The Aztec Avenger Read online

  NICK CARTER

  The Aztec Avenger

  Copyright Notice

  This book was scanned and proofed by papachanjo. Use it only for reading and not for a gain of any sort. If you have any comments, feel free to send them to: [email protected].

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  What happened to me several months ago was what a psychologist would call an identity crisis. The symptoms were easy to identify. First, I began to lose interest in my work. Then it turned into a gnawing discontent, and finally into an outright dislike for what I was doing. I began to get a feeling of being trapped and was faced with the fact that I was well into my life and what the hell had I accomplished?

  I asked myself the crucial question.

  “Who are you?”

  And the answer was, “I’m a killer.”

  I didn’t like the answer.

  So I walked away from AXE, from Hawk, from Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and swore that I’d never do another job for them as long as I lived.

  Wilhelmina, the 9mm. Luger that was almost like an extension of my right hand, was packed away along with Hugo and Pierre. I had run my fingers lovingly over the deadly, honed steel of the stiletto before I laid it down and wrapped the gun, the knife, and the tiny gas bomb into a chamois lining. All three went into my safe deposit box. The next day I was gone,

  Since then, I’d hidden myself in half a dozen countries under twice that many assumed names. I wanted peace and serenity. I wanted to be left alone, to have the security of knowing that I would live through each day to enjoy the next

  I’d had exactly six months and two days of it before the telephone rang in my hotel room. At nine-thirty in the morning.

  I hadn’t been expecting a telephone call. I’d thought that no one knew that I. was in El Paso. The ringing of the bell meant that someone knew something about me that they weren’t supposed to know. I didn’t like the idea one damned bit because it meant that Td gotten careless, and carelessness could get me killed.

  The telephone on the night table beside my bed shrilled insistently at me. I reached over and picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “Your taxi is here, Mr. Stephans,” said the overly polite voice of the desk clerk.

  I hadn’t ordered a taxi. Someone was letting me know that he knew I was in town, and that he also knew the alias I’d registered under.

  It did no good to wonder who it was. There was only one way to find out.

  “Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said and hung up.

  Deliberately, I took my time. Td been lying sprawled on the large double bed, my head propped up on the bunched pillows when the phone had rung. Now, I locked my hands behind my head and stared across the room at my reflection in the large row of minors above the long, walnut-veneered triple chest of drawers.

  What I saw was a lean, lithe body with a face of indeterminate age. It was a face that just missed being handsome, but that wasn’t the important thing about it. It was a face that reflected coldness with eyes that had seen too much in one lifetime. Too much death. Too much killing. Too much torture and maiming and more bloodshed than any one man should see.

  I remembered once, a few years back, in a room in a small pensione in a not too elegant section of Rome, a girl had flared up at me and called me an arrogant, cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch.

  “You just don’t give a damn! Not about me or about anything!” she’d screamed at me. “You don’t have any feelings! I thought I meant something to you but I was wrong! You’re nothing but a bastard! Doesn’t it mean anything to you—what we’ve been doing for the last hour?”

  I had had no answer for her. I had lain there, naked on the rumpled bed and watched her finish getting dressed without a flicker of emotion showing on my face.

  She had grabbed up her purse and turned at the door.

  “What makes you the way you are?” she had asked me almost plaintively. “Why can’t you be reached? Is it me? Don’t I have any importance for you? Am I absolutely nothing to you?”

  “I’ll call for you tonight at seven,” I’d said curtly, ignoring her angry demands.

  She had spun around stiffly and stepped out the door, slamming it behind her, I’d watched her go, knowing that by evening she would learn in one fast moment, that she wasn’t yet ‘absolutely nothing’ to me. I hadn’t allowed my feelings to make any difference, because from the start of our affair she had been one in a cast of many who’d played a part in my AXE assignment. Her role ended that night. She’d found out too much, and at seven that evening, I’d rung down her final curtain with my stiletto.

  Now, several years later, I lay on another bed in a hotel room in El Paso and examined my face in the mirror. It was a face that accused me of being everything she had called me—tired, cynical, arrogant, cold.

  I realized I could lie on that bed for hours, but there was someone waiting for me in a taxi and he wouldn’t go away. And if I wanted to find out who had penetrated my anonymity, there was only one way to do it. Go down and face him.

  So I swung my legs off the bed, stood up and straightened my clothes, and stepped from my room, wishing that I had the security of Wilhelmina tucked under my armpit—or even the cold deadliness of Hugo’s pencil-thin, sharpened steel attached to my arm.

  In the lobby, I nodded to the desk clerk as I passed by and went out through the revolving doors. After the air-conditioned chill of the hotel, the moist heat of El Paso’s early summer morning wrapped itself around me like a damp embrace.

  The taxi was idling by the curb.

  I walked slowly toward the cab, my eyes flicking automatically around it.

