Free The Detonators by Donald Hamilton

good, maybe a little too goody-good, that prim-and-proper act she puts on, but among other things she’s been arrested and she’s spent time in jail. Granted that the causes were all very noble, and that she doesn’t go in for shoplifting or fraud or arson; these kids never seem to know how to draw a line between legitimate protest and criminal activity. She’s been in on several pretty rough demonstrations that could have had her up on serious charges. To put it bluntly, she’s an erratic little screwball with idealistic pretensions and I’m afraid it’s got her into real trouble at last.”
    It seemed to be my week for being wrong about people. He was talking about a girl I’d never met. I couldn’t visualize the tidy and controlled young woman I’d met screaming wild obscenities in a protest march and being knocked down by the fire hoses and hauled off to a cell all bruised and bedraggled.
    “What kind of trouble?” I asked.
    “We learned quite recently, when the man was spotted in Cincinnati, that my daughter’s recently been shacked up with somebody whose record we both know, somebody I’ve actually been tracking for the last couple of years while I pretended to take up boatbuilding in my retirement. I don’t for a moment think they got together by accident. He knows I’m after him, and I think he sought her out specifically because she was my daughter; more specifically because she was my daughter who’d been taught to detest and despise me. And I don’t think she just happened to start looking for her dear old daddy by accident either, even though I did write her a note after her mother’s death. I think she was following the very careful instructions of her lover, Mr. Alfred Minister, and the organization by which he’s been hired.”
    I whistled softly. “Minister? Our inhibited young lady sure picks her company!” Then I asked, “Hired to do what?”
    “That’s what we have to find out,” Doug said.

7
    Officially, our specialty may be called counterassassination, as opposed, say, to counterespionage, or counterintelligence. We’re the good guys with the guns who go after the bad guys with the guns when they’re too mean for anybody else to handle—although I’ve heard doubts expressed in some quarters as to just how good we are. Some folks just don’t like guns no matter who uses them. I don’t suppose they liked the club, the spear, or the bow and arrow, either.
    Anyway, in the line of duty, we have to keep track of a lot of people, mostly dangerous people. Among them, Alfred Minister was easy to remember, because he had a quaint conceit: his aliases were always ecclesiastical. We had records of him operating under several different names reflecting the same theme, like Aloysius Pastor or Alan Priest. It was a proud signature of sorts, like an artist placing an identifying scrawl in the corner of his canvas.
    Minister was very good at his art. He could blow up practically anything with practically anything. Give him a little acid and something for it to chew on and he’d cook you up a nice batch of nitro in the kitchen sink and show you how to set it off very simply; but for his own use he preferred more exotic explosives detonated in more complicated ways.
    Driving back to Miami, I didn’t pay much attention to what was behind me after an initial check to make sure nobody’d managed to pick me up at the motel: Doug’s continued existence was still a secret. Beyond that, there was nothing to be gained by being fancy, since I was returning to the Marina Towers, where anybody could find me who wanted me. As I drove, I reviewed what I’d just been told; also what I hadn’t been told, like the real reason Doug Barnett had been officially retired to devote his time, almost two whole years, to the Minister case and nothing else. We don’t usually pay so much attention to a lousy dynamiter, even one who’s a virtuoso.
    Doug had handed me a condensed dossier to look through as we