Flashpoint

9

The sound of the telephone woke me.

I had fallen asleep in an awkward position and I had no feeling in my right arm. Talia picked up the bedside extension and gave several short answers in the foreign-language-mixture of harsh consonants and soft vowels I was beginning to recognize if not understand. Then she hung up the phone.

She slipped from the bed and walked, nude, to her dressing table. She removed a pair of panty hose from a drawer and began working her legs, thighs, and hips into their semi-transparent snugness. I watched with drowsy regret as the brilliant-hued butterfly on her hip disappeared from view. When the material fit her like a second skin, Talia did a momentary hula as she plucked its tautness from her crotch, picked up a bra, hooked it together in front of her before rotating the clasped portion to the rear, and encased her full breasts in the cups.

"Going someplace?" I asked lazily. The taste in my mouth made me wonder if I had any American cigarettes left in my clothes.

She didn't look in my direction. "Go back to sleep. It was a call from the UN to appear in native costume for some publicity photos. I won't be gone long."

Still clad only in the bra and panty hose, she disappeared into a closet and reemerged with a piece of airplane luggage. She placed it on a chair and began packing it with brightly colored items of clothing. I yawned, stretched, and felt the tug of previously unused muscles.

I realized that the rustling sound of clothing being packed had continued for some time. I raised my head, about to ask her a question, then changed my mind. Talia was at the dresser, and the angle of her head indicated to me that she was watching me in its mirror. "Got any food in the place?" I inquired.

"There's a delicatessen around the corner that will deliver," she replied. "The phone number is in the telephone index."

"Okay." I sat up on the edge of the bed and picked up the index. From the corner of my eye, I saw Talia swiftly remove something from the dresser and drop it into her opened handbag. It was the size and shape of a passport case, and a number of pieces began to fit together. There was no activity at the UN requiring Talia to appear in native costume. The Turk's deadline must be getting close. He was moving the girl out of the operation.

I pretended to look for the deli phone number while Talia went into the bathroom. She came out again in an electric-blue dress which managed to appear both Turkish and American by virtue of its fabric and design. Talia picked up her bag, then paused. "We will try something different when I return," she said.

"You mean there's something different left? It's going to take me a month to get over the something different you've already shown me."

She was smiling. "A steady horse for a long race," she said. "You qualify."

"You have yourself to thank. Hurry back."

"I will." She left the bedroom, and I listened for the solid click of the apartment-door lock. Then I dashed to her closet. Some clothing remained in it, but not much. The underwear drawers in her dresser were empty. The only cosmetic items left were almost-empty tubes and jars,

I didn't bother with underwear or socks. I slid into shirt, pants, and jacket, shoved my.38 into the holster I had recovered from Talia's bathroom, jammed my feet into my shoes, and started for the door. If I could follow Talia, it might be a shortcut to information we lacked. But I had to hurry.

I stepped out into the corridor and started down the hall. There was a whirr of movement behind me and the back of my head seemed to explode. I caught one quick whiff of a musky, lemon-essenced cologne as I started falling face-forward, and then I plunged into blackness.

The first thing I felt when consciousness returned was a sharp, stabbing pain in my head. Fiery, throbbing lances pulsed through my skull with each heartbeat. When I opened my eyes cautiously and the walls stopped swirling, I was prone on Talia's white carpet. Someone had dragged me inside from the corridor, and I knew who the someone was.

Automatically I reached for the.38 in my shoulder holster. It was gone. This job was sure hell on guns. I swallowed hard to subdue incipient nausea, then fingered a Ping-Pong-ball lump under my ear. I pushed myself up to hands and knees, hung on until the dizziness subsided, and made it to my feet. Sweat drenched my face as I grabbed the back of a chair to retain my uncertain balance, but the unsteadiness dissipated.

Feet wide apart, I shuffled to the apartment door. It was locked, and from the outside. My celluloid pick was no help. Second thought convinced me that if Abdel was still patrolling the corridor outside, I didn't want to see him now. Not without my.38.

But I had to let Erikson know about Talia's being manipulated out of the action" by the Turk. The elephant-clock told me that she already had a half hour's head start. I headed for the telephone. I had dialed the first three numbers of Erikson's office phone before my scrambled brain began to function properly. If Erikson could bug Talia's phone, so could Iskir Bayak, and with his suspicious nature, he was a damn sight more likely to have bugged it. If I called Erikson from here and Bayak was able to listen to the conversation, the whole operation would be blown.

I replaced the receiver.

But I had to let Erikson know somehow.

I had to get to a safe phone.

