pressed the lobby-floor button and we rode down; I could hear his breathing. The doors slid open and we stepped out into the lobby and Cartlidge wiped the sweat off his face. He gave me a wry inquiring look. “I take it you found your fact.”

“I think so.”

“Want to share it?”

“Not just yet. Not until I’m sure. Let’s get to the conference building.”

We used the side exit. The car was waiting, engine running, driver armed.

I could have told Cartlidge which one was Gregorius but there was a remote chance I was wrong and I don’t like making a fool of myself.

Caracas is a curiously Scandinavian city — the downtown architecture is modern and sterile; even the hillside slums are colorful and appear clean. The wealth of Twentieth Century oil has shaped the city and there isn’t much about its superficial appearance, other than the Spanish-language neon signs, to suggest it’s a Latin town. Traffic is clotted with big expensive cars and the boulevards are self-consciously elegant. Most of the establishments in the central shopping district are branches of American and European companies — banks, appliances, couturiers, Cadillac showrooms. It doesn’t look the sort of place where bombs could go off: terrorism doesn’t suit it. One pictures Gregorius and his kind in the shabby crumbling wretched rancid passageways of Cairo or Beirut. Caracas? No; too hygienic.

As we parked the car the walkie-talkies crackled with static. It was one of Cartlidge’s lads — they’d found the armed device on the hotel’s fire stairs. I’d been mistaken about one thing: it was a trip-wire, not a pressure plate. Again I’d forgotten how indiscriminate Gregorius could be, his indifference to the risk to innocents.

We had twenty minutes before the scheduled arrivals of the ministers. I said, “It’ll be here somewhere. The bomb.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only place he can be sure they’ll turn up on schedule. Are the three suspects still under surveillance? Check them out.”

He hunched over the walkie-talkie while I turned the volume knob of mine down to get rid of the distracting noise and climbed out of the car and had my look around; I bounced the walkie-talkie in my palm absently while I considered the possibilities. The broad steps of the palacio where the conference of OPEC ministers would take place were roped off and guarded by dark-faced cops in Sam Brownes. On the wide landing that separated the two massive flights of steps was a circular fountain that sprayed gaily; normally people sat on the tile ring that contained it but today the security people had cleared the place.

There wasn’t much of a crowd; it wasn’t going to be the kind of spectacle that would draw any public interest. There was no television equipment; a few reporters clustered off to one side with microphones and tape recorders. Routine traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian. That was useful because it meant Gregorius wouldn’t be able to get in close; there would be no crowd to screen him.

Still, it wasn’t too helpful. All it meant was that he would use a remote-control device to trigger the bomb.

Cartlidge lowered the walkie-talkie from his face. “Did you hear?”

“No.” I had difficulty hearing him now as well: the fountain made white noise, the constant gnashing of water, and I moved closer to him while he scow led at my own walkie-talkie. His eyes accused me forlornly. “Would it kill you to use it? All three accounted for. One in his room, one at the hotel pool, one in the dining room having his breakfast.”

I looked up past the rooftops. I could see the upper floors of the Hotel Tamanaco — it sits on high ground on the outskirts — and beyond it the tiny swaying shape of a cable car ascending the lofty mountain. Cotton-ball clouds over the peaks. Caracas is cupped in the palm of the mountains; its setting is fabulous. I said to Cartlidge, “He has a thing about stairs, doesn’t he.”

“What?”

“The Hamburg Bahnhof — the bomb was on the platform stairway The Cairo job, again stairs. This morning, the hotel fire stairs. That’s the thing about stairways — they’re funnels.” I pointed at the flight of stone steps that led up to the portals of the palacio, “The ministers have to climb them to get inside.”

“Stone stairs. How could he hide a bomb there? You can’t get underneath them. Everything’s in plain sight.”

I brooded on it He was right. But it had to be: suddenly I realized it had to be — because I was here and the Saudi’s limousine was drawing up at the curb and it meant Gregorius could get both of us with one shot and then I saw the Venezuelan minister walk out of the building and start down the stairs to meet the limousine and it was even more perfect for Gregorius: ail three with one explosion. It had to be: right here, right now.

Where was the damned thing? Where?

I had the feeling I needed to find the answer within about seven seconds because it was going to take the Venezuelan minister that long to come this far down the steps while the Saudi was getting out of the limousine; already the Venezuelan was nearly down to the fountain and the Saudi was ducking his berobed head and poking a foot out of the car toward the pavement. The entourage of Arab dignitaries had hurried out of the second limousine and they were forming a double column on the steps for the Saudi to walk through; a police captain drew himself to attention, saluting; coming down the stairs the Venezuelan minister had a wide welcoming smile across his austere handsome face.

