into neutral. The car came to a stop halfway down the block, at the curb.
‘You bastard! You broke my leg!’ Leslie’s eyes were filled with tears of
pain, not sorrow. She was close to fury but she did not shout. And that
told David something about Leslie he had not known before.
‘I’ll break more than a leg if you don’t start telling me what you’re doing
here! How many others are there? I saw one; how many more?’
She snapped her head up, her long hair whipping back, her eyes defiant.
‘Did you think we couldn’t find him?’
‘WhoT
‘Your scientist. This Lyons! We found him!’
‘Leslie, for Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’
‘Stopping you!’
‘Me?’
‘You. Altmiffler, Rhinemann. Koening! Those pigs in Washington….
PeenemUnde! It’s all over. They won’t trust you anymore. “Tortugas” is
finished!’
The faceless name – Altiniffier again. Tortugas…. Koening?
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Words, names … meaning and no meaning. The tunnels had no light.
There was no time I
Spaulding reached over and pulled the girl toward him. He clutched the hair
above her forehead, yanking it taut, and with his other hand he circled his
fingers high up under her throat, just below the jawbone. He applied
pressure in swift, harsh spurts, each worse than the last.
So much, so alien.
‘You want to play this game, you play it out! Now tell mel What’s
happening? Now?’
She tried to squirm, lashing out her arms, kicking at him; but each time
she moved he ripped his fingers into her throat. Her eyes widened until the
sockets were round. He spoke again.
‘Say it, Leslie! I’ll have to kill you if you don’t. I don’t have a choice
I Not now…. For Christ’s sake, don’t force me!’
She slumped; her body went limp but not unconscious. Her head moved up and
down; she sobbed deep-throated moans. He released her and gently held her
face. She opened her eyes.
‘Don’t touch me! Oh, God, don’t touch me!’ She could barely whisper, much
less scream. ‘Inside…. We’re going inside. Kill the scientists; kill
Rhinemann’s men. . . .’
Before she finished, Spaulding clenched his fist and hammered a short, hard
blow into the side of her chin. She slumped, unconscious.
He’d heard enough. There was no time.
He stretched her out in the small front seat, removing the ignition keys as
he did so. He looked for her purse; she had none. He opened the door,
closed it firmly and looked up and down the street. There were two couples
halfway down the block; a car was parking at the comer; a window was opened
on the second floor of a building across the way, music coming from within.
Except for these – nothing. San Telmo was at peace.
Spaulding ran to within yards of Terraza Amarilla. He stopped and edged his
way along an iron fence that bordered the comer, swearing at the spill of
the streetlamp. He looked through the black grillwork at Rhinemann’s car
less than a hundred yards away. He tried to focus on the front seat, on the
two heads he’d seen moving minutes ago. There was no movement now, no glow
of cigarettes, no shifting of shoulders.
Nothing.
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Yet there was a break in the silhouette of the left window frame; an
obstruction that filled the lower section of the glass.
David rounded the sharp angle of the iron fence and walked slowly toward
the automobile, his hand clamped on the Beretta, his finger steady over the
trigger. Seventy yards, sixty, forty-five.
The obstruction did not move.
Thirty-five, thirty… he pulled the pistol from his belt, prepared to
fire.
Nothing.
He saw it clearly now. The obstruction was a head, sprung back into the
glass – not resting, but wrenched, twisted from the neck; immobile.
Dead.
He raced across the street to the rear of the car and crouched, his Beretta
level with his shoulders. There was no noise, no rustling from within.
The block was deserted now. The only sounds were the muffled, blurred hums
from a hundred lighted windows. A latch could be heard far down the street;
a small dog barked; the wail of an infant was discernible in the distance.
David rose and looked through the automobile’s rear window.
He saw the figure of a second man sprawled over the felt top of the front
seat. The light of the streetlamps illuminated the upper part of the man’s
back and shoulders. The whole area was a mass of blood and slashed cloth.
Spaulding slipped around the side of the car to the front right door. The
window was open, the sight within sickening. The man behind the wheel had
been shot through the side of his head, his companion knifed repeatedly.
The oblong, leather-cased radio was smashed, lying on the floor beneath the
dashboard.
It had to have happened within the past five or six minutes, thought David.
Leslie Hawkwood had rushed down the street in the Renault to intercept him
– at the precise moment men with silenced pistols and long-bladed knives
were heading for Rhinemann’s guards.
The killings complete, the men with knives and pistols must have raced
across the street into the gates towards Lyons’s house. Raced without
thought of cover or camouflage, knowing the radios were in constant contact
with those inside 15 Terraza Verde.
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Spaulding opened the car door, rolled up the window, and pulled the
lifeless form off the top of the seat. He closed the door; the bodies were
visible, but less so than before. It was no moment for alarms in the street
if they could be avoided.
He looked over at the gates across the way on each side of the townhouse.
The left one was slightly ajar.
He ran over to it and eased himself through the opening, touching nothing,
his gun thrust laterally at his side, aiming forward. Beyond the gate was
a cement passageway that stretched the length of the building to some sort
of miniature patio bordered by a high brick wall.
He walked silently, rapidly to the end of the open alley; the patio was a
combination of slate paths, plots of grass and small flower gardens.
Alabaster statuary shone in the moonlight; vines crawled up the brick wall.
He judged the height of the wall: seven feet, perhaps, seven and a half.
Thickness: eight, ten inches – standard. Construction: new, within several
years, strong. It was the construction with which he was most concerned. In
1942 he took a nine-foot wall in San SebastiAn that collapsed under him. A
month later it was amusing; at the time it nearly killed him.
He replaced the Beretta in his shoulder holster, locking the safety,
shoving in the weapon securely. He bent down and rubbed his hands in the
dry dirt at the edge of the cement, absorbing whatever sweat was on them.
He stood up and raced towards the brick wall.
Spaulding leaped. Once on top of the wall, he held – silent, prone; his
hands gripping the sides, his body motionless – a part of the stone. He
remained immobile, his face towards Lyons’s terrace, and waited several
seconds. The back door to Lyons’s flat was closed – no lights were on in
the kitchen; the shades were drawn over the windows throughout the floor.
No sounds from within.
He slid down from the wall, removed his gun and ran to the side of the
kitchen door, pressing his back against the white stucco. To his
astonishment he saw that the door was not closed; and then he saw why. At
the base, barely visible in the darkness of the room beyond, was a section
of a hand. It had gripped the bottom of the doorframe and been smashed into
the saddle; the fingers were the fingers of a dead man.
Spaulding reached over and pressed the door. An inch. Two
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inches. Wood against dead weight; his elbow ached from the pressure.
Three, four, five inches. A foot.
Indistinguishable voices could be heard now; faint, male, excited.
He stepped swiftly in front of the door and pushed violently – as quietly
as possible – against the fallen body that acted as a huge, soft, dead
weight against the frame. He stepped over the corpse of Rhinemann’s guard,
noting that the oblong radio had been torn from its leather case, smashed
on the floor. He closed the door silently.
The voices came from the sitting room. He edged his way against the wall,
the Beretta poised, unlatched, ready to fire.
An open pantry against the opposite side of the room caught his eye. The
single window, made of mass-produced stained glass, was high in the west
wall, creating eerie shafts of colored light from the moon. Below, on the
floor, was Rhinemann’s second guard. The method of death he could not tell;
the body was arched backward – probably a bullet from a small-caliber
pistol had killed him. A pistol with a silencer attached. It would be very