The Death’s Head Conspiracy Read online

  “You’d better let me drive,” I told her. This may take some tricky maneuvering.”

  She handed me the keys and moved quickly around to get in on the passenger’s side. I slid behind the wheel, noticing that the back seat was full of more of her guitar-making equipment—rosewood panels, spools of steel and nylon strings, and ebony fingerboards.

  The motorcycle bunch hadn’t seen us yet, but they were milling restlessly around at the foot of the road. I kicked the engine to life and heard shouts behind us. I slammed the shift lever into low, and the car leaped up the hill. We squealed around an S-curve, momentarily out of sight, but I could hear their machines roaring up the hill after us.

  We picked up speed on a short climbing straightaway, and I gave a silent thanks that Rona had herself a car with some muscle under the hood. The motorcycles came into sight in the rearview mirror, and I heard a popping sound that was not part of their exhausts. A slug whanged off the rear deck of the car and was followed by another, aimed low.

  I jockeyed the machine around another curve and dug Wilhelmina out of the holster. I flicked off the safety and handed the Luger to Rona. I said, “I can’t slow down to give you a good shot at them, but keep firing and it’ll give them something to think about”

  Rona leaned out the window and fired left-handed at the bikers. I was pleased to see that she knew how to handle a gun. Holding the car on the road kept me too busy to look around to see if she hit anything, but a change in the pitch of engine noise behind us told me she was at least slowing them down.

  Just as I was getting a little breathing distance between us and the bikers, the sharp smell of gasoline told me they’d shot a hole in our tank. The needle of the fuel gage was already jiggling at E, so I knew we weren’t going a whole lot farther. I tramped the accelerator pedal to the floor and we swerved dangerously around two more curves.

  The cycles were still roaring up the road behind us, but I had a couple of turns between us when the engine coughed and I knew we were down to the fumes. During the past thirty seconds I’d come up with a desperate plan to get us out of there alive. Rona had emptied the Luger, and there was no time to reload. The brush on both sides of the road was too thick for us to run far. There were only seconds to act before the pursuers were upon us, so my first try would be the only one we would get.

  I slammed to a stop in the middle of the road, grabbed a spool of steel guitar string wire off the back seat, and sprinted to a utility pole at the side of the road. I looped the wire around the pole, double-twisting the end to make it secure. Running back to the car, I tossed the spool in through the rear window, jumped into the front seat and goosed the last ounce of power out of the machine to boost us up a small grade and out of sight behind a clump of chapparal on the other side of the road.

  The thunder of the motorcycles was just one curve downhill from us when I leaned across the seat, at the same time telling Rona, “Get out and crouch down behind the car.”

  “But, Nick, they’ll see us as soon as they get past the bushes here.”

  “I think they’ll have something else to think about,” I said. “Now, do what I tell you.”

  As Rona followed instructions, I grabbed the spool of guitar wire and yanked it taut. I opened the door, wound the wire about the window frame, and rolled up the window to hold it in place. Then I slammed the door. The bikes were roaring up the straightaway when I fell beside Rona, leaving the steel guitar string stretched across the road at a height of about four feet.

  The two leaders of the motorcycle pack hit the wire almost simultaneously. It looked as though they had nodded together in agreement at something, but in the next instant the two heads stayed poised in air while the choppers roared out from under them. The helmeted heads hit the asphalt and bounced crazily along the road like grisly soccer balls. The cycles, handlebars still gripped by the headless riders, roared on up the Hill for several yards before one wobbled over to bump the other, sending them both into a spinning tangle of flesh and machinery.

  The rest of the bikers attempted lurching, sliding stops on the blood-slick pavement. The result was a pile-up, a tangle of twisted machines and sprawling bodies. I grabbed Rona’s hand and we raced off. We were lying prone behind a clump of bushes when the survivors of the motorcycle gang could be heard starting their bikes, fading in the distance.

  A shudder went through Rona’s lean body. “Who do you suppose they were, Nick?”

