Operation Breakthrough

Dan J Marlowe

• Publisher: Prologue Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781440542169
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Drake had the assignment. He was sent to steal confidential files of the Mafia that had been stashed somewhere in a bank vault on an island in the Bahamas.Drake got the files.He also got himself trapped into a deadly private war—with the Syndicate, the local police, and a gang of freelance assassins.The only man who could help him out of the trap was being held incommunicado—behind the thick walls of a Bahamian prison.Breaking out of jail was something Drake knew about. Breaking in was something else again …

THREE

I DRIED myself vigorously with a coarse towel, wrapped its dampness around my waist, and went in search of Candy.

Outside the bathroom door I almost ran into Chen Yi, the Chinese girl. It was something of a relief to find that at least her six-foot, four-inch presence had been no dream. She had on another high-necked garment of some gauzy material, barely opaque, but this one reached her ankles. “Good morning,” I said. “Or is it afternoon?”

“Early afternoon,” she replied. “I’ve brought you a set of Candy’s underwear.” She removed it from her arm and handed it to me. I noticed for the first time that despite her size, her voice had a musical, little girl tinkle to it.

“Just what I need,” I assured her. “I appreciate it.”

She smiled, but her eyes were upon my body above the damp towel fastened at my waist. She made no comment about my body scars, though. “I’ve pressed your suit for you,” she continued.

“That wasn’t necessary,” I protested halfheartedly. A freshly pressed suit would help a good deal in avoiding attention when I left Candy’s. I wondered if Chen Yi had noticed the lack of labels.

I returned to the bathroom with Candy’s underwear. His choice ran to bold colors and wild patterns, but the fresh material felt welcome. I went back into the room I had come to think of as the Incense Room and found my freshly shined shoes at one end of the couch with a new pair of socks draped across them. My pressed suit rested on the back of the couch. The hospitality in Candy’s apartment almost was embarrassing in its thoroughness.

I pulled on socks and shoes and sat down on the couch opposite the end marked by a slight lumpiness where I had hidden the canvas sack with the papers from the bank’s safe deposit boxes. If I followed the script, I’d get to the private airstrip and meet the escape plane. There I’d turn the canvas sack with its contents over to someone named Baker.

I hoped that Baker knew me because I surely didn’t know him.

I’d never learned which government agency employed Karl Erikson. There were times when I’d suspected he was a troubleshooter for more than one agency, doing special government jobs on assignment. The only other man who worked with Erikson who was more than a nameless face to me was Jock McLaren. He’d been with Erikson and me on the recovery of an AEC shipment, a job which used an import office on Fifth Avenue in New York City as a cover for the retrieval effort.

But if I left the island now, there was Karl Erikson himself.

Right now he was undoubtedly lodged in the Bahamian equivalent of maximum security. He had made a point of emphasizing, as he always did on these jobs, that we were strictly on our own if anything went wrong. Now that it had, no US consul was about to step around to the Nassau brig and inquire about Karl Erikson’s welfare.

No one knew he was there except me.

He had been emphatic about that contingency, too. “If only one of us makes it, there’ll be no looking back by the survivor,” he’d said to me on the darkened jet which had flown us from Andrews Field when the pilot began to circle the cluster of lights that was Nassau below us in the black water. “The whole purpose is to get what we’re after into the right hands.”

Which was fine — business as usual — except that I recalled at least twice when he’d violated the rule himself. Once in Cuba he’d come back across an open space he’d successfully traversed to knock out an armed Castro militiaman who was preventing me from taking the same escape route.

And once when he and Hazel and I were in the drink in the south Atlantic after a fishing cruiser had been shot out from under us, he’d tried to save Hazel at a time when he couldn’t reasonably have expected to save himself.

I looked up as a sound from a corner of the room caught my attention. Candy Kane was standing in the doorway, his blocky body swathed in a bright purple robe. “Whooo-eee!” he exclaimed with every evidence of deep feeling. “Must’ve been quite a bash from the way I feel.”

“Your brandy is potent,” I admitted. He was eyeing my underwear. His underwear. “Chen Yi pressed my suit, too,” I added.

He nodded. “The den mother,” he said with no particular emphasis. “What’d you think of Hermione?”

“I was trying to make up my mind if I’d dreamed her.”

