The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER ONE

What happened to me several months ago was what a psychologist would call an identity crisis. The symptoms were easy to identify. First, I began to lose interest in my work. Then it turned into a gnawing discontent, and finally into an outright dislike for what I was doing. I began to get a feeling of being trapped and was faced with the fact that I was well into my life and what the hell had I accomplished?

I asked myself the crucial question.

“Who are you?”

And the answer was, “I’m a killer.”

I didn’t like the answer.

So I walked away from AXE, from Hawk, from Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and swore that I’d never do another job for them as long as I lived.

Wilhelmina, the 9mm. Luger that was almost like an extension of my right hand, was packed away along with Hugo and Pierre. I had run my fingers lovingly over the deadly, honed steel of the stiletto before I laid it down and wrapped the gun, the knife, and the tiny gas bomb into a chamois lining. All three went into my safe deposit box. The next day I was gone,

Since then, I’d hidden myself in half a dozen countries under twice that many assumed names. I wanted peace and serenity. I wanted to be left alone, to have the security of knowing that I would live through each day to enjoy the next

I’d had exactly six months and two days of it before the telephone rang in my hotel room. At nine-thirty in the morning.

I hadn’t been expecting a telephone call. I’d thought that no one knew that I. was in El Paso. The ringing of the bell meant that someone knew something about me that they weren’t supposed to know. I didn’t like the idea one damned bit because it meant that Td gotten careless, and carelessness could get me killed.

The telephone on the night table beside my bed shrilled insistently at me. I reached over and picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Your taxi is here, Mr. Stephans,” said the overly polite voice of the desk clerk.

I hadn’t ordered a taxi. Someone was letting me know that he knew I was in town, and that he also knew the alias I’d registered under.

It did no good to wonder who it was. There was only one way to find out.

“Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said and hung up.

Deliberately, I took my time. Td been lying sprawled on the large double bed, my head propped up on the bunched pillows when the phone had rung. Now, I locked my hands behind my head and stared across the room at my reflection in the large row of minors above the long, walnut-veneered triple chest of drawers.

What I saw was a lean, lithe body with a face of indeterminate age. It was a face that just missed being handsome, but that wasn’t the important thing about it. It was a face that reflected coldness with eyes that had seen too much in one lifetime. Too much death. Too much killing. Too much torture and maiming and more bloodshed than any one man should see.

I remembered once, a few years back, in a room in a small pensione in a not too elegant section of Rome, a girl had flared up at me and called me an arrogant, cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch.

“You just don’t give a damn! Not about me or about anything!” she’d screamed at me. “You don’t have any feelings! I thought I meant something to you but I was wrong! You’re nothing but a bastard! Doesn’t it mean anything to you — what we’ve been doing for the last hour?”

I had had no answer for her. I had lain there, naked on the rumpled bed and watched her finish getting dressed without a flicker of emotion showing on my face.

She had grabbed up her purse and turned at the door.

“What makes you the way you are?” she had asked me almost plaintively. “Why can’t you be reached? Is it me? Don’t I have any importance for you? Am I absolutely nothing to you?”

“I’ll call for you tonight at seven,” I’d said curtly, ignoring her angry demands.

She had spun around stiffly and stepped out the door, slamming it behind her, I’d watched her go, knowing that by evening she would learn in one fast moment, that she wasn’t yet ‘absolutely nothing’ to me. I hadn’t allowed my feelings to make any difference, because from the start of our affair she had been one in a cast of many who’d played a part in my AXE assignment. Her role ended that night. She’d found out too much, and at seven that evening, I’d rung down her final curtain with my stiletto.

Now, several years later, I lay on another bed in a hotel room in El Paso and examined my face in the mirror. It was a face that accused me of being everything she had called me — tired, cynical, arrogant, cold.

I realized I could lie on that bed for hours, but there was someone waiting for me in a taxi and he wouldn’t go away. And if I wanted to find out who had penetrated my anonymity, there was only one way to do it. Go down and face him.

So I swung my legs off the bed, stood up and straightened my clothes, and stepped from my room, wishing that I had the security of Wilhelmina tucked under my armpit — or even the cold deadliness of Hugo’s pencil-thin, sharpened steel attached to my arm.

In the lobby, I nodded to the desk clerk as I passed by and went out through the revolving doors. After the air-conditioned chill of the hotel, the moist heat of El Paso’s early summer morning wrapped itself around me like a damp embrace.

The taxi was idling by the curb.

I walked slowly toward the cab, my eyes flicking automatically around it.

There was nothing suspicious in the quiet street or the faces of the few people strolling casually down the sidewalk.

The driver came around from the far side of the taxi.

“Mr. Stephans?”

I nodded.

“My name’s Jiminez,” he said. I caught the flash of white teeth set in a dark, solid face. The man was stocky and powerfully built He wore an open-necked sport shirt over light blue slacks.

