There was a tap on the door. Carter grabbed the automatic and pressed his ear against the panel.
"It's me… open the door!"
He threw the two locks and yanked the door open. Louisa entered quickly and Carter locked it behind her. When he turned, she had already shed her coat and was halfway out of her skirt and blouse.
"Contact?"
"Yes," she nodded, selecting a dark green, shimmery thing and sliding it over her head. "About ten minutes ago. I'm to meet this Cubanez in the lounge of the Hotel Roc Blanc."
Carter sighed and dropped into a chair. "Then they got in all right."
Again she nodded, applying a brush vigorously to her lustrous hair. "They snowshoed over the Sierra de Enclar from Os de Civis on the Spanish side."
"And the equipment?"
"I don't know," she said, changing her shoes and giving herself a last appraisal in the mirror. "The man who contacted me didn't have much time to talk."
Carter scowled. He had told Cubanez exactly how to get the hardware in — a helicopter drop — and where — in a ravine above the village of Canillo about two and a half miles from the villa.
He only hoped that Cubanez had not taken it upon himself to change Carter's basic plan.
"I'm ready. I should have him back here within the hour."
"Fine," Carter replied, "but make it look good."
"Didn't I make it look good to you?"
"Perfect." He stood and brushed her forehead with his lips. "An hour."
"How's the arm?" she asked, moving to the door.
"Sore as hell, but I can shoot."
"An hour," she said, slipping through the door and closing it behind her.
Carter locked it, then started pacing again.
The decision to make a full-scale, guerrilla-type assault on the villa was his, but it would take some of the edge off an international incident if Cubanez was in on it. As a representative of the Spanish government, Cubanez had no authority in Andorra, but he could take a lot of heat off if something went wrong.
Also, explanations would be more acceptable if they came from him instead of the "mass murderer," Nicholas Carstocus.
But the bottom line was still not to let anything go wrong. If possible, the ideal would be to get in so fast and get it over with so quickly that the Andorrans — police and civilians alike — would never suspect there had been an incident.
Each minute was a passing eternity as night enveloped the peaceful country outside the window.
Carter passed them by imagining the scene in the Roc Blanc lounge. Louisa would be nursing a drink. Cubanez would sidle up to her table and ask if he could join her.
The game would progress just as it does in singles bars all over the world, until Louisa was "seduced."
They would leave the Roc Blanc and walk, arm in arm, a bit unsteadily toward her hotel. In the lobby, the concierge would frown at the young singer's obvious promiscuity, but he would say nothing.
At that moment, Carter heard the elevator at the end of the hall open and Louisa's by now familiar laugh.
Seconds later, her key was turning the deadbolt and Carter was moving into the bedroom alcove, Wilhelmina in hand.
Just in case.
When the door was shut and again securely locked, Carter leathered the Luger and stepped into the room.
"Buenos noches, mi amigo." Cubanez said with a wide grin. "You look like hell."
"Gracias," Carter replied. "And you look like an aging Latin roué."
"Wasn't that the idea?"
"Right. Let's get to work."
"I'll change," Louisa said, darting into the alcove.
From inside the large, fur-trimmed coat he wore, Ramon pulled a series of maps. Then he shed the coat and slid into a chair beside Carter, spreading the maps out on a table.
"You pick some real tricky ones," he said, smoothing out several Polaroids of the Smythe villa and the countryside surrounding it.
"I didn't say it would be a piece of cake," Carter replied. "Before we get into that, what about my hunches?"
"Looks like bull's-eye on every one. Our ferret in the ETA in San Sebastian tells us that the word went out immediately after the news of de Nerro's death hit the streets."
"It is de Varga."
"Right," Cubanez said. "Within the ranks, he claims that he has stayed undercover and hid the fact that he was still alive so he would be free to carry out the ultimate attack on the Spanish government that keeps the Basque people in 'imperialist chains. »
"And," Carter added, "Armanda de Nerro has only been acting in his stead all this time?"
"Right. Now, because the Spanish government has used the killer, Bluebeard, to assassinate Armanda de Nerro, Lupe de Varga himself has been forced to come into the open to lead the movement."
"Very neat," Carter muttered. "And I fell for it like a ton of bricks."
Cubanez shrugged. "It was well planned and you had no way of knowing. The police and news media are buying the love triangle bit, which also plays into de Varga's plan."
"And the police buying Maria de Nerro's killing as a suicide also plays into his hand."
Cubanez grinned, his stark white teem gleaming like ivory in his dark face. "But into ours as well. If we pull this off tonight, the whole thing will be dismissed as just another jet-set scandal, and no one will be the wiser that eight nuclear devices have fallen into the hands of fanatic terrorists."
Carter nodded and rifled quickly through the photos.
"When did de Varga and his crew move into the villa?"
"My guess is within minutes after Armanda de Nerro's murder was broadcast. It was probably easy. Her people thought de Varga was dead. When he turned up alive, knowing the whole blackmail scheme, and de Nerro was dead, they just accepted the new leadership."
"What about Alain Smythe?" Carter asked, selecting a blowup of the villa proper and studying it with rapt concentration.
"As near as we can tell, it is the same deal as De Palma and Sons Limited in San Sebastian. Smythe came up fast from nowhere. It takes a lot of money to get started in the fashion industry, and even more to branch out into allied businesses like perfume, design endorsements, and the like. Years, usually."
"And Smythe did it in less than three years," Carter growled.
"Did it big. We have not been able to confirm this, but when we do I imagine we'll find another Liechtenstein holding company behind Alain Smythe Enterprises. Armanda de Nerro was a very organized woman. My guess is that she owned Smythe. He had to go along with this or she could have — how do you say? — pulled the plug on his little empire."
"Good enough," Carter said. "Let's get to it."
Cubanez arranged maps and pictures in front of them, and started to explain.
The renovations of the villa had been little short of miraculous. To the ordinary eye it appeared that Smythe had faithfully restored a seventeenth-century castle to its former glory.
And he had.
But not for aesthetic reasons.
"The place," Cubanez intoned, "is literally a fortress. The moat is for real. These firing slits — here, here, here, and here — are not empty."
Carter accepted a magnifying glass and examined the picture where Cubanez had indicated.
On very close scrutiny, he detected 50mm mounted machine guns on the parapets behind the slits.
"They have mortars up there, too," Cubanez added. "At first glance they could hold off an army once they gave Madrid their ultimatum: an independent Basque nation, or Toulouse, Barcelona, and Madrid are ashes."
"So how do you figure on doing it?"
"A two-pronged assault," Cubanez replied, obviously warming to the task. "Actually, three. We send the jeep up the front road — here — as a diversion. It has a mounted fifty. It will not do any damage, but it will probably draw their attention and their fire. Meanwhile, we ski down the mountain — here — to these rocks."