Operation Flashpoint Read online

  I could go up or down. The bottom of the balcony floor above me was three feet above my upstretched hand. I’d either need something to stand on—and nothing was available—or I’d have to balance myself atop the half-round guard rail before I could grip the iron uprights supporting the concrete on the balcony. I was hardly in shape to perch on the rail and lean out into space while trying for a secure handhold on wet, slippery iron and concrete. I doubted that I’d be able to muscle my entire body weight up the balcony’s concrete facing even with a good handhold.

  So it had to be down.

  I didn’t give myself time to think about it.

  I went over the railing and eased myself downward with both hands gripping the cold iron uprights and my toes anchored to the platform rim. I took a solid hold, then removed my toes from the edge and hung freely, extended at full length. I clenched and unclenched my palms, dropping in short jerks until the heels of my hands reached the bottom of the vertical iron bars.

  I swung myself cautiously in a gentle, pendulumlike movement. The tip of my shoes scraped against the guard rail below. I knew the balcony floor was a drop of only three feet. The trick was to fall inside, not outside, the railing.

  Too hard a swing forward and I’d lose my blance upon landing and fall backward with a good chance of smashing my. head against the guard rail grillwork and knocking myself out again. Too easy a swing and I could look forward to a quick glimpse inside each lighted window as I clawed the air on my way down to the street.

  My pendulumlike momentum built up until I felt it was right, and then I let go. My feet hit concrete, all right, but my kidneys struck the iron railing painfully at the same time. I had slightly underdone the forward swing. The kidney-contact threw me forward sharply, and I landed on hands and knees in a puddle of water that was trapped in a slight depression on the unlighted balcony.

  I scrambled near the french doors out of the worst of the rain and massaged my wet, abraded palms. Sudden light from inside the apartment flooded over me. I ducked instinctively, thinking I’d been seen. When nothing happened, I straightened slightly so I could look into the apartment through glass curtains covering the double doors.

  A fat, middle-aged woman in a quilted robe was placing a towel on the floor. Her hair was in curlers and her face was greasy with cream. She went to a low, cabinet-style stereo set and placed a large record on the turntable. All I could think of was that if she settled down for a music session in the room, she had me trapped on the balcony.

  I tried the door latch quietly and found it locked. I reached for my wallet and extracted my celluloid pick. Martial music blared forth from inside the locked french doors. Then a male voice boomed forth in a tone of command from the stereo set.

  “We’ll now do the cross-body bend in four counts. Take your position, please. Feet spread and arms extended. Bend from the waist, left hand to right toe at the count of one, upright at the count of two, right hand to left toe at three, and back to starting position at four. Are you ready? Now … in time to the music, please. One, two, three …”

  I looked inside again. The fat woman had tossed her robe to one side. Beneath it she was totally nude. Jiggling breasts and buttocks looked like four pale basketballs attached to a flesh-covered barrel. Jellolike quivering accompanied each movement as she strained to reach her toes with the opposite hand. Each time she managed halfway down her shin.

  My position had changed unwittingly to that of Peeping Tom. I tried the pick on the lock as the booming voice from the record player issued new instructions. “The bicycle exercise now,” the exercise master announced. “Down flat on the rug.”

  The lock on the french doors was an old-fashioned type that wouldn’t permit insertion of the pick. The fat woman had lowered herself to the towel on the floor with an audible thump. She stretched out on her back, elevated her chubby legs, and pedaled furiously as the music-cadenced “one, two, three, four” issued from the speaker.

  At least she was in no condition to pursue me. I wrapped my handerchief around my knuckles and broke the glass near the lock. It smashed into a hundred tinkling fragments, and I reached inside and turned the lock.

  The woman had frozen with her legs still upright at the sound of the breaking glass. Her massive bare behind and furry slit pointed right at me as I stepped inside. Her mouth shaped itself into a round O as I sprinted across the room, but no sound emerged. I manipulated the chain bolt on the apartment door, stepped outside, slammed the door, and took off down the corridor.