  “They’ve got to be tied up with the people who blew up Mumura and are threatening New York. Probably there’s been a tap on your phone for a long time. This morning, when you called Hawk, they knew you were onto something. They waited to see who AXE would send out, then planned to dispose of us.

  “Yes, but they’re only troops. Who gives the orders?”

  “The leader appears to be Anton Zhizov, a real warhawk from the Red Army. One of the men with him seems to be Fyodor Gorodin. Not as smart as Zhizov, but just as dangerous. And if your hunch is right, there’s Knox Warnow.”

  “So all you have to do is find them and stop them from blowing up most of the United States.”

  “That’s all. But what the hell, I’ve got eight whole days.”

  After a safe interval we returned to the road and walked to a clapboard-front store run by an apple-cheeked woman who looked like everybody’s mom. I bought Rona a root beer and got a handful of change for the telephone.

  First I called the LA contact man for the Joint Intelligence Committee. I told him about the bodies up the road, and about Rona’s car in the bushes. I phoned for a taxi and Rona and I settled down to wait

  Five

  Malibu. Playground of the movie stars, weekend homes for the wealthy, and location of AXE Emergency Quarters Number 12. There were a number of these spotted around the country for use of AXE agents in special circumstances. I felt that Rona and I met the requirements.

  The same key, carried by every AXE agent, opened the door to any of them. They were located in all sorts of neighborhoods and all kinds of buildings. The one in Malibu wasn’t adequately described by the term Emergency Quarters. A modern glass and redwood structure, it was sheltered from the access road off Pacific Coast Highway by a seven-foot fence. Downstairs was a huge, high-ceilinged livingroom with comfortable furniture arranged around a hanging fireplace. A ten-foot ebony bar separated the livingroom from the small, functional kitchen. A spiraling wrought-iron staircase led up to a three-sided landing, where the bedrooms were.

  Rona spotted the bathroom with its sunken Roman tub. “I’d sure like a bath,” she said. “Do you suppose there’s anything around here I could slip into afterward?”

  “Take a look through the bedrooms,” I said. “These places are pretty well stocked.”

  She went upstairs and prowled through closets and drawers while I checked out the bar. In a little while she came tripping back down with a velour robe draped over one arm and her hands full of bottles and Jars.

  “AXE certainly equips their hideouts for all occasions, don’t they?”

  “They’re not all this plush,” I told her. “I’ve been in a couple where I had to battle the rats for sleeping space.”

  Rona gave me a long look from the foot of the stairs. “That’s one problem we won’t have here.”

  “At least one,” I agreed. “What do you like to drink? HI have a couple ready when you come out.”

  “Whatever you’re having,” she said, stepping into the bathroom.

  The wall section by the sunken tub was of pebbled glass, and faced the bar outside. When the bathroom light was on, the glass was quite translucent, and whatever was going on inside was very visible, at least in suggestion, to anybody watching from the bar area. I couldn’t be sure whether Rona was aware of this voyeur effect or not, but from the studied grace of her movements, I suspected that she was.

  She set the bottles and jars down on a shelf, then peeled off her blouse. Even through the distortion of the pebbled glass the pink of her nipples was dist
inguishable from the whiter flesh of her breasts. She stepped out of her loose blue pants and slid a strip of black bikini panties down her long, slim legs. She tested the water with one foot, took a last look at herself in the full-length mirror, then stepped down into the tub.

  I walked to the telephone at the far end of the bar to call Hawk. The private number got me through at once. There was a possibility, of course, that the Malibu phone was tapped, but at the rate things were moving, I couldn’t stop to worry about it.

  Before I could report what I’d learned from Rona, Hawk opened the conversation.

  “I’ve just been on the wire with a very excited JIC rep out there who says you left some rather messy cleanup work for him to dispose of and explain to the local police.”