I went to the balcony's french double-doors and opened them. A reviving damp breeze flowed over me. It was raining again, and the street below glistened with reflected light from its rain-wet surface. There was another balcony above my head. I leaned over the guard rail and looked downward with the rain blowing in my face. A duplicate balcony extended outward from the apartment below.

I could go up or down. The bottom of the balcony floor above me was three feet above my upstretched hand. I'd either need something to stand on-and nothing was available-or I'd have to balance myself atop the half-round guard rail before I could grip the iron uprights supporting the concrete on the balcony. I was hardly in shape to perch on the rail and lean out into space while trying for a secure handhold on wet, slippery iron and concrete. I doubted that I'd be able to muscle my entire body weight up the balcony's concrete facing even with a good handhold.

So it had to be down.

I didn't give myself time to think about it.

I went over the railing and eased myself downward with both hands gripping the cold iron uprights and my toes anchored to the platform rim. I took a solid hold, then removed my toes from the edge and hung freely, extended at full length. I clenched and unclenched my palms, dropping in short jerks until the heels of my hands reached the bottom of the vertical iron bars.

I swung myself cautiously in a gentle, pendulumlike movement. The tip of my shoes scraped against the guard rail below. I knew the balcony floor was a drop of only three feet. The trick was to fall inside, not outside, the railing.

Too hard a swing forward and I'd lose my balance upon landing and fall backward with a good chance of smashing my head against the guard rail grillwork and knocking myself out again. Too easy a swing and I could look forward to a quick glimpse inside each lighted window as I clawed the air on my way down to the street.

My pendulumlike momentum built up until I felt it was right, and then I let go. My feet hit concrete, all right, but my kidneys struck the iron railing painfully at the same time. I had slightly underdone the forward swing. The kidney-contact threw me forward sharply, and I landed on hands and knees in a puddle of water that was trapped in a slight depression on the unlighted balcony.

I scrambled near the french doors out of the worst of the rain and massaged my wet, abraded palms. Sudden light from inside the apartment flooded over me. I ducked instinctively, thinking I'd been seen. When nothing happened, I straightened slightly so I could look into the apartment through glass curtains covering the double doors.

A fat, middle-aged woman in a quilted robe was placing a towel on the floor. Her hair was in curlers and her face was greasy with cream. She went to a low, cabinet-style stereo set and placed a large record on the turntable. All I could think of was that if she settled down for a music session in the room, she had me trapped on the balcony.

I tried the door latch quietly and found it locked. I reached for my wallet and extracted my celluloid pick. Martial music blared forth from inside the locked french doors. Then a male voice boomed forth in a tone of command from the stereo set.

"We'll now do the cross-body bend in four counts. Take your position, please. Feet spread and arms extended. Bend from the waist, left hand to right toe at the count of one, upright at the count of two, right hand to left toe at three, and back to starting position at four. Are you ready? Now… in time to the music, please. One, two, three…"

I looked inside again. The fat woman had tossed her robe to one side. Beneath it she was totally nude. Jiggling breasts and buttocks looked like four pale basketballs attached to a flesh-covered barrel. Jellolike quivering accompanied each movement as she strained to reach her toes with the opposite hand. Each time she managed halfway down her shin.

My position had changed unwittingly to that of Peeping Tom. I tried the pick on the lock as the booming voice from the record player issued new instructions. "The bicycle exercise now," the exercise master announced. "Down flat on the rug."

The lock on the french doors was an old-fashioned type that wouldn't permit insertion of the pick. The fat woman had lowered herself to the towel on the floor with an audible thump. She stretched out on her back, elevated her chubby legs, and pedaled furiously as the music-cadenced "one, two, three, four" issued from the speaker.

At least she was in no condition to pursue me. I wrapped my handkerchief around my knuckles and broke the glass near the lock. It smashed into a hundred tinkling fragments, and I reached inside and turned the lock.

The woman had frozen with her legs still upright at the sound of the breaking glass. Her massive bare behind and furry slit pointed right at me as I stepped inside. Her mouth shaped itself into a round O as I sprinted across the room, but no sound emerged. I manipulated the chain bolt on the apartment door, stepped outside, slammed the door, and took off down the corridor.

I avoided the elevator in case Abdel was monitoring it. I raced down the stairs in case the fat woman recovered quickly enough to get to her telephone and sound the alarm, then slowed my pace as I approached the street.

There was no Abdel, and no alarm.

I found a drug store and called Erikson. "My guess is that she's out of the picture now," I concluded after telling him about Talia's departure.

"If that really was her passport you saw, you're probably right. Would she head for Bayak's place?"

