“We could.”
“Of course you could.”
“And they’d take all our pretty toys and use them on us.”
“They wouldn’t have the manpower to hold out.”
“Right. We’d win. But they’d probably last as long as they could, and it would be expensive for us. We might try it anyway. More likely, we’d try to use para divisions to cut them off when they try loading the plane. Again, it’s something that would probably work, unless there was a foulup somewhere along the line. Which might happen.”
“If they already stole the weapons and a good-sized cargo jet, I’d say foulups have a tendency to happen.”
“You’re not the first person to notice that.” He chuckled. “Paul, let me save time. You’re not going to think of a line of defense that either a man or a machine hasn’t already suggested. Some have been ruled out and some are in the planning stage. None is ideal. An ideal operation would recover the weapons intact with no loss of life on our side and no publicity. If it doesn’t work, then the other procedures come into play one by one. What we want you for is the first step, the ideal play.”
“Which is?”
“They stole ’em from us, and now we steal ’em back again.”
“Who is we?”
“Two men. You and me.” He watched my eyes. “No clever answer?”
“No.”
“You on the inside, an unknown. We know they must have men in our camp but no one will know about you. You on the inside and me on the outside. You don’t know the physical plant, you can’t visualize it, but you can take my word it’s feasible. It can be done.”
“I’ll take your word.”
“No immediate doubts, No great show of surprise?”
“None.” I stood up. “I saw it coming.”
He looked worried.
“I made a mistake,” I told him. “I should have drowned you before. All I had to do was do nothing, leave you there in the water. I could have used you for fishbait and your boat for firewood and no one would ever have come looking for you. No, don’t get up. Don’t even try, or I’ll knock you down again. They don’t know you’re here. They lost interest in me the day I checked out of the Doulton. You’re all on your own.”
“Paul—”
“Shut up. This isn’t an Agency job, it’s your job. All yours. The last time I saw you, the only other time I saw you, you told me my trouble was that I learned how to think. Don’t forget it. You told me I wouldn’t take a black pill. I won’t take one with a sugar coating either. You want me for something, then you give it to me straight and I say yes or no.”
He started to get up. I let him get most of the way, then kicked his feet out from under him.
I said, “There are two things you can do. You can stick to your lie or find a new one, and if you do I’ll know it, and I’ll take you out and drown you. Or you can start over without the frills and do it right. It’s your move.”
“You would drown me.”
“You already knew that.”
“We had a meal together, we talked, and you would drown me.”
“Oh, cut the shit.”
“You’re a beauty. They never should have let you get away. I knew it the day I talked to you, I saw things that wouldn’t fit on their graphs. I knew you’d crack and I knew you’d mend, and—”
“Leave me out. Let’s hear it.”
“Sure,” he said. “You may not like it, but this time it’s straight. And it’s a honey.”
It wasn’t bad. Everything was about as he had described it, he explained, except that the United States government wasn’t in on it. Both the military and the civilian intelligence people had it on very good authority that the whole shipment had already arrived in South America, and the Agency was busy rushing men to that area to try to minimize the damage.
“But it isn’t there, Paul. It’s still in the States. I know it, and I have to be the only person who does. Nobody came and told me. There was data coming across my desk, miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything concrete. You could feed the whole mess to a computer and not even find out what time it was.”
But he sensed something, enough to make it worth his while to take a quiet little trip west. He nosed around and found out he was right. He already had me traced as far as Florida. A private investigator placed me in Key West, and he did the rest of the detecting himself.
“You remember that conversation we had? I was talking to myself as much as to you. I could put this package on the right desk and come out neck deep in glory. I don’t want glory anymore. I’d rather be up to my neck in money.”
He figured a half share would come to a million dollars. A half share was all he wanted. With that kind of money around, all of it tax-free, it made no sense to haggle over a split. A million dollars was a footnote in an administrative budget. It was also his present take-home pay for the next eighty-seven years and seven months. And it was one half of what he was certain he could get from a well-heeled refugee group in Tampa.
“They’re in the same camp as the good guys who were originally set to receive the stuff. That’s the real beauty of it, Paul. They’re on the same side. The goods go to their original destination, the U.S. comes out clean, our friends down south avoid getting themselves atomized, and you and I cut up a two-million-dollar pie.”
There were more details, fine points. I let him finish. Then he asked me what I thought, and I said I wanted to think it over, and he told me that was just the answer he hoped I’d give him. He finished his last cigarette, and I walked him down to the boat to get his other pack. He opened it and flipped the strip of cellophane away. I didn’t say anything about it. He lit up and asked me if I didn’t feel chilly. I said I didn’t, that I rarely noticed temperature changes. He said he wished his clothes were dry. I waited until he had finished his cigarette and flipped it into the water. It was amazing how quickly he forgot to behave.
“Beautiful out here,” he said. “Really beautiful.”
“It is,” I said.
Then I spun him around and stabbed three fingers into his gut two inches south of his navel. I pulled it enough so that nothing would get ruptured. He doubled up in agony but couldn’t make a sound. That’s one of the nice things about that particular jab.
The next thing he knew he was on his back in two feet of water, just about halfway between the top and the bottom.
I kept him under for maybe ten seconds. His eyes were open, but it was impossible to catch his expression in that light, not with the water in the way.
I pulled him up and let him sputter and breathe. I didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t. Then I stuck him under again.
Ten more seconds and I brought him up. I had never before seen such terror on a human face. I wasn’t doing anything to him, he wasn’t even swallowing any water, but that hardly mattered. He was in very bad shape.
“You’re about to go down for the third time,” I told him gently. “The third time is the charm. You seem to think that you have to tell me what I want to hear, but all I want to hear is the truth. Forget about persuading me. Concentrate on staying alive.”
He didn’t say a word. His mouth moved but that was all.
“You’ve got ten seconds, George.” If he wanted me to call him George this was a good time to start. “It shouldn’t take you more than three sentences. When your time’s up you go under, so you’d better finish before I get bored.”
The words came out of him in one uninflected stream, no punctuation anywhere. But it only added up to two sentences.
“The government still has the stuff in a warehouse. It won’t be shipped but we can steal it and split two million cash.”