A power cart was blowing air into one of the engines of a big jet. A sudden exhaust spumed toward Camilla as the engine came alive. A truck carrying baggage bore down on her. Blinded by the lights, she leaped aside.
In an upstairs bedroom in an imitation Moorish apartment building in Coral Gables, a dark young man with pale green eyes, which seemed darker in photographs, moved the curtain a quarter of an inch and looked out carefully.
There were several others in the room, including a girl. The young man at the window asked a slightly built teenager a question. The boy assented eagerly. The others fitted him out with a disfiguring set of front teeth, a false moustache and sunglasses. He emptied a glass of wine, went out to the street and sauntered north. Two detectives followed.
Soon afterward the young man and the others left the building by a rear door. They removed to another house some distance away. After making sure that they hadn’t been followed, they loaded two dozen Winchester sporting rifles into the trunk of a Pontiac convertible. The girl parked it two blocks away, checked twice to be sure it was locked, and walked back to the house.
The meeting was held in a conference room in City Hall.
The mayor of Miami was present with two of his aides. They remained silent. Will Gentry, Miami chief of police, had called the meeting. Peter Painter was there, representing the Miami Beach police. Abe Berger, the Secret Service agent charged with the protection of cabinet members, had flown in from Washington. General Matt Turner, of the U.S. Army, was sitting beside Michael Shayne.
Gentry opened the meeting, outlining the security situation as it had seemed that morning, and asked Shayne to take it from there.
There was a small flurry at the door and another man arrived. He was short and plump, with a nervous moustache which he dabbed at anxiously when he saw that everybody in the room was looking at him. “Am I late? Teddy Sparrow. I’m standing in for Mr. Devlin.”
Larry Devlin, a tough, competent ex-cop, commanded the International Protective Agency contingent at the International Airport, a uniformed force of thirty or forty private guards. Sparrow until recently had operated his own one-man private detective business in Miami. He had tried hard, but he was almost completely inept, and he had finally closed his office and gone to work at the airport. “Devlin said he’d be here,” Gentry said.
“He was called away, you might say. He’s in Oklahoma on private business. But he left me explicit instructions and I’m glad to report that the situation at International Airport is well in hand.”
He pulled out the chair next to General Turner, and the corner of the chair caught the general in the knee. Flustered, he apologized too profusely, and sat down. He laced his fingers, broke them apart and laced them again.
“Shayne’s going to fill us in on the background of this thing,” Gentry said. “Go ahead, Mike.”
“I’d like to ask what made Devlin take off for Oklahoma on such short notice,” Shayne said.
Sparrow looked startled. He tightened his necktie and looked around the table with an ingratiating smile.
“I find myself in pretty fast company, is all I have to say. I didn’t realize this was going to be on such a rarefied level.” He closed off his smile and looked serious. “I did promise Devlin before he left that I wouldn’t noise it around, but if he was here himself I think he’d give me the all-clear. It’s his son, Lawrence, Junior. He wired his father to come at once and bring six hundred dollars in cash, and not to say anything to the boy’s mother. And that indicates to me that it’s something embarrassing, but I more or less felt I had to leave it at that. I wish it hadn’t happened at just this juncture. But we’re a team out there, gentlemen. We finish each other’s sentences, so to speak. I’ll just ask myself what Larry Devlin would do in my shoes, and I don’t think I’ll go very far wrong. Every man on the regular force will be working tomorrow, plus twenty specials at double-time.”
“Do you have a number where Devlin can be reached?” Shayne said.
“He’s going to call me. We didn’t understand it was that much of an emergency.”
Shayne and Will Gentry exchanged a look. Gentry said calmly, “Continue, Mike.”
Shayne described Vega’s plan to disrupt the Galvez demonstration, and he played the tape Vega had given him. Parts of it were inaudible.
“I made a rough transcript,” Shayne said, “and you can pick up a copy before you leave. Now here’s a conversation I had with Vega a couple of hours ago. I have the man himself on tap in North Miami if anybody wants to talk to him.”
They listened closely. Abe Berger, the Secret Service man, shot Shayne a sharp look when Vega called what he had been persuaded to believe was a Washington number.
“You’re a sharpshooter, Mike.”
“Yeah. Now here’s the phone call I got about the assassination.”
On this hearing, it seemed to Shayne that the Latin accent was too careful to be real.
“He used a filter to change the pitch,” Abe Berger said slowly. “I’d better take it back and let the lab boys fool with it.”
“But it’s an obvious phony!” Peter Painter said waspishly. “I’m surprised you’re taking it so seriously. It’s supposed to distract our attention so they can hit us somewhere else.”
General Turner started to speak, and Painter said hastily, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t take every precaution. I can assure you that my Miami Beach organization is ready for anything short of a natural disaster. If these radicals think they’re going to outflank me, they’re in for a surprise. There’ll be some skulls cracked tomorrow, I can promise you that.”
“Which may be just what they want,” Shayne observed. “And I’m prepared to oblige them!”
The meeting broke up twenty minutes later. One important decision had been reached: General Turner had made four phone calls, in ascending order of importance, and a battalion of airborne infantry was promised for nine o’clock the following morning. Security precautions were to be intensified at the airport and the hotel. The assassination tip was to be kept quiet. The printing plant that had printed Vega’s leaflets had been fire-bombed earlier that evening, and the leaders of every militant Latin American organization in Miami were to be picked up and held on high bail until Eliot Crowther had completed his speech and started back.
Berger and Shayne left the room together. Teddy Sparrow, who had bolted to the corridor the minute the meeting was over, intercepted them at the elevators.
“Mike,” he said, patting his forehead with a folded square of Kleenex, “could I have a word with you, more or less in private?”
“Be with you in a minute, Abe.” He took his plump ex-colleague further down the corridor. “What is it, Teddy?”
“Well, listen, I didn’t anticipate getting thrown in there with the top brass. I used to hold my own pretty well when I had the investigator’s license, but I know what your regular cop thinks of people in protection agencies. Glorified night watchmen. Painter! He looks down his nose at anybody who didn’t pass their civil service exams. Never mind that. I wanted to ask what you think about that telegram Devlin got. Do you think there’s a chance it was a fake?”
“A very good chance, Teddy,” Shayne said. “Gentry’s checking on it.”
Sparrow patted his forehead. “And the deduction I make from that is that something’s definitely going to take place at the airport tomorrow, and they wanted to get Devlin out of town. Not so flattering to yours truly, but let that go. Damn it, I may not have that much experience in airport security, but I know the physical plant inside out, and if I say it myself, I have good rapport with the men. Who are not all dunces, by any manner of means.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Teddy,” Shayne said impatiently. “Can you get to the point?”
“The point is this. The army and Berger and so on are planning to bypass us. You may have noticed that whenever I made a suggestion, it was received with an amused little smile. Well, it’s dumb! It’s all very well, bringing in paratroops, but those boys have never been in Miami International, and they’ll need Seeing Eye dogs to lead them around. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting in everybody’s way out of ignorance of the situation, when I could be making a contribution. I’ll be up all night if I can manage to stay awake, which is a problem with me, and if there’s anything you think I ought to know, I hope you’ll call me.”
“I’m pretty far down the chain of command this time,” Shayne said.
“Now, Mike,” Sparrow said, smiling. “But that’s neither here nor there. Bear it in mind, and here’s what I really wanted to tell you. Painter was sort of pooh-poohing that phone call you got, the voice from nowhere that