  I admitted the accuracy of the report

  “Nick, I understand,” Hawk went on, “that in our line of work a few bodies are bound to be left behind. Would it be asking too much that in the future you make the necessary disposals in a tidier manner . . . say shooting them through the heart?”

  “I’ll try to be neater,” I promised, “circumstances permitting.”

  “Good. Now tell me, does Miss Volstedt have anything valuable for us?”

  I suppressed a smile as I saw Rona stand up in the tub and reach a naked arm out for the towel. “Yes,” I said, “I think she has.”

  I told Hawk about Rona’s investigation of Knox Warnow five years ago, and his scheme for blackmailing a nation by threatening to blow up its cities one by one. Hawk was especially interested when I told him Wamow’s idea for making a plastic nuclear explosive.

  He said, “That fits in very nicely with a new development on this end. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone, but I’d like for you to fly back to Washington in the morning.”

  “Right. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  Rona was out of the tub now, toweling herself off. With casual sensuality she moved the fluffy towel up and down the smooth expense of her inner thigh. When I answered Hawk, a little of my disappointment at ending such a promising acquaintance so soon must have come through in my voice. Hawk cleared his throat in that disapproving way of his. “You might bring Miss Volstedt along. The project I have in mind will include a job for the two of you.”

  “We’ll be there,” I said, with more enthusiasm.

  I hung up the phone and built a couple of martinis from the well-stocked liquor supply beneath the bar. As I dropped a twist of lemon into each glass, Rona emerged from the bathroom. She wore the short velour robe belted at her waist. It was just long enough to reach the crease where thigh met buttock.

  “I’m afraid this robe wasn’t made for a tall girl,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I told her. Rona’s legs, exposed as they were now, didn’t look even a little bit thin. Instead, they looked rounded and smooth and pliable. I handed her the martini.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Did you call Washington?”

  “Yes. Hawk wants us to fly back there tomorrow. Says he has a job for both of us. Is that all right with you?”

  “Why not? It’s got to be better than hanging around here with motorcycle creeps and God knows who else shooting at me.”

  Rona took a sip of her drink, then set the glass down on the bar and began to shudder violently, as though fanned by a blast of chill air.

  I took a step toward her. “Rona, what’s wrong?”

  She drew a deep breath. “A delayed reaction, to all the excitement this afternoon, I guess. It seems I’m not as cool and collected as I thought I was.”

  I moved in and put my arms around her. Her body, which looked so lean and capable in clothes, melted against me with a warm suppleness that was surprising. Her breasts, pressing against my chest, moved softly with her breathing.

  “I’m so damned scared, Nick,” she said, “for you and for me and for everybody else in the world. How will it end?”

  “Badly,” I said. “But not for us. Now relax and let me worry.”

  I massaged the smooth muscles of her back through the velour robe.

  She tilted her head to look up into my eyes. “I hope you’re right, Nick,” she said.

  I bent and kissed her on the mouth. She smelled of soap from her bath, with a touch of some floral scent in her hair. Her lips were cool and yielding, and sort of minty to the taste.

  My hands slid up and found the open edge of the robe, then moved down to the warm, rising hills of her breasts. With a small cry of desire, she pulled away from me Just long enough to loosen the belt and slide the robe back over her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor.

  Slowly, deliberately, she drew my hands down over her nakedness, pressing her breasts for a moment, then letting the nipples bob up again as she wound my hands down her body and across the flat stomach with its softer-than-chamois skin.

  Her eyes were entranced as she bent her head to watch, she guided my fingers over her silky cushion to her warm center, and her hungry eyes rose to meet mine.

  As I stepped back and hurried out of my clothes, she studied me with frank interest and admiration, never turning coyly away, even when I was completely naked. Then she simply opened her arms to welcome me.

  I glanced upward to the bedroom landing, but she shook her head—as if to say that her need was too urgent for delay—that the place was here, the time was now. So we stretched out on the thick blue carpet and I stroked her body. Her moans came softly at first, like the sighing of wind, but soon rose to feverish cries of demand, as she rolled and pulled me down on top of her.

