The Annihilators (26 page)

I said, “Okay, that’s my job, procurement. Midnight requisitions, I believe they used to be called. Your assignment is to study them, right? Learn all their routines and habits. Any time of day or night I bring the guns, you be ready with a suitable plan that’ll let us wipe them out without losing too many of our tourists…”

“Jim!”

The interruption annoyed him. He started to speak angrily; then he checked himself and put a hand on his wife’s arm. “It’s what I was doing on the other side of the Pacific, honey,” he said. “You knew that, you came to terms with it, remember? What makes it so much worse here? Now, please, let Sam and me finish up before somebody comes to see what we’re plotting in here.” He looked at me. “Who?”

“Henderson and Olcott.”

He frowned. “Henderson’s pretty old, and not too well.”

“Don’t send him up any pyramids, then. And you’ll have to treat him diplomatically because he outranks hell out of you. But he was a jungle fighter back when you were bruising other kids’ fists with your nose in that fancy school they undoubtedly sent you to, if you did such a crude and lower-class thing as fight with the other little rich boys.”

“I did,” he said with a grin. “Olcott? He hunts, doesn’t he?”

“His specialty is mountain sheep, which means that he can climb, he can stalk, and he can shoot. Whether or not he can shoot a man remains to be seen; some of them can’t. But I don’t think we can afford to pass up an expert marksman.”

Putnam said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t want to trust a gun in the hands of that blowhard Wilder. What about Gardenschwartz?”

“The information I have is that he and his wife are members of a couple of Hate-the-Handgun groups. Their privilege; but my experience indicates that people who want to prohibit guns generally don’t know much about shooting them.”

“Just four of us, then.” He glanced at me. “You’ve been doing your homework, haven’t you?”

“Call me Boy Scout for short, always prepared.”

“You’re mixed up, son, it’s the Coast Guard that are
Semper paratus
.”

I grinned. “And now I think you’d both better hate me a little,” I said. “Ostracized, that’s me, the wicked guy responsible for this whole dreadful predicament. Sanchez deliberately turned you all against me; well, that’s great, stay turned. They know what I am, they’ll have their eyes on me, so you and Gloria Jean will have to make all the contacts and arrangements. Just pretend that I don’t exist and that you wouldn’t want to be contaminated by knowing me if I did exist. But have things ready to move when I produce the armaments. I may need some help with that once I’ve got it figured out. If I do, I’ll get in touch. One more thing. Well, two more to be exact.”

“Yes?”

I got up carefully, and waited for my head to stop pounding, and looked down at the two of them sitting there. “We’re harmless,” I said. “Keep that in mind every minute of every day. We’re scared like rabbits. After seeing Miranda shot down like that we’re broken, browbeaten, docile like sheep. No spunk, no defiance. No matter what happens, repeat, no matter
what
happens, we don’t fight back until we have something effective to fight with. Console yourselves with the thought that when the time comes we’ll totally eradicate the bastards; but in the meantime we let the others make their grandstand plays all over the place, but the four of us who’re going to do the work don’t get ourselves beat up so we can’t fight, or shot up, or locked up, or tied up, not if we can possibly help it. Pass the word. We eat all the shit they offer us and ask for more:
mas mierda, por favor.
It could be a week, it could be much longer, but that’s the way we handle it, no matter how long it takes. Okay?”

They nodded. Gloria Jean, who seemed to have resigned herself to our plans, asked, “And the other thing?”

“Don’t trust anybody you don’t have to,” I said. “If Henderson and Olcott feel they have to tell their wives you can’t stop them; but there’s no need for anybody else to know what we’re hoping to do. That goes for the Wilders, the Gardenschwartzes, the two schoolteachers, and even Frances Dillman. All it takes is one peace-loving character who starts a big loud argument with one of us about the virtues of patience and nonviolence, and all our work to maintain a low profile is shot to hell.” I thought I’d done it pretty well, throwing Frances’s name casually into the pot like that. “Well, we’d better break this up.”

Jim said, “I think there’s an empty apartment a few doors down; let me give you a hand with… No, that’s right, we hate you, you sneaky CIA sonofabitch. Haul your ass to hell out of here and I hope next time they knock your lousy brains out.”

