by James Grady
And I came all this way to find two homosexuals shacking up on a farm, thought Malcolm: trained to find smut. He started the jeep's engine. Before he engaged the clutch, he glanced between the buildings to his left at the rolling, checkerboard-pattern fields. Three hills and five miles away hid the missile site where Parkins had been shot. The hills blocked Malcolm's view of the site, but he guessed the powerful searchlights cast an eerie glow over Whitlash. He looked in his side mirror. It had slipped out of line again. Malcolm fought a continuous battle to keep it in line. Bouncing over the rough gravel roads aided and abetted his unnamable enemy. In its out-of-kilter position the mirror reflected the tiny dot of brown which was the Bells' roof. Malcolm could barely discern that lump on the horizon which housed the only two suspicious persons he had uncovered in his investigation.
Sweet Jesus, he thought, then he engaged the clutch and drove away.
Malcolm lost his enthusiasm for his day's work after the Robinsons dampened his curiosity about the Bell brothers. He deliberately allowed himself to become lost, and he took a two-hour lunch break beside a deserted gravel road. After he finished his lunch, he sat quietly, staring to the west where the Rocky Mountains' blue and white tips broke the skyline. Finally he sighed, decided that not enough of the day remained to make an effort at work and drove leisurely back to Shelby.
In the late afternoon Malcolm left his motel room to see if he could find a new restaurant for dinner. As he made a decision on which direction to travel, a Greyhound bus headed for St. Louis slowly pulled out of Manhattan's Port Authority Terminal. Canadian tourist Rene' Erickson rode that bus, as did three male and one female American security agents, several prim old women, one toothless old man, a dirty sailor, four exhausted college students returning to separate institutes of higher learning, a middle-aged couple from Dubuque headed home at a "sensible" price from an unsensible second honeymoon, one nervous runaway teenager and two ageless nuns who still wore the traditional habit. During the thirty-two-hour trip the "full route" passengers would be joined by a variety of shorthop customers who would ride the bus for a few miles, then leave it to, continue its appointed journey. Even the bus driver was unaware that cars of American agents preceded and followed his machine as it pulled out of New York to heed Horace Greeley's purloined phrase and go west.
Kevin called the old man an hour before the bus departed. "Our boy is on the move, sir. Rose bought a round trip bus ticket from New York to. St. Louis. We've got a team aboard and we'll cover him all-the way."
"Good, Kevin, good. Is it a direct, nonstop run?"
"No, it's a hopper. There are a lot of stops along the way, although nothing longer than an hour and a half, and there are only two of those. The bus services the out of the way places. Its ETA for St. Louis is the afternoon of the day after tomorrow. The St. Louis FBI has no record of him booking passage on any other form of public transportation going anywhere, so he may have another contact there."
"Fine, fine. Keep him in your sights, my boy."
"I will, sir. How's Condor?"
"Our boy is doing fine, although I'm afraid he's becoming quite bored with his assignment. He's having us check out two suspects, but he doesn't think we'll find anything tying them to our problem. From what he's told me I'm inclined to agree with him although I am glad he was able to dig up something. It shows he's thinking, for you can always find something suspicious if you took hard enough. I've kept him up-to-date so far. You never know what his mind will come up with."
"Anything else new?"
"No," said the old man, "nothing here. I'll talk to you soon."
The old man had lied to Kevin, by omission if not commission. True, the old man knew nothing new, but not for a lack of trying. Very quietly, using leverage inside the CIA independent of the project involving Parkins' death, the old man was probing Russian intelligence for anything out of the ordinary. He felt something was wrong, and he hoped his endeavors would either prove -his fears groundless or give him a clue to what bothered him.
All his inquiries turned up nothing he didn't already know which made the old man even less sure of the whole affair.
8
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. 'Wow, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
The next morning dawned brightly in Montana. Malcolm's spirits improved considerably as he drove to the truck stop for breakfast. By now he knew 6f most of the early-morning customers, at. least by sight, and he genuinely meant the pleasantries he exchanged with them. By 7:45 Malcolm was ten miles east of Shelby, turning off the main highway onto a dirt road which would lead him to the quadrant north and east of the missile site where Parkins had died.
In his long hours of driving through the countryside Malcolm had experimented with the jeep's powerful AM radio, finding a variety of stations ranging from the small town folksy ones with farm reports, local gossip and news shows with moderately "popular" music to a hard-core country and western one. Most of the time Malcolm listened to a Great Falls station which played "contemporary" music aimed at the high school and college audiences within its 100-mile daytime broadcasting range. The station cut back half its power at night. After dark the northern Montana teenagers cruising the short streets of their towns were forced to pick up the exotic sounds of Chicago, the Twin Cities or Oklahoma City.
Most of the current popular music bored and nauseated Malcolm, but the Great Falls station's morning program catered to the "older" generation, that group of Americans who grew up in the early days of rock and roll, the 1950's to late 1960's, and who now as housewives, laborers, middle-level government clerks, sales personnel, white collar, blue-collar and "professional" people would listen to a station which brought back memories of the days when they didn't face the dreary prospect of work. The station's commercials were aimed at that age bracket, interspersing the ads with carefully selected musical programming, bringing back the good old days of yesterday to sell today's new improved soap.
