The Spanish Connection Read online

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  "WE WANT TO HEAR THE MUSIC BEFORE HIS THROAT IS SLIT."

  Those were Nick Carter's orders. Translated, they meant that Nick had to find Rico Corelli before the Syndicate killers did.

  Corelli had been controlling the international drug chain from Corsica for years. But when the Mob found that their profits were slipping and Corelli's were mounting, the heat was on and Corelli was on the run.

  If Killmaster got to him first, Corelli could be made to talk and the drug chain would drop in AXE's lap. If the Mafia did, there'd be one more bloody name on the Mob's death list.

  Armed only with a beautiful female narc and a flimsy cover, AXE's chief agent begins the hunt. But the Mafia's enforcers are with him all the way. And the first corpse is a ringer for the man Nick Carter is supposed to impersonate…

  In a tense, bloody race against time, Killmaster stalks a man he's never seen, a ruthless unphotographed killer running for his life from the men who know him best!

  * * *

  Nick Carter

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  * * *

  Nick Carter

  The Spanish Connection

  Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Service of the United States of America

  One

  It was Hawk and he was being arch. He had not had much practice at it, nor would he have been good at it even if he were in top form.

  "Do you ski, N3?" he asked me on the phone.

  "Of course I ski. Very well, too, if I may say so"

  "Pack your skis. You're going to Spain."

  "Tough skiing in Spain," I said. "No snow"

  "Correction. Sierra Nevada. Translation. Snow-covered mountain."

  "Oh, maybe it snows now and then…"

  "You'll have a companion."

  "Also a skier?"

  "Very much so. Also an expert on the drug scene. On loan from the Narcotics Division of Treasury."

  "A snow bird?"

  "Very funny. You'll both be meeting a party at a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada."

  "Called…?"

  "Sol y Nieve."

  "Translation: 'sun and snow/ No, Sir. I mean, who is the party?"

  "Brief you later. For now, get a plane out of San Diego to Ensenada."

  "Ensenada?"

  "A small fishing town in Baja California."

  "I know what it is and I know where it is. I even know its special smell. What has a desert town to do with skiing?"

  "You'll be picking up the Treasury agent there."

  "Ah."

  "Be nice to her. We need her expertise."

  "Her?" Warning bells jangled in my nerve centers.

  "Her."

  "What is this? Am I supposed to be a nursemaid for female narcs?"

  "You're there to see that the meeting comes off."

  "Meeting?"

  "Between her and one of the links in the Turkey-Corsica-California chain. He wants to sing. I want to hear the music before his throat is slit."

  "Sir, sometimes you…"

  "Don't say it! The address is La Casa Verde. Ask for Juana Rivera."

  "And then?"

  "Bring her with you to Washington."

  "When?"

  "On the next plane out of Ensenada."

  "Right." He could not see my clenched fist.

  "Nicholas!" sighed Hawk. He suspects me of frivolity.

  I hung up. After closing a case in the Philippines that had the stench of overripe coconuts, I had flown to San Diego from Hawaii just two days ago. I was only beginning to get the kinks out of my muscles and the tension out of my psyche. Killing is never pleasant, I had overdone my quota in P.I.

  Best to put it all out of sight, out of mind — with the help of a bevy of beautiful starlets on location in San Diego for a television series. But now…

  I rang the desk clerk, informing him of my most regrettable change in plans, and requested that he get my bill ready. I then rang the airport and learned that the next plane to Ensenada would take off in an hour and a half.

  If I cut short my needle-pointy shower, I could just make it.

  * * *

  Baja California is a tail hanging down from California proper. No one seemed to know quite what to do with it. For many years it was the subject of a great deal of controversy between the United States and Mexico. After haggling over possession of the desert strip for many months, the Mexicans finally gave in and agreed to take it.

  I settled back in my seat and slept all the way to the small dirt-strip airport outside the tiny fishing village called Ensenada. The word actually means "inlet," or "little stream," if you go in for fascinating trivia.

  When I stepped out of the plane into the blazing sunlight, the glare was so intense I put on a pair of sunglasses.

  A new Mustang taxicab stood by the door of the operations tower, and I hailed the driver for a ride into town. After bumping through rutted roads and sagebrush and greasewood-covered savannahs, we finally rolled into the main street of the town.

  La Casa Verde — which was supposed to be colored green, if my Spanish still serves, but was actually a kind of vanishing pastel lime — was at the end of a sagging block where it lay sunning itself like a lizard on a rock.

  I got out of the cab, took my bag, and strolled into the lobby. After the blazing sunlight, it was pitch dark inside the motel, but I could see the mustachioed youth making a pretense of interest in my arrival. I waved him aside and picked up the house phone.

  "Diga." It was a girl at some miniature switchboard.

  "Would you please connect me with Señorita Juana Rivera?"

  "Ah, yes." There was a click and a long ring.

  "Diga." It was another girl.

  "Juana Rivera?"

  "Si."

  "Do you speak English?"

  There was a hesitation. "Jess?"

  I closed my eyes. It was going to be one of those missions. I shook my head and recited the code phrase, trying not to feel absurd:

  "October is the eighth month of the year."

