The Intimidators Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Donald Hamilton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

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  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Also by Donald Hamilton and available from Titan Books

  Death of a Citizen

  The Wrecking Crew

  The Removers

  The Silencers

  Murderers’ Row

  The Ambushers

  The Shadowers

  The Ravagers

  The Devastators

  The Betrayers

  The Menacers

  The Interlopers

  The Poisoners

  The Intriguers

  The Terminators (June 2015)

  The Intimidators

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783293001

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783293018

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 2015

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1974, 2015 by Donald Hamilton. All rights reserved.

  Matt Helm® is the registered trademark of Integute AB.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  1

  It was a good day, until we got back to the dock and found the messenger waiting. I didn’t know he was a messenger when I saw him, of course. We seldom do, until they identify themselves. He was just an ordinary-looking man, for the Bahamas, black, rather shabbily dressed, chatting with one of the marina employees as he watched our captain back the fifty-foot twin-screw sportfisherman into its narrow slip, making the complex maneuver look as if it were so easy that even I could do it if I wanted to try, which I didn’t.

  I was standing aft in the open cockpit beside the fighting chair, wondering if I was supposed to be performing some useful operation with the stern rope—excuse me, line—since the mate was busy forward. As you’ll gather, I’m not the world’s greatest nautical expert. Then the marina gent on shore stepped up and gestured toward the line in question. I handed it to him. As he dropped the loop over one of the big dock cleats, his companion caught my eye and made a small signal, never mind what.

  That was all. The next moment, the unknown man was strolling away casually along the pier, stopping to talk with another black man near the marina office, and I was trying to secure the dockline I was holding, a duty from which I was relieved by the young mate.

  As I said, it had been a pretty good day up to that point. We’d raised two sailfish and connected with a blue marlin in the three-hundred-pound class. Probably because of my total inexperience, we’d missed both sails, and the big boy had managed to wrap the wire leader around his bill, snap it, and get away. Nevertheless, I’d had him on for about fifteen minutes, all three hundred pounds of him, and for an ex-freshwater-angler, brought up on little ten-inch trout, the whole experience had been fairly memorable. You might say I was the one who was hooked.

  I’d discovered that, for a man in my line of work, deep-sea fishing has considerable advantages as an off-duty sport. Trolling or casting on the average inland lake, you’re often within easy rifle shot of shore; wading a brushy stream, fishing rod in hand, you’re almost always a beautiful target for anyone lurking in the bushes. On the ocean, on the other hand, you’re reasonably safe from hostile attention. Once you’ve checked out the boat, and sized up the crew, and your fishing companions if any, you can relax and forget about watching your back. Unless somebody considers you important enough to send a submarine after you—and I don’t flatter myself I’ve made anybody quite that mad—nothing’s going to sneak up on you unexpectedly on a small vessel ten miles at sea.

  Besides, I’d just learned, fighting a truly big fish is a hell of a lot of fun; and the rest of the time you can lean back lazily in the fighting chair watching the baits skipping astern, soaking up the sunshine, and carefully forgetting about various things including a nice lady named Laura, a colleague who’d been called back to work some weeks ago after we’d spent a pleasant Florida interlude together. Well, I guess she wasn’t a nice lady by ordinary standards—there are no nice people in our business—but I’d found her an attractive and enjoyable companion despite certain strong-minded Women’s Lib tendencies.

  Now it was my turn to receive the summons to action. I reviewed the situation hastily. Loafing around the Florida Keys alone after Laura had left, doing a little desultory angling, I’d run into a fairly prominent Texas businessman and sportsman, a gent reputed to have a finger in various political pies, who seemed to think I’d done him a favor. I’d barely been aware of his existence when he approached me, and he must have had very good Washington sources of information—perhaps a little too good—to know about me and the assignment I’d recently completed, a job with political overtones. It had been a cooperative venture, anyway, with a lot of agents involved. Nevertheless, the success of our mission had apparently saved Big Bill Haseltine’s bacon in some way and he’d been aching to show his gratitude to somebody and I’d been elected. He’d insisted on arranging for me to spend a week learning about real ocean fishing at a private club where, he’d said, the billfish were so thick you hardly dared go swimming for fear of being accidentally perforated by a passing marlin or casually skewered by a sail.

  Walker’s Cay—pronounced key just like in Florida—is the northernmost inhabited point in the Bahama Islands which, in case you didn’t know, were part of a foreign country or possession called the British West Indies, or B.W.I., lying at its nearest some forty-odd miles east of Miami. I hadn’t known, and it came as a big surprise to me. Somehow, never having been there, I’d had the vague impression that the Bahamas were located way down south of Cuba in the Caribbean somewhere, or maybe far out east in the Atlantic in the neighborhood of Bermuda.