  She arched her lean blonde body up to meet me as I entered her. Then there was the writhing, twisting rhythm of her tortured desire, the mounting together on a cresting wave of climax, followed by the long, surging descent to the empty shore of sweet exhaustion.

  Six

  Early the next morning Rona went to work and turned out a huge breakfast. The night’s exercise had given us both big appetites, and we put the food away with enthusiasm. As the coffee cooled in our cups, other things began to warm up. However, this was a working day and, from what I’d learned of Rona the night before, a spot of after-breakfast recreation might just keep us occupied until late afternoon.

  So instead, I stood in the sunken tub and took a cold shower.

  We got away from LA. International on a nine o’clock flight, and at Dulles another of Hawk’s silent, efficient chauffeurs met us with an AXE limousine.

  We went through the security rigamarole and soon were seated across the desk from David Hawk. The head AXE man ran his eyes over Rona Volstedt and turned back to me with an unspoken question in his gaze. I shrugged and grinned back at him as innocently as I could.

  Hawk cleared his throat explosively and got down to business. “At the time you called me yesterday, Nick, we were holding a seaman named Juan Escobar off the Caribbean cruise ship Gaviota. He was picked up in Fort Lauderdale when he was acting suspiciously going through customs. No contraband was found on his person or in his suitcase, but with all our people on double alert these days, the Florida authorities called our office. We had Escobar brought up here for questioning, but we couldn’t get anything out of him. Then, when you passed on Miss Volstedt’s information about Knox Warnow and his nuclear plastic explosive, we had a closer look at the suitcase he brought in. Sure enough, our labs showed it to be fissionable material. In the latch we found a microelec-tronic detonator that could be activated by a long-distance radio signal. And, funny thing, there was a small skull embossed on the handle—a tiny death’s-head.”

  “Have you learned anything more from the seaman?” I asked.

  “Not much. I’ll let the man tell you himself.”

  Hawk tapped a button on his intercom and said, “Send in Escobar.” A minute later a pair of grim looking government men entered with a sullen, pockmarked man between them. The government men left and Hawk motioned Escobar into a chair.

  I walked over and stood in front of the man. “Let’s hear your story,” I said. />
  Escobar shifted uncomfortably. “I already told it twenty times.”

  “Tell it again,” I said. “To me.”

  He took a look at my face and started to talk without further hesitation. “The big man, he give me the suitcase and five hundred dollars. He say take a couple weeks off. Then when I catch up with ship, he give me another five. All I do is stick the suitcase in a locker in Cleveland and leave it there. That is all I know. I swear.”

  “Who is the big man?” I asked.

  “I do not know his name. He comes on board sometimes at one port, sometimes at another. All I know, he is with new owners, and when he gives an order, everybody jump.”

  “New owners, did you say?”

  “Si. Five, six months ago, they buy the Gaviota. Most of the old crew they fire, a few of us they keep. Me, I work for anybody. It’s a job, you know. The new guys they put on the crew, they are not South American like the rest of us. They talk funny, and they keep away from us.”

  “Tell me more about the big man.”

  “He is the boss, that is all I know. He looks rough and he talks in deep voice. Big shoulders, like a bull.”

  I glanced at Hawk.

  “The description fits Fyodor Gorodin,” he said.

  To Escobar I said, “Anybody else giving orders?”

  “One man I only see twice. Skinny, mean looking, white hair. He’s the only one I ever see give orders to the big man.”

  Again I turned to Hawk. “Zhizov?”

  He nodded.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked slowly to the far wall. Then I came back and planted myself in front of the sailor again. I stared into his eyes till he looked away.

  “Juan,” I told him, “you have probably heard that the United States deals fairly with criminals and that you don’t have to be afraid of mistreatment. But this situation is quite different, Juan. There is no time for patience. If you are lying to us, I will personally see to it that even if you live, you will be useless to the senoritas. Do you understand me, Juan?”