"Not likely. He wants her underground now. Out of the country, even. Our little bird has flown and I'll bet it's the Turk's intention that she keep right on flying."

"I'll put out word to every transportation terminal with emphasis on the airports," Erikson said. "Meantime you'd better get over here, Earl. It sounds like we're getting too damned close to the payoff, and we still don't know what the score is."

I left the drug store and headed for his office.

McLaren was waiting with Erikson when I arrived. He gave me a sardonic grin as he stared at the lump that still persisted behind my ear. Erikson wasted no time on levity. "We've located the girl at Kennedy," he said without preliminary. "She purchased a one-way ticket to Damascus on a flight that leaves in three hours."

"And I suppose you'll just stand around and let her take off?" I said. Neither man answered. "Why are you letting her leave the country?"

"Don't you read the papers?" McLaren inquired. "It's a free country."

"We're watching her," Erikson chimed in.

"Watching her? What the hell good is that? We know we're getting close to the time of this hijack, but what do we know about it? Not even the location. I don't think the girl knows everything about Bayak's business, but she damn sure knows more about it than we do. And she could tell us."

McLaren's eyes were upon my face. "Could?"

"Could be made to."

"Like?"

"Like pick her up, grab her hypodermic, sit her down in a corner until the skinful of dope she's carrying now evaporates, and in six or eight hours she'll tell you her sins back to her fifth birthday."

McLaren grimaced at Erikson. "You do come up with these direct-action types."

"Give me an alternative if we're going to get anywhere with this thing," I challenged them.

The office was quiet for a moment. "There's Doc Walsh's private clinic in Queens," McLaren suggested. "Ol' Doc owes us a favor or three." He was watching Erikson. "I could have the girl paged at the flight desk, asked to step into the airline-terminal office, and whisko- Long Island via very private car."

"It sounds like a winner to me," I said.

"Well, chief?" McLaren said. "Can do. Can do easily if you say the magic word."

"I don't like it," Erikson frowned. "If anything went wrong, the UN angle alone would splash us on every front page in the country. Let alone the mysterious disappearance of a damned attractive girl."

"You think Bayak's going to the police?" I argued. "No way. If you don't step in, Talia may never reach Damascus, anyway. She's expendable in the Turk's plan right now." I waited for that to sink in. "You might be the means of keeping her alive." I thought of Chryssie spread-eagled to the four corners of the bed in the tenement flat. I still hadn't raised a hand to the man who had authorized that.

"Thanks for appealing to my better nature," Erikson said. "What would your role be if we did this?"

"I'd borrow a.38 from you, hustle over to Bayak's penthouse, and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing when he had Abdel put the chop on me. It's what he'll expect to hear. Then business as usual."

There was another silence. "Somehow the thought of you running loose over there with a.38 does nothing for my blood pressure," Erikson said at last.

"Bayak knows he needs me," I said. "I'm the only one still wired into this operation. Sure, he's planning on stopping my clock, but not until I've pulled his marshmallows out of the fire."

"Wish to God we knew what the marshmallows were," McLaren grumbled.

"Give me the gun and I'll get going," I suggested. "One thing I should have mentioned before. Bayak must be paying off everyone in that building. His safe has been blown once, and I put two bullets into the air there the other day, yet he's never been asked to leave."

"We'd tip him off if we tried to shake anything out of the apartment-building people now," McLaren said. "Later, maybe."

Erikson gestured toward the hidden room. McLaren went toward it, activated the concealed latch, and disappeared through the revealed door in the wall. He was back at once and handed me a well-oiled.38 and two clips. I loaded one and dropped the other into my jacket pocket. "Like you're getting to be expensive to keep in armament," McLaren said to me. I ignored him.

"Have her picked up," Erikson said to McLaren. "But with discretion, damn it. Handle it yourself. I've no desire to have my hide nailed up on a barn wall."

"Nothing to it, chief," McLaren said confidently. "You coming out to the clinic when we get her settled?"

"I'll be there. I want to talk to you a minute, Earl." He waited until McLaren left the office. "What do you know about the magazine office next door to us?"

"Only that it's there," I said innocently. "Why?"

"Two detectives burst in here past Jock this afternoon with a woman who screeched hysterically in my face that I was raping her daughter. I can tell you it was damned embarrassing. When we got it straightened out that it wasn't me, the troupe went down the hall and played the same bill next door."

"Girls will be girls," I remarked. "Are you regretting a lost opportunity?" Erikson snorted. "How do I get in touch with you out in Queens if necessary?"

