Deadly Doubles Read online

  “What did you find out?” Nancy asked.

  Bess pulled off her sundress and carefully laid out a less casual outfit while she answered Nancy. “I got a lesson on South American politics. That president-for-life in San Carlos really is bad news. He’d probably arrest someone for looking at him cross-eyed, and so many people have simply disappeared that the place is on the edge of a real revolution. And our government’s going crazy because there’s no knowing which political group will take over! Meanwhile, back at the palace, the president’s bought himself some terrorists to eliminate the leaders of the opposition. And there are probably other terrorists trying to eliminate him.”

  “You can’t tell the players without a score-card,” George murmured.

  Bess nodded. “According to Dan, the players are switching sides all the time. He says that every time you blink, people change loyalties there.

  “Well, I’m first for the shower,” Bess continued, heading for it. “You two had better get a move on. Dan’s picking us up for dinner in half an hour, and he’s bringing along two more bodyguards.”

  “Who’s going to protect us from them—or them from Bess?” George wondered aloud.

  Bess was right—Dan was good company. He was intelligent, shrewd, and funny, and so were his friends. They ate dinner in a Greek restaurant, and afterward there was music and dancing. It was a fun evening. Or it would have been, if Nancy could have gotten Teresa off her mind.

  But she was still thinking about her when the young men returned the girls to their hotel. “Want us to see you into your rooms?” Dan asked.

  “Thanks. I think we’ll be safer if you don’t,” Bess answered with a laugh.

  The men walked the girls to their door anyway and waited until they were safely inside. George bolted the door.

  “That was a nice evening. I think I’ll check with the front desk to see if there were any phone calls while we were out,” Nancy said, heading for her own bedroom.

  She flipped on the light switch as she entered.

  Then she screamed.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SCREAM BROUGHT Nancy’s friends running. They froze, appalled, their eyes following the direction of Nancy’s pointing finger.

  There was a message, but it hadn’t come by phone and hadn’t been left with the front desk. It lay in the center of Nancy’s bed in the tightly locked suite.

  It was a doll, an eight-inch redheaded doll with a teenage figure, dressed in an abbreviated blue bikini. The doll’s head lolled sickeningly to one side. A red cord was knotted around the broken neck.

  A note was attached, written with a blood-red marker:

  GO HOME, SEŃORITA.

  THIS COULD BE YOU!

  Nancy recovered quickly and approached the bed as Bess dove for the phone.

  Bess frantically punched numbers, then spoke in a rush. “Dan! Get back up here fast!” She dropped the receiver with a clatter that made them all jump.

  “So he just happened to give me his beeper number,” Bess said with a forced smile as Nancy eyed her. “It’s a good thing he did.” She reached out toward the broken doll.

  “Don’t touch it!” Nancy jerked Bess’s hand away. “There may be fingerprints.”

  Footsteps came pounding down the corridor. “They sure didn’t waste time waiting for the elevator,” George commented, opening the door carefully with her hand wrapped in a section of her skirt so she wouldn’t leave prints.

  All at once the room was full of very stern plainclothes detectives. Dan borrowed Nancy’s small camera to take pictures as his friend Joe phoned for reinforcements. The girls weren’t allowed to touch anything in the room until a fingerprint expert had arrived. When he came, FBI agents were with him.

  “Where are we supposed to go?” Nancy demanded when the fingerprint man refused even to let her sit on the edge of the bathtub.

  “If you have any sense, you’ll go back home,” Dan told her flatly. “This is no mess for nice girls like you to be mixed up in.”

  “Teresa’s mixed up in this mess,” Nancy replied with conviction. “I’m not leaving until she’s out of it. There has to be some way I can help her! And I’m not going home until Senator Kilpatrick has that hit list in her hands!”

  She turned to her friends. “There’s no reason you have to stay here, though. Why don’t you phone home? I’m sure Dan can find someone to take you to the airport.”

  “No way!” George said gruffly as Bess nodded loyally.