The music gave Malcolm a fresh, innocent feeling. The day was warm, the huge blue sky held no clouds and his jeep ran smoothly down the country roads. He drove at a moderate rate, his window open, the clean spring air gently washing over his face, carrying with it the fresh earth smells of greenness. He hummed and sang along with the radio. The station's musical programmer, most likely through accident, played three songs in a row and in the chronological order of their release. The first song, from the early 1960's, told the story of a young man's heartbreak because his parents refused to let him wed the girl of his dreams because of her poverty and his painful acquiescence to their wishes, all sung in the crackling falsetto of puberty. The second song came from and for a slightly more sophisticated generation in the mid-1960's. The plaintive melodic wail told of one-way signs and removed the young man from any blame. The third and final song before the beer commercial again cracked in falsetto, but a falsetto well past puberty. The starry-eyed young man was crying that the revolution was here, the determined wail of the 1960's. Then came a beer commercial, followed by the latest "youth" hit, a hot number from a twelve-year-old male sex symbol singing of the pain of unrequited love pledged forever.
Malcolm shook his head slowly as the fourth song ended. A long way to go in a circle, he thought, an, awfully long way.
The road was deserted. Malcolm saw no fellow travelers for half an hour after he left the main road. This particular quadrant held few farms, none closer than eleven miles to the missile site. Malcolm doubted that Parkins could have come from anyplace as far away. The old man had, agreed with Malcolm when he checked in the night before: In order to keep his cover, Malcolm had to visit the farms. Besides, the old man told him, we need to keep you out there, and finishing the survey will give us the excuse. Take your time, the old man had said, which Malcolm, who was enjoying the easy pace of his work, fully intended to do.
Three miles from his f
irst scheduled stop Malcolm topped a hill and saw a car pulled off the side of the road.
His first thought was that it was very unsafe for anyone to park in a dip in the road like that. It sat at the base of the dip, almost hidden in the small gully. Malcolm slowed to a crawl: Malcolm knew almost nothing about automobiles, but he recognized this as a fairly new model, in good condition despite some scratches in the blue paint. He saw someone bent over the front, his back to Malcolm.
The person heard the jeep and turned around. Malcolm saw that the he was a she and -that she was trying to fix a flat tire. Malcolm stopped ten feet from the car, shut his motor off and got out to help.
For some reason Malcolm immediately noticed the car's Canadian license plate. Probably a lost tourist, he thought, or an Albertan farm girl who took the wrong road somewhere heading for a friend's and before she knew it found herself in the United States with a flat tire.
The second thing Malcolm noticed was the woman. She was medium height and somewhat stocky. Malcolm remembered McGiffert's training in identification, and half in jest he described her for the police blotter: height, 5'5"; slender to stocky build (Malcolm could never approximate weights accurately); dark brown complexion (Indian?); pleasant, attractive face; brown eyes; black hair. Dressed in nylon windbreaker (medium breasts, thought. Malcolm unprofessionally), blue jeans, tennis shoes. A nice smile.
"Excuse me," she said. Her voice was soft, low. "Could you help me?"
Malcolm returned her smile. "I can try, although I must warn you, I'm a horrible mechanic."
She laughed. "I don't think it will take much. I'm just having trouble turning the tire iron."
Malcolm's mind raced. She was the first single woman (he automatically assumed the absence of a ring on her left band's fourth finger precluded a husband) he had talked to since he arrived in Montana who seemed anywhere near his age. It was, of course, stupid to think of establishing any kind of "relationship" with her: She would quickly return to Canada and he would continue with his survey. Nevertheless, before he reached the car, his fantasy had the two of them eating dinner together in Shelby that night. The fantasy omitted any of the explanation of how they got to dinner, but Malcolm was too busy to worry about that.
"I'll give it a try," he said. He frowned, trying to look competent and serious. He regretted not having chewed gum after breakfast because the mint flavor might have killed the maple-syrup smell he tasted in his mouth. Don't breathe deeply on her, he thought. "Let's see now," he said. He put both hands on the lug wrench, squatted ("Pants, don't rip," he silently commanded) and muttered, "Maybe you've been turning the wrong way."
Malcolm didn't hear a reply. He vaguely thought he heard garments moving and gravel crunching underfoot, but he was too busy concentrating on his task to pay much attention. The last sensation he remembered was the feeling of cold strength transmitted through the brown iron lug wrench. Then the girl smashed the blackjack across the back of his neck and Malcolm lost consciousness, sliding to the ground in a heap. In his fall he knocked the lug wrench off the wheel nut. The wrench banged his limp ankle, but he didn't feel the pain.
