Nick Carter groaned aloud. "I should do it," he told her. "I really should teach you a lesson. I ought to tear you apart!"
Nick reached for the bedside lamp and switched it on. He slid out of bed and stalked to a closet, not looking back at the bed. He threw on a robe, belted it, then swung to face the bed.
Debbie was staring at him, blinking her huge eyes against the light. She was naked on the sheet, slim legs outflung, firm breasts spiked with pink, a bare smudge of gold showing between her legs.
Nick stalked toward the bed. "All right, Debbie! Now you're going to get it. I'm not your father or your godfather or your uncle or a nice older man! I'm not Ralphie boy, either! Or Nickie. I'm just a man that's angry. And you're a little teen-age whore who needs a lesson. Now you're going to get it!"
She put out her tongue and started to laugh. Then she saw the look in his eye, squealed in sudden terror, and tried to scramble off the bed. He caught her ankle in one big hand and lifted her high, dangling her over the bed like a chained lamb on a conveyor belt, going to the slaughter. She let out a scream.
With his free, open hand he smacked her across the buttocks as hard as he could. Her scream died in a wail of real pain. His hand left a stark red imprint on the creamy flesh.
He held her aloft as easily as an obstetrician holds a baby and he smacked her again and again. Until her lovely little ass was a mass of angry weals. She sobbed and cried and begged. Nick kept flogging her with his open hand. A dozen times in all. When he had finished he tossed her over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes and carried her back to the guest room. He flung her on the bed, where she buried her wet face in the pillow and began to scream: "I hate you… I h… hate y… you!"
He closed the door and left her without speaking.
Down the corridor a shard of light was leaking under Pok's door. Nick halted outside and said, "It's all right, Pok. Nothing that concerns you. Go back to bed."
"Yis, sar." In a moment the light went out.
Nick went back to his own bedroom, got back in bed and turned out the light, knowing he would not sleep. He could smell her fragrance on the bedclothes.
He was right about not sleeping. After an hour he gave it up and turned on the light. Nearly five o'clock. He went into the study for a smoke and a drink. He would call Louise first thing in the morning and tell her to come over and bail him out. He couldn't just toss Debbie out into the street. The whole messy episode would gradually fade into memory, as such matters did, and in time…
Behind Nick Carter, in one corner of the study, was an exquisitely graven and lacquered Chinese screen in triptych. Behind the screen was a small pier table beneath its narrow, accompanying mirror. A red phone stood on the little table.
The phone buzzed softly now. Again. And again. It buzzed three times before Nick Carter stood up, crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray, and went to answer it. It would be Hawk, of course. Either Hawk or his secretary, Delia Stokes. At this hour, a quarter after five, it was more likely Hawk. That meant only one thing. Killmaster was going back to work.
He picked up the phone and, cautiously, because he was already working again, said "Yes?" He spoke in a neutral tone that no one could have positively identified as the voice of Nick Carter. It was a routine precaution, something he did without conscious thought, but it was routine and precaution that kept an agent alive.
David Hawk's harsh voice was oddly reassuring to the AXEman. Here he was in his own element again, on safe ground; the conversation, the summons, he was about to hear could only lead to dangers which he knew and understood.
Hawk told him to scramble. Nick pressed a button on the base of the red phone. "Scrambling, sir."
"I've just come from an all-night session of the Joint Intelligence Committee," Hawk said. "There's another one tomorrow. Starts at one o'clock over at State. I want you there. I think this is going to be your pigeon, boy, and it's going to be a tough one. Maybe an impossible one. We'll have to see. Anyway be at State at one tomorrow. I mean today, of course. Got it?"
"Got it, sir. Ill be there."
"You'd better. Oh, yes, another thing — you've been awarded the Gold Cross, first class, for that Israel job. What do you want me to do with it?"
"Do you really want me to tell you, sir?"
His boss chuckled, not a usual thing with him. "You'd better not. I'd have to court-martial you. So I'll lock it up with the others — you get them all when you retire. It's something to look forward to, son. When you're old and gray and retired you can go to balls and wear all your decorations — thirteen by last count This makes fourteen."
"I feel old and tired and gray right now," Nick said.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Hawk demanded. "You are in shape?"
Killmaster glanced at himself in the long pier glass, at the wide shoulders, the muscular throat and flat belly and narrow waist, the long hard leg columns. Even when not working or taking special courses, he did special exercises, swam, golfed, played tennis and did two hours daily of handball or squash at the NYAC.
"I'm in good shape," he told his boss. "But at times I feel that I'm getting on a bit. I hope this job is something that an older man can handle?"
There was a long pause. Hawk was suspicious. Nick Carter was the only agent who could pull his leg with impunity, and that not always, but Nick did it often enough to keep the old man on his guard.
