Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit Read Online Free Page B

man?”
    “Wulff. The one we brought here.”
    “Fifty people dead?” Delgado said. “I’m afraid that fifty of your people—they were your people were they not?—dead means far less to us than the fact that there were another fifty aboard that airliner and but for the grace of God
they
might have been dead and we would have had to bear the responsibility. You see, whoever is giving you your orders is a fool.”
    The man on the floor coughed again, spewed blood across the carpet. Delgado looked at it with distaste. It was uncosmetic, that was all. You could not have a nice, clean interrogation anymore. In the old days people understood and cooperated but then again, Delgado reminded himself and this had to be taken into account, in the old days the people who understood and cooperated were on
his
side. The enemy had never been so reasonable. “Things have changed,” he said again. “Only the premier and the highest levels of the government know how much they have but this is still no excuse for you. You took orders from a fool, you have given us a most serious difficulty here and you may have set back certain facets of our international relations by several years. We will have to take the most extreme measures.”
    He opened the desk drawer again, this time very casually and took out a pistol. Feeling it slide into his hand, leaping into his palm almost as might a woman’s breast, Delgado had a flash of recollection: this was not 1974 but instead 1957 or so and it was not he who was standing behind the desk but another man, someone in the uniform of Battista’s secret police … and this person was levelling the gun at a form which only could have been Delgado’s.
Please don’t do this to me; I am a loyalist
, this recollected Delgado was pleading,
don’t kill me, don’t kill me
. The weakness of this remembered voice poured out, gasping through every syllable and Delgado had a sudden flash of revulsion, all the more difficult because it was unexpected. The same, he thought, it is always the same, the actors and the masks and the words change but when you come to the end nothing has changed whatsoever; we have merely turned the tables. I am no different from any of the others, Delgado is like everyone else. And he reacted against this.
No!
he screamed in memory and then realized that it was not memory at all but reality which had overtaken him and facing this quivering man it was the Delgado of the present who was screaming
no!
the cry driving slivers of pain all the way from hand and elbow and then he was firing the gun into the man in front of him, firing convulsively: head, throat, shoulders, heart, spleen and the man was changing before him; he was no longer a man but a bag filled with blood, the blood spurting and leaping like fire through all the little discovered openings of his body … and then the form was falling, burbling.
    “God!” Delgado found himself shouting as the man lay before him, “This cannot be,” and then his interrogator’s calm returned to him as it always would (because the masks would never change and now he was the Official, the Interrogator) and he found himself looking at the corpse now, the exploding form on the floor with something that was not revulsion at all but came closer to a sense of command. “You cannot do this to us,” he said in a calm, flat tone, “you simply cannot do this kind of thing to us anymore,” and did not know if he was talking about the hijacking and the drugs or whether it was an entirely different matter but then his attention flicked to the man lying on the floor, the man he had beaten. Death in the room had revived this man, unconsciousness had fallen from him and he was sitting in a cramped position on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, looking up at Delgado with the expression of a child. Yes, he had made children of both of them: that was the essence of power, to strip personality and control from people and turn them into the