wise it would be counterproductive. I can see that. And with five hundred combat infantrymen on the premises we should be able to handle anything. Don’t you agree with me, Mike?” he said anxiously.
Two companies of paratroops had been airlifted to the Bayshore Country Club in Miami Beach, to back up the police if the Collins Avenue demonstration got out of hand. The remainder of the battalion was being held at the airport in reserve. Directly below the tower, in the ramp area and along the front of the International Concourse, four big troop-carrying Sikorsky helicopters waited. The soldiers themselves were dispersed in the departure lounges.
Two Bell helicopters, much smaller than the Sikorskys, were parked on a grassy triangle near an intersection of a taxiway with the main northwest-southeast landing strip, several hundred yards from the terminal. These were to carry Crowther’s party into the city.
“If they’re bound and determined to demonstrate, damn it,” Sparrow went on, popping a digestive tablet into his mouth, “why don’t they demonstrate where they were given a permit? Not that I don’t think it was a mistake to issue that permit, but that’s Miami Beach business. An airport isn’t a street. It’s a mechanism. We’ve got to run a regular schedule of arrivals and departures here, VIP’s or no VIP’s. What if we get a landing emergency and people are yelling so loud we can’t hear the announcements? Lives could be lost.”
“I’m hitching a ride on one of the helicopters,” Shayne said. “Are you using soldiers to cover the transfer?”
“That’s General Turner’s responsibility. He worked it all out on the telephone with Abe Berger.” He touched Shayne’s sleeve. “Mike, this is kind of unorthodox, but it’s an unorthodox situation. While you’re looking around, if you see anything about my dispositions I ought to change, I hope you won’t hesitate to tell me. I don’t have a hell of a lot of flexibility. I’ve still got to think about the warehouses and the cargo area, I can’t forget those. I’ve pulled as many men off routine duty as I dare.”
“Nothing to worry about, Teddy,” Shayne said absently, scanning the crowd.
“I certainly hope you’re right. I’ve got a case of indigestion I wouldn’t want to wish on Eliot Crowther himself. People have been running to me with rumors all morning. It’s the army’s responsibility to load Crowther into a helicopter, and it’s my responsibility to protect the airport facilities. But in case of a political outburst, whose responsibility is it to break it up? That hasn’t been made clear to me.”
“We’re all going to be improvising,” Shayne said. Among the shifting mass of people on the deck, he saw a tall girl with long black hair, in a white sleeveless blouse. He nodded at Sparrow. Putting on a pair of sunglasses, he moved through the crowd.
The girl was Adele Galvez, still as good-looking as she had been the day before. She seemed to be alone, but as Shayne approached he saw a look pass between her and a dark youth twenty feet away, leaning against the coping overlooking the aircraft apron.
“Your uncle’s probably wondering why you’re not on the Beach,” Shayne remarked as he came up.
She whirled. A quick look of dismay fled across her face, and then she closed with him and kissed him hard. “I knew I’d see you again sooner or later.”
“It’s a small town.”
She turned him away from the youth across the deck. “Everybody’s so impressed with you, Mike! The way you squashed poor Lorenzo Vega. But as for me! My standing’s way down. One of my friends wanted to know why I didn’t seduce you. All I could say was, I tried!”
She hugged his arm.
“Would you like to try again?” he said. “I can get a room at the hotel here. We’ve got twenty minutes.”
She looked at him. “That might be nice, but you don’t really mean it, do you?”
“That’s right, Adele. I don’t really mean it.”
He moved to the right and cut back. Adele stayed with him. The boy she had signaled was being careful not to look toward them. Shayne bulldozed his way through the crowd and took his elbow in a firm grip. With a quick twist, he wrenched a shopping bag out of his hand. The youth grabbed for it, but Adele stopped him with a quick word in Spanish. Shayne set the shopping bag on the coping. There was nothing inside but a purple banner.
“What’s it say?”
“I’m afraid it’s slightly obscene,” Adele said.
A circle of unoccupied space had opened about them. Shayne told the youth to hold still and let himself be searched.
“Like hell. I don’t see a badge.”
“If you want to be busted instead,” Shayne said, “I can arrange it.”
After a moment the boy spread his arms. Shayne gave him a quick going-over but found nothing of interest except a toothbrush in a plastic container. He recorded the number of the boy’s driver’s license on the back of an envelope. He hesitated for another instant because of the toothbrush, but the boy had probably come expecting to be arrested.
“Have fun,” he told the young people, and walked away.
In a ladies’ room in the Beach hotel next to the St. Albans, Camilla Steele shut herself in a booth and opened her shoulder bag. She had left herself plenty of time, but all the clocks she consulted today seemed to be behaving strangely. They would stop for a stretch, stop absolutely dead. Then she would blink, and fifteen minutes would pass.
The gun was inside the bag, wrapped in a black scarf. She touched it lightly, and was reassured by its solidity. Much that had happened in the course of the night had been shadowy and unreal. But the gun was a fact, with definite dimensions and properties, a hard, smooth surface with curves and corners. She couldn’t understand now why she had been so unsure about using it. If a gun hangs on the wall in the opening act, it has to be fired before the end of the third-Chekhov said that, and Camilla entirely agreed. An assassination is impossible without an assassin.
Smiling to herself, she took out the hypodermic syringe.
It was charged with Adrenalin, precisely the thing she needed. She hated needles, as a rule. Her horror of injecting herself was what had kept her from going beyond pills. But of course people gave themselves shots all the time. All it took was courage.
She waved her hand in the air until the blue map appeared on her forearm. Holding her breath, she plunged in the needle, hitting the right spot the first time-perhaps a good omen. Then, like a fool, she forgot to depress the plunger, and she actually pulled the needle out before she noticed. The next time she had trouble finding the vein, and she felt a spurt of panic. But finally she had it. She sighed deeply, and her thumb came down.
Her heart began to rattle violently. She pulled out the needle and put it away.
She had been given a half-tablet to swallow, and she managed to get it down without water. This was Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde medicine, to change her appearance during her first few moments in the St. Albans. It was Antabuse, a drug prescribed for alcoholics, to make the taste of liquor acutely unpleasant.
She put on an unbecoming pair of dime-store glasses with tinted lenses. She had cut her hair the day before, and dyed it in tawny streaks. She was wearing a too-large dress and a padded bra, shoes with thick heels. She left the booth, and with the Adrenalin racing happily through her veins, she was certain for the first time that this was really going to work. A surge of crazy optimism carried her into the hotel bar, where she ordered a bottle of imported beer. She was not only going to shoot the man, she was going to get away with it, and live to a pleasant old age. Everybody deserves to have one major secret. The fact that she had killed an attorney general was going to be hers.
The bartender poured the beer. It looked insipid, and had a noxious smell. Her lip curled as she raised the glass. She was the only customer; the bartender had gone back to preparing mixes at the far end of the bar. She held her nose and drank.
It was vile stuff, but she didn’t set the glass down until it was empty. She saw a dim reflection of herself in the back mirror. Her eyeballs pounded. Blood poured to her head, and she felt her features beginning to coarsen. But the mirror was too dark, and she returned to the one in the rest room.
She found herself unevenly flushed, with patches of color high on each cheekbone. Her eyes did seem to protrude slightly. She wouldn’t be looking her best when she shot Mr. Crowther, but needless to say, that wasn’t the object.
A good-humored crowd had gathered along Collins Avenue. A line of police trestles, backed up by cops,
