What he could see of the castle reminded him of a fairy tale castle he had once seen on the Rhine. He could see turrets and castellated towers and a single line of ramparts with bartizans overlooking an invisible moat. From the tallest tower, a long spire of an affair, there floated a large pennon. As the breeze snapped it taut Nick could make out the device — a single white lily emblazoned against scarlet. He could not repress a smile at the incongruity of the scene. Splendor, even grandeur in this setting, wedded to commercialism. The White Lily. Symbolic of White Lily cosmetics! Millions of jars of goo purchased annually by women all over the world. Women who hoped the white paste would make them as beautiful as Gerda von Rothe. Known locally as The Bitch.
Nick laughed softly and shook his head. It was a mad world. But The Bitch and her castle and her cosmetic products had nothing to do with his mission. She had millions, so no need for her to counterfeit. And a woman like that was not likely to mix in Mexican politics. No. It was chance, nothing more, that The Bitch and her castle happened to be squarely in the middle of things. Of the immense area he had to explore.
And yet — the plane had come from that airstrip. The airstrip belonged to the lady and so, as far as the Mexican police knew, did the Beechcraft. Vargas had been employed as a pilot by the lady. That was all the Mexican police had known.
Nick smiled. Of course they might have been a little more interested if the CIA had told them about the two bags of counterfeit found in the plane. But the CIA had not told them about it. They had sat on that, and simply reported the crash of a Mexican national in a stolen plane.
It was verging into darkness now, but not too dark for the gunner to see him. The bullet splatted off a boulder just to the left of Nick and went caterwauling around in frantic ricochet.
Nick flattened out and tried to dig himself into solid rock. We are not alone, he thought with a complete lack of piety. Goddamn it — we are not alone! With the Webley in his hand he wriggled sideways like a snake into the shelter of an overhanging rock and waited for the next bullet.
Chapter 5
The Bitch
In the dead quiet that followed, Nick thought he heard a mocking laugh somewhere out in the gloom. He was not really sure — it might have been a trick of echo or the play of his imagination. In any case it did not come again. Nor was he shot at again. There was nothing but silence and the falling dark and the night cries of small birds. He lay unmoving, scarcely breathing in the shelter of his rocks, thinking furiously all the while. Since he was now on the highest point of land for miles around the shot had come from below, from one of the innumerable gullies and ravines and rock forts that covered the area. It was made-to-order ambush country.
And yet the gunner had missed! Granted that shooting uphill was tricky at any time, especially in crepuscular light, still he wondered. Had the gunner tried again, had he tried to hold Nick with a volley, the matter would have been clear. But there had been only one shot. That and the mocking laugh — had he really heard it?
The alternative was that someone was having fun and games with him; he had been warned, put on notice that he was being watched. By whom? The bandits mentioned by the CIA Director? Minions of The Bitch? Members of the Serpent Party? Friends of the ex-Nazi he had only just buried? Nick shrugged and with some effort extricated himself from the mental tangle. It would work itself out in time. Things always did.
For an hour he lay unmoving. A sidewinder twitched past without seeing him. Finally he made his way back to the barranca, his eyes a luminous amber now as he made his way easily through the dark along a trail he had only traveled once.
Nothing in or around the hut had been disturbed. There were no traces of visitors. Working in the dark, Nick cut some cedar branches and, with the musette bag, arranged them to look like a man sleeping on the bunk. He covered them with his only blanket.
The moon was pushing one golden horn above the blunted teeth of the sierra to the east when he snaked out of the hut and took up lodgings for the night in the low branches of a piñon pine and settled down for the vigil.
It proved a waste of time. His only visitor was a cougar. The big cat came softly out of the trees beyond the pond, on stealthy velvet paws, then paused as it caught the man-scent. With a flash of saffron in the moonlight it was gone.
As dawn seeped over the peaks in pale effulgence, Nick went to sleep, clinging to his branch. When he awoke the sun was three hours high. He climbed down, swearing at his stiffness and feeling just a bit the fool. Still it had been necessary to take the precaution. He bathed his face in the pool, then with the Webley in his belt and concealed by his shirt, he skirted the pond and climbed to the mesa. Descending on the far side he found a path that led toward the tiny village of Cosala. He followed it at an easy pace. He was gambling there would be no police in the village, and a visit for supplies would aid in establishing his role as a gold tramp. It might also, he thought rather grimly, provide some sort of reaction — other than shooting at him — from those who were watching him. N3’s frown, as he trudged along, had something of puzzlement in it. The CIA man had assured him that he did not have to worry about the bandidos. Nick wondered now how the CIA could be so sure. Did they have some sort of private deal cooked up with El Tigre and his band of cutthroats? Somewhere in the back of his mind Nick was beginning to feel the first prick of apprehension. Was this going to turn out to be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing? Another Bay of Pigs on a lesser scale? He knew damned well that the CIA hadn’t told him everything. They never did!
Still there was his own job to do, no matter what the obstacles; he was responsible to Hawk and AXE and had to get on with it. Yet, as he entered the village, the vague feeling of impending snafu would not go away.
It was a dismal little village, typical of the poverty and inertia the Serpent Party was trying to exploit. Nick Carter, rather an apolitical type, could see instantly that this could be made a fertile breeding ground for communism. It would, of course, be called by another name. The Chinese Reds were very far from being fools.
There was a single, mean street lined with tumble-down adobe houses. An open gutter, crammed with filth, ran down the center of the street. The smell and aspect of poverty was everywhere, hanging over the village like a miasma, attaching itself to the few peasants who shuffled past him without the usual friendly greeting that one receives in Mexico. Nick was aware of the furtive glances as he kept alert for any sign of a policeman. The villagers, of course, would know instantly what he was. A gold bum. As sullen and unfriendly as they were, he doubted any of them would turn him in to the Federal authorities; people like these were not usually on good terms with the police.
At the far end of the street he found a shabby cantina lit by candles and guttering oil lamp. No electricity in the village, of course. Nor any running water. That would have to be fetched from a single communal pump. As Nick rapped on the bar for service — there was no one in attendance — he could not help making the stark comparison between this village and Acapulco. They were two different worlds. Granted that this was one of the poorer provinces, and that the Mexican Government was doing everything in its power, yet these people were still living in ignorance, poverty and desperation. None of their country’s many bloody revolutions had availed for them. So it was here, and in the other places like it, that the Serpent Party was winning seats in the Chamber of Deputies and even in the Senate. It was weak as yet, the Party, but it was on the march. And financed, according to both the AXE and CIA experts, by the proceeds of the counterfeit that was playing hell with the American economy. Clever bastards, these Chinese!