  I avoided the elevator in case Abdel was monitoring it. I raced down the stairs in case the fat woman recovered quickly enough to get to her telephone and sound the alarm, then slowed my pace as I approached the street.

  There was no Abdel, and no alarm.

  I found a drug store and called Erikson. “My guess is that she’s out of the picture now,” I concluded after telling him about Talia’s departure.

  “If that really was her passport you saw, you’re probably right. Would she head for Bayak’s place?”

  “Not likely. He wants her underground now. Out of the country, even. Our little bird has flown and I’ll bet it’s the Turk’s intention that she keep right on flying.”

  “I’ll put out word to every transportation terminal with emphasis on the airports,” Erikson said. “Meantime you’d better get over here, Earl. It sounds like we’re getting too damned close to the payoff, and we still don’t know what the score is.”

  I left the drug store and headed for his office.

  McLaren was waiting with Erikson when I arrived. He gave me a sardonic grin as he stared at the lump that still persisted behind my ear. Erikson wasted no time on levity. “We’ve located the girl at Kennedy,” he said without preliminary. “She purchased a one-way ticket to Damascus on a flight that leaves in three hours.”

  “And I suppose you’ll just stand around and let her take off?” I said. Neither man answered. “Why are you letting her leave the country?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?” McLaren inquired. “It’s a free country.”

  “We’re watching her,” Erikson chimed in.

  “Watching her? What the hell good is that? We know we’re getting close to the time of this hijack, but what do we know about it? Not even the location. I don’t think the girl knows everything about Bayak’s business, but she damn sure knows more about it than we do. And she could tell us.”

  McLaren’s eyes were upon my face. “Could?”

  “Could be made to.”

  “Like?”

  “Like pick her up, grab her hypodermic, sit her down in a corner until the skinful of dope she’s carrying now evaporates, and in six or eight hours she’ll tell you her sins back to her fifth birthday.”

  McLaren grimaced at Erikson. “You do come up with these direct-action types.”

  “Give me an alternative if we’re going to get anywhere with this thing,” I challenged them.

  The office was quiet for a moment. “There’s Doc Walsh’s private clinic in Queens,” McLaren suggested. “Ol’ Doc owes us a favor or three.” He was watching Erikson. “I could have the girl paged at the flight desk, asked to step into the airline-terminal office, and whisko—Long Island via very private car.”

  “It sounds like a winner to me,” I said.

  “Well, chief?” McLaren said. “Can do. Can do easily if you say the magic word.”

  “I don’t like it,” Erikson frowned. “If anything went wrong, the UN angle alone would splash us on every front page in the country. Let alone the mysterious disappearance of a damned attractive girl.”

  “You think Bayak’s going to the police?” I argued. “No way. If you don’t step in, Talia may never reach Damascus, anyway. She’s expendable in the Turk’s plan right now.” I waited for that to sink in. “You might be the means of keeping her alive.” I thought of Chryssie spreadeagled to the four corners of the bed in the tenement flat. I still hadn’t raised a hand to the man who had authorized that.
r />   “Thanks for appealing to my better nature,” Erikson said. “What would your role be if we did this?”

  “I’d borrow a.38 from you, hustle over to Bayak’s penthouse, and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing when he had Abdel put the chop on me. It’s what he’ll expect to hear. Then business as usual.”

  There was another silence. “Somehow the thought of you running loose over there with a.38 does nothing for my blood pressure,” Erikson said at last.

  “Bayak knows he needs me,” I said. “I’m the only one still wired into this operation. Sure, he’s planning on stopping my clock, but not until I’ve pulled his marshmallows out of the fire.”

  “Wish to God we knew what the marshmallows were,” McLaren grumbled.

  “Give me the gun and I’ll get going,” I suggested. “One thing I should have mentioned before. Bayak must be paying off everyone in that building. His safe has been blown once, and I put two bullets into the air there the other day, yet he’s never been asked to leave.”

  “We’d tip him off if we tried to shake anything out of the apartment-building people now,” McLaren said. “Later, maybe.”