  Actually, Walker’s Cay, although off to the north a bit, turned out to be barely an hour’s plane ride from the airport at Fort Lauderdale, just up the Florida coast from Miami. The plane was a clumsy-looking and not very speedy flying boat, a private craf
t belonging to my hosts-to-be. Rather to my disappointment, it didn’t sit down on the water upon arrival but put down its wheels again and landed on the paved strip that took up a large part of the little island. The rest of the limited real estate was mostly devoted to the clubhouse with its grounds, swimming pool, cottages, and service buildings; and by the marina and its facilities. To let us know we were really landing on foreign soil, there was a black Bahamian customs gent to greet us; but we’d already filled out the simple entry form on the plane, and the pilot took care of the rest of the formalities…

  All that seemed longer ago than yesterday morning. After a day and a half on the water, I’d got into the swing of this angling existence, and all I’d had on my mind until a moment ago was fish. Now I had to figure out how to get out of here quickly without causing comment, and locate a moderately safe phone, and call Washington. What I’d just received was the “make contact at once” signal, which implies reasonable dispatch but also reasonable concern for security. There’s also the simple “make contact” signal, which says take your time and be absolutely certain you don’t attract attention and aren’t being watched; and then there’s the “make contact with utmost haste” signal, which means drop everything and grab the nearest phone regardless.

  I went through the motions of thanking the captain and mate for a fine day, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I hoped they didn’t notice; they’d been very considerate to a clumsy beginner at the sport. Stepping ashore, I couldn’t help feeling a slight resentment. This was unreasonable. Certainly there had been times when I’d been snatched back to work unceremoniously after being promised a lengthy leave, but this wasn’t one of them. I’d had most of the summer free; I was in no position to complain. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wishing that I’d either managed to land that big marlin this afternoon, or that Mac had held off a day or two and let me hook into another one.

  I walked along the pier and up the hill past the swimming pool to the main building, and went into the office to do a little research on the problem of communications. The telephone company does not, of course, run its wires to islands a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. I knew the club had radio facilities—you could see the mast far out at sea—and kept some kind of schedule. I knew they could probably, therefore, get me any number in the U.S. by way of the nearest marine operator on the mainland. However, since any radio-equipped boat between here and there could presumably listen in, it seemed like a hell of a public way of chatting with Washington on subjects that would probably prove to be very private indeed.

  I was selling Mac short. He’d taken care of everything. The girl at the desk, a slight, friendly looking redhead with freckles, looked up quickly.

  “Oh, Mr. Helm,” she said. “Any luck today?”

  “We hooked a good-sized blue but I couldn’t bring him in,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “I mean, it’s really too bad, because I have a message for you from Mr. Starkweather, Jonas Starkweather, editor of Outdoors Magazine. It just came in. He’s going to be in Fort Lauderdale tomorrow night and he would like you to have dinner with him. He says it’s important, something about some pictures he needs very badly.”

  At an earlier period in my life I’d made my living with a camera, with an occasional assist from a typewriter. It was a cover we still used upon occasion; but it was unlikely that any magazine editor remembered my name at all, let alone favorably enough to buy me a dinner. Nevertheless, I might have considered the possibility if the man at the dock hadn’t prepared me for some devious, secret-agent-type shenanigans.

  “Damn!” I said. “There goes my fishing trip! Did he say where and when?”

  “The rooftop restaurant of the Yankee Clipper Hotel at seven o’clock tomorrow night. He’s staying there and he’s reserved a room for you. I’ve put you down for the plane tomorrow, if that’s all right, Mr. Helm. You should be down here with your luggage a little before ten…”

  Flying over the island the following morning, I could see the big white sportfisherman lying idle in its slip in the marina; and I knew a twinge of regret, which was ridiculous. Spending a lot of time and effort catching an enormous fish you weren’t even going to eat was actually an absurd sport, I told myself firmly. It wasn’t as if I needed the excitement. Mac would provide me with plenty of excitement, I was quite certain. He always did.

