The Terrible Ones (13 page)

“We’ve run out of time,” he said regretfully, and kissed her once more before he rose and began to pull his clothes on. Paula gave a startled exclamation.

“I had forgotten!” she said, full of self-reproach. “How could I forget?”

“Easily, I hope,” he murmured. “But don’t forget tonight.”

She flashed him a quick and radiant smile. “Never. Just one more . . .”

They kissed again, and then he helped her dress.

They pulled themselves together hastily and raised the sail. Even with the auxiliary motor it would be a race to join the fishing boats entering San Jorge with their night’s catch.

They came in last, laughing together over the few fish they had somehow managed to draw into the net. But their landing was accepted without question, and that was all that counted for the moment.

Paula led him to a battered jeep parked in a side street of the fishing town, and as the sun cast its long morning shadows over the hills-they started on the long drive to the city of Santo Domingo.

Nick drove at breakneck speed while Paula navigated. Again they shared a growing sense of urgency but now it was for something other than sexual satisfaction. The wait for dawn had given them each other, but it had also taken precious time.

“This girl Luz,” Nick said abruptly. “How much could she tell if she were questioned?”

Paula’s mouth set suddenly into its old hard line.

“She could say that there are a hundred women in the city who call themselves The Terrible Ones, that a hard core of nine—of whom she is one—have a hideout in the city. That we are looking for the Trujillo treasure, and that Evita was working on Padilla for a clue. That there are other men with similar clues. That the Americans were sending help.” She shot him a quick glance. “It seems that she had mentioned that already.”

“Under duress, do you think?” Nick said quietly.

Paula stared at him. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “She has always had a high opinion of Castro’s Cubans and a low one of Americans. I think she might easily have said something to Alonzo without being forced to. But only about your arrival, nothing more. Nothing about The Terrible Ones. And nothing at all to anyone else.”

“I would think that Alonzo’s comrades would be wondering where he is,” said Nick. “Do they know that he’d been seeing her?”

Paula sucked in her breath. “I have been thinking about that. But the Cubans are not enemies of ours!”

“Did they know?” Nick insisted.

“Yes. They knew.” Twin lines of worry pinched her brows together. “But they wouldn’t know where to find her. Unless— they would recognize her, of Course. And all of us are out most of the day, tracking down leads. She might have been seen.”

Nick let it go at that. There was no use belaboring what might have happened to Luz if she had been caught. He changed the subject.

“Do you have any idea what the Castle of the Blacks might be?”

She shook her head. “I, too, would have guessed La Citadelle. I cannot think of any place near Santo Domingo that would fit the name. But at least we do know that it is somewhere near the city.”

“That’s not all we know,” said Nick. “We have another clue. ‘La Trinitaria.’ Because I’m sure that was meant to be a clue.”

“It was a cheap Trujillo joke,” Paula said angrily. “Typical of him, to mock the freedom fighters. Of course it would have to be a joke to him, to steal all their possessions and know that dead men could never find them.”

“No, it must be more than that. A joke, maybe, but a joke with meaning. Padilla thought so, remember?”

She nodded expressionlessly. Nick knew that she was thinking of Evita and what had turned to be her deathbed scene.

“You must have known there would be risks involved when you undertook this hunt,” he said obliquely. “The best thing you could do would be to drop this whole thing and disband altogether.”

“I will
not
do any such thing until—” she began hotly, and Nick cut in swiftly.

“Until you’ve found it and shared the wealth,” he finished for her. “I know. I’d feel that way myself. But about ‘La Trinitaria.’ Was there any place that they met regularly, any place that had any particular significance for them that Trujillo might have found out about?”

“They might have had and he might have found out, but they did not tell their wives about it,” she said bitterly.

“But do you think they did have?” he persisted.

“I think they must have, but I have no idea where it might have been. I tell you, they didn’t
tell
us anything!”

“Very wise,” he commented, shooting past a heavy truck on the upgrade and swooping down the other side of the hill. “But kind of a nuisance for us. Still, it couldn’t have been far from Domingo, could it?”

She looked at him with a faint glint of hope. “No, it couldn’t.”