Finally Hawk said, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about and I don't want to know. But this job is definitely not for an old man. If it was, for Christ's sake, I'd do it myself! I think we're going to have to send you into China. Good night, Nick."
Chapter 3
Hawk met Nick Carter at the Washington National Airport with a chauffeured black Cadillac. The chauffeur was a tall, blocky man with his shoulder holster showing under an ill-fitting jacket. Nick remarked on it.
"Not ours," said Hawk tartly. "He's CIA. The meeting of JIC has been changed to Langley. We're going there now. A lot has happened since I talked to you this morning — some good, some bad, all of it complex. I'll try to zero you in before we get to Langley — the high points, at least, so I'll talk and you listen. Okay?"
"Okay." Nick crossed his long legs, lit a gold-tipped cigarette, and watched his chief's face. Hawk was looking haggard, with dark brown circles under his eyes. He was wearing a salt-and-pepper tweed that looked slept in, a shirt that was not fresh, and a loud, badly knotted tie. Now he took off a battered slouch hat and rubbed his scalp tiredly. His thinning hair, Killmaster noted, was going from gray to white. Hawk was long past retirement age. Nick wondered if he would be able to drive himself the way Hawk did when he reached the man's age. If? Not to worry. Nick flicked ashes on the floor of the Cadillac and thought there was very little chance he would ever have to worry about getting old.
Hawk spoke around the unlit cigar in his mouth. "You knew a Chinese girl in Hong Kong? Fan Su? You worked with her in smuggling an old Chinese general out of China into Hong Kong?"[1]
"Yes. I remember her well. Fan Su wasn't her milk name. I never knew her real name." He was not likely to forget the girl who had called herself Fan Su. After the mission, which had been a rough and bloody one, they had spent a few days together. In bed, and out, it had been marvelous.
Hawk nodded. "And there was something about an organization called Undertong? An organization she was trying to get started — a Chinese underground movement?"
"There was. I think it was pretty hopeless. At the time she had only a few cadres, and the ChiComs had already liquidated some of these. I don't know what ever came of it. Probably not much. China is probably the only country in the world where it is impossible to form any real underground. Too many factors against it. Chiang Kaishek has been trying for years and he hasn't gotten anywhere."
Hawk shot him a slightly malevolent look. The dry cigar crackled between his false teeth. "You're starting to sound like one of those China experts over at State! This can be done — that can't be done.
Mao's bowels didn't move this morning, so we'll all have to recast our thinking. Sometimes I think they use incense and chicken entrails!"
Nick stared out the window, careful not to smile. So Hawk was in one of those moods! He flipped his cigarette out the window. They were getting into Georgetown now.
"I've got news for you," Hawk said. "Your Fan Su has been in touch. She wants you. I can't go into all of it now, but the gist is that things have changed in China. This Red Guard upheaval is beginning to backfire, in a lot of ways, and this girl claims that her outfit, this Undertong, has been infiltrating the Guards with a lot of success. She's got a brother who is in the Red Guard, a fanatic. Or he was. Now he's seen the light and is helping her recruit for Undertong. She got a long message through to me, by a one-in-a-million chance — I'll explain all that later — and she thinks that now, right now, is the time to start organizing a real, viable underground in China. That's one of the things we're going to talk about at this meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Just one of 'em. There's a lot more."
They were doing a good eighty on the Georgetown Pike. Nick Carter was silent, trying to digest what he had just heard. Finally he asked the question that bothered him most. The glass partition was closed and the intercom button was off.
"How in hell did Fan Su ever manage to get in touch with you?"
Hawk shrugged his skinny shoulders, looking more like a scarecrow than ever. "Luck, accident, miracle — call it any of those. She used an old CIA code that's been extinct, compromised, for years. How she got it God only knows — all they'll tell me is that they left a few agents, Chinese, scattered around the country back in the fifties. They had given them this old code, a guard channel, and some beat-up old transmitters." His thin mouth moved in what was almost a smile. "Crystal sets, I wouldn't doubt. But she didn't have a transmission problem. She's in this country. Right now."
Killmaster sat up straight. "Fan Su is here?"
"Not in Washington," Hawk said. "In San Francisco at the moment, I think. Things are a little bit fluid right now. Of course," he added thoughtfully, "she may be dead by now. The chances are about fifty-fifty. I lost a live drop in San Francisco yesterday. Man by the name of Sun Yat. Ran a bookstore in Chinatown, and the ChiComs were using him for a drop, too.
Hawk bit his cigar in two, looked at the ends in disgust, then tossed them out a window. "God damn it," he said with feeling. "It took me three years to get Sun Yat set up. He was doubling, of course, but doubling on our side. He sold very high-class dirty books, and I put on a little pressure, kept the local cops off his back. He made copies of all the ChiCom mail and left it for me at another live drop, a Chinese pharmacy."