  I didn’t speculate on what form it would take. I just sat and watched the subtle, shifting colors—all shades of blue and green, with an occasional touch of weedy brown—of the shallow water below. We were crossing the extensive Little Bahama Bank, so called to distinguish it from the even larger Great Bahama Bank farther south. There was a tiny islet or two, none as big as Walker’s Cay; and then we passed the tip of the much larger island of Grand Bahama. Although big enough that only a fraction of it could be seen from the plane—the fourth largest island in the Bahamas, I’d been told—it didn’t look very high, and I couldn’t help thinking that, judging by the little I’d seen, if the whole area should sink a few feet into the sea, there’d be nothing left but some nasty submerged reefs. On the other hand, if it should rise just a little, there’d be the biggest land-rush of the century, to a brand-new subcontinent just off the coast of Florida. Undoubtedly developers and promoters somewhere were already hard at work on the problem of jacking up all those endless, beautiful, lonely, useless, watery flats just far enough to turn them into valuable real estate on which to build their lousy little houses and golf courses.

  Soon we were out over the violet-blue Gulf Stream—a thousand feet deep, I’d been told—and shortly we were landing at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Customs inspection was, for U.S. Customs, surprisingly fast and considerate, at least compared with the last inquisition to which I’d been subjected, returning from Mexico. Maybe nobody grows poppies or grass or coca leaves in the Bahamas. It was nice to know that returning to your native land could be made so simple and pleasant; but it kind of made you wonder if it was really a worthwhile endeavor, delaying and humiliating millions of honest, upright, martini-drinking Americans at their own borders, elsewhere, just to save a few people from one particular bad habit.

  I guess the prospect of going back to work after a couple of months of leisure was making me philosophical. There were no messages for me at the Yankee Clipper Hotel, a narrow, seven-story hostelry on a wide, white beach that was visible from the window of my third-floor room. I could also see a couple of sailboats far out in the blue Gulf Stream that I’d just flown over; and some powerboats closer to shore where the water was paler. The bellboy showed me the view and the TV set and the bathroom. I gave him a buck and a thirty-second head start, caught the next elevator down, and ducked into a lobby phone booth I’d spotted on my way in.

  “Eric here,” I said when Mac came on the line.

  “Pavel Minsk,” he said. “Reported heading for Nassau, New Providence Island, B.W.I. Find out why, and then make the touch. Mr. Minsk is long overdue.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  2

  I didn’t like it. It was the usual cheapie Washington routine, trying to get double mileage out of a single agent. It wasn’t enough that one of the other side’s big guns, a man we’d been after for a long time, had at last been spotted out in the open where we might be able to move in on him. That didn’t satisfy the greedy gents from whom Mac got his instructions, although they’d been screaming at us for years to do something drastic about this very individual—well, if it could be managed discreetly, that is.

  Now that we at last had the target in view, or would have shortly, I was supposed to stall around playing superspy and learning just why he’d come out of hiding before I moved in on him. It was kind of like going after a man-eating tiger with strict orders to determine exactly which native the big cat planned to make a meal of next, before firing a shot. I mean, there was really no doubt about why Pavel Minsk—also known as Paul Minsky, or Pavlo Menshesky, or simply as the Mink—was going to Nassau
, if he was really heading that way. Outside his own country, the Mink went places for just one reason. The only question was who.

  I was tempted to ask Mac why the hell the high-up people who wanted information so badly didn’t send one or two of their own intelligence-gathering geniuses to handle that end of the job. They were supposed to be good at it, and information wasn’t exactly my business. They could call me in to exercise my specialty when they were through working at theirs. I didn’t ask the question, because I already knew the answer. Various intelligence agencies had already lost too many eager espionage and counterespionage types to the Mink. He hunted them the happy way a mongoose hunts snakes. The bureaus and departments concerned didn’t want to risk any more nice, valuable, well-trained young men and women in that dangerous neighborhood. Just me.

  “Yes, sir,” I said grimly. “The British Colonial Hotel. Yes, sir.”

  “You will be briefed on the background at dinner this evening,” Mac said. “Just keep the engagement arranged for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t sound pleased, Eric. I should think that by this time you’d be bored with inactivity and happy to have some work to do.”

  He was needling me gently. I said, “It kind of depends upon the work, sir.”

  “If you don’t feel up to dealing with Minsk…”

  I said, “Go to hell, sir. You know damned well the Mink rates just about as well as I do by anybody’s scoring system. We’re both pros in the same line of business, and if I may say so, pretty good pros at that. That means it’s a fifty-fifty proposition, or was. But if I’m supposed to snoop around playing invisible tag with him for a couple of days before I make the touch, the odds in his favor go a lot higher.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Those are the orders. You are at liberty to turn them down.”

  “If I did, you’d send some other poor dope to do the same job under the same crummy conditions, maybe Laura, and I’d be responsible for getting them killed. No, thanks.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did have Laura in mind as an alternate,” Mac said calmly. “She should be back in this country shortly.”