“Okay, whether they had such a place or not, we still have three things to go on: Castle of the Blacks, something to do with La Trinitaria that’s a little more than a joke, and a place not far from Santo Domingo. Things could be worse. On the other side of the coin, I think we can be pretty certain that the Cubans aren’t going to help us any more than the Chinese.” He concentrated on the road for a moment and eased the brake down smoothly. “There’s a crossroads coming up— where do I turn?”

She told him and they made a rocketing left along the coastal road to the capital.

They talked a little more and then fell into silence.

Nick looked at Paula suddenly and grinned. For the past few minutes he had been conscious of her appraising look.

“Looking under my beard to see if I have a chin?” he teased.

She reddened slightly. “No. I know already that you have. I was wondering if I had proved to you that I really am a woman.”

“You proved it,” he said fervently. “Oh, how you proved it, Paolo baby!”

The sun was casting late-afternoon shadows as they left the jeep and glided through the back streets of Santo Domingo. Broken windows and bullet pocks gave evidence of recent street fighting and troopers were on guard at various points, but Paula knew her way around them and picked out their route unerringly.

They walked for almost half an hour before she touched his arm and pointed across a deserted street. “There,” she said. “We have taken the roundabout route, but it is safer this way. That is the place—our headquarters.”

He looked, and saw nothing but ruins. The whole block seemed to be tumbledown and abandoned. What she had pointed at was a pair of apparently uninhabitable wrecks. One was a very old ruin overgrown with vines and foliage and the other, its immediate neighbor, was a big sagging house whose scars dated back perhaps to Trujillo times. Loose bricks lay in front of it on the broken sidewalk, its front steps were gone, its garden was a jungle. Doors and windows were boarded up and it exuded an air of utter desolation.

“Which one?” Nick asked, puzzled.

“Both. Come, follow me.”

She flashed a watchful look down the street and stepped quickly into the tangle of fallen masonry and vines. He followed her under an overhang of foliage and through a gap between two crumbling piles of timeworn stone. The gap became a passage with a wall on one side and a curtain of old brick and foliage on the other. A suggestion of a ravaged roof hung overhead. Paula stepped over a fallen column, apparently the remnant of a collapsed portico, and into an area that looked like some long-abandoned living room with a ceiling of leaves and sky. Then they were in another passage, this one short and dank and dark, still with its roof intact. At the end of it was a blank stone wall.

“This part of it is our own work,” Paula said softly. “The roof here, which we have concealed from the outside with vines, and the door. Do you see the door?”

“No, I don’t,” he admitted.

“Good. You will, when it opens.”

So far as he could see she had done nothing to open it, but as he watched a small panel slid back and a white blob of a face stared out at them.

“Automatic warning signal,” Paula said. “We stepped on it.”

All very ingenious, Nick told himself. Marvelous what automation could do. Among other things, it left plenty of room for human error. His hand clamped over Wilhelmina’s butt.

Paula was talking to the face behind the opening.

“Open,” she said. “All is well. He is a friend.”

“Enter, then. All here is well.”

The heavy stone door swung inward. Paula hurried in and drew Nick after her.

“Luz!” she said happily, as the small dark-haired girl in the foyer swung the great door shut behind them. “You are safe, then?”

“Of course.” The girl slid a vast bolt across the door and turned to face them. Nick thought she looked unhealthily pale, and there were beads of perspiration on her upper lip. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“We’ll talk about that a little later,” Paula said. She was looking rather oddly at the girl, Nick thought. “It is Alva’s turn for duty, is it not? Why are you at the door?”

“She was very late coming in,” said Luz, looking at the floor, “and very tired. So I said I would take her first two hours.”

“Oh.” Paula was still staring at her. “Are you sure that all is well?”

“Yes, yes!” Luz said.

But she was shaking her head from side to side and her eyes were wide with fear.

The Inquiring Cubans

Carter moved fast, but he wasn’t fast enough. He was taut with readiness at Luz’s signal, but it was one thing to be ready and another to cover all the dark corners of an unfamiliar place. He spun toward a movement in the shadows and fired rapidly into a stone wall. The stone wall seemed to fire back at him with enviable accuracy, because there was a tiny spurt of flame from it and Wilhelmina flew away from him with a loud complaining clank. He was ducking and groping for Hugo when the swooshing sound sang toward his ear and exploded against his skull.

