“Maybe she’s really naked,” Pedro said, feigning excitement. “I’d give a pack of cigarettes for a look at that.”
“Why not?” The guard held out his hand with the key dangling from it. Pedro reached for it. “First the cigarettes,” the guard chided him. Pedro handed him the cigarettes and the guard gave him the key.
Pedro pulled a chair over in front of the door. He stood on it and unlocked the slot. He peered through it for a long time.
“What do you see?” the first guard asked. Pedro didn’t answer.
“What is it?” the second guard demanded.
Pedro lifted his eyes from the slot and winked at them. Then he peered into the prison again.
“Is she naked?” The two guards spoke together.
Pedro leaned back again and gave a low whistle.
“Let us see!” Both guards were tugging at his legs now. One of them pulled a chair up alongside the one Pedro was standing on and climbed up beside him. The other one kept trying to pull Pedro down from his perch.
Pedro moved just enough to let the first man glue his eyes to the slot. Then Pedro and I moved together. Using our gun butts, we clubbed the two of them, Pedro felling the man on the chair at the same instant that I hit the one pulling at Pedro’s legs.
“That’ll teach ’em that voyeurism doesn’t pay,” I murmured as they crumpled to the floor.
“Get them out of my way!” Minetti sprang into action.
I Pedro and I pulled the two unconscious bodies off to the side and bound and gagged them while Minetti examined the lock. He still had his nose to it as I hefted the iron bar free of the door. “Not too bad,” he told us finally. “It’ll take about an hour to do it right, maybe two.”
Actually, it turned out to take about an hour and a half. Then, when Minetti was ready, I climbed up to the peephole and called Victoria’s name. Her face was startled, but there was no time to explain anything. “Get under your bunk,” I told her, “and cover your face with a pillow.” She quickly followed my instructions.
Minetti inserted the device he had created. It looked like a filter cigarette. Its twin nestled in his breast pocket beside the white handkerchief. He ran a string from it to the far side of the room, near the staircase. Then he soaked the string in lighter fluid. “Pull those two oafs over here,” he instructed us, “and get underneath them. If there’s any flying debris, they’ll make a good shield.”
When this was done, Minetti crouched down with us behind the two tethered guards. He lit the string with his cigarette lighter and the three of us buried our faces against the flesh of our prisoners. There was the sound of a faint sizzle and then a dull, thud-like explosion.
Minetti stood up. “Perfect,” he announced. The lock to the cell was still smoking. He picked up the iron bar and pried at the door with it. After a moment it swung easily open.
Pedro, his gun at the ready, stood at the foot of the staircase, poised to kill anyone who might have been attracted by the noise. I watched as Vickie came out from under the cell bunk and emerged from the doorway. She looked disheveled, but unhurt.
“Steve Victor,” she exclaimed. “Am I ever glad to see you!”
“Hello, you faithless bitch,” I replied pleasantly. “How’s the sweetheart of the CIA?”
“Be bitter if you want to, Steve, but I’ve really never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life.” Even that hoity-toity English accent of hers couldn’t disguise the fact that she meant it. “You are a sight for sore eyes,” she added.
“You look pretty good yourself,” I admitted grudgingly. And so she did. That flaming red hair, those sculptured Anglican breasts, the deep green eyes, the slim hips and long sexy legs, the air of sexiness and hauteur about her-—it was all there, all still there as it had been in the past when she gave me the gate for Alan Foster, all still there and sending that same old little thrill of desire through me as I looked at her. “You don’t look any the worse for wear,” I told her. “Word was that they tortured you, but you don’t look like they did.”
“Word was wrong. They were going to, but orders must have come from on high to keep me intact. They think I know something about—” She paused. “About something,” she finished lamely.
“You mean the German gentleman they’re holding upstairs?” I asked blithely.
“Then he is here!” she said excitedly. “I was right. I was on the right trail when they grabbed me.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Let me not mislead you. I’m not sure. We have info that there’s a foreigner here. But that’s really all we know. It may not be the guy you’re after.”
“But there’s a chance--” she began.
“Look,” Minetti interrupted, “we don’t have time for this now. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Not without him,” Vickie insisted. “We’ve got to get him out with us.”
“Sorry. That wasn’t the way we planned it,” Minetti told her icily.
“Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be,” she answered with equal firmness.
“Is she giving the orders around here?” Minetti turned to me.
Remembering that Putnam had said I was to help Vickie in any way I could, I had no choice but to tell Minetti that we’d have to play it her way. His eyes said he didn’t like it. But he agreed to cooperate. “Wait down here,” he said, “While I take care of the bozo at the top of the stairs.”
He was only gone a moment. When he returned, we followed him up the stairs. The guard was slumped in his chair, his head thrown back. He’d sprouted a second mouth, a grinning mouth running with blood from ear to ear. Minetti had slit his throat neatly, quickly and silently from behind.
He slit two more throats in the same way before we were on the floor where Pedro’s information said the foreigner was. It also happened to be the floor where Fidel Castro himself had his quarters. Pedro silently garroted the guard sitting with his back to the stairwell up which we’d come. He dragged him through it as he finished choking him to death, and I quickly slipped out and took his place. I looked up and down the hall. There were two other guards in sight. I snapped my fingers and Pedro walked brazenly from the doorway behind me. We were both in uniform. He walked toward one of the two guards, I toward the other. We reached them at the same moment. Mine looked up questioningly as I approached. I answered his question by noiselessly clubbing him with the butt of my gun. Pedro did the same.
Minetti and Victoria joined us in the center of the hall. “That would be Castro’s quarters over there,” Minetti told us, indicating the door behind the guard Pedro had clubbed. “And the other guy must have been guarding his foreigner you’re after.” Pedro nodded agreement. “Okay then, come on. We’re going to do this right so we get away with it. I’ve been thinking and I have a plan. Follow me.”
He led the way to the door alongside the one leading to Castro’s bedroom. He tried the knob. It was locked. Minetti took a thin, hooked wire from his pocket. The lock was a simple hotel room lock and he picked it easily and quickly. A moment later the four of us were in a rather large bathroom.
“All right now, here’s how we’re going to pull off this caper,” Minetti said, reverting from his usually precise speech to the lingo of his early days in the Mafia. “That”--he pointed to the door on the opposite wall of the bathroorn—-“leads into a bedroom of none other than Fidel himself.” He took the gadget that looked like a filter cigarette from his breast pocket. “This,” he informed us, “has enough soup in it to blow up Gibraltar, rock and all. There’s a tiny timer mechanism in it, and I’ve set it already. It’ll go off in about thirty minutes.”
The three of us exchanged nervous looks and then looked back at Minetti.
“Don’t worry,” he told us. “We won’t be here when it blows. But friend Fidel will. By that time we’ll be at the other end of the hotel, right at the gate to the farthest guard post. They’ll hear the explosion and come running. If they don’t, we’ll just have to fight our way out. Even that shouldn’t be too hard, because any help they might get ordinarily if they sounded an alarm should be busy picking up the pieces of their bearded leader in there.”