Candy chuckled. “If you’d been goin’ to stick around for awhile, I wouldn’t have let her tie into you like that. She’s shacked up reg’lar with a muscle type, kind of a nasty job when he’s turned on. But Hermione enjoys a change of scenery.”

“What happens if the muscle type catches her at it?”

“He leans on her, but it’s never stopped her yet. I’d have to say the pair of them are well matched.” He rubbed his chin. “How long ‘d you say last night you wanted to stay?”

“Three or four days. Maybe less.” I recalled that Erikson’s man Baker was only going to keep the Andrews Field rendezvous for three mornings. “Surely less.”

“Seems to me you’d be takin’ your fences faster’n that with the bobbies lookin’ for you.”

“There’s a problem. My partner was grabbed last night.”

“He was? Where?”

“On the roof of a bank building on Shirley Street.”

Candy cocked an eyebrow in a skeptical expression I was beginning to recognize as nearly habitual with him. “You’re beginnin’ to sound like a real hot potato, Earl. I only get to run my game here on the strength of a couple of contacts an’ a little payoff. I can’t afford trouble.” He moved to the couch and sat down on the other end of it. The papers in the canvas sack crackled slightly under his weight, but he didn’t notice. There was a brooding look on his heavy features as his eyes met mine at the closer range. “You know what I mean?”

“Why would anyone look for me here?” I asked in a tone of voice intended to sound reasonable. “There’s no possible connection. For the law to suspect, I mean. As for my partner, there’s something I’d like to ask you about — ”

I broke off as Chen Yi reentered the room. The tall Chinese girl had my washed-and-ironed shirt in her hand. “Thanks again,” I said and stood up and began to slip into the shirt.

“What about your partner?” Candy wanted to know. I glanced at the Chinese girl, but Candy waved an impatient hand. “She goes with the lease here. Speak up.”

“I’d like to take him with me.”

Candy stared. “Take him — ? You mean — ?”

“It might not be too much of a job, depending upon the detention facilities,” I went on. “And I’d pay the right man well for a little help.”

“I’m not about to get my black ass fussed up in no jailbreak,” Candy began, then paused. “You’d pay? For what kind’ve help?”

“It shouldn’t take too much. And I’d expect to pay.”

“I could sure use a fresh bankroll,” Candy said thoughtfully. “The dice turned real unfriendly since that Las Vegas disaster. Before that I’d been goin’ so good you wouldn’t believe it.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it goes. But this thing you’re talkin’ about — ” He was silent for a moment. “Well, how much of a payoff would go to this right man you mentioned?”

I tried to make my tone impressive. “You name it.”

He rubbed his chin again. “What kind of help ’d you say?”

“I’d need to know a few things first. Where would he be held?”

“Not at East Street, I wouldn’t think,” Candy responded immediately. “Cartwright Street more likely. It’s kind of an unofficial detention center. Prob’ly not more’n two hundred yards from where you say he was grabbed. Did you score with the bank?”

I knew that my answer would have a lot to do with the price Candy set for his assistance — if he decided to help — and I had no cash to pay off at once. “I’m going to have to come back and retrieve it later when the heat’s off,” I said.

The answer appeared to satisfy him. “Was there any rough stuff that would make the police hairy?”

I thought of Karl Erikson’s thickly thewed body shedding police like pearls from a broken necklace strand. And the wallop I gave the sergeant. “Just a little scuffle on the roof. What kind of a jail is this one you think he’d be in?”

“A bloody poor one, compared to US types,” Candy said. “Actually, it’s a place people are sometimes held before they appear before a magistrate. I don’t think there’s more’n half a dozen cells behind the bookin’ desk, but even at night there’s enough blokes around so no one walks in an’ out unless he’s got business there.”

“Even behind a gun?”

“Don’t talk no guns to me, mon. That’s out.”

“What kind of a building is it?”

“Old like most of the government buildings near Bay Street.”

“No, I mean what kind of construction. Masonry? Steel and concrete?”

“Let’s see now.” Candy’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember. “Seems to me it’s bricked over now,” he said finally, “but when I was a tyke it was a wood-frame-an'-lath affair and old even then. Why?”

“If I can’t go in the front, maybe I can go in the back.”

“Through the back wall, you mean?”

“...