Harrigan instructed the chief to leave some of his men behind to watch the front gate. “They can raise us on this,” he said, handing Coderoni a spare walkie-talkie. “Gather ’round again!”
The G-men and local cops did so.
“We’re going in,” Harrigan said, “in four teams. Special Agent Krueger is already heading in, to take the back way — that’s Team Number One. The rest of us will split up at the end of Main Street. Team Number Two will head to the left, Team Three to the right, Team Four’ll continue on straight ahead. Place is set up like the points of a compass. We’ll converge at the rear of the park, at the midway.”
“How about a password?” the lieutenant asked.
“What?”
“So if we run into somebody, splittin’ up like this, we don’t shoot their head off.”
That wasn’t a bad suggestion, considering the source.
“Make it ‘Armageddon,’ ” Harrigan said.
Around back, Sam Krueger had discovered two parked cars in the bushes near the metal gate that half-heartedly barred further passage to Disneyland.
The captain was the first to reach the abandoned cars: a blue Buick and a green Ford, both late models.
“This one’s a rental,” the officer said, shining his flashlight on the back license plate of the Ford.
“This is Marilyn’s,” Krueger said, kneeling beside the Buick, noting that the tires had been slashed. Clearly these assassins didn’t want their prey to get away.
The captain assigned one of his men to stay with the cars, “in case the assassins return,” a tactic Krueger approved.
The FBI man used the walkie-talkie to bring Harrigan up to speed.
Harrigan took the info, and instructed Krueger to continue on into the park; right now the State Department agent was in the lead, the three teams — men with drawn handguns and flashlights and walkie-talkies — following him slowly up Main Street a replica of turn-of-the-century storefronts, Victorian in a cartoony, postcard sort of way.
At Harrigan’s side, the chief said, “No sign of Mr. Disney… Thought he might meet us here, if not at the gate. He has an apartment right there, you see.”
The chief was pointing to a mock fire station.
Harrigan shuddered — a foreign agent murdering Walt Disney would be almost as bad as Khrushchev buying it on American soil; wars had been fought over less.
They cautiously proceeded in, only the moon and a few security lights providing any illumination. Eyes darting from storefront to storefront, the former Secret Service agent felt he was going down a Hogan’s Alley, one of those academy training exercises where at any moment a cardboard gunman might “jump” into a doorway.
But any gunman who leapt from these doorways would hardly be cardboard.
In the meantime, Krueger’s group — the Anaheim captain, two Secret Service agents, one KGB, and a cop, also armed with walkie-talkies and flashlights, were fanning out from the rear of the park, jogging past a pagoda and park benches that sat peacefully among the rhododendrons in the moonlight.
Then Krueger noticed a halo of light shining through the trees up ahead — could that be the sun coming up? No, too early for that… He picked up his speed.
The FBI man broke away from his group, running toward the light, finding himself on the midway, where various rides were shut down and dark, like slumbering beasts at a zoo.
All, that is, but one…
“Jack,” Krueger whispered urgently into his walkie-talkie, “I’ve got something over here… Toad’s Wild Ride. Lights are on like she’s open for business.”
The communicator crackled. “Copy.”
Krueger had just signed off when he noticed several dark splotches on the ground, ahead of him. He knew what they were even before he knelt and touched one — still damp! — and his heart sank even as his breath quickened.
An out-of-wind Harrigan appeared at his side. “Jesus, Sam — don’t… don’t tell me that’s what I think it is?”
“It’s not catsup off somebody’s hot dog.”
They followed the blood trail with their flashlights, twin paths that led into the alcove of the ride. Harrigan splashed light on an empty Model T car.
“Looks like the blood starts here,” he said.
Krueger leaned in, having a closer look at the car. “Shit — Jack… there’s a bullet hole in the back of the seat…”
Harrigan, noting the puncture in the car’s vinyl padding, said, “Armageddon is right.”
“What?”
“That’s our ‘password.’ Don Knotts back there insisted.”
By this time, the others in Harrigan’s group had caught up with them.
“Watch where you step!” Harrigan said, flashing his light on the blood trail. “We’re trying to find where this goes.”
Flashlights flickered across the ground like giant lightning bugs.
“Looks like it goes back the way we came,” the lieutenant said.
“No,” Krueger said. “The trail leads there…”
And the FBI man pointed toward Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, silhouetted against the night sky like some gothic illusion.
As the group headed off in that direction, Harrigan wondered who the blood belonged to.
Khrushchev? Marilyn? One of the assassins?
Or maybe Mickey Mouse’s daddy?
It sure as hell wasn’t some kid who got a bloody nose on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
He was pondering that when he began to hear the screams — the shrill screams of a woman in danger.
Chapter Fifteen
Wild Frontier
A rough hand slipped gently over the mouth of the slumbering Marilyn, and an elbow nudged her, waking her from a deep sleep. Groggy and disoriented, for a moment — as on so many mornings, after swallowing too many Nembutals — she at first didn’t remember where she was, sleep having mercifully removed their peril. Then the moon face of Nikita Khrushchev — stern, determined — came into focus.
The premier’s frowning expression was not directed at her. Pointed ears perking like a dog’s, he stared intently at the square hole in the floor where the stairwell led to this upper landing in the rocket’s nose cone.
She stiffened in his arms: had the assassin found them?
Slowly, Nikita removed his hand from her lips, and together they listened. For a long, agonizing minute or more, she heard nothing other than their own shallow breathing. Then it came… faintly, but unmistakably, from below, as if that hole in the floor were speaking to them — the creak of a foot.
Marilyn’s heart was a trip hammer. They were trapped, no way out, cornered without a weapon. Her eyes darted in panic around the small curved-walled enclosure, the dreary insides of a futuristic tomb.
There wasn’t even a plank to pry loose.
Trembling, Marilyn clung to Nikita’s arm. She looked at him and realized that the eyes in the otherwise resolute face glimmered with something that might have been fear. He had said, back in the teacup, that he too was frightened…
What can we do? her eyes asked him, terror mounting.
His eyes, however, turned suddenly hard and black, like the lumps of coal stuck in a snowman’s face. He slipped something in his pants pocket — she didn’t know what, and couldn’t exactly ask — and then he smiled at her, his expression seeming to say, I have idea.
Gently, he withdrew himself from her, then reached along his trousered leg and began to untie one of his heavy, thick-heeled brown shoes.
He whispered in her ear: “Distraction” was all he said. Then he looked significantly toward her bosom, and gave her a small smile and an arched eyebrow; Marilyn understood and smiled a little herself and nodded.
Crawling quietly away from him, like a baby only quieter, she positioned herself directly opposite where the stairs emptied out. Re-staging one of her notorious calendar poses, she leaned against the wall, tucking her legs to one side, bringing an arm up to cradle her head, thrusting her ample bosom out. She looked at Nikita for his verdict.