The girl called softly. The man who had been hiding in the culvert scrambled up the embankment to join her next' to Malcolm. He shared the girl's light brown complexion. The girl gave Malcolm an injection while the man quickly searched him. The man put on Malcolm's jacket before he, helped the girl stuff Malcolm in the car's trunk. The man used a can of pressurized air to fill the "flat" tire quickly, lowered the jack and stowed the tire-repair items next to Malcolm in the trunk. He then took a large canvas bag from the car's backseat. The bag contained Alberta license plates, which the man substituted for Malcolm's U.S. government plates. While he made those changes, the girl pasted false siding strips over the Department of Defense insignias on the jeep's doors. The man climbed in the jeep and drove north, and the girl trailed him in her car, allowing her companion a good mile's lead.-The whole operation, from the time Malcolm stopped until the time the two vehicles pulled away, took just under five minutes, easily an acceptable risk time for an operation in such a protected, deserted area.
Except for the girl's summons, she and her companion exchanged no words.
The two vehicles sometimes used fairly good gravel roads but more often crossed dirt tracks first cut by farmers and bootleggers. Within twenty minutes they had illegally entered Canada. Within an hour they were thirty miles from the site where they had kidnapped Malcolm and had seen no other traffic on the roads they traveled. Their destination was a farm ten miles from a small Alberta community about four times the size of Whitlash. The two vehicles turned off the road and into the farmyard. The girl parked her car behind the house, near the kitchen door. The man parked the jeep inside a shed, then closed the door. He whistled softly as he walked toward the house. The two of them casually carried Malcolm's limp form into the house, gently shutting the door behind them.
Condor was caught, and no one even guessed he was missing.
The Greyhound bus carrying Nurich turned off the interstate fifteen miles east of Cincinnati. The standard bus would have continued without stopping for lunch until it came to the city terminal, but this bus, the holdover, was a milk run kept in service because it made all the obscure, out-of-the-way stops. The driver didn't mind the milk run. While it was annoying to pull off the main road and check to see if he had any passengers at every small town, at least he got to see the small towns before they died and were absorbed by sprawling suburbia. The driver told his wife (when he saw her) that the milk run was "kind - of poetical" and that someday he would tell younger drivers about it and they would shake their heads with amazement. "Just like the buffalo dying out," the driver would say, "just like that."
The stop fifteen miles east of Cincinnati is one of many junction towns whose existence has become all but ignored as a result of the high-speed interstate. People no longer needed to pull off the road to fuel up or eat before hitting Cincinnati as they used to before the interstate cut fifteen miles and twenty minutes from their journey. Even so, the farmers still came to the large gas station for coffee, and the gas station's new manager had turned it into a truck stop of some repute in the Midwestern teamster circles. Through his franchiser, the owner had even persuaded the bus line to continue stopping the milk run there for fuel and a lunch break for the passengers.
The bus parked between two idling semi-trucks. The passengers didn't need their driver's urging to disembark, stretch, use the rest room and, for those who could afford it, sample 'the food. The agents traveling with Nurich maintained their watch on their quarry, but this was just another stop on his way to St. Louis. So far he had made no suspicious moves. They expected none here. They exchanged glances when the Russian carried - his bag from the bus, but when he emerged from the men's room shaven and wearing a new set of clothes, they relaxed once more.
Nurich ate a rather large lunch of roast beef, vegetables, potatoes, milk, pie and coffee. The four American agents sat scattered throughout the truck stop. The two older male agents sat with their backs to Nurich. Elaine, the woman agent, and the youngest male agent, who wore long hair, blue jeans, a faded work' shirt and boots to imply college student, sat on either side of the Russian at the counter.
A security agent from the first of the two advance surveillance cars waited in the filling station, pretending to use the public phone booth. He actually spoke into a very compact, very powerful walkie-talkie to Kevin, who was parked at a rest stop five miles away in one of the two security cars trailing the bus.
"They're sitting in there eating, just like before," the agent in the phone booth said. "Rose is covered. According to the bus schedule, they are due to depart in eighteen minutes. The driver has punched the clock to the minute since the trip began, and there's no indication he'll be late this time."
"Where's the rest of your team?" asked Kevin as he stared at the cars whizzing by on the interstate.
"Our Unit One is parked at the gas pumps. If
Rose stood and looked over some other cars, he could see it. It's ready to go, but one of the men is pretending to fiddle with the engine while he asks the attendant dumb questions. Unit Two is parked by some buildings about one hundred yards from the station. They are monitoring."
"Okay." Kevin sighed his boredom. Nothing would probably happen until they reached Cincinnati, and even then the likelihood of something happening was minimal. St. Louis was Rose's destination, although Kevin had no idea what waited in St. Louis.
"Unit Two, three minutes before departure time you will leave. Cruise slowly so you won't have far to drop back. Unit One will pull out just before the bus rolls. Cut it thin, but not so thin Rose might think it's funny. Unit One, let us know when the bus clears the ramp, then we'll roll and pick up a tight formation for entering the city. We have two local teams meeting us there, just in case our boy gets off. Hang in there, troops, only a few more hours. Central clear."
Kevin hung the mike from its loop. He took the stale bologna and cheese sandwich offered him by his assistant sitting in the backseat. The door opened, and the driver, who had been availing himself of a lull in traffic passing the stop, maneuvered his large body behind the wheel. "Brother, am I tired of riding in this car," said the driver. "Do you think Rose will get but in Cincinnati? I could use some legwork.