lowered myself gently to the floor and looked out, a dark figure was already moving up the ladder. Slater dropped down beside me with a disturbingly loud grunt, followed in a few seconds by the catlike Erikson.
“We’ll pick the guards off inside the front entrance,” I whispered. I put the beam of a pencil flashlight on the floor so we wouldn’t stumble over anything, then led the way to the balcony railing. We could see about two-thirds of the ground-floor lobby. A whitehaired man was drinking a cup of coffee. Another man was sitting in a booth that contained two chairs and a coffeemaker on a burner.
I led the way along the mezzanine, aiming the thin beam of light in quick blips. I found the fire door, and we crept down the iron stairway, passed through another fire door, and emerged into the lobby. Erikson moved toward the guard post, circling the lobby to take advantage of the deepest shadow. I followed behind him.
Both guards were outside the booth, talking. Erikson was within ten feet of them before one man saw him. The guard’s eyes widened, and he tugged wordlessly at his colleague’s sleeve. Erikson’s big hands clamped down on him, then passed him back to me while he aborted an attempt by the second guard to run back inside the guard post.
There was no fight in either old man. We tied them like cordwood and dumped them inside the booth. Erikson paused in the act of gagging his man. “Where’s Slater?” he asked. We both looked around the deserted lobby. “Where the money is,” Erikson answered his own question grimly. He sprinted across the floor.
I finished the gagging and hurried to the basement fire door. My flashlight’s thin beam failed to illuminate much of the airless blackness on the stairs. I came to another metal door, which I opened cautiously. Lights and voices were evident inside. Slater’s voice was raised angrily. I picked my way through a jungle of crated and uncrated pictures and statuary to the source of light. Erikson’s lantern was shining upon a shelf in a niche in the basement wall containing a number of large jars discolored by humidity-drippings. Three of the jars were at Slater’s feet. One had been dumped so that loose earth was scattered on the floor.
Slater was pulling packages of cellophane-wrapped bills from his uniform and slapping them resentfully into Erikson’s outstretched hand. “Goddamnit, Karl,” Slater complained, “you don’t need—”
“Shut up!” Erikson ordered. “Dump the other jars.” He took Slater’s haversack and began to pack the money in it.
I watched as Slater kicked through the clotted dirt of the second and third jars to disclose more wrapped bundles of money. “Is that all?” I asked. “It doesn’t look like enough.”
“It’s not bulky in thousand-dollar bills,” Erikson replied. He hefted the haversack. “There’s about four hundred fifty bills to the pound.”
“Each of us ought to carry some of that, Karl,” Slater tried again. “Suppose somethin’ happens to you?”
“If it’s fatal, help yourself,” Erikson said curtly.
He slipped his arms into the haversack straps and led the way from the basement. We returned to the opened window on the mezzanine, swarmed down the ladder, and returned to the truck after collapsing the extension. The driver’s hands were shaking as he took the ladder from us and relodged it on the truck roof. Once on the ground, Erikson never let Slater get behind him.
Erikson and I got into the back of the truck again. The driver waited while the headlights of a patrol jeep lazily moving through the area disappeared. Then the truck lurched forward, rolled across the grass, and bounced down onto the roadway with a rasp of ancient springs. The driver put the lights on. “Drive out the airport road,” Erikson ordered him. “We’ll—”
Behind us a siren screamed and a searchlight bounced off the truck, illuminating even the interior. “A Fidelista patrol,” the driver breathed. His voice was a prayer.
“They had us staked out,” Erikson said without emotion. “Wilson talked under torture.” He drew his gun.
I took the butt of mine and knocked out the glass on the street side of the panel. We were racing wide open up a broad boulevard, swaying from side to side, but the jeep gained rapidly on the old truck. The siren sounded again as it came alongside. I put my arm out the window and tried to line up the driver’s head. I had to thread a needle to get the bullet past a soldier standing up on the front seat. Just as I squeezed off the trigger a long burst from a machine gun in the hands of the standing soldier hosed down the front of the truck.
