Tanner’s Tiger

“I am at the pavilion,” she said ultimately. “There is not too long a line. It should take me but a few minutes. Evan, which is the switch that I must throw? I ca

“The one on the right,” I said aloud. As if she could hear me.

“As if you could answer me. It is all right. I will throw them all at once.”

“Oh, God,” I said. As if He were listening.

I told the pilot – damn it, I still didn’t know his name – to start the engines. He did, and I leaped from my seat and grabbed his arm. “Off!” I shouted. “My God, they’re noisy!”

“Can’t fly without ’em, Mr. Ta

“But I can’t hear over them.” He cut them out, and I listened again to Arlette. I wondered if people had noticed that she was talking to herself. I suppose she wasn’t speaking in much more than a whisper, but she came through loud and clear.

With the engines off, that is. With them on, I couldn’t hear a thing. If the fool thing had come with earphones, we would have been all right, but it didn’t. I told the pilot to leave the engines off until we had a particular reason to start flying. For the moment, it was more important to maintain communication with Arlette.

Seth wondered aloud how we would be able to follow her in the copter if we couldn’t hear her. The same thought had already occurred to me. I said we would have to pick them up with aerial reco

All we had to do was lose them. That would be the payoff, all right – we would scare them into skipping the country with all the prisoners, Mi

Arlette’s voice, just a whisper: “I am within the building. There is a guard, I must wait until he goes away. He is not looking at me now. Did you say the switch on the left? I will throw them all, now-”

Then there was a lot of noise, all at once, shouts in Spanish and English and other languages, machinery noises. And then, over it all, Arlette’s voice ringing out: “In the name of J. B. Westley and the Dominion of Canada you are all under arrest! In the name-”

Halfway through the sentence some of the background noise stopped, as if the aperture leading from the dungeon to the first floor had been closed again. And then there was a sort of thunk, and Arlette stopped talking. I heard an excited babble of Cuban Spanish but couldn’t make out the words.

“What happened, man?”

“I think they knocked her out.”

“The poor chick-”

“Shhh…”

I hoped they hadn’t hurt her. As I saw it, she was well out of it; a bump on the head would be a small price to pay for an hour or so of unconsciousness. From our standpoint, it was both good and bad. She would be unable to tell me what was happening, but she would be equally incapable of answering any questions the Cubans might put to her.

I concentrated on the Spanish. “They’re going through her purse,” I said. “They found her ID card. They’re reading it. I hope the lighting down there is terrible… They believe the ID. One of them just told the other that she’s a Canadian agent.”

“Is she all right, Evan?”

“Just a minute. I think she must be coming to, because one just said they should chloroform her at once. That’s good, that’s damned good. She couldn’t have been badly hurt, and the chloroform won’t hurt her now. It’ll just keep her out. If she were awake now, she’d be terrified-”

“Do you blame her?”

“No, not a bit. This way she’ll sleep. Oh, hell!”

“What?”

“They found the bug in her hair. Damn it, they know what it is. I wonder if-”

A loud, ear-splitting noise came through the receiver, followed by absolute silence.

“They smashed it,” I a

The prop spun, the engines caught. They drowned out the rest of my sentence, but that didn’t matter. Everyone knew the ending.

Chapter 18

As our pilot pointed out, it wouldn’t be fitting to hover permanently in the air over the Cuban Pavilion. Helicopters buzzing to and fro were a common enough sight at Expo, but helicopters on stakeout duty might draw stares. We worked out a pattern of lazy, looping circles, dipping here, rising there, but contriving to keep the Cuban building constantly in view. Our pilot came up with a small pair of binoculars, and I kept them trained on the pavilion as well as I could. I wished I had thought to bring Claude’s field glasses along. These were less powerful and spotlighted a smaller field.

The pilot was giving us a surprisingly smooth flight, and I found myself almost relaxed. From time to time the memory of our near miss of the British Pavilion would set my nerves on end, but by and large the ride was far less harrowing than thoughts of what would happen if we missed them.

This watching and waiting was a pain in the ass. It seemed I’d been doing a lot of it lately. Sitting endlessly around the apartment while Arlette ran errands, crouching interminably on the crest of the hill waiting for the fireworks barge, and now circling eternally around the Cuban Pavilion waiting for-

Waiting for what? For a whole lot of people to leave it, and to do so in a secretive ma

The pilot began shouting something. I couldn’t understand him at first, then realized he was offering me a drink. I wondered how it might affect me. The little voice in my head still blurted out some fool thing every once in a while, and I didn’t know whether liquor would oil its tongue or rust it. I decided to find out and accepted the bottle of McNaughton’s, tilted it, and let a gratifying quantity leap straight for my liver. The pilot gestured at the boys and I passed the bottle their way. When they sent it back, I returned it to the pilot and watched him pour an impossible amount down his throat. He didn’t even swallow, just tucked in his glottis and poured it down the pipe.

I said something about drinking and flying. “Don’t give it a second thought,” he said, and hiccuped. “Any bloody fool can fly this crate with his eyes closed. Want to try your hand at it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, come give it a try. I’ll show you what to do.”

“I’d better keep an eye down below.”

“How about you boys, then?” They came forward, and he had Seth sit at the controls while he and Randy watched over his shoulders. “A good skill for any man to know. Especially for you boys. Americans, are you? Now when you get over to Vietnam, you can be helicopter pilots. It’s the key weapon of the war, do you know. One lad at the controls like so, and another on the side potting away at the wogs with a tommy gun, and one more man to send the naphtha on its way. Pay attention while I teach you, now, and they’ll make officers of you.”

While the fair itself didn’t close until the small hours of the morning, most of the national pavilions began shutting down a few hours earlier. At 11:15 the doors of the Cuban Pavilion were closed. Not long afterward the lights went out – one by one, though, not all at once, as they must have when Arlette hit the switches.

“Won’t be long now,” I said. “There goes the building across the street from them. As soon as a few more shut down, it will be safe for them to start moving prisoners.”

“Good thing, too. We’re ru