Микки Спиллейн - The Delta Factor

“We’re not at liberty to decide on that matter,” Woolart said quietly.

I had them then. “Like hell you’re not. This was dropped in your laps and you were told to handle it. You were told to make the deal and if you come back empty-handed somebody will drop a hot potato in them. Buddies, you done bought the farm. Now I’ll lay it out. If I pull it off, you knock off fifteen years, all sentences to run concurrently, and nobody touches that loot. Plain enough?”

“No.” Gavin Woolart’s tone was adamant.

“Is your boy worth forty million, Mr. Woolart? Can you do the job yourself?”

And from the rear Carter said, “Let it stand, Gavin. It’s the only deal we can make.”

For a few long seconds Woolart just stared at me. It was his kind of game, this mental cat-and-mouse bit, and he had been at it a long time where all the participants were experts. Now he was calling on all his resources to catalog me properly. Then, very quietly, he said, “No.”

“Why, Gavin?” Carter asked him. The rest of the room was very quiet.

I said, “He’s considering a possibility, Mr. Carter. A forty-million-dollar possibility. He hates to see that kind of money cut from the budget. Now let me inject another possibility… that I didn’t take it. Oh, sure, it was proven in court through circumstantial evidence, but more than one innocent person went that route before me. The cute little possibility he’s considering is that if you guarantee I can keep the forty big ones… and I didn’t heist it to begin with… but manage to get my hands on it in the meantime, you people are up the creek. Make it a public issue and some of our more progressive papers will take you apart… not to say what will happen politically. Right, Woolart?”

He didn’t answer me.

I said, “He knows I might pull it off, too.” I let a grin crease my face and relaxed in the chair. “It’s an interesting challenge.”

Gavin Woolart’s face was drawn into a tight mask. “There’s no doubt about your having that money, Morgan.”

“Or that I might get it,” I added.

He shrugged, not changing his expression. “Either way, the answer is still No.”

“You authorized to make the decision or does it go through channels, Mr. Woolart?”

He didn’t have to give me the answer. I saw the sudden narrowing of his eyes. “For your own satisfaction, you’ll get an opinion from higher quarters, but I can assure you it will be negative. However, there’s a time element involved and I advise you not to delay making up your mind or the entire situation will revert unconditionally to your recapture.”

“But the rest of the deal stands?”

“That’s the offer. Take your choice.”

I nodded. “Okay, buddy, I’ll take it.” I scanned the room and watched the small glances they exchanged, those tiny motions of relief like finding out that there was still some time left in the ball game after all. I said, “How do you know you can trust me?”

Gavin Woolart gathered his papers together and stood up. His eyes were cold beads that said he hated every facet of the arrangement, but it was out of his hands. Very tersely, he told me, “We don’t, Morgan.”

For a week they sweated me in the Montebahn Hotel, a crappy six-story building wedged between two similar ones in the upper forties. Maybe it was to condition me to the idea of what they wanted. Maybe it was to diagram the security arrangements they could use if they wanted to.

They had recruited types from somewhere who seemed just too damned innocuous to be carrying a badge until you spotted all the little things that marked them as being top guns who would as soon slice you up as say hello. The rooms opposite and flanking mine each held a pair, with each door cracked enough so they could see any passing movement in the hall outside. Nobody had to tell me there would be others. Every exit from the roof to the basement would be covered with a twenty-four-hour watch after a lot of heavy minds went into screening any possible escape route.

A half hour after I was in the room I spotted a couple of bugs they had planted but didn’t try to scramble them. In this age of electronics they didn’t need anything quite so obvious, so my guess was that they were deliberately left exposed enough to see what action I’d take. The mirror over the battered dresser was new enough to be a give-way. The Montebahn Hotel didn’t go to such extremes to make its guests happy, so the thing had to be a two-way job. The only amusement I had for a while was making faces into it, so if there was a psychiatrist back there trying to observe my actions for a possible stability factor, he was going to have a hell of a lot of notes to play with.

Oh, they were covering every angle, all right. The bathroom mirror was gimmicked the same way and that particular invasion of privacy I didn’t like at all.

So I had to teach them a lesson. And like the man said… the aggressor always has the initial advantage.

The first night I shut the venetian blinds, pulled the musty curtains across the windows and got into bed in total darkness. I gave myself another hour, then pulled the drawer out from the nightstand beside the bed, hauled it under the covers and bashed the back out of it with the heel of my hand, then put it back in position. Any sound they heard would have been interpreted as a normal sleeper’s movements and disregarded. And that was their tough luck.

Now all I could hope for was a habit pattern. I knew they were observing mine, so I could take advantage of theirs. The one thing they allowed me was room service from the grill downstairs and calling for a steak each night could damn near be expected. Something else could be expected too. In a place like this the steaks had to be tough, so the knife they supplied had to be sharp enough to compensate for it.

Then I began toilet training the great Federal agencies. Ten minutes after I finished I turned the news up on TV, went to the bathroom, draped a towel over the mirror there, knowing damn well they’d grin at my reluctance to be observed at what was my private affair, then I’d start to carve out the gun. Ten minutes was all I gave myself, then I flushed down the chips, shoved the chunk of wood well under the bathtub, went back and finished my coffee and called the waiter up to get the mess out of my room.

He was another one of them and his eyes neatly tabulated the dishes, the cutlery and everything else, then satisfied, he left. In the morning I’d use the john again properly so if they thought about it at all, I was just one of those regular types who never had any congestion of the lower tract.

The seventh day the flat little imitation automatic was finished. The only deviation from my habit pattern, and one they didn’t notice, was that when I used the bathroom this time I took the bottle of Worchestershire sauce with me and it made a handy dye to blacken the wood of the mock-up gun. When I got back the gimmick was stuck inside my shirt, the bottle replaced and I called for the waiter again.

It had to figure out. They’d give me credit for having spotted the waiter, so they wouldn’t take a chance of having me jump him and grab his rod, so he’d be unarmed. The door was always locked from the outside; the only time it was opened was when room service or the maid opened it. The maid was a scared hotel employee, so somebody would be waiting outside if I tried a break for it then. But when the waiter was there, the guard wouldn’t be quite so worried.

He came in on schedule, but used to his job now, a little more efficient and unconcerned. I had arranged his habit pattern too. When he was pushing the tray toward the door I crossed behind him, ostensibly to adjust the TV, whipped the Worcestershire sauce bottle from the table and laid it across his ear from the only position the two-way mirror couldn’t cover.