  There was nothing suspicious in the quiet street or the faces of the few people strolling casually down the sidewalk.

  The driver came around from the far side of the taxi.

  “Mr. Stephans?”

  I nodded.

  “My name’s Jiminez,” he said. I caught the flash of white teeth set in a dark, solid face. The man was stocky and powerfully built He wore an open-necked sport shirt over light blue slacks.

  Jiminez opened the rear door for me. I could see that there was no one else in the taxi.

  He caught my glance. “You satisfied?”

  I didn’t answer him. I got into the back and Jiminez closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. He slipped into the front seat and pulled the car out into the light stream of traffic.

  I edged further to the left until I was sitting almost directly behind the stocky man. As I did so, I leaned forward, my muscles tensing, the fingers of my right hand curling under so that the knuckles stiffened, making a lethal weapon of my fist.

  Jiminez looked up into the rear-view mirror.

  “Why don’t you sit back and relax?” he suggested easily. “Nothing’s going to happen. He just wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  Jiminez shrugged his powerful shoulders. “I don’t know. All I’m supposed
to tell you is that the word came down from Hawk for you to follow instructions. Whatever that means.”

  It meant a lot. It meant that Hawk had been letting me have my little vacation. It meant that Hawk had always known how to get in touch with me. It meant that I was still working for Hawk and for AXE, America’s super-secret intelligence agency.

  “All right,” I said, wearily, “what are the instructions?”

  “I’m to take you out to the airport,” Jiminez said. “Rent a light plane. Be sure the tanks are full. Once you’ve cleared the area, take up a course of sixty degrees. And tune your communications radio to Unicom. You’ll get further instructions in the air.”

  “Apparently, I’m going to meet someone,” I said, probing for more information. “You know who it is?”

  Jiminez nodded.

  “Gregorius.”

  He dropped the name into the air between us and it was as if he dropped a bomb.

  By ten-thirty, I was at 6,500 feet, on a course of 60° with my radio tuned to 122.8 megacycles, which is the Unicom frequency for talk between planes.

  The sky was clear, with only a faint smudge of haze near the horizon. I held the Cessna 210 steadily on course at slow cruise. I kept looking, from side to side, scanning the skies around me.

  I saw the other plane on an intercept course when it was still so far away that it looked like a small dot that could have been anything, even an optical illusion. I reduced the speed of my own aircraft even more, pulling back the throttle and resetting the trim tab. In a few minutes, the other plane took on shape. Presently, it swung in a wide arc, circling to come in beside me, flying wingtip to wingtip. The plane was a Bonanza. There was only one man in it. The pilot of the Bonanza picked up his mike. I heard a rough baritone voice crackle in my earphones.

  “Five . . . niner . . . Alpha. Is that you, Carter?”

  I picked up my own mike.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Follow me,” he said, and the Bonanza swung smoothly away on a northerly course, sliding in ahead of my aircraft, slightly to my left and just above me where I could easily keep it in sight I turned the Cessna 210 to follow it, pushing the throttle ahead, picking up speed to keep it in sight.

  Almost an hour later, the Bonanza slowed, let down its flaps and gear, and turned in a tight bank to let down for a landing on a strip bulldozed in the floor of a valley.

  As I followed the Bonanza in, I saw that there was a Learjet parked at the far end of the runway, and I knew that Gregorius was waiting for me.

  Inside the plush interior of the Learjet, I sat across from Gregorius, almost enfolded by the rich leather of the armchair.

  “I know you are angry,” Gregorius said calmly, his voice smooth and polished. “However, please don’t let your emotions get in the way of your thinking. It wouldn’t be like you at all.”

  “I told you that I’d never do another job for you again, Gregorius. I told that to Hawk, too.”

  I watched the big man intently.

  “So you did,” admitted Gregorius. He took a sip of his drink. “But then, nothing in this world is ever final—except death.”

  He smiled at me out of a large, rubbery face of oversized features. Large mouth, large eyes that bulged codlike under thick gray eyebrows, a huge, protuberant nose with heavy nostrils, coarse pores in a sallow skin— Gregorius’ face was like a sculptor’s rough, clay head molded in heroic size to match the rest of his gross body.

  “Besides,” he said smoothly, “Hawk has lent you to me, so you’re really working for him, you see.”

  “Prove it.”

  Gregorius pulled a folded sheet of onion skin paper out of his pocket. He reached over and handed it to me.

  The message was in code. Not too difficult to decipher, either. Decoded, it read simply, “N3 on lend-lease to Gregorius. No AXE until job completed. Hawk.”

  I lifted my head and stared coldly at Gregorius.

  “It could be a fake,” I said.

  “Here’s the proof that it’s genuine,” he answered, and handed me a package.