  Erikson gestured toward the hidden room. McLaren went toward it, activated the concealed latch, and disappeared through the revealed door in the wall. He was back at once and handed me a well-oiled.38 and two clips. I loaded one and dropped the other into my jacket pocket. “Like you’re getting to be expensive to keep in armament,” McLaren said to me. I ignored him.

  “Have her picked up,” Erikson said to McLaren. “But with discretion, damn it. Handle it yourself. I’ve no desire to have my hide nailed up on a barn wall.”

  “Nothing to it, chief,” McLaren said confidently. “You coming out to the clinic when we get her settled?”

  “I’ll be there. I want to talk to you a minute, Earl.” He waited until McLaren left the office. “What do you know about the magazine office next door to us?”

  “Only that it’s there,” I said innocently. “Why?”

  “Two detectives burst in here past Jock this afternoon with a woman who screeched hysterically in my face that I was raping her daughter. I can tell you it was damned embarrassing. When we got it straightened out that it wasn’t me, the troupe went down the hall and played the same bill next door.”

  “Girls will be girls,” I remarked. “Are you regretting a lost opportunity?” Erikson snorted. “How do I get in touch with you out in Queens if necessary?”

  He unlocked a drawer in his desk, took out a metal box which he also unlocked, found an address book, and wrote down an address and telephone number. “Don’t overreach yourself with these people,” he cautioned me as he returned the metal box to his desk.

  “I’m all right as long as they think they’re dealing with the mobster you set me up to be,” I said. “See you.”

  I left the office three minutes after McLaren and took a cab uptown. In the private elevator on the way up to the penthouse I had an unpleasant thought. If Abdel had been outside Talia’s apartment, my mysterious disappearance could have made Bayak suspicious. I had to act more suspicious than he did.

  When the elevator doors parted, it wasn’t Abdel who stood there. It was a smaller man I’d never seen before. He had a gun in his hand, but I brushed past him as though I didn’t even see it. Bayak was sitting at the far end of the sunken living room, his pudgy hands steepled in front of his face and his shrewd black eyes studying me from above his pressed-together fingertips.

  “Where the hell is that big tub of lard, Abdel?” I yelled at him across the combined distance of the two rooms whose length resembled a train station.

  “He will be here presently,” the Turk said suavely. “Come and sit down.”

  “Sit down? I’ll—”

  “Calm yourself,” Bayak interrupted me.

  “Calm myself? I’ll calm myself when I’ve cooled off that water buffalo. What did he think he was doing when he put the slug on me like that?”

  “He was following orders. Sit here.”

  “Orders? Why, you fat creep, I ought to put the blast on you, too. I don’t know what—”

  “Exactly. You do not know,” Bayak cut me off sharply. “Your little sex holiday is over, friend. It’s time you went to work. I simply removed temptation from your path so you could concentrate on the job at hand. I assume you’re still interested in money?”

  “Certainly I’m interested in money,” I grumbled, pretending to be slightly mollified.

  “Then come sit down and look at this plan.”

  I descended the stairs to the living room. I hadn’t seen a signal from Bayak, but the gun the new guard had been holding on me during the conversation disappeared. Abdel could be standing behind one of the billowing draperies with a gun lined up on my head, of course. Iskir Bayak wasn’t the type to take unnecessary chances with his own oily skin.

  Bayak was removing papers from a manila envelope and spreading them on the surface of a low coffee table whose lacquered top contained a black-and-white collage of the Blue Mosque. “See what you think of this,” Bayak said to me.

  “This” was the same hijack plan I’d already seen in Erikson’s office. I pulled a chair up to the coffee table, sat down, and leaned forward to study the map which the Turk swiveled in my direction. I hoped it would now contain identifying marks as to location, but it still showed Roads A, B, C, and D and nothing else. I looked at it long enough to give the impression I’d never seen it before, then sat back in my chair. “This doesn’t tell me a thing,” I declared.