Nick dropped to his knees in a blaze of light that was all inside his head. The moments stretched out as he struggled to rise, and he heard a sudden groan of pain from Paula and a low cluck-cluck of human sound.

“Ah, shaking the head was naughty, my little Luz,” a pleasant baritone voice said in Spanish. “Alonzo would not approve, I know. Tch!” Then something cannoned into Nick’s gut like a battering ram and doubled him into a groaning, puking heap. He clawed out with his hands and found a trousered leg which he tugged with all his might. There was a loud curse and a heavy masculine body sprawled on top of him.

“Tch, careless, Ernesto,” the pleasant voice clucked, and again there was that swoosh and the explosion in Nick’s head. But this time the coruscating lights inside his cranium blurred into one agonizing sheet of pain and then went out altogether.

He heard a man groaning and it took him a while to realize it was himself.

Nick kept his eyes closed and peered out from beneath the shutter of his lashes. He was in a room of almost sybaritic splendor compared with anything he had seen since leaving Washington. There were rugs, chairs, drapes, pictures, book-shelves; and there were three men whose forms were still a little blurred but who were rapidly becoming clearer. They all looked very much like himself, except that they had their fatigues on and he was in his underwear. And they were sitting comfortably in chairs, while he way lying on the floor with cord around his wrists and ankles.

There was a soft chuckle and the pleasant voice spoke gently.

“You can open your eyes, amigo. You have rested long enough.”

Nick opened them and shook the mists away. He was throbbing painfully in half a dozen places but nothing seemed to be broken. Except—he grunted suddenly as he tried to sit—maybe a rib or two. His eyes slowly swiveled around the room as he tested the cords that bound him. It was pleasantly feminine rather than luxurious, but it was spoiled by the three bearded men who were sprawled in the best of chairs.

“Where are the women?” Nick demanded.

The man in the middle, he of the pleasant baritone, laughed.

“What a time to think of women,” he said with mock reproach. “But you must not worry about them. They are . . . taken care of.”

“What do you mean, taken care of?” Nick made himself look outraged and alarmed. He was both, but not as much as he seemed. What he needed was time to clear his head and size things up.

“Oh, nothing terrible,” the man said easily. “A tap on the head for each, binding and gagging, things like that.” His smile widened. “It was not at all unpleasant, I assure you. All those lovely women!”

Nick’s eyes flicked around the room. Furniture. Rugs. No windows. One heavy door. Locked? Probably. No key in it, though.,

“All?” he asked vaguely, as though still stunned.

“But of course. It would have been most imprudent not to have immoblized them all.” He laughed. “Eight silent women, all together in one room! Is that not miraculous? And they are silent, I assure you.” His merry face suddenly became serious. “Of course, the little Luz does not feel too well. We followed her, as you must realize, when she came looking for a missing comrade of ours. And then the lovely Alva at the door was somewhat difficult about letting us come in, so I’m afraid we were forced to be a little rough with her. She will get better, probably. No doubt she will make a fine addition to our camp up in the hills.” He gave his merry little laugh again and groped in his pocket for a long Churchillian cigar. “Of course Luz did not take too kindly to our questioning, so there again we had to be persuasive. I am sure she had even more to tell us, but . . . um . . . our questioning of the lovely ladies led me to believe that we did not have too much time before company arrived. And here you are. How very nice. Welcome amigo.” He chuckled hugely and applied a match to his cigar.

“Enough of that, Hector,” one of the others growled. “Let me go back to headquarters and tell them where we are. Question the fellow—don’t tell him your life story!”

The man called Hector puffed succulently on his cigar.

“All in good time, Felix,” he said genially. “The more background we can give our friend, the more intelligently he can answer us. For instance, we must make sure he understands what we are likely to do to all his lady friends if he does not cooperate. To his leading lady in particular. What was her name again? Ah, yes. Paula. Delightful name. A wildcat, too. Delicious.”