  “All for one and one for all?” Nancy whispered. “Thanks, guys.”

  “There’s one thing you are going to do, whether you like it or not,” Dan said, reaching for the phone as the fingerprint expert finished with it. “I’m under orders to protect you, so I’m moving you out of these rooms. I happen to know the government’s paid the hotel to keep the rooms on either side of Teresa’s empty,” he added as he punched the button for the hotel manager.

  Nancy was about to protest, but she stopped abruptly. That location would be perfect! Within minutes, the three detectives were helping the girls carry overnight bags up the emergency stairs.

  “No one will know you’re in here,” Dan said with satisfaction as soon as he’d checked out the new two-bedroom suite. “I told the manager we’re using these rooms for a stakeout. We’ll move the rest of your things up tomorrow. In the meantime, you can lie low.” He thumped the pillows on the living-room sofa. “And I’ll spend the night right here to make sure nobody bothers you.”

  Nancy nodded silently. She had her own plans in mind—plans that would be blown if Dan spent the night on the sofa. He’d see her leaving the suite.

  Then her brow cleared as a thought struck her. If this suite was set up like the one they’d just left . . .

  “I’d really like to freshen up,” Nancy said demurely. “Did anyone bring a blow-dryer?”

  “I think I brought mine,” said Bess, picking up her bag.

  “Let’s get everything sorted out in here,” Nancy said, leading the way to the far bedroom and firmly closing the door.

  “What was that all about?” George demanded suspiciously.

  Nancy put her finger to her lips. “Turn on the dryer,” she whispered. “I don’t want Dan to hear us.” Then, followed by George and Bess, she tiptoed straight to the phone. She punched the number of Teresa’s room.

  On the second ring, Teresa answered, her voice a tight whisper.

  “It’s Nancy. Are you alone?”

  “No, but Seńora Ramirez is asleep in the other room,” Teresa replied softly.

  “Well, I’m in the room on the other side of you. We just moved in here. As soon as I put down the receiver I’ll unlock the connecting door on my side. You lock the door between you and Seńora Ramirez and come in here.”

  In less than a minute, Teresa stood in the connecting doorway. Her eyes were swollen with weeping, and she looked very frail in her thin nightdress. “Have you heard any more about Roberto?” she asked immediately.

  Nancy hurried her inside. “We have to talk softly. Our bodyguard’s in the room just outside this door. Didn’t the government assign anyone to guard you?”

  Teresa shook her head. “Now that Roberto’s dead, they think I’m not important to the assassins,” she said simply.

  “I’m not so sure.” Nancy sat on the bed opposite Teresa and took her hands. “I want you to think very hard. Tell me everything you can remember about Roberto’s movements from the moment you arrived in Washington.”

  Bess flicked the record button on the little cassette player she often brought along on trips. George took the memo pad and ballpoint pen from the bedside table.

  Teresa stared at the connecting door as if it were a TV screen on which she was watching a documentary of her journey. “So much was new—I have never been out of my own country before, so I remember—the plane came in—”

  “Which airport?” Nancy asked quickly.

  “I don’t know. Near here—there was a lot of traffic, and we cou
ld see the dome on your Capitol.” National Airport, Nancy thought. Good. It was only a mile or two away.

  “We come out of the plane into a corridor like a tube. Then we go through a waiting area—we don’t stop at all—and down a wide corridor with windows. Then we come to Immigration. They ask a lot of questions about why are we here, and stamp our passports. The man was nice,” Teresa said with some surprise. “He wished me luck in my tournament.”

  “Then what?” Nancy asked.

  Teresa described a routine the girls all recognized. Down an escalator. Waiting endlessly for luggage to be unloaded. Finding luggage carts and suitcases—and, in Teresa’s case, tennis rackets. Then the long ordeal of Customs inspection. The inspectors had been very thorough with Teresa and Roberto and Seńora Ramirez. They had taken away the fruit Teresa had brought with her and the flowers she’d been given at the San Carlos airport.