  I looked down into my hands. The package was wrapped in paper, and when I tore that off, I found another wrapping underneath of chamois. And swaddled in the chamois was my 9mm Luger, the pencil-slim knife that I had carried in its sheath strapped to my right forearm, and Pierre, the tiny gas bomb.

  I’d put them away—safely, I thought—six months ago. How Hawk had found my safe deposit box or had gotten its contents I’ll never know. But then, Hawk was able to do many things no one knew about. I nodded my head.

  “You’ve proved your point,” I told Gregorius. “The message is genuine.”

  “So you will listen to me now?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll listen.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I refused Gregorius’ offer of lunch, but I did have coffee while he put away a huge meal. He didn’t talk while he ate, concentrating on his food with almost total dedication. It gave me a chance to examine him while I smoked and sipped at my coffee.

  Alexander Gregorius was one of the world’s richest and most secretive men. I think I knew more about him than anyone else because I had set up his incredible information network when Hawk had put me out on loan to him before.

  As Hawk had said, “We can use him. A man with his power and his money can be a valuable help to us. There’s just one thing for you to remember, Nick. Whatever he knows, I want to know, too.”

  I’d set up the fantastic information system that was to work, for Gregorius and then tested it by ordering information gathered on Gregorius himself. I passed that information on to AXE’s files.

  There was damned little hard information about his early years. Most of it was unconfirmed. Rumor had it that he’d been born somewhere in the Balkans or Asia Minor. Rumor had it that he was part Cypriot and part Lebanese. Or Syrian and Turk. Nothing was completely definitive.

  But I’d discovered his real name was not Alexander Gregorius, something which a very few people knew. But even I couldn’t learn where he’d really come from or what he’d done during the first twenty-five years of his life.

  He emerged from nowhere right after World War II. He appeared on an immigration record in Athens as having come from Ankara, but his passport was Lebanese.

  By the end of the 50s, he was deep in Greek shipping, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil, Lebanese banking, French import-export, South American copper, manganese, tungsten—you name it. It was almost impossible to pin down all his activities even from an insider’s seat.

  It would be an accountant’s nightmare to uncover his exact holdings. He’d hidden them by incorporating in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Panama—countries where corporate secrecy is virtually unbreachable. That’s because the S.A. after the names of European and South American companies stands for Societe Anonyme. No one knows who the stockholders are.

  I don’t think that even Gregorius himself could pin down the exact extent of his wealth. He no longer measured it in terms of dollars, but in terms of power and influence—and he had plenty of both.

  What I’d done for him, on that first assignment from Hawk, was to set up an information gathering service that consisted of an insurance company, a credit checking organization, and a news magazine with foreign bureaus in more than thirty countries and well over a hundred correspondents and stringers. Add to that an electronic data processing firm and a market research business. Their combined investigative resources were staggering.

  I showed Gregorius how we could put all this data together, compiling completely detailed dossiers about several hundred thousand people. Especially those who worked for companies he had an interest in or that he owned outright. Or who worked for his competition.

  The information flowed in from correspondents, from credit investigators, from insurance records, from his market research people, from the files of his news-magazine. It was all fed into a bank of IBM 360 computers at the EDP company located in Denver.

  In l
ess than sixty seconds I could have a printout on any one of these people packed with such thorough information that it would scare the hell out of them.

  It would be complete from the time they were born, the schools they went to, the grades they got, the exact salaries earned on every job they ever held, the loans they ever took out and the payments they have to make. It can even compute their estimated annual income taxes for every year they worked.

  It knows the affairs they’re having or have had. Right down to the names and addresses of their lovers. And it included information on their sexual proclivities and perversions.

  There’s also one special reel of tape, containing some two thousand or more dossiers with both input and output, handled only by a few carefully selected ex-FBI men. That’s because the information is too secret and too dangerous to be seen by anyone else.

  Any U.S. District Attorney would sell his soul to get his hands on the data reel on the Mafia families and Syndicate members that had been compiled.

  Only Gregorius or myself could authorize a printout from this special reel.

  Gregorius finally finished eating. He pushed away his tray and leaned back in his armchair, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin.

  “The problem is Carmine Stocelli,” he said abruptly. “You know who he is?”

  I nodded. “That’s like asking me who owns Getty Oil. Carmine runs the biggest Mafia family in New York. Numbers and dope are his specialty. How are you mixed up with him?”

  Gregorius frowned. “Stocelli’s trying to muscle in on one of my new enterprises. I want no part of him.”

  “Give me the details.”

  Tin in the middle of building a number of resorts. One in each of six countries. Imagine an enclave consisting of a luxury hotel, several low-rise condominium apartment buildings adjacent to the hotel, and some thirty to forty private villas surrounding the entire package.”

  “And restricted to millionaires, right?” I grinned at him.

  “Right.”

  I did a quick estimate in my head. “That’s an investment of some eight hundred million dollars,” I remarked. “Who’s financing it?”