“Please, Mister, I didn’t mean to make no trouble for all you nice people…”

I saw Gloria Jean, watching us, stop smiling and look quickly toward the door as the light was suddenly diminished by a human body—four human bodies, as it turned out. Lt. Errol Flynn, otherwise known as Julio Barbera, was there with three armed men.

“You!” he said to me. “You can walk now, si? You will pick up your belongings outside and go with this man, here. He will show you where you must stay. And this time, if you move too rapidly, he
will
shoot you.”

I saw that it was the same scarred, chunky man, Eugenio, who’d clobbered me earlier. I moved forward as he gestured with his weapon; but I heard Julio Barbera’s voice behind me:

“And you, beautiful señora, you will come with me… Tell your husband to stand still unless you wish him to die!”

Eugenio poked me in the back as I hesitated. The sunlight was very bright outside. We emerged on the long raised platform, a dozen feet above the clearing, that held the Nunnery we’d never got around to exploring, that was now our home away from home. It was simply a long, low, narrow stone building consisting of a series of cubicles like the one from which I’d just emerged: kind of a tourist court thousands of years old. From up here you got a good view of the blue water of the
cenote
, at the edge of the jungle; and you could look down a little on the ground-level Chapel, in the center of the clearing; and up at the Citadel on the far side, on its much higher pyramid. A sentry lounged carelessly against one of the ancient stone pillars up there.

“
No, Jim, no!
”

It was Gloria Jean’s voice, breathless and pleading. I waited for shots, but none came. Eugenio poked me with his M16, and I picked up my suitcase and the thin ragged mattress-pad that had apparently been issued to me
in absentia.
I was aware of the girl emerging from the chamber behind me as I moved away, her arm gripped firmly by Lieutenant Barbera, although she was offering no resistance. In fact she was walking quite steadily beside him, holding herself very straight. She didn’t look back at all.

After a moment, the other two soldiers who’d come with Barbera backed out of the chamber warily, guns ready, and took up stations from which they could cover the doorway.

I drew a breath of relief. The precautions seemed to indicate that Jim Putnam was still alive in there… Eugenio poked me again, indicating the last little doorway down the line. I crouched and started inside, but stopped as somebody moved in the shadows ahead of me.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Frances Dillman.

Gloria Jean Putnam returned to us just as the sun was setting behind the high Citadel ruins. She had to run the ghoul gauntlet, of course. They had all been waiting—okay, we had all been waiting—to receive her, solicitously ready for the worst, to cover up the poor outraged body revealed by the torn clothing, to minister to the poor battered face, to steady her as she stumbled, carry her when she could walk no further, sympathize fulsomely with her shame and suffering…

She was a big disappointment to everybody. She simply came marching up the steep rubble slope to the Nunnery, holding herself as erect as when she’d left with Barbera, a strong, sturdy young woman getting along perfectly well under her own power, thanks. Her costume was intact and neatly buttoned and zipped. The dark frizzy hair was no wilder than usual.

Perhaps the face looked a bit pale and shiny, perhaps the mouth looked a bit swollen, perhaps there was a bruise on the temple, but in the fading light, with all that hair, it was hard to be sure. Perhaps she moved just a bit awkwardly, as if there were places that hurt, and certainly there was a stony look in her eyes as she passed without acknowledging our presence in any way; but it was clear from the undamaged condition of her clothes and her own lack of conspicuous injuries that she had undressed for the man obediently and done what was required, and allowed to be done to her what was required. She’d satisfied Barbera’s demands well enough that he had not felt compelled to abuse her further. Then, given permission, she’d cleaned herself up and dressed herself with care; and anybody who wanted a poor whimpering little rape victim for a pet could just go look elsewhere.

We watched the guards step back to let her go by. She. disappeared into the fourth little doorway from the far end. I drew a long breath and moved back into my assigned chamber, the seventh and last, without looking at my assigned roommate. I sat down on my thin sleeping-pad with my back to the wall and wished, for the first time in a long time, that I had a pipe to smoke. After all, there were worse things than emphysema.

