and Camilla, old allies, had planned the shooting together. Camilla had fired the shots and Shayne had made her escape possible.
No one had rung for the elevator on the lower floors, and it descended directly to the lobby. Shayne stepped out. The lobby seemed normal-more crowded than usual, but as yet no one knew what had happened on the eighth floor.
Shayne moved quickly, his hand in his pocket. He needed some fast transportation. Outside, the approach to the helicopter was still clear.
The crowd on Collins Avenue was chanting rhythmically. Here everything was serene; Shayne was two or three minutes ahead of the hue and cry. He headed for the helicopter that had brought him from the airport. As he pulled himself in, the pilot, a young man with fanlike ears and hair redder than Shayne’s own, looked around from his controls.
“Yeah, want something?”
Shayne shut the door and said briskly, “Back to the airport.”
The pilot had seen Shayne as part of the security detail surrounding Crowther. Responding automatically to the note of command in Shayne’s voice, he switched on his engine. The overhead rotors began to revolve.
“Just by yourself?”
“Let’s go,” Shayne snapped. “The bastard left his dispatch case on the Jet-Star.”
“Oh.”
The beginnings of doubt faded out of the pilot’s face. As the helicopter rose Shayne watched the front entrance of the hotel. The scene was still peaceful. A hundred feet from the ground, the pilot changed the tilt of the blades, hesitated and turned toward Shayne.
“I don’t want to be chintzy, but I think for my own protection I’d better get the captain to authorize this. They’ve been tightening up lately. I mean, you’re a civilian, right?”
He reached for the control yoke, and Shayne, stepping forward, hit him with the flat of the pistol, just hard enough to jar him. He fell sideward, his hand going to his head. The helicopter stayed where it was, drifting almost imperceptibly toward the ocean.
“Let’s get going,” Shayne said quietly.
“What did you do that for?” He came out of his seat slowly. “Put that gun down, mister, or I’ll be forced to take it away from you.”
Shayne’s expression hardened, and he brought the gun up between them. “Stop where you are.” The pilot stopped. “Don’t be a damn fool. Sit down and let’s travel.”
“I warn you,” the pilot said, going into a crouch. “I’m getting my Irish up. You wouldn’t shoot me. You need me to fly the helicopter.”
“Hold still,” Shayne said in a voice that stopped him again as he started to move forward. “I don’t know how accurate this gun is.”
He fired. The pilot looked amazed and clapped his hand to his ear. When he looked at his hand he saw blood.
“The next one goes in your shoulder,” Shayne told him coldly. “After that, we’ll see.”
Blood was streaming from the lobe of the other’s ear. Twisting, he collapsed into his seat, and in a moment the helicopter was roaring in the direction of the mainland. Glancing down through the paint-spattered side window, Shayne saw two Secret Service men burst out of the hotel. “What’s your name?”
“Hank McSorley,” the man muttered.
“I’m Michael Shayne. Christ! People have been hijacking planes at the rate of one a week, and nobody’s had the slightest trouble. And I have to run into the one idiot who believes in protecting government property.”
“All I wanted to do was go down and get an OK.”
“Can you get a little more speed out of this, McSorley? I’m in a hurry.”
“Because Crowther forgot his dispatch case. What crap.”
“The truth is, I’m being chased. It’s possible that I’ve committed a crime and I want to get to the airport to catch the next flight for Brazil. It’s also possible that I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Take off your shirt. You’re losing blood, and I don’t want you to faint.”
“I do feel a little-”
“Come on, come on,” Shayne said without sympathy. “All you lost was the tip of an ear. Worse things happen all the time. Let’s have your shirt.”
McSorley struggled out of his shirt. Shayne ripped it into strips. Standing behind him, he put on a crude slanting bandage.
“Now when we get there, you’re going to do what I tell you, aren’t you?”
“Under duress. Under duress!”
Harry Montgomery, tower control chief at the International Airport, held up the incoming flights until the brief anti-Crowther demonstration had been completely suppressed. The banner that had flown briefly from the edge of the observation deck was lying in a sad heap below, near a docking gate. Too bad it had been so ineffective, Montgomery thought. He had been rooting for those boys with the black paint to get through so they could splash the people who were arriving from Washington. It was his own personal opinion that the United States had no business backing military despots like Colonel Caldera. As for Crowther, Montgomery had no use for the man at all.
At the same time, it didn’t pay to fool around in the middle of a busy airport. Luckily he’d had a hunch that something might happen, and he had put all incoming traffic into a holding pattern until he saw that Crowther’s helicopters were safely on their way. Even at the best of times, with all runways open, ceiling and visibility unlimited, a major disaster was never more than a second away. He mistrusted even the tiniest variations from routing, because they disturbed his concentration. Of course the men in the tower cab relied on the sensitive electronic devices all around them, but only an imbecile imagined that machines never made mistakes. It was a human voice, in the end, which told the planes overhead that it was safe to come down.
While the demonstrators were racing toward the helicopters with their buckets of black paint, Montgomery had crossed his fingers, a gesture that dated back to the days before radarscopes and the beginnings of air transportation. He had kept them crossed until the young men were rounded up and herded back onto Concourse 5. The Jet-Star was moved into a holding area. The taxiways cleared rapidly as departures were resumed. The stacked-up flights were now being talked down. Still Montgomery had an uncomfortable feeling that something was not exactly normal.
The big Sikorskys were waiting at Gates 63 and 64, but they had been there all morning. He made a circuit of the windows. The observation deck was still crowded, though less so than before. A surprising number of people were staying to give Crowther an enthusiastic send-off after he returned from Miami Beach. The herringbone pattern of cars in the main parking lot had broken. A telephone repair crew was working around an open trench; he hoped nothing had happened to the cable into the city.
Suddenly soldiers swarmed out onto the apron below Gate 63 and began pouring into helicopters. The radar screens in the tower showed nothing unusual, but Montgomery’s personal early-warning system, located somewhere at the back of his scalp, became agitated immediately. These troops had been held in reserve, awaiting developments in Miami Beach. The helicopter pilots requested clearance to take off. The man at the front console gave them a flight path and an altitude, and presently they were in the air.
Montgomery continued to move from one window to another. In the cargo area, a mile and a half away in the airport’s southwest corner, two cargo planes had moved in against the loading platforms at W-4, the main warehouse for short-term in-and-out cargo. The tower had no cargo departures scheduled. He told one of his phone men to find out from the warehouse coordinator how soon the planes would be ready, and he resumed his patrol. At the phone desk, the man clacked the disconnect-bar angrily. “Damn line’s out again, Mr. Montgomery.”
“Try again in a few minutes. It’s not urgent.”
At one of the side consoles, the operator in charge of east arrivals was calling into his mike, “Bell one-forty, this is Miami Approach Control. I don’t receive you. I don’t receive you.”
Montgomery caught the note of urgency and turned to watch a Bell helicopter approach from the northeast, too low and too fast. He saw splashes of black paint on its side windows, and then it lifted over the tower and disappeared. At that moment the door of the tower cab opened and a dark-haired boy came in, smiling in