  "I beg your pardon? Oh. Oh! The apples are ripe then."

  "Good girl! This is George Peabody." That was my current cover name, and Hawk had not instructed me to change it. So I was still George Peabody.

  "Oh, Señor Peabody." I was pleased to hear the accent had disappeared. "Where are you?"

  "I'm in the lobby," I said. "Shall I come up?"

  "No, no!" she said quickly. "I'll be down."

  "In the bar," I sighed, looking into the very shady end of the lobby where a man behind the bar was busy wiping glasses.

  I turned and made my way into the darkened bar. The bartender looked at me. "Señor?"

  "Pisco sour," I said.

  He nodded and turned to make it.

  I could feel the heavy air move gently behind me, wafting the scent of fresh lemons my way. I turned and saw a slim, dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman of perhaps twenty-five, with the kind of almost luminescent pale white skin that belongs to water lilies.

  "George," she said in the Spanish way. It sounded like "Hor-hay."

  "Juana?" I said, pronouncing it correctly midway between an «h» and a "w."

  She held out a hand. I took it. Then I motioned to a table beside the wall.

  We walked over. She was dainty and clean and very feminine- Her body was lithe and very nicely shaped. So were her legs. "Good old Hawk!" I was thinking. How uncharacteris
tic of him!

  We sat down.

  She ordered iced tea, settled herself in her chair and leaned forward, her eyes bright. "Now. What is this all about?"

  I shook my head. "No idea. We re being briefed by my superior in Washington."

  "When?"

  "Tonight."

  Her face was blank. "But that means that we will not be here tonight"

  "Es verdad."

  Her mouth hung open. "Then there will be no time for the…" She shut her mouth abruptly.

  "The what, Juana?"

  Her face was pink. "Me he olvidado."

  "You have a short memory," I said and finished my pisco sour. Lovely aguardiente, I thought. Someday I'd have to visit Pisco, Peru.

  I stood up. "Pack your bags, Juana. We're leaving on the next flight out of here."

  "But you must know something about the mission…"

  "Drugs," I said.

  "Of course it's about drugs I"

  "And the Mediterranean. We're going to Spain."

  Her mouth formed an "o."

  "To ski."

  She drank her iced tea. "Would you kindly repeat that?"

  I did so.

  Then she fooled me. Her eyes lit up. "Ah! Of course, the Sierra Nevada! There is a first-class ski resort there, just outside Granada."

  I stared.

  "Can you ski?" she asked me.

  It was the day for that question. "Yes. You?"

  "Very well," she responded serenely.

  "Modest, too," I thought. I spoke softly, "We'll have a ball."

  The bartender was watching me. I winked at Juana, and she winked back. She was beautiful, she was exquisite, she was attainable.

  * * *

  As we stepped outside, the flash of light glinting off the rifle barrel drew my eye to the black hole at the end of it. The man was lying flat on the hot tarpaper roof across the street, and I knew he had me centered in the cross hairs of his scope sight.

  For an instant I froze. Then I hurled Juana aside and dived in the opposite direction, toward the shelter of the doorway. The shot reverberated through the street.

  "Stay down!" I shouted out to her.

  "But Nick…"

  "Quiet!" I hissed.

  I rose quickly and ran to a window in the lobby. Keeping myself covered, I peered out of the window. Again I caught the glint of the rifle barrel. The man was still on the roof of the dry-goods store.

  As I went for my gun, he steadied the rifle and fired again. The slug buried itself in the woodwork just above Juana's head. Now she was crawling back through the doorway. "Good girl!" I thought.

  When I looked up again, the man had vanished.

  I could hear running feet. I glanced through the dusty window and saw a man in a black suit coming out of a store down the street, looking up at the spot where the sniper had lain in wait for us.

  I ran out of the hotel, waving to Juana to stay inside, and made it up the stairs of the dry-goods store two at a time to the top floor.

  I was too late. He was gone.

  There was nothing left on the roof but a lot of Mexican cigarette butts and a sombrero that had been purchased two days before in the store downstairs.

  "By a foreigner," said the store owner, a man with a fat belly and a smiling face. González.

  "A tourist?"

  "Sí."

  "Can you describe him?"

  González shrugged. "About your height. Brown hair. Brown eyes. A thin man. Nervous."

  That was all.

  I drew Juana aside in the hotel lobby as we waited for the cab to pick us up and take us to the airport.

  "He was here two days ago," I told her.

  "So?"

  "How long have you been here?"

  Tour."

  "You think he figured out who you are?"

  Her eyes narrowed. She took it as an insult. She was Latin and beautiful and full of fire. "I do not think so!" she said indignantly.

  I had not meant it as an insult.

  "What were you working on before you were contacted for this assignment?"

  "A drug drop."

  "Smash it?"

  She nodded, her eyes lowered.

  "All of it?"

  "Yes." Her chin lifted defiantly.

  "One got away?"

  "Maybe so," she said noncommittally.

  I turned and glanced out the doorway at the top of the dry-goods store.

  "Yes," I agreed. "I think maybe so."

  Her face knotted in fury.

  I grasped her elbow. The cab had come. Lucky Nick. Saved by the Ensenada Taxicab Company.

