Six Seconds to Kill

confined the demonstrators to half the street, keeping the other half open. None of this concerned her. She had to show her lunch ticket before she was allowed through the police barrier. She passed clumps of soldiers. At other times she would have drawn admiring stares, but today, a dowdy, squarish middle-aged woman with a distracted air and some kind of skin disease, she was ignored.

A triangle of beach in front of the hotel had been cleared as a landing pad for Crowther’s helicopter. She watched the preparations idly, starting for the entrance only when a taxi arrived with a party of guests. She moved uncertainly, and they overtook her. They all entered the lobby together, two men and three women. Inside, she stumbled against one of the men and caught his arm.

“Sorry. I always seem to trip at that exact spot.”

They both held the same political opinions, or they wouldn’t have been here, and the man’s face showed his concern.

“Are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” she said. “Do you think they’re going to start on time, or will they give us a drink first?”

The man laughed. “More than one, I hope, considering the speeches we have ahead of us.”

They were asked to show their cards again before they were allowed into the elevator. They showed them again at a table in the eighth-floor corridor. After being told her table number, Camilla was issued a tag with a pseudonym on it-Doris Myerson. She exchanged a smile with her new friends, and asked the ladies at the table if they needed any help.

The Jet-Star bringing Eliot Crowther from Washington came down on the number-one landing strip, slowed to taxiing speed, and rolled past the Delta Airlines building toward the International Concourse. The helicopters started their engines.

Michael Shayne, in the lead helicopter, saw the young demonstrators at the edge of the observation deck break out their banner. Soldiers in a loose formation moved out of the ground-level gates. The Jet-Star, now headed directly away from the terminal, continued toward the concrete intersection where the transfer would take place. A cloud of red balloons rose suddenly from the observation deck, and a dozen or so youths burst out of the gates in Concourses 3 and 5 and raced onto the field.

A command was shouted. The soldiers wheeled toward the demonstrators, who were carrying buckets of black paint, which sloshed out as they ran. Only two were able to break through the line of soldiers. They hurled paint at the helicopter Shayne was in. Some of it splashed against the windows. They were seized from behind and manhandled back to the terminal.

Picket signs appeared above the crowd on the deck. They wavered and dipped, then vanished.

A movable ramp was rolled into place against the forward cabin door of the Jet-Star. The soldiers formed a tight corridor connecting the bottom of the ramp with the helicopter.

Abe Berger was the first man out of the plane. He conferred with an army officer and looked around carefully. Two more Secret Service men appeared at the top of the ramp. They were followed by Crowther.

He was bareheaded, as usual, his shock of white hair stirred by the breeze. All the preparations had been directed against an anti-Crowther demonstration, and Shayne was surprised when most of the people on the observation deck began cheering and shaking small American flags. Crowther, too, seemed surprised. He stopped on the top step and broke into a wide grin, raising both hands over his head. His adherents cheered more loudly. Berger, below him, looked pained. Crowther was isolated for a moment, a marvelous target. Berger returned to his side and hustled him down the steps and between the two lines of soldiers to the helicopter.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Berger snapped as he passed Shayne. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out and around, Abe.”

Crowther swung up into the helicopter. The happy politician’s grin was still on his face, but it lost some of its luster when he saw Shayne.

“Mike Shayne,” he said. “I’m told some people wanted to come out in the streets in support of the United States government, in support of my position, and you discouraged them.”

“I had something to do with that,” Shayne agreed. “It wouldn’t have amounted to much.”

Without warning, traces of his smile still showing, Crowther drove one fist hard into Shayne’s stomach. Shayne grunted. Crowther pretended he had injured his fist, holding it up with a mock grimace.

“You keep in shape, don’t you, kiddo?”

His laugh boomed out. He tapped Shayne on the shoulder and went on to his seat, where he began working on his hair, disarranged by the breeze.

The helicopter filled rapidly. Berger came back up the aisle. His breath was sour and his eyes were heavy from lack of sleep.

“I hope he pulled that punch,” he remarked to Shayne.

“As long as it made him feel better.”

“You’ve been kind of elusive, boy. Gentry says he couldn’t locate you either. He’s used to your lack of cooperation. I’m not. They still haven’t found the Steele woman?”

“Not as far as I know.”

The door slammed. Through the closed door to the cockpit, Shayne heard the voice of the ATC ground controller in the tower: “Bell one-forty, cleared for takeoff. Change frequency for airways clearance.”

The rotors clacked and they lifted from the concrete. Crowther, halfway back in the cabin, put on his half- glasses to go over his speech. He began making breath-marks on the manuscript in red pencil.

Berger had to raise his voice so Shayne could hear him. “A hell of a place to talk. What happened last night after I left?”

“Not that much.”

“Mike, Mike,” Berger said impatiently. “Level with me, please. My radar’s picking up some funny blips. I don’t like secrets. You’re involved in something you don’t want to let me in on.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Instinct. When this much is going on, you don’t go to bed and take a pill so the phone won’t bother you. Did you talk to her?”

“Camilla?”

“Yeah, yeah!”

“No.”

They crossed the river, a thousand feet above the East-West Expressway, heading east toward Miami Beach. The tangled spaghetti of the 7th Avenue interchange lay ahead.

“I’m supposed to be in charge here,” Berger said savagely. “I don’t like people who duck my phone calls, and I’m making a note. But the hell with that now, we don’t have time. I get the feeling you don’t think this is quite as serious as you did last night, which means you know something I don’t, because it still looks goddamn serious to me.”

“He got a nice round of applause at the airport.”

Berger shook his head shortly. “Maybe I know something you don’t, Mike, has that occurred to you? I woke up a few people in Washington. I got an absolute denial from the CIA-this is not a public relations denial, it’s the real one, and I had to go as high as the President to get it. None of their people or anybody they deal with had anything to do with any of these demonstrations or counterdemonstrations. The Mr. Robinson who talked to Vega told him Gil Ruiz is in this country. The CIA is supposed to know things like that, and they didn’t. Ruiz, as a matter of fact, has a special reason for being sore at our boy.” He nodded at Crowther. “This is goddamn secret stuff, and I shouldn’t be shouting it in a helicopter.”

One of Crowther’s aides came up the aisle. Berger waved him to a stop. “This is private.”

When the man retreated Berger went on, “Crowther’s been arguing in cabinet meetings for tougher action in support of the Caldera junta against the insurgents. Diplomatic muscle, money, weapons-the works. To be specific, you’ve heard of the M-16, the new lightweight automatic rifle? All our own infantry divisions haven’t been equipped with it yet, and it hasn’t been peddled abroad. Crowther carried a vote in favor of letting Caldera have ten thousand M-16s to see how they work against guerrillas. The assumption is that they’ll work goddamn well.”

“Have they been shipped yet?” Shayne said quickly.

“You’re awake, good. No, they’re here in Miami, waiting for clearance. At the airport, as a matter of fact. There’s still some high-level lobbying going on, people who want to reverse the order. If Ruiz and his people can get