I turned my head in time to see the driver slump down over the wheel with the top of his skull gone. Puffs of dust hemstitched Slater’s uniform shirt from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Erikson lunged over the back of the seat to grab for the steering wheel. The searchlight disappeared, and I looked out the window. The jeep was careening in a wide arc across the boulevard. It smashed head-on into a building wall and disintegrated.
Erikson had forced himself into the front seat beside the driver’s body while keeping the truck under control. He opened the door and the body dropped out onto the road. The truck’s motor was coughing and spitting. “Took a piece of lead somewhere,” Erikson said, and steered into an alley.
When he saw it was a dead end, he tried to back out again, but the engine quit altogether. He went to the front of the truck and threw up the hood. I got out and opened the door on Slater’s side. He was huddled together with his arms wrapped around himself, and his eyes were already glazing. “No … damn … luck,” he got out painfully. “You’ll have … to kill him … like I planned. He’s … Treasury agent.”
I thought he was delirious. “Who’s a Treasury agent?”
“Karl … Erikson.” Slater swallowed with difficulty. A tiny bubble of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth. “Government … got me … out of Joliet … not prison … break. How … you think … we got through … U.S. part … Gitmo … so easy?”
I thought of Erikson’s continual checking of his watch as though he’d been running on a schedule. I thought of his insistence that no U.S. personnel be killed. And I thought of how easily he had gotten rid of the White Pine County deputy in San Diego.
Blood was dripping down Slater’s chin. “Newspaper … clipping … faked,” he gasped. “Like … tape recording. Treasury … want recover … money … or destroy.” His voice rose a notch. “Gettin’ … dark—”
I drew my.38 again and walked around to the front of the truck. Erikson was listening to the motor, which he had running again after a fashion. “Hello, Mr. Treasury Agent,” I said.
The stare he turned upon me was the iciest I had ever encountered. “Would it make any difference if I were a Chinese Maoist so far as our getting off this island alive is concerned?”
I argued with myself for a long moment before I put the.38 away. When I went back to Slater, he was dead. We took the body from the truck and laid it alongside a building. Erikson got under the wheel, backed out of the alley, and the truck limped along the highway at twenty miles an hour.
“The tank park’s next,” Erikson said. “If we don’t find a command tank with a radio—” he didn’t finish.
I had lost my bearings during the chase, but Erikson knew where he was going. “We’re a block away,” he said finally, parking the truck. “A lot is going to depend on how well this place is guarded. They shouldn’t be worried about anyone stealing tanks, though. Including us.”
“You think the jeep had time to put out a description on this truck?”
“I doubt it. That was a fast bit of action.” He glanced at me. “Wasn’t it convenient that the driver caught it so you didn’t have to eliminate him to make sure Melia got to keep that last bit of money you gave her?” I didn’t answer him.
We came up on the open area I had seen with Wilson that first afternoon. My heart sank at the sight of it. There was a well-lit front gate with a soldier carrying a carbine standing to one side of it. In the fringes of the gate floodlights I could see the barbed wire extending in both directions.
“Rough,” I said. “In the daylight it looked deserted.”
“That wire isn’t meant to stop anyone,” Erikson said. “The strands must be a foot apart. It’s just a deterrent to Cuban civilians.” He turned the corner and drove along a darker street. “We’re lucky this is a tank storage area and not a full-fledged motor park with gas pumps, a repair garage, and a motor maintenance office. That would be really well-guarded.”
From the side street the interior of the open area was dimly lit by bare bulbs under coolie-hat reflectors atop wide-spaced telephone poles. Another corner turned brought us to the rear of the park, which was darker yet. “There they are,” Erikson said. I stared at a dozen low, bulky silhouettes.
Erikson parked a hundred yards away on another side street. “We’ve got to conserve gas,” he explained. “Although there’s got to be at least one more guard inside and I’d like to circle again and try to spot him. Can’t do it, though.”
“So what now?”
“We walk back and slip inside the rear area through the wire. Look for a tank with a pennant flying from its
