I hadn’t a lighter or a match; I had nothing at all except my sense of touch. Alert, tensing myself against anyone who might be in the room — if it was a room — and straining not to cough again, I felt in front of me like a blind man, taking a half-pace at a time. In a moment I struck something hard: a bench, about waist-high, littered with small objects I could not identify.
Fumbling over the bench, I touched a wall, and started to grope along it. My head felt as though it were stuffed with horsehair; my throat was rasped from my violent coughing. I wondered wildly whether I was engulfed in a nightmare or whether this was real.
My shaking fingers touched a switch. I threw it, not caring what the consequences might be. Nothing happened, and I started to creep farther forward.
Suddenly a startling pattern of lights leaped into being just in front of my face, and I staggered back, almost losing my balance. Things dropped into perspective with astonishing precision.
It was a cathode ray tube I had turned on. And by its fitful, irregular glare I could see that this was the concrete shed — the blockhouse — where Maria Posador had brought me to show me her recording of my appearance on television.
I looked around wonderingly. What the hell was I doing here?
Before I had had time to digest my situation, there was a clinking sound. I spun to face its direction; it came from the heavy padlocked door. Someone was putting a key in. I could hear tense breathing.
I snatched a length of metal bar from the nearest bench and snapped off the switch controlling the cathode ray tube. In the renewed darkness I saw irregular glimmers from a hand-held flashlight, seeping through the crack at the edge of the door. Cautiously, I moved toward the glimmers. Whoever had put me in here was going to get as good as he gave.
The door swung back — thrown back violently. I leaped forward, seeing in the dim light of dawn that the newcomer held not only a flashlight, but a gun.
Then my bare foot landed, with my entire weight behind it, on a thick electric cable crossing the floor.
The pain was shocking. I lost my footing, lost my grip on the metal bar — and the gun cracked.
Something hit the fleshy upper part of my left arm; it felt as though a pair of gigantic red-hot pincers had closed on the skin. The impact spun me around and sent me sprawling across the floor. Rough concrete burned skin from my cheek and the palm of the hand with which I tried to break my fall. My head rang with dizzying pain.
Light bloomed from the ceiling; I tried to turn my head, but all I could see was a pair of soft moccasin slippers and the lower part of a pair of biscuit-colored linen slacks. A voice said softly, “Madre de Dios! Why should he be here?”
Maria Posador herself.
I heard a clinking sound as she hurriedly pushed the gun and the flashlight onto a bench; then she was kneeling beside me, probing my blood-smeared arm with precise, gentle fingers. I dug my voice harshly out of my raw throat.
“I’m not unconscious, you know,” I said stupidly. “I—”
Another fit of coughing seized me. Maria Posador rocked back on her heels, staring down at me in astonishment. “But you!” she said, shaking her head. “But — you! I — I — oh, we must get you to the house. And quickly!”
I wasn’t thinking clearly for the next few minutes. I got to my feet somehow and stumbled out into the dawn with my left arm hanging limp, my right around her shoulders. The grass was cool and soft under my bare feet; the fresh, clean air steadied me and blew the clouds from my brain.
When we came in sight of the house itself, Maria Posador cried out for aid; a man who might have been Filipino threw open a window and stared out, his face blank with sleep. In a moment, though, he had comprehended the situation and was hurrying down to us.
I simply took the line of least resistance; I allowed myself to be guided into a room and laid on a divan. I set my teeth while she cut away the arm of my pajama jacket and wiped the wound with a cloth wrung out in hot water brought by the Filipino houseman. A fat, motherly woman who reminded me by her cast of face of Fats Brown’s wife came with brandy, and when my arm was bandaged I was made to sip a glass of it.
In a little while I was able to sit up. The bullet had gone clear through, making a shallow groove in the flesh rather than a hole, and the substance of the muscle was hardly touched. I could even move the arm — stiffly, but without great pain — when it was dressed.
Maria Posador watched me with her face quite expressionless.
“I will not ask your forgiveness,” she said at length. “Once before — soon after I came back to Aguazul five years ago — there was an ambush laid for me. I was beaten about the head and left to die.”
She reached up and drew back her sleek black hair from her left temple. With a quick twitch she removed one of the tresses — a postiche. Where it had been, a patch of red, granular scar tissue showed on her scalp.
She left it visible just long enough for me to take in its meaning. Then, deftly, she restored her hair to its original immaculate state.
“So,” she said levelly. “It was because of that, you understand. I have not been out very often to that place since the television center was burned down. But last night I heard a strange noise, and it occurred to me to — well, to see if there had been trouble. It was perhaps foolhardy to go out alone, but what could I do?
“And then I came to the shed, and I saw fresh scratches on the lock, as though someone had tried to open it with a wrong key. So I returned to get my gun, and — there you were.”
I nodded. There was a little more brandy in the glass at my side. I sipped it carefully. “I must have frightened you, coming for you with that iron bar,” I said. “But — who did it? Who kidnapped me and brought me here?”
“We will find out,” she said in a voice like ice breaking. “We will find out.”
There was a silence. The motherly woman came back into the room carrying a tray loaded with breakfast — hot coffee, glasses of fruit juice, half a dozen native cold dishes in little glass bowls.
“Drink coffee,” said Maria Posador stonily. “It will aid the refreshing stimulus of the brandy you have taken.”
I shivered a little, although the room was very warm. I said, “You know, if it hadn’t been for that cable I trod on — which knocked me off my balance — I’d be dead now. I’m sure of it.”
She gave a grave nod. “I have no doubt that was what was intended.”
Something clicked in my mind, and I gave a grunt of astonishment. “That cigarette you gave me last night — was it — was that cigarette doped?”
I half-rose to my feet, my mind flooding with suspicion. She looked at me calmly.
“Not so far as I am aware. Who could have obtained my own case? Who could have ensured that I gave you that cigarette and no other?”
“You could,” I said. There was silence for a while. “I could,” she said at last. “But in that case — would I have missed my aim?”
“Possibly. You might be — oh, hell, you wouldn’t have had to go to all that trouble.” I subsided, feeling that I had said several stupid things.
“Of course not,” was the calm comment. “You are a weapon in a struggle which trembles on the verge of open civil war. Enough people hate you for it to be possible to find an assassin to destroy you. No, señor! Your destruction was to have been linked to mine, plainly! Well, that has failed. But it may be tried again. I would suggest to you that you leave the country at once, today, but some formality would certainly be found to hinder your going…I am sorry that you should be involved as you are. But, as you yourself have said to me, we are at the mercy of impersonal forces.”