  Then the party had gone into the main lobby. They had not yet separated at all, not even to go to the rest rooms. At that point, Teresa said, Roberto had noticed how much Seńora Ramirez’s feet were hurting and had suggested she sit down.

  All at once Nancy’s ears perked up. “Where did Roberto leave Seńora Ramirez?” she asked breathlessly.

  “He left both of us,” Teresa corrected her, “and went to find out about the car we had arranged to rent. It took him a long time, I think, but—”

  “Did he go anywhere else?”

  Teresa frowned. “I do not think so. It was a very long day,” she confessed. “We had been traveling since dawn.”

  Nancy jumped up, her eyes shining. At last there was something she could do. “Bess, go into the sitting room and turn on the charm,” she commanded. “We’re going to the airport, and we’d better have Dan with us!”

  “What? The airport now?” George said. “Why, Nancy?”

  “I have a hunch that Roberto may have left the list there somewhere—and I want to find it before anyone else does!”

  In a few minutes Nancy, Bess, George—and Dan—were in Dan’s car, with Dan at the wheel. Apparently Bess had been very persuasive. Teresa had begged to go with them, but when Nancy had reminded her of her tournament match the next day, she had returned reluctantly to her own room.

  Dan’s small station wagon reassured Nancy. So did his own brawny presence. No one would connect him or his car with San Carlos or with Nancy Drew—particularly since Nancy was wearing Bess’s sundress and George’s battered baseball cap, both brought by Dan from the downstairs room.

  Then why, Nancy asked herself as they rolled up the exit ramp from the parking garage, do I suddenly feel as if something’s about to happen?

  She found out all too soon. As the station wagon turned into the street and headed for the corner, a car parked near the curb came quietly to life. It pulled in behind them as they halted for the stop sign—then turned left just as Dan did.

  “We’re being followed,” Nancy said quietly.

  Chapter Nine

  “NOT FOR LONG,” Dan replied grimly. He started cruising at a slow speed. Then, as they approached a traffic light, he slowed down even more.

  The light began to change. Swiftly Dan slammed the wagon into gear and shot through, barely missing being hit by a sports car that had jumped the signal in the other direction. The sports car was not so lucky. Dan’s pursuer smashed into its right side—and was then penned in place by the flow of traffic from the cross street.

  Nancy watched, fascinated, as Dan roared away. “Car pursuing police officer in accident on comer of Washington and Queen,” Dan snapped into his car radio.

  “Pretty smooth,” George commented admiringly as Dan proceeded to execute a complicated series of turns and cut-throughs that brought them onto the service road to the airline arrivals building.

  “Don’t try a maneuver like that unless you’re a cop on a chase. And even then you’d better have a darn good reason,” Dan answered, grinning.

  He parked in short-term parking, and the four threaded their way through sparse late-night traffic into the terminal. There they played back Bess’s cassette recording and went over the careful notes George had organized so as to retrace Roberto’s and Teresa’s steps. Dan even got permission to go up to the actual tunnel through which the three travelers from San Carlos had deplaned.

  “Nothing here,” Dan remarked after searching every inch of the tunnel. “You find anything?”

  “Only a piece of a baggage claim ticket.” Nancy turned it over to him. “It’s from an afternoon flight today. Not much use.”

  They searched the waiting area and worked their way down the corridor, still without discovering anything. Dan arranged to have the Customs and Immigration officials who had been on duty at the time available for questioning in the morning. “The FBI boys will probably insist on doing that themselves,” he said enviously.

  At last they reached the main concourse again. Nancy looked around. “Where are the car rental counters?” she asked.

  “Over there,” Dan said, pointing.

  “Then I’ll bet this is the sitting area Teresa mentioned. It’s the closest one. Now if we could just figure out where Roberto might have gone while Teresa and Seńora Ramirez waited here. He’d have to be out of their sight for a while so he could look for a hiding place.”