After a while I said, “Ten pieces of silver was the going rate two thousand years ago, but I hope you allowed for inflation.”

Frances was hardly visible at the other side of the little room. She didn’t react to my needling. She said, “You knew at the
cenote
, at lunch, what I was going to do. What was going to happen.”

“Yes, sweetheart. As an actress, you’re a hell of an archaeologist. And I’m not going to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Where I hid the gun. That’s why they put you in here with me, isn’t it? To keep an eye on me as before; and to find out where I hid the revolver and ammo you’d told them I had. A missing firearm can make people awfully nervous in a situation like this.”

“You were in there with the Putnams for quite a while.” Her voice even. “Did you tell them about me, about what I’d done?”

“No,” I said. “I warned them against trusting certain people around here including you, that’s all. One thing we don’t need is a lynching party. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Dillman? What does Montano have on you that gives him the power to order you around and slap you around as he pleases? Your passion for archaeology can’t be all that compulsive; you can’t be doing all this just to preserve your lousy dig.”

She said, “You’re really a pretty stupid man, aren’t you, darling?”

I said, “Goody, does the fact that she’s got around to insulting me indicate that she’s going to break down and tell me the truth I’ve been pleading for for a week?”

She said, “Goddamn you, Sam, look at me! Don’t you have any respect for me at all? Don’t you know me well enough by now to know there’s only one thing that could have forced me to do the things I’ve done? Can you really see me acting like this for money, or for a political cause, or even for my career—the Copalque excavations are important to me, certainly, but not
that
important! Not important enough for me to betray a lot of people who trusted me… She drew a deep and uneven breath. “Sam, when a married woman does strange and desperate and inexplicable things, what’s the usual answer?”

I looked at the pale shape of her face in the growing dusk and realized how obtuse I’d been. “Your little girl, the one in the wheelchair?”

“I don’t have any little girl, in or out of a wheelchair. That was just another of my lousy lies, to explain my concern for Ricardo Jimenez.”

So much for the great detective. I guess when I studied the report on Frances Ransome Dillman I’d been looking for things that were there, not for things that weren’t there, like a child she’d talked about but never had.

“So what’s left, darling?” Her voice was insistent. “You really ought to be able to figure it out by now.”

I said carefully, “I thought your husband was attending an important conference at Canyon de Chelly.”

“That’s what you were supposed to think,” Frances said. “That’s what everybody was supposed to think. Archie had one of his inspirations, something about the cave and the calendar wheel; and he just had to dash down here—he only planned to take an extended weekend—to recheck some inscriptions we’d only examined superficially. He didn’t tell anybody but me because he didn’t want to make his brainstorm seem too important in case it turned out to be nonproductive. The next thing I knew, there was an envelope in the mailbox with a little lump in it. I thought it was some kind of advertising, you know, where they send you a tiny pencil or something as a gesture of good will. When I opened it, I found a note.” She was silent for a moment, clearly projecting the memorized message on the screen of her mind. She licked her lips and said, “It read: I AM BEING HELD PRISONER. TELL NOBODY. YOU WILL RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS. PLEASE OBEY EXACTLY, REPEAT,
EXACTLY
, OR THEY WILL KILL ME. MY LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS. I LOVE YOU. ARCHIE.”

Again there was silence in our little artificial cave. I found myself trying to assemble in my mind the jigsaw puzzle that was the unseen Archibald Dillman: the absentminded professor who couldn’t find his glasses on his nose, the gentle lover, the coward. Because only a coward would put “I love you” in a ransom note. Or “My life is in your hands.” Those sentences had not been dictated by Montano, although he’d undoubtedly been glad to have them. They were the frightened husband reminding the loyal, loving wife of the duty she owed him, giving her no choice whatever because he was terrified for his life and wanted her to take no chances at all, no matter what the cost to her. They left her no alternative but total obedience to the kidnapers’ demands.

“And the enclosure?” I asked.

She licked her lips. “A small plastic bag. There was a little scrap of… of flesh in it, all bloody. Dried, of course. I had to wash it off before I could identify it.” She swallowed hard. “It was a human earlobe.”