He unlocked a drawer in his desk, took out a metal box which he also unlocked, found an address book, and wrote down an address and telephone number. "Don't overreach yourself with these people," he cautioned me as he returned the metal box to his desk.

"I'm all right as long as they think they're dealing with the mobster you set me up to be," I said. "See you."

I left the office three minutes after McLaren and took a cab uptown. In the private elevator on the way up to the penthouse I had an unpleasant thought. If Abdel had been outside Talia's apartment, my mysterious disappearance could have made Bayak suspicious. I had to act more suspicious than he did.

When the elevator doors parted, it wasn't Abdel who stood there. It was a smaller man I'd never seen before. He had a gun in his hand, but I brushed past him as though I didn't even see it. Bayak was sitting at the far end of the sunken living room, his pudgy hands steepled in front of his face and his shrewd black eyes studying me from above his pressed-together fingertips.

"Where the hell is that big tub of lard, Abdel?" I yelled at him across the combined distance of the two rooms whose length resembled a train station.

"He will be here presently," the Turk said suavely. "Come and sit down."

"Sit down? I'll-"

"Calm yourself," Bayak interrupted me.

"Calm myself? I'll calm myself when I've cooled off that water buffalo. What did he think he was doing when he put the slug on me like that?"

"He was following orders. Sit here."

"Orders? Why, you fat creep, I ought to put the blast on you, too. I don't know what-"

"Exactly. You do not know," Bayak cut me off sharply. "Your little sex holiday is over, friend. It's time you went to work. I simply removed temptation from your path so you could concentrate on the job at hand. I assume you're still interested in money?"

"Certainly I'm interested in money," I grumbled, pretending to be slightly mollified.

"Then come sit down and look at this plan."

I descended the stairs to the living room. I hadn't seen a signal from Bayak, but the gun the new guard had been holding on me during the conversation disappeared. Abdel could be standing behind one of the billowing draperies with a gun lined up on my head, of course. Iskir Bayak wasn't the type to take unnecessary chances with his own oily skin.

Bayak was removing papers from a manila envelope and spreading them on the surface of a low coffee table whose lacquered top contained a black-and-white collage of the Blue Mosque. "See what you think of this," Bayak said to me.

"This" was the same hijack plan I'd already seen in Erikson's office. I pulled a chair up to the coffee table, sat down, and leaned forward to study the map which the

Turk swiveled in my direction. I hoped it would now contain identifying marks as to location, but it still showed Roads A, B, C, and D and nothing else. I looked at it long enough to give the impression I'd never seen it before, then sat back in my chair. "This doesn't tell me a thing," I declared.

"It should tell you enough," Bayak retorted. A pudgy finger pointed to the largest rectangle on the plan. "A truck approaches from this direction, so, on Road A. Four men will be stationed, so." The finger indicated the circles numbered 1,2, 3, and 4. "They will halt the truck, recover a package from it, and escape in this vehicle." The finger settled on the small square indicating a getaway car that I'd shown to McLaren and Erikson. "A simple operation." Bayak looked at me. "Yes?"

"How the hell do I know?" I gestured at the sheet. "What does that tell me that I need to know? Nothing. I'd want to check out escape routes, meter the flow of traffic to judge pursuit possibilities, set up a system-"

"All that has been done by an expert."

"Not by this expert, and he's the one you're expecting to put his head in the lion's mouth. What does your expert list as necessary for the job?"

Bayak blinked. "Necessary?"

I waved an impatient hand. "Weapons, disguises, tools, contingency explosives, rehearsal time."

"Oh." The fat man thumbed through the sheets of paper on the coffee table and handed me one. "Here."

It was a rather complete listing of the type I'd just mentioned, but I tossed it aside in pretended disgust after scanning it. "Without even knowing the particular problems, I can see two requirements that aren't on here at all," I said.

"That cannot be," the Turk responded immediately. "Hakim was a thorough man."

"So thorough you need me to replace him, right?" Bayak didn't reply. I picked up the sheet of paper again. "There's no hand-held acetylene torch listed here, in case we need to burn through the lock on the truck's loading door. And we should also have a back-up supply of plastic explosives if it looks as though the torch won't do the job quickly enough."

Bayak nodded slowly. "It doesn't sound unreasonable. You will have only the one chance. Unfortunately, I am unable to furnish these items on short notice."

I tapped myself on the chest. "I'll see to it. I'd rather do the selecting anyway, since I'm the guy who'll have to use them. Just produce a little cash." The fat man heaved himself awkwardly to his feet, and I knew he was going to the wall safe. I was glad he'd bought the idea I'd just sold him, because it would give me a chance to get away from him while I was supposed to be picking up the items. If we were as close to the action as he sounded, he'd want someone from his organization to stick to me as closely as two teenagers at a drive-in movie. "But we haven't come to the important point," I went on.

