The Annihilators by Donald Hamilton Page B

not to say shocking and frightening, darling. It’s scary what an innocent girl can get mixed up in simply by going to bed with a man, isn’t it? Sam.”
    “Yes?”
    Her eyes were steady on my face. “It’s odd, but even after what you’ve told me, I don’t feel a bit soiled by what you call our intimate contact. I’ll let you know when it’s safe for us to… to meet again.” She had finished her breakfast and was gathering up her purse and the attache case she carried for the tour records. She stood up. I rose to face her. She said crisply, “The bus leaves for the museum at eight-thirty, Mr. Felton. In front of the hotel. Please don’t make us wait for you.”
    I watched her march away, the tailored poplin skirt snapping at her long fine legs. I remembered that I’d once thought those legs a bit too thin. It seemed a long time ago.

8
    I’m not a museum freak, but I have spent some time in those impressive institutions, sometimes dragged there by intellectual female acquaintances yearning for knowledge, sometimes meeting people or following people or trying to shake off people who were following me.
    The
Museo Anthropologia
was quite a splendid example of the breed. For one thing, the Mexicans have a fine freewheeling sense of architecture; and for another the exhibits were breathtaking even to a guy who didn’t know an Aztec from a Toltec. There was, for instance, an enormous stone Aztec calendar wheel, magnificently carved. There was also—as far as I was concerned, the star of the show—a great, brooding, wicked Olmec head, tons of it, too big to be exhibited inside, so it glowered at you blackly from a grassy knoll in the patio, huge, neckless, bodiless, frightening, reminding you that the fearsome ideas of the human race are not all of recent origin.
    I hadn’t known where contact would be made, but when a slim, well-dressed young Mexican gentleman paused near our group to adjust the buckle of his well-polished shoe—I guess laces are obsolete in certain circles—and made a certain signal, I cut out of formation with a word of apology to my wheelchair patient, who grinned and said he could make it fine by himself while I answered nature’s urgent summons.
    I ducked into the nearby male-type
sanitario
, a fancy word they’ve just invented down there to match our dainty restroom-doubletalk. We can’t bear to mention the nasty word toilet, and I was discovering that they’ve got too delicate to refer to
baño
any longer, even though it really means bath and not crapper. I took my time at the urinal, and after a while he came in and stood beside me. I won’t bother you with the recognition nonsense, it was as ridiculous as ever.
    “You are very clean, señor,” the contact said. “If you are being watched, it is being done from within your own group.”
    “Gracias.”
    “Bultman has been observed in Santa Rosalia, again in the company of Enrique Echeverria,
El Rojo
, The Red One, the head of the infamous
Servicio Seguridad Nacional
, commonly known as SSN. It is thought that Bultman has also made contact with
El Presidente
Rael.”
    “Check.”
    “I am asked to inform you that there is other activity in the area. Kronbeck, Marschak, and Rutterfeld have all been reported in Costa Verde recently. No contact observed with Bultman.”
    I frowned at the news and, after a moment, shook my head. “There won’t be. Bultman runs his own shows; he’ll be setting up his own team for the job, whatever it is Rael wants of him, presumably Hector Jimenez. He picks them smart and disciplined; he wouldn’t touch a muscular meat-head like Marschak, or a vicious little snake like Kronbeck; and Rutterfeld wouldn’t touch him. Rutterfeld wants his underlings brainwashed and brainless so he can do all the thinking and grab all the credit, not to mention the money.” I grimaced. “Obviously somebody’s got another project going down there that doesn’t necessarily impinge on Bultman’s operation. I