Ник Картер: The Spanish Connection

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 tar-paper 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. Gonzalez.

“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?”

“Four”

“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.

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, even 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.