He stopped and looked at me inquiringly.

"I want to know where this job is taking place. You can't expect me to take it on cold without knowing the location and the escape hatches."

Bayak returned to his chair and dropped into it heavily. "That you will know at the proper time, friend, and only then." I started to say something but he held up his hand. "As it stands now, there is a man who knows the location, the men to be used, the escape routes, and nothing else. And there is a man-" the familiar pudgy finger leveled at me "-who knows what we seek to acquire and the necessary techniques. If either man had both pieces of information-" he paused for effect "-what need would he have of me?"

I didn't answer him.

I couldn't answer him.

From his point of view, there wasn't any satisfactory answer. He had engineered the situation so he was protected every step of the way. Only when the two men with the dovetailing bits of information were brought together could the job be activated, and obviously the Turk had no intention of bringing them together until it was time for the hijack.

He sat there with a satisfied smirk on his fat face as he read my mind. "You will be taken to the location at the proper time," he said. He looked at his watch. "In approximately five and one half hours."

That really shook me up. Even though I'd told Erikson that Bayak's attitude indicated that the time was getting close, I hadn't expected it would be this soon. "What kind of men am I getting to work with?" I asked.

Bayak hesitated. "You should have an honest answer to that," he said finally. "There have been personnel losses among the group assigned to me to recover this item. Two even before Hakim. Two good men." Those would be the two in Nevada, I thought. "Hakim himself, of course. And one who disappeared completely." The truck must have mangled the one I'd dropped out Chryssie's window so that identification had never been made.

"Those were the cream," Bayak went on. "The rest-" he gestured vaguely "-loyal but inexperienced. Make no mistake-they will enter a blazing building if ordered. But they need leadership. Your leadership. And they are expendable."

Like I was expendable. "What happens to the 'item' when we get it?"

"That is not your department," he retorted, unruffled. He rose to his feet again. "How much money do you require for the purchases you mentioned?"

"Three thousand." Actually it wouldn't take a sixth of that unless the torch and the explosive came encrusted with diamonds, but I was testing. Bayak made no protest.

My back was to the wall safe as he waddled toward it. "Do not turn around," he said over his shoulder. I knew he couldn't open the safe and watch me, too, so someone else was watching me. I shifted position slightly until I could see his obese figure in the same polished lamp base as before.

"Something I forgot," I said as I saw in the lamp base the same up-and-down movement twice of the concealing picture next to the liquor storage closet before the safe dial appeared. "How much does the 'item' weigh? Will there be any difficulty in moving it?"

"There will be no difficulty." Bayak's voice was muffled as his face pressed close to the safe's opened door. "It weighs twelve pounds."

Twelve pounds of heroin wasn't a small amount, but it hardly seemed like enough to warrant the elaborate preparation and the money Bayak was throwing around. For the first time I began to feel that Erikson could be right in his insistence that dope wasn't the target. But what else could be valuable enough to warrant such a violent laying on of hands?

Bayak turned away from the safe with money in his hand. "Do not return here again," he said brusquely as he confronted me and thrust the money at me. "There is a cocktail lounge on Lexington Avenue near Forty-sixth Street, called the Alhambra. Be there in four hours. Call me here-I will be able to verify from where you are calling-and you will be told where to go to meet the individual who will take you to the hijack spot"

I really had to admire the bastard.

Whatever else happened, Iskir Bayak's coattails were going to remain out of the grease pit

He would have a contact at the Alhambra to note and report to him anything unusual, either in my conduct or my companionship.

Iskir Bayak was protecting himself right down to the fifth decimal place.

"We haven't talked about how I'm to be paid off," I suggested. I knew he would expect it, and be ready for it.

Nor was I mistaken. "When you leave the Alhambra, you will be taken to Grand Central Station by a man who in your presence will deposit forty thousand dollars in U.S. currency in a locker," Bayak said smoothly. "At the hijack location, when you are committed, you will be given the only key, and upon the completion of the job you will return and recover the money."

Beautiful.

Except that I knew it was this fat slug's intention that I never return from the hijack. One of the hijack crew would have orders to finish me off with a bullet in the back of the head. I'd gone this far thinking I had only to learn the location and let Erikson know and have his people take over. Now I was being firmly locked into the operation with no possibility of finding out the essential factor: where the hijack was to take place.

It was in a thoughtful mood that I left the penthouse apartment.

I had to get to a phone and call Erikson at the Queens number he'd given me.