  "Let's go, Juana. Next stop, Washington, D.C."

  Very authoritarian. Very commanding.

  Meekly she climbed in the cab flashing a nice piece of thigh. But I barely noticed it.

  Two

  Hawk sat at the console of AXE's screening-room control panel, pushing buttons and setting dials. One button for sound. One button for tapes. One button for 16 mm film. One button for live television. One button for old black-and-white films. One button for slides. Or, if you wanted to rest your eyes, one button for a soft feminine voice reading out intelligence estimates.

  The conversation up to this point had been casual chit-chat. I have erased it all from my mind. I only remember that I could take, and did take, Juana Rivera visually. Something about her thoughts, however, seemed preconditioned, pretested, and sterile.

  But she was beautiful and I have an affinity for beautiful women. I thought, "If only I could erase her voice, the way Hawk could erase a tape he did not want to hear."

  The lights went completely out and there was the picture in front of us on a screen that had magically appeared on the wall.

  "Enrico Corelli," a woman's bland voice announced over the picture flashed on the screen. It was a still photograph, taken perhaps fifteen years ago, and blown up from a most minute portion of some larger picture. The background scene was the rotunda of the Vatican.

  "Photographed circa 1954," the voice continued. "This is the last remaining photograph of Corelli. The other photographs of him have been bought off for large sums of money. Investigation cannot prove that the money comes from the Mafia treasury. But that's what is believed."

  I took a long, hard look at the photograph. There was almost nothing to distinguish the face from any other. The features were quite ordinary, the hair dark, the chin firm, the face shape without distinction. I memorized it the best I could, but because it had been blown up so many times from such a small piece of grainy film, there was almost nothing there I could concentrate on.

  A map flashed on the screen. It was a map of Corsica. There was a circle drawn around the town of Basria.

  "It is established that Enrico Corelli lives here in a suburb of Basria, Corsica, in a villa dating back to the Napoleonic era. He has a staff of a dozen servants, and two bodyguards. He lives with a woman named Tina Bergson.

  "Corelli is now forty-five years of age. He had worked for the Italian government in Rome, but he was dismissed after a very few months. He was married briefly, but his wife died of pneumonia during the time Corelli was out of work. In disgust he began working for members of a ring of forgers and thieves — exiles from the United States who had been born in Sicily and who had been members of the Mafia in New York and Chicago. He became a good enforcer and a very good businessman for them. When the drug chain was established, he was one of the first men to set up a flow point near Naples.

  "The drug chain flourished in the 1960s and at the end of that time, Corelli had become the key figure in the Mafia's entire chain.

  "He has had various mistresses since then. One tried to kill him when he dropped her for another woman. She was later found drowned in the Bay of Naples."

  The map disappeared and a palatial yacht, about 180 feet long, filled the screen in a beautiful color slide.

  "This is Corelli's pleasure yacht, the Lysistrata. It flies the flag of France. Corelli considers himself a citizen of Corsica, ev
en though he was born in Milan."

  Now a picture of a large villa appeared on the screen.

  "Corelli's house. Although he has only two bodyguards to keep his own person secure, he has a half dozen gunmen patrolling the estate at all times."

  A new picture flashed on. A body lay in the weeds. It had been shot several times. The corpse was unrecognizable, but from the appearance of the remains, I decided that the slugs that hit it had been dumdums — ordinary bullets sliced across the point in an X. A dumdum slug mushrooms into a cutting, destroying shape when it enters its target.

  "This was an agent of France named Emil Ferenc. He had tried to penetrate the Villa Corelli, as the estate is called. He was apparently discovered by the patrols and killed."

  Then picture of desolate, desertlike countryside appeared on the screen. The lens zoomed in on a figure standing near a stately Lombardy poplar, the only tree of any size in sight As the figure grew bigger, it could be seen that the man was of indeterminate age, but rather tall and powerfully built. The face was in shadow.

  "Enrico Corelli. This is the closest anyone has succeeded in photographing him for the past ten years. The picture was taken by telescopic lens from a secure vantage point on an opposite hill. Although the face is indistinguishable, the man's body can be seen clearly. Estimates from the computer put his weight at about 182, his height at 6 feet, his stance erect, and his health excellent"

  The screen darkened. Then a motion picture started up. It was a scene at the beach, possibly the French Riviera. A stunning blonde girl in a miniscule bikini paraded across the sand, swinging her hips, long blonde hair swinging about her shoulders. Momentarily she stopped and turned, as if someone had spoken to her. She looked past the camera and smiled.

  "Tina Bergson. She is twenty-three. Born in Sweden, she moved to Rome where she had a brief, but unsuccessful motion picture career. Then, two years ago, she moved to Switzerland, where she involved herself in money manipulation, apparently for the Mafia, or for some organization like the Mafia. She was caught but never brought to trial. A great deal of money is said to have changed hands to help her escape Swiss authorities.

  "Soon after this, she turned up in the household of Enrico Corelli. Corelli has not married her, but she is his constant companion. She speaks Swedish, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as English. Her IQ is said to be 145 by actual test, made when she filled out an application to be an employee of a Swiss bank. She is an excellent skier."