The Ransom of Black Stealth One

“You’re—I’llbegod-damned if you are,” he blurted, and stopped.

“And you’re going to take me at gunpoint,” she added.

“To fucking Cuba?”

“You’re not going to Cuba. You let me go so that I’d send them off in the wrong direction.” Not in questioning tones, but a flat declaration.

“Also,” he said, “so you won’t get killed if I make a mistake. I’ve made a few, you know.”

“And what I know, they’ll soon find out. Because I’ll damned well tell them, Kyle, I’ll tell them everything I can think of if you break your promise now!” She was almost shouting as she finished, eyes blazing, breast heaving wonderfully, he thought.

“What promise?”

“I said I’d help you on one condition. You said yes. The condition is that you take me as far as I want to go.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I thought about it a lot last night.” She folded her arms.

“Would you mind telling me why?”

She hesitated, looking from him to the softly purring aircraft, back to him again. “I can’t. Too many reasons. I—well, if I’m in trouble, after last night I can’t make it any worse by another day. Are you really going to turn that incredible machine over to someone else?”

“And what if I do?”

“You’re crazy. I wouldn’t. Whatever you get for it, it couldn’t be better than keeping it.” She saw something in his face, perhaps a recognition of sorts, and added, “You know what I fantasize, while I’m on a damn bridge design project? That it’s my spaceship. I can land it on the moon, or the asteroid Vesta. Don’t laugh, it’s a feeling that just fills me up to bursting, something that could lift me away from everyday things, of, of—”

“Freedom,” he supplied.

“Yes! I know I’m taking awful risks, maybe freedom is always risky. But dammit, I’ve been secure for twenty-two years, and I know what I want. I know you have it, and you owe me a little piece of it without treating me like a Goddamned juvenile delinquent. At least for another day or so. Please, Kyle?”

He saw that she was fighting back tears. “I’m giving you the freedom to get yourself seriously killed; you know that.”

“I’m of age, Kyle! If I wanted to drive a race car like my dad did, nobody could stop me.”

“Why don’t you?”

She thought about it a moment, wiped her eyes, and grinned. “Too many rules,” she replied.

“Shit,” he murmured.

“What’s wrong?”

“I was born thirty years too soon,” he said, and cocked his head. “Don’t move,” he cautioned. “Here it comes.”

The next moment her eyes grew wide because she could hear its approach but she stood there immovable as the little Northrup F-5 howled overhead at perhaps two thousand feet, banking as it passed. Corbett looked up and waved for the few seconds it was in sight. “Don’t worry,” he said as his hands came down. “He’d need a mile of freeway to land that thing. We’ve got a few minutes, but if he takes up orbit over us, believe me, you don’t want to go.”

“And if he doesn’t, what do we do with lover-boy?”

“I’ll cut him loose and—no, he’d see the hellbug and his testimony might hurt you.”

“I won’t let you kill him, Kyle, I don’t know why but—”

“I didn’t intend to. Wait: in that bedroom there’s a bottle of booze. I want you to stuff everything in the hellbug and wait for me. Don’t forget toilet paper. And bring that damned old alarm clock near the cash register. I’m probably going to need it.” He saw the elation in her face, tried to avoid thinking how that face would look after falling a mile, or taking a fifty-caliber incendiary slug.

As they separated inside the store she asked, “What are you going to do to Bobby?”

“I’m going to have a little drink with him. And he’s going to have a big, big drink with me.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The man who had shown a Finnish passport and the name Einar Fredriks to a customs official could have seen treetops in Chapultepec Park from the triple-glazed high window of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. Instead, Karel Vins leaned back in the swivel chair and placed his bootheels on the desk before him. “How do you like the pattern, Jorge?” Vins had trained these men and his Spanish was excellent.

Jorge Ocampo’s was better. Before the Soviets took him to Cuba he had been tenth-generation Mexican. His short, sturdy brown body and strong aquiline nose were pure Indio, though European stock had favored him with eyes that were not quite brown enough to be black. “May I sit?”

“Of course, of a certainty,” Vins exclaimed, smiling at Jorge and at Mateo Carranza, the scarred veteran whose reddish hair marked him, a Cuban, with his Castilian extraction. A few kilos lighter than Ocampo and only slightly taller, Carranza did not carry himself like a fighter. It had been known to give him an edge—and all Carranza needed was an edge. Men of the usual stamp—say, KGB— would have automatically favored Mateo Carranza over the swarthy peasant, Jorge. Vins was not hampered by such bigotry; and besides, Jorge had stood his ground with a Kalashnikov to cover the escape of his revered Lobo after Vins, some years before, had been wounded near the Nicaraguan border. Mateo was more of a loner, and probably would have deserted military life for armed robbery years before, were it not for his aged mother in Matanzas. She, it seemed, had thought the world of Mateo. So, in his way, did Karel Vins, alias Vawlk, alias Lobo. Vins had known both men in rough times, and knew what they were made of. He had chosen them carefully. “Sit, sit,” he urged, smiling. He snapped the edges of his bootsoles together. “What do you think of these?”

Mateo, whose slouching carriage and stolid face made him appear dull at times, was nothing of the sort. “I think they are yanqui boots,” he said. Jorge merely looked and shrugged.

“Exactly right. You remember a surveillance school session after all this time?”

Mateo Carranza ran a forefinger under his nose to hide a smile. “No, but I remember how you think. To claim otherwise would be lying, Major.”

Vins dropped his feet and leaned forward. “No more rank, Mateo. Not this time. I am your lobo, if you like, and you will follow me as always. But this time, I think, we must consider ourselves more as equals, even brothers.” He let it sink in, knowing the two latinos were not close, that Jorge did not really trust a man like Mateo. “Mateo: you recall the bar in Camaguey?”

“He recalls many bars, many places,” Jorge said.

“But you were with me too, Jorge,” Vins said. “I was standing you drinks for saving my pelt in Nicaragua.”

“Ay, Madre de Dios,” Mateo said. “The money.”

“The marked money,” Vins insisted, one finger raised.

“Not here, if you please,” said Mateo, looking around him.

Vins beamed and stood up, stepping over to rap a wall which was surfaced with padded canvas. “Why not here, compadre? This is not an ordinary embassy room. This is a GRU room. I control the ears here. It is, in fact, the only room in Ciudad Mexico where we can speak as we like”—he paused and released another smile, prefabricated but always useful—“of the things we like. So: I saw the roll you carried was marked. And I knew how you had gotten it.”

“A man must eat,” said Mateo, flushing. “His mother must eat, too.”

“And is your mother well?” asked Vins, who knew exactly how she had fared.

“Among the saints in Heaven,” said Mateo, crossing himself.

“Lo siento mucho, it is much regretted,” Vins replied. Nothing tied Carranza to his home now, and their interchange had stressed the fact. “But I mention Camaguey only to refresh you on certain things we discussed that night.”