“What about the German?” Victoria asked.
“I’m coming to that. Do you think he’ll come with us willingly?”
“I don’t know,” Victoria admitted.
“Then we won’t take any chances. Pedro and I will go get him. We’ll tie him and gag him and take him by force. You two wait here. We should be back in five minutes.”
“Don’t you think I should go with you?” I asked.
“No. The two of us can handle it. And in case we run into trouble, you’ll still have a chance to get away with her. That’s what this mission is all about, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Don’t worry. It should be simple. But just in case—-” He handed me the cigarette-like cylinder. “If a stray bullet happened to connect with this, goodbye!” he told me with a grin. “You’d better hold onto it.”
I took it gingerly as Minetti and Pedro slipped out to the hallway. I looked at Victoria and smiled. “Alone at last,” I said, absentmindedly juggling the bomb in my hand.
“Put it down, will you?” she said nervously.
“Of course, my love.” I set the cylinder on the sink and took her in my arms.
“Are you crazy—?” Her rebuke was a sharp whisper.
“Not at all. But revenge is sweet, my one and only.”
“Stop it!”
“Hush, sweetness. Fidel needs his sleep.” I kissed her and let her go with a laugh.
She smiled back faintly. “Who do you think you are? James Bond?” she asked sarcastically.
“No. Merely the man from O.R.G.Y.,” I told her and pinched her succulent English bottom to prove it. She squelched a squeal and looked at me reproachfully. I smiled back. I was enjoying myself. I’d teach her to pass me up for a CIA mattress.
Suddenly there was the sound of the door being opened from Castro’s bedroom. I grabbed Victoria and pulled her into the bathtub, behind the shower curtain. We were lucky. It was solid, not opaque. After a moment I separated the curtain just enough to look through it.
There he was! The great man himself! The bearded terror of the Western hemisphere! Fidel Castro! There he was! Sitting on his potty-chair with his pajama pants around his ankles and making the sour faces of a man suffering from constipation.
Poor Fidel! Despite everything, I could identify with his struggling. It seemed truly mammoth, but destined to defeat!
However, I had no time to dwell on his travails. There was the sudden chatter of a machine gun sounding very close. Then everything happened at once. Fidel sprang to his feet. Pedro leaped through the door and locked it behind him, flattening himself against the wall to avoid the splatter of tommygun bullets following him through the door. I shot out from behind the shower curtain and waved my gun under Castro’s nose. He got the message. He sat back down.
“Pedro. Tell them we’ve got this fink here,” I said.
“Better let him tell them himself,” Pedro replied. “They might not be so quick to believe me.” He chattered to Castro in Spanish. Castro shouted out a few words and the shooting stopped. But we could hear them in Castro’s bedroom as well as in the hall now.
“What happened?” I asked Pedro.
“They got Minetti,” he told me simply.
“Dead?”
“Si. We had the foreigner all tied up and were ready to bring him here when a whole platoon of soldiers came into the room. They took us by surprise. Fortunately, they were as surprised as we were. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here now. Minetti and I both bolted. One of their bullets blew off the top of his head just as we reached this door.” He fell silent a moment. “What do we do now?” he asked finally.
Before I could answer, Castro chattered something in Spanish to Pedro.
“What did he say?” I wanted to know.
“He asked the same question I did,” Pedro translated.
“Tell him not to worry about it. Those guys out there aren’t going to bother us as long as we’ve got him for a hostage. Tell him to just put it out of his mind and go on with whatever he was doing. Or, rather, trying to do,” I added on second thought. “We’ve got all the time in the world to figure a way out of this.”
“Do we?” Victoria Winters asked. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“That.” She pointed to the little cylinder I’d left on the washstand. “From what Minetti said, we’ve got less than twenty minutes before it goes off. Unless one of you two know how to dismantle it. Do you?”
We both admitted that we didn’t. Pedro picked it up and I looked over his shoulder as he examined it. Mi- netti had done a good job. It was perfectly smooth. Neither one of us could figure a way of de-fusing it. And the truth is that even if we’d had a hunch we’d have been afraid to try it lest we blow ourselves to smithereens.
Castro spoke again and Pedro put the bomb down carefully and translated. “He asks if he might not pull his pajama pants up since there is a lady present.”
“Tell him okay. Even a Commie should be allowed to die with his pants on.”
After that we fell silent. The only sound was the faint buzzing from the time-bomb. It was buzzing off the minutes, precious minutes, minutes of life. I stood up and investigated the window over the bathtub. If worst came to worst, maybe I could just heave the bomb out the window and hope it exploded far enough away so that we could survive the blast. No luck. The windows were sealed with steel shutters. Security precautions, no doubt. The Reds didn’t want their head fink bumped off in the undignified process of coping with his constipation.
I sat down on the edge of the tub. The faint buzzing seemed to grow louder. Fifteen minutes left. Ten minutes. Five. Our lives were buzzing away and there didn’t seem to be one damned thing we could do about it.
CHAPTER SIX
FIVE MINUTES. The buzzing—-more of a hum really—- continued, grew louder, more noticeable. Castro heard the noise. He cocked his head. He didn’t speak English and so he hadn’t understood our discussion of the bomb. Now, slowly, recognition of what the sound meant showed in his eyes.
Four minutes.
Castro spoke in Spanish. “He asks if he is correct in guessing that this object is a bomb,” Pedro told us.
“Give that man $64,000,” I replied drily10 .
“What?”
“Tell him he’s right.” Pedro told him and Castro spoke again. “When is the timing mechanism set for?” Pedro translated.
I looked at my watch. “Three minutes,” I told him.
Three minutes!
There was a lot of urgency in Castro’s voice as he spoke again. “He asks if we are not going to dismantle it,” Pedro said. “And he advises that we do so with all speed.”
“Tell him I couldn’t agree with him more. But fill him in on the facts, which are that we just don’t know how to stop this particular clock.”
Castro chattered rapidly. “He says he does,” Pedro told us. “He says he will if we will guarantee to let him go. He says he has had much experience with this type of device during his days as a terrorist.”
“Tell him we’ll let him go in exchange for his promise of safe conduct out of the hotel,” I told Pedro.
Two minutes!
“No!” Pedro said. “A chance like this may never come again. What does it matter if we die? So long as we take the tyrant with us.”
Lordy save us from true believers, I thought to myself. Desperately, I pulled rank. “That decision is mine to make,” I told Pedro. “Tell him what I said.”