  Nancy stood back as Dan began a careful search, alerting an airport security officer as he did so. Bess and George also began to search under Dan’s direction, while Nancy just stood thoughtfully. The others glanced at her curiously, but she ignored them. There were times when working with her brain could bring faster results than hunting for clues.

  He’d have known he wouldn’t have much time, Nancy thought. He’d do what I’m doing—stand still for a minute and look around.

  What would he have seen? The chairs. The standing ashtrays. They might be good places to leave something for pickup by a contact, but the meet had been planned for the tournament—not the airport.

  Past the sitting area were a small coffee shop, which Dan was checking, and a novelty store. In the window was a large poster for the tennis tournament. Whoever’s doing promotion for the tournament hasn’t missed a trick, Nancy reflected, remembering the banner in the parking garage.

  She sauntered over to look at the array of Washington, D.C., souvenirs in the store windows.

  I wish I had a picture of Roberto with me to show the store owners, she thought. She’d have to come back with that later, after finding out when the same clerks would be on duty.

  Where else could Roberto have gone to quickly, out of sight of Teresa? The restrooms?

  “Negative,” Dan reported, emerging from the men’s room.

  It seemed unlikely that Roberto would have risked going into the ladies’ room, but Nancy checked it just in case. Also negative.

  There was nothing left to investigate but the baggage lockers themselves. They could only be rented for twelve hours at a time. Roberto would have to have planned a trip back to the airport twice a day to check the merchandise—

  Something’s not adding up, Nancy thought, frowning. I’m sure the airport was the only place Roberto could have hidden the hit list. Unless he had it on him when he died.

  He couldn’t have, or bodies other than Roberto’s would have started turning up.

  By then Dan and Bess had returned, followed soon by George. “Pretty smart to advertise the tennis tournament out here,” George said, nodding toward the novelty store. “Should bring in a lot of tourists.”

  Nancy only nodded. She was still lost in thought. Bess slipped an arm around her. “Come on. Dan’ll drive us home. He says the FBI will go through this place thoroughly first thing in the morning.”

  They headed for the car. It was waiting, locked tightly, just where Dan had left it. Before unlocking it Dan went over it from top to bottom with an electronic beeper. “Just in case,” he said tautly. “Though a listening device would be more likely than a bomb.”

  Dan unlocked the car, and they climbed in quick
ly. He paid the parking fee at the exit gate and began driving around the spiral of roads that led to the Memorial Parkway. There weren’t many cars at that time of night.

  “Hey, that’s the second time that big gray car’s changed lanes with us,” Bess said suddenly.

  Nancy sat up straight. “What big gray car?”

  Bess pointed. Dan stole a glance over his shoulder, and his eyes narrowed. “I’ve seen that car before tonight.”

  “I’ve seen it before, too,” Nancy said. “If it’s not the one I was kidnapped in, it’s the spitting image of it!”

  “Car rental company license plates,” Dan noted. He read them out to George, who wrote them down. Then he radioed in to the police.

  “Okay.” Dan grinned humorlessly. “Let’s lose ’em.”

  He put on a burst of speed. The gray car fell behind. Nancy remembered the speed it was capable of and felt a twinge of apprehension. But the car made no move to catch up with them, and her tension eased.

  “Almost home,” Dan said reassuringly to Bess, who cuddled close to him.

  By then the parkway was practically deserted. That shows how late it is, Nancy thought drowsily.

  Suddenly lights flashed in her eyes. No, not lights. Mirror reflection—

  Nancy sprang up in the seat just as the big car bore down on them, ominously close.

  “What—?” Dan yelped as the headlights, turned to high beams, hit him right in the eyes.

  The gray car struck them from behind, and the little station wagon swerved with a sickening lurch.

  Dan fought desperately for control. But before he regained it the killer car struck again, ramming the wagon toward the guardrail.

  The lightweight wagon leaped into the air—and then crashed through the rail. It plunged down the steep embankment with Nancy and her friends inside.

  Chapter Ten

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, you almost got killed in a car crash?” Ned’s voice shouted through the telephone receiver into Nancy’s ear.