“Man must be a damn fool or damned crazy to try it with what he was reportin’,” a ground crewman, who was also about to pack it up and leave, noted.
The helicopter seemed a bit wobbly, and as it landed, pretty hard and off the mark, they could see a trail of black smoke coming from the rear and could also see, in the spotlights, places where the aircraft’s paint seemed blistered or burnt.
The pilot cut the engines and went back to get his passengers off as fast as possible, as technicians raced forward with special fire gear. It didn’t take long for the pilot and passengers, both of them, to get off and away, but all seemed more than a little shaky. One of them, a slender, small woman in a loose-fitting dress, looked around, spotted MacDonald, and made her way shakily to him. She was carrying a small briefcase handcuffed to her wrist.
“Jesus!” she swore as she reached him, looking a little green and more than a little like she was about to throw up. “I don’t care what anybody’s payin’ me. I wait and take the boat back!”
“Rough trip, huh?”
“Rough ain’t the word! Lightning and swaying and everything horrible that anybody can imagine in a helicopter and then some! Only reason we made it was that lightning struck the interior electrical system knocking out most of his instruments and all his navigation. Somehow he managed to spot a landmark and made for here, since he knew how to get here blind easier than gettin’ back to someplace else. I tell ya, it was awful. Weird, too. Soon as we got close to the island here it cleared up like it wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at all. Stars, clear air, everything. Pilot managed to jury rig the landing lights. Only reason I ain’t throwin’ up on you is ’cause there ain’t nothin’ left!”
He reached over to the handcuffs, brought up her arm, and placed a thumb on a small metal plate in back of the cuff that was attached to her wrist. The cuff snapped open and he took the case. “I think maybe they wanted to stop this from getting to me,” he told her grimly. “As usual, they used a cannon to swat a fly and muffed it.”
She stared at him. “You mean somebody caused all that?”
He nodded. “I expected something of the sort when I found that Martinez hadn’t reboarded the ship when it left St. George’s.”
“He’s dead,” she told him. “They found his body in the hills. Carved up like a ripe melon from all reports. Ugly.” The idea, however, seemed far less unpleasant to her than the storm she’d just gone through. “Cops said it looked almost like a ritual murder.”
He nodded. “Well, I think you’ll be safe now. You were just brought in for this one trip and don’t know enough to make you a target. The ship’s just left, so you’re either here for three more days or you can take the trip back to Trinidad by chopper tomorrow. I know what your feelings are now, but I think you’ll find it much smoother going the other way.”
She looked dubiously back at the helicopter, its rear panel off, the technicians having stopped the fire now looking at the mess. “Well, maybe. Can’t give me a hint as to what this is about?”
“Sorry. You want to be safe—or dead?”
“Safe every time. But—what about you? Aren’t you a sitting duck now?”
“I doubt it. If they haven’t tried for me by this point, I doubt if they’ll do it now. There’s the tram for the Lodge. Take it with the pilot and the other passenger.’’
“Aren’t you coming?”
“No, I’ll catch one going downhill from here to the village. Say—what’s your name?”
She grinned, seeming to have fully recovered now. “Kristy. I’m from San Diego.”
“O.K., Kristy of San Diego, you just go up and relax. The doc up there will give you something for the stomach if you need it.”
“Thanks. You take care, now.”
“I will,” he called to her, then watched the tram leave. He knew that there would be a routine late tram from the Lodge in about half an hour, and he decided to wait for it. He didn’t want to go up to the Lodge with the contents of the briefcase unread and unstudied, and he didn’t feel like making his way back down the hill in the dark, even though it was an easy walk. If they could whip up that kind of reception for the chopper, how hard would it be to have somebody waiting for him with a good, stiff blackjack?
There were bright lights on at the helipad, four techs still working on the chopper, and there seemed no reason not to sit down at the edge of the pad and take a look now at what he had. He took his keyring out of his pocket, found one out of the perhaps twenty or so keys, stuck it in the lock, then opened the clasps. If you didn’t open them just so, a fairly loud alarm and a canister of tear gas went off, though he didn’t really think that was much of a deterrent.
Some of the files inside, though, were dynamite. He didn’t worry that they were mostly computer printouts; he knew that this had not been run through any computer connected up to a master system.
Old Reggie, for example, had quite an interesting background. Second son of the Earl of Halsey, who went broke during the sixties when Labour was attacking the old ancestral seats of wealth. Eaton, Oxford, all the best—but that was before. Older brother hanged himself in a London flat in ’76, attributed to depression and heavy drug use, particularly hallucinogens. Reggie theoretically inherited, but there hadn’t been much to inherit. In fact, by then he’d been a big wheel in mainframe computers and apparently he and his brother hadn’t been close. Reggie could have easily bailed out the family financially and covered his brother’s debts—indeed, he could have bought back the ancestral home from the American who had purchased it from the bank—but he hadn’t.
Reggie’s passion was computers—his knighthood, the only title he didn’t refuse or surrender—was for his work in helping set up the British intelligence computer network.
All this, of course, was known and easily available in SAINT’s own files. Also not new was the revelation that his brother had gotten rather strongly involved with a London-based cult, and that this cult seemed to be a bunch of devil worshippers. They did the drugs and the Black Mass and the ceremonies and were considered quite round the bend. They were also suspected in a number of grisly murders that had made the tabloids’ day off and on for a couple of years, but their link was never proven and they were never brought to trial. The identities of most of the members, however, were known to Scotland Yard and they were always under close watch, which seemed to have stopped the murder spree for the past few years.
What was new, however, was the discovery of some old records and the writings of some now dead cult members that indicated that Reggie was just as deep in it as his brother, and might, in fact, have gotten his brother involved as a public shill, masking Reggie’s own involvement and acting as his surrogate. The security boys at Cheltenham had thought Reggie might be involved in some sort of cult stuff, but because it was entirely British and seemed apolitical, and because he never attended any rites or got directly involved with them, and, also, because he knew they knew of his interests, and therefore was unlikely to be blackmailed over it, they let it pass.
There had also, in fact, been an inheritance from his brother. Tons, it seemed, of ancient and modern books and pamphlets on Satanism, devil cults, anthropological studies of worldwide religious beliefs and ceremonies, and all the rest. Where his brother, who’d made his living at the end as a London tour guide, got the money to accumulate such a massive library was unknown, but Reggie had accepted it and had himself seemed rather taken aback by the sheer volume of material. He had, however, had it moved up to his house and had reviewed and meticulously cataloged it. After three years, he’d turned it over to an auction house to be broken up and sold, the money going to various charities, and that had seemed the end of it.