"Excuse me," announced Corazon. "We did the rapist this morning. That one is guilty of arch treason
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and plotting to blow up Ciudad Natividado and other horrible things."
The woman spat.
"Sir," whispered an aide into Jameson's ear. "That's the madam of the whorehouse. She's a second cousin to the Generalissimo. Why would he be killing her on that obviously trumped-up charge?"
Corazon watched the gringo aide whisper in the gringo ear and he had a question of his own. Criminals were one thing. But a second cousin who also had some control with spirits and who sent some of her brothel profits to El Presidente was another.
"Why we kill Juanita?" asked Corazon.
"She was making magic against you," said the new minister of justice.
"What kind?"
"Mountain magic. Saying you are a dead man."
"A lie," said Corazon.
"Yes. Most yes," said the minister. "You are all-powerful. Yes."
Corazon squinted at Juanita. She knew her women and she knew her men. She knew her magic. Was this some strange game? Did she say it at all? Should he ask her? Wouldn't she lie?
Corazon thought deeply about these things and finally he summoned her to him. Two soldiers held her wrists at the end of chains. They followed her.
Corazon leaned forward and whispered into his second cousin's ear.
"Say, Juanita, what is this they tell me about you, that you make the magic against me, heh?"
One of the Britons just behind Dr. Jameson eased a dial in his pocket and turned his left shoulder toward Corazon and the woman. Everything being whispered would be picked up by the miniature directional mike
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built into the small shoulder pad on the left side of his jacket. Even if Corazon did not give Britain the secret of the machine, M.I.5 could break the secret, and that would at least come in handy to show the Generalissimo the power of Great Britain. Something along the lines of "We have ears everywhere."
Juanita whispered something back. And Corazon asked again why she had made magic against him.
And Juanita whispered something else in her cousin's ear.
Generalissimo Sacristo Corazon bolted upright. Instead of the languid snakelike motions of a serpent ready to strike, Corazon himself jumped.
He grabbed the velvet cover from the black box and threw it in the face of his new minister of justice. He spat on the marble floor. He spat on the box. He spat into his cousin Juanita's face.
"Whore," he called her. "I make you into nothing."
"No matter," said the woman. "Nothing, it matters. Nothing. Nothing."
Corazon, not so wild as to forget his greatest enemies were always his closest allies, turned the phony dials he had mounted on the machine. Secret British cameras and other instrumentation among the Jameson party went into action.
"I give you last chance. Last chance. Whose magic is strongest?"
"Not yours. Never yours."
"Goodbye," said Corazon. "And now look at whose magic is strongest."
For a moment Corazon worried. The last time he had used the machine, it had taken too long to thaw the Umibian ambassador. He pressed the control button. The little gasoline engine whirred away, activating the cathode tube by providing electricity. The
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cathode rays interacted with what the natives called mung and the power was built up. It was released with a crack and a green glow, and the brightly colored orange dress sighed and collapsed over a dark puddle that had been the madam of the finest brothel in Baqia.
"Impressive," said Dr. Jameson. "We would like to join with you, Britain and Baqia, sister islands in a joint defense."
"Liar," boomed Corazon. "Liar, liar, liar. She was a liar. Liar."
"Quite, your excellency, but as to the matter at hand . . ." began Dr. Jameson. "The matter is a liar died a liar's death, yes?" "Yes, of course," said Dr. Jameson. He bowed. The British agents bowed and they left the palace. But they did not return immediately to their hotel rooms. They picked up a bit of South African tail, so to speak, and quite neatly they lured the African agents, posing as businessmen, into a side road, where the good old boys from Eton dispensed with the former colonial Afrikaaners.
Not much to make ado about, Dr. Jameson realized. You allowed the car to follow one of your cars, which led their car into where your chaps waited, and when they slowed to surround your stalled car, some very effective chaps from your show put on a rather neat display of Walther P-38 bullets into their foreheads. Jameson and his men had done it scores of times before, not only to enemy agents but to those of friendly countries-Americans, Israelis, French, Canadians. It didn't matter. The only immorality in spying was being caught.
"Good show,"'Dr. Jameson told his men.
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A South African, dying from a grazing miss that had taken off his left ear, raised a hand for mercy.
He held onto the steering wheel of one of the ambushed cars as if it were life itself.
"So sorry, old boy," said Dr. Jameson. "Cartwright, would you please?"
'"Course," said a bony-faced man. He was a bit sorry he had missed the first time. He put the fellow away with a .38 slug into the right eyeball, which popped like a grape pierced by a javelin. The head went back across the front seat as though yanked by snap pulleys.
It was neat, but then Dr. Jameson had put this unit together in a neat and proper manner. A simple ambush was not about to put anyone out of sorts.
They had worked at their craft with British pluck and a reasonableness so absent from that island's politics or journalism, and so had become that very rare thing: competent. Cartwright turned off the South African's motor.
"What say we do our readouts on the instruments here?" said Dr. Jameson. "The delays from using laboratories back home are really not worth it. Who wants to wait a month to find out that some chambermaid who handled something had tuberculosis or something, what?"
These questions were not really questions. That so-casual air Dr. Jameson had learned to affect encouraged success rather than heroism, and asking a question instead of giving an order kept the whole thing in proportion. No one on his M.I.5 team was about to say no or maybe to any of Dr. Jameson's questions.
The first readout was from the directional listening device.
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"Be nice to find out what the brown-berry bugger got so frothed about, what?" said Dr. Jameson.
Corazon spoke in Spanish to his cousin and she in island Spanish to him. It was not the finest, Castilian and had overlays of Indian words.
Corazon surprisingly had given his cousin a chance to live. All she had to do was to acknowledge that his power was the greatest on the island. And even more surprisingly, she refused to do this on the grounds that she and Corazon were dead anyhow and why bother. Dr. Jameson shook his head. He couldn't quite believe what the translator had just told him.
One of his crew, the expert on local culture, pointed out that the people of Baqia were quite fatalistic, especially the holy people connected with the island's voodoo religion.
"Give me a literal on that," said Dr. Jameson. He filled a small pipe with a stiff Dunhill mixture. The aide rewound the small tape recorder attached to the directional mike. He talked in English, translating the island Spanish.
"Juanita says "You dead and to die. Your force weak. You little boy. Mimado.' That means spoiled brat. Tfou trumpet big things. But you no big thing. You steal president's chair. When big thing and you come together, you lose.' Corazon says, 'Don't say that.' And she says, 'Real power on this island be with the force in the mountain. With the religion of our people. With the voodoo. With the undead. The holy man up there, he be one big power. He gonna be king. And now another big power come and he going make the holy man in the mountains king. And you going to lose.' Something like that. Not clear. And Corazon says, 'You got one more chance/ and she