They’d picked the limousine at random from a motor pool of six. So it couldn’t be in the car.

It couldn’t be on the steps because the palacio had been guarded inside and out for nearly a week and it had been searched half an hour ago by electronic devices, dogs, and human eyes.

It couldn’t be in the fountain either. That had been too obvious. We’d exercised special care in searching the fountain; it had only been switched on ten minutes earlier. In any case you can’t plant a bomb under water because the water absorbs the force of the explosion and all you get is a big bubble and a waterspout.

In other words there was no way for Gregorius to have planted a bomb here. And yet I knew he had done so. I knew where Gregorius was: I knew he had field glasses to his eyes and his finger on the remote-control button that would trigger the bomb by radio signal. When the Saudi met the Venezuelan and they shook hands on the steps not a dozen feet from me, Gregorius would set it off.

Six seconds now. The Venezuelan came past the fountain.

The walkie-talkie in my hand cracked with static but I didn’t turn it up. The mind raced at Grand Prix speed. If he didn’t plant the bomb beforehand — and I knew he hadn’t — then there had to be a delivery system.

Five seconds. Gregorius: cold, brutal, neat, ingenious. Then I knew — I was the bomb.

Four seconds and my arm swung back. It has been a long time since I threw a football and I had to pray the instinct was still in the arm and then I was watching the walkie-talkie soar over the Venezuelan’s head and I could only stand and watch while it lofted and descended. It struck the near lip of the fountain and for a moment it looked ready to fall back onto the stairs, but then it tipped over the rim and went into the water.

His reaction time would be slowed by distance and the awkwardness of handling binoculars and the unexpectedness of my move. Instinctively he reached for the trigger button, but by the time he pressed it the walkie-talkie had gone into the water. The explosion wasn’t loud. Water blistered at the surface and a crack appeared in the surrounding nm; little spouts began to break through the shattered concrete; a great frothy mushroom of water bubbled up over the surface and cascaded down the steps.

Nobody was hurt.

We went into the hotel fast. I was talking to Cartlidge: “I assume the one who’s still upstairs in his room is the blond one with the crew cut.”

“How the hell did you know that?”

“He’s Gregorius. He had to have a vantage point.”

Gregorius was still there in the room because he’d had no reason to believe we’d tumbled to his identity. He was as conceited as I; he was sure he hadn’t made any mistake to give himself away. He was wrong of course. He’d made only one but it was enough.

Cartlidge’s bomb-squad lads were our flying wedge. They kicked the door in and we walked right in on him and he looked at all the guns and decided to sit still.

His window overlooked the palacio and the binoculars were on the sill. I said to Cartlidge, “Have a look for the transmitter. He hasn’t had time to hide it too far away.”

The Blond said, “What is this about?” All injured innocence.

I said, “It’s finished, Gregorius.”

He wasn’t going to admit a thing but I did see the brief flash of rage in his eyes: it was all the confirmation I needed. I gave him my best Rice smile. “You’ll be pleased to talk in time.”

They searched him, handcuffed him, gave the room a toss, and didn’t find anything; later that day the transmitter turned up in a cleaning-supplies cupboard down the hall.

To this day Cartlidge still isn’t sure we got the right man because nobody ever told him what happened after we got Gregorius back to the States. Rice and I know the truth. The computer kids in Debriefing sweated Gregorius for weeks and finally he broke and they’re still analyzing the wealth of information he has supplied. I’d lost interest by that time; my part of it was finished and I knew from the start that I’d got the right man. I don’t make that kind of mistake; it didn’t need confirmation from the shabby hypodermics of Debriefing. As I’d said to Rice, “The binoculars on the windowsill clinched it, of course. When the Venezuelan and the Saudi shook hands he planned to trigger it — it was the best way to hit all three of us.

“But I knew it had to be the Blond much earlier. I suppose I might have arrested him first before we went looking for the bomb but I wasn’t absolutely certain.”

“Don’t lie,” Rice said. “You wanted him to be watching you in his binoculars — you wanted him to know you were the one who defused him. One of these days your brain’s going to slow down a notch or two. Next time maybe it’ll blow up before you throw it in the pond. But all right, since you’re waiting for me to ask — how did you pick the blond one?”

“We knew until recently he’d worn his hair hippie length.”

”So?”

“I saw him at the pool toweling himself dry. I saw him shake his head back the way you do when you want to get the hair back out of your eyes. He had a crew cut. He wouldn’t have done that unless he’d cut his hair so recently he still had the old habit.”

Rice said, “It took you twelve hours to figure that out? You are getting old, Charlie.”

“And hungry. Have you got anything to eat around here?”

“No.”