Jiminez opened the rear door for me. I could see that there was no one else in the taxi.

He caught my glance. “You satisfied?”

I didn’t answer him. I got into the back and Jiminez closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. He slipped into the front seat and pulled the car out into the light stream of traffic.

I edged further to the left until I was sitting almost directly behind the stocky man. As I did so, I leaned forward, my muscles tensing, the fingers of my right hand curling under so that the knuckles stiffened, making a lethal weapon of my fist.

Jiminez looked up into the rear-view mirror.

“Why don’t you sit back and relax?” he suggested easily. “Nothing’s going to happen. He just wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

Jiminez shrugged his powerful shoulders. “I don’t know. All I’m supposed to tell you is that the word came down from Hawk for you to follow instructions. Whatever that means.”

It meant a lot. It meant that Hawk had been letting me have my little vacation. It meant that Hawk had always known how to get in touch with me. It meant that I was still working for Hawk and for AXE, America’s super-secret intelligence agency.

“All right,” I said, wearily, “what are the instructions?”

“I’m to take you out to the airport,” Jiminez said. “Rent a light plane. Be sure the tanks are full. Once you’ve cleared the area, take up a course of sixty degrees. And tune your communications radio to Unicom. You’ll get further instructions in the air.”

“Apparently, I’m going to meet someone,” I said, probing for more information. “You know who it is?”

Jiminez nodded.

“Gregorius.”

He dropped the name into the air between us and it was as if he dropped a bomb.

By ten-thirty, I was at 6,500 feet, on a course of 60° with my radio tuned to 122.8 megacycles, which is the Unicom frequency for talk between planes.

The sky was clear, with only a faint smudge of haze near the horizon. I held the Cessna 210 steadily on course at slow cruise. I kept looking, from side to side, scanning the skies around me.

I saw the other plane on an intercept course when it was still so far away that it looked like a small dot that could have been anything, even an optical illusion. I reduced the speed of my own aircraft even more, pulling back the throttle and resetting the trim tab. In a few minutes, the other plane took on shape. Presently, it swung in a wide arc, circling to come in beside me, flying wingtip to wingtip. The plane was a Bonanza. There was only one man in it. The pilot of the Bonanza picked up his mike. I heard a rough baritone voice crackle in my earphones.

“Five… niner… Alpha. Is that you, Carter?”

I picked up my own mike.

“Affirmative.”

“Follow me,” he said, and the Bonanza swung smoothly away on a northerly course, sliding in ahead of my aircraft, slightly to my left and just above me where I could easily keep it in sight I turned the Cessna 210 to follow it, pushing the throttle ahead, picking up speed to keep it in sight.

Almost an hour later, the Bonanza slowed, let down its flaps and gear, and turned in a tight bank to let down for a landing on a strip bulldozed in the floor of a valley.

As I followed the Bonanza in, I saw that there was a Learjet parked at the far end of the runway, and I knew that Gregorius was waiting for me.

Inside the plush interior of the Learjet, I sat across from Gregorius, almost enfolded by the rich leather of the armchair.

“I know you are angry,” Gregorius said calmly, his voice smooth and polished. “However, please don’t let your emotions get in the way of your thinking. It wouldn’t be like you at all.”

“I told you that I’d never do another job for you again, Gregorius. I told that to Hawk, too.”

I watched the big man intently.

“So you did,” admitted Gregorius. He took a sip of his drink. “But then, nothing in this world is ever final — except death.”

He smiled at me out of a large, rubbery face of oversized features. Large mouth, large eyes that bulged codlike under thick gray eyebrows, a huge, protuberant nose with heavy nostrils, coarse pores in a sallow skin— Gregorius’ face was like a sculptor’s rough, clay head molded in heroic size to match the rest of his gross body.

“Besides,” he said smoothly, “Hawk has lent you to me, so you’re really working for him, you see.”

“Prove it.”

Gregorius pulled a folded sheet of onion skin paper out of his pocket. He reached over and handed it to me.

The message was in code. Not too difficult to decipher, either. Decoded, it read simply, “N3 on lend-lease to Gregorius. No AXE until job completed. Hawk.”

I lifted my head and stared coldly at Gregorius.

“It could be a fake,” I said.

“Here’s the proof that it’s genuine,” he answered, and handed me a package.

I looked down into my hands. The package was wrapped in paper, and when I tore that off, I found another wrapping underneath of chamois. And swaddled in the chamois was my 9mm Luger, the pencil-slim knife that I had carried in its sheath strapped to my right forearm, and Pierre, the tiny gas bomb.

I’d put them away — safely, I thought — six months ago. How Hawk had found my safe deposit box or had gotten its contents I’ll never know. But then, Hawk was able to do many things no one knew about. I nodded my head.

“You’ve proved your point,” I told Gregorius. “The message is genuine.”

“So you will listen to me now?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll listen.”