  “It should tell you enough,” Bayak retorted. A pudgy finger pointed to the largest rectangle on the plan. “A truck approaches from this direction, so, on Road A. Four men will be stationed, so.” The finger indicated the circles numbered 1,2, 3, and 4. “They will halt the truck, recover a package from it, and escape in this vehicle.” The finger settled on the small square indicating a getaway car that I’d shown to McLaren and Erikson. “A simple operation.” Bayak looked at me. “Yes?”

  “How the hell do I know?” I gestured at the sheet. “What does that tell me that I need to know? Nothing. I’d want to check out escape routes, meter the flow of traffic to judge pursuit possibilities, set up a system—”

  “All that has been done by an expert.”

  “Not by this expert, and he’s the one you’re expecting to put his head in the lion’s mouth. What does your expert list as necessary for the job?”

  Bayak blinked. “Necessary?”

  I waved an impatient hand. “Weapons, disguises, tools, contingency explosives, rehearsal time.”

  “Oh.” The fat man thumbed through the sheets of paper on the coffee table and handed me one. “Here.”

  It was a rather complete listing of the type I’d just mentioned, but I tossed it aside in pretended disgust after scanning it. “Without even knowing the particular problems, I can see two requirements that aren’t on here at all,” I said.

  “That cannot be,” the Turk responded immediately. “Hakim was a thorough man.”

  “So thorough you need me to replace him, right?” Bayak didn’t reply. I picked up the sheet of paper again. “There’s no hand-held acetylene torch listed here, in case we need to burn through the lock on the truck’s loading door. And we should also have a back-up supply of plastic explosives if it looks as though the torch won’t do the job quickly enough.”

  Bayak nodded slowly. “It doesn’t sound unreasonable. You will have only the one chance. Unfortunately, I am unable to furnish these items on short notice.”

  I tapped myself on the chest. “I’ll see to it. I’d rather do the selecting anyway, since I’m the guy who’ll have to use them. Just produce a little cash.” The fat man heaved himself awkwardly to his feet, and I knew he was going to the wall safe. I was glad he’d bought the idea I’d just sold him, because it would give me a chance to get away from him while I was supposed to be picking up the items. If we were as close to the action as he sounded, he’d want someone
from his organization to stick to me as closely as two teenagers at a drive-in movie. “But we haven’t come to the important point,” I went on.

  He stopped and looked at me inquiringly.

  “I want to know where this job is taking place. You can’t expect me to take it on cold without knowing the location and the escape hatches.”

  Bayak returned to his chair and dropped into it heavily. “That you will know at the proper time, friend, and only then.” I started to say something but he held up his hand. “As it stands now, there is a man who knows the location, the men to be used, the escape routes, and nothing else. And there is a man—” the familiar pudgy finger leveled at me “—who knows what we seek to acquire and the necessary techniques. If either man had both pieces of information—” he paused for effect “—what need would he have of me?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  I couldn’t answer him.

  From his point of view, there wasn’t any satisfactory answer. He had engineered the situation so he was protected every step of the way. Only when the two men with the dovetailing bits of information were brought together could the job be activated, and obviously the Turk had no intention of bringing them together until it was time for the hijack.

  He sat there with a satisfied smirk on his fat face as he read my mind. “You will be taken to the location at the proper time,” he said. He looked at his watch. “In approximately five and one half hours.”

  That really shook me up. Even though I’d told Erikson that Bayak’s attitude indicated that the time was getting close, I hadn’t expected it would be this soon. “What kind of men am I getting to work with?” I asked.

  Bayak hesitated. “You should have an honest answer to that,” he said finally. “There have been personnel losses among the group assigned to me to recover this item. Two even before Hakim. Two good men.” Those would be the two in Nevada, I thought. “Hakim himself, of course. And one who disappeared completely.” The truck must have mangled the one I’d dropped out Chryssie’s window so that identification had never been made.

  “Those were the cream,” Bayak went on. “The rest—” he gestured vaguely “—loyal but inexperienced. Make no mistake—they will enter a blazing building if ordered. But they need leadership. Your leadership. And they are expendable.”