Hawk sighed and stripped cellophane from a fresh cigar. "He won't be much good to me from now on. Somebody chopped him to pieces with hatchets last night — if his girl friend hadn't gone to find him I still wouldn't know it. When I talked to San Francisco — we've got a man planted on Homicide there — he said the killers tried to make it look like a tong killing. There were probably two of them — out-of-towners brought in for the job, I suppose — and they left the hatchets behind. Not too subtle, was it? Not for the ChiComs."
Nick Carter realized, once again, how little he knew of the total AXE operation. It had to be that way, of course. An agent, even a top man like himself, was allowed to know only what he needed to do his job. That way, if caught and tortured, he could do little harm to the organization as a whole. Only Hawk — alone — carried the complete picture in his cunning old brain.
"Not subtle," he agreed now, "but to the point. AXE — hatchets. They just wanted you to know that they knew. But what about your other drop? The pharmacy? They haven't hit that one yet?"
Hawk shook his head. "Not that I've heard. I'm keeping my fingers crossed there. I can't have it watched or protected, naturally, because that would blow it. And your girl, this Fan Su, got her message to me through the pharmacy, not through Sun Yat. That I don't understand at all. Maybe you can find out when you see her."
"I'm going to see her?"
Hawk blew his nose into a clean handkerchief, and put the handkerchief away. "This lousy cold. Can't get rid of it. Yes, at least I hope you're going to see her. I said the chance was fifty-fifty that she's still alive. As soon as this meeting is over you're catching a plane for San Francisco."
They were in Virginia now. Nick could see the Potomac sparkling a cold October blue in the distance.
He turned back to Hawk. "Fan Su sent you a message in an old CIA code? That's got me a little baffled, sir. How did you read it?"
"I didn't. We didn't. We didn't have a single damned clue. So I gave it to the Brain Boys and they couldn't do anything with it either — until one of them, who used to work for the CIA before he came to us, thought he recognized it from years back. It wasn't much, but it was all we had. So I rushed it down to Langley. They had to dig an old code machine out of the vaults to decipher it." Hawk frowned. "And very damned condescending about it, too!" His frown deepened to a scowl, and Nick turned away to hide his grin. Hawk was always feuding with the CIA. Not because of any lack of mutual respect or cooperation. It was a question of seniority and money, and CIA had a great deal more of both than did AXE. Hawk was always fighting his budget.
Now the old man seemed to pick up Nick's thought. "I said this thing is complex, remember. Part of the deal is that CIA is interested, very definitely interested, in building an underground in China. Only they don't think it can be done. They don't want to waste a lot of money and effort, and agents, on a flop effort. But there is also another angle to it — they've got a dirty little job they want done in China! If we play along and do it for them, then maybe they'll spend a little money helping us get the underground started."
* * *
Nick Carter skipped lightly over the "dirty little job" bit. That was routine. Life in AXE was just one dirty little job after another.
He put his finger at once or the fallacy. "But CIA wants the underground, not us. That's not our line of work."
Hawk's eyes were like flint and his smile was cold. "Ummm — no. That's not exactly true, son. I want an underground in China almost as much as they do, but for different reasons. They want it mainly for information — I want it — well, you understand."
Nick Carter did understand. Hawk could make even Killmaster feel a little cold when he looked like that. Hawk wanted an underground in China for the sole and inexorable purpose of putting the opposition leaders down in the real sense of the word. Putting down, to Hawk, meant just that. Six feet down.
The Cadillac slowed and turned off the parkway, past a sign that said BPR. Bureau of Public Roads. Nick smiled faintly. Until just recently the sign had said: Central Intelligence Agency. Some brain had finally got around to taking that one down.
They were checked through a gate and started up a long winding drive to the massive gray-white building with its two stubby U wings. The area was heavily forested, some of the trees already barren of leaves, but many still waving brilliant panaches of October color.
"This JIC meeting," Hawk said, "is going to be a continuation of last night's rat race. You're just an onlooker, remember. You'll have to answer direct questions, of course, but otherwise stay out of it. I know how to handle these donkeys. They've all got more money than we have, but we've got what it takes to do their dirty work." He ruined another cigar with a savage snap. "Everything is going to be damned quid pro quo!"
Nick Carter was content to play the role of onlooker. He had been to Langley only once before, and he had never attended a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Making policy, squabbling over priorities and money was not in his line. From time to time the thought came that one day, in the natural course of events, Hawk would be gone and Nick would have to take his place. He tried not to think about it.
They were put through the smooth routine of fingerprinting and photographing — all this automated now — and an armed guard conducted them to a large room on an upp
er floor of the right wing. It was windowless and air-conditioned. A little group of men waited around a U-shaped table. The chair in the mouth of the U was vacant, and Hawk went straight to it. Nick understood then that Hawk was chairing the meeting. The old man had not mentioned it.
Hawk did not introduce Nick. No one appeared to think this strange. They were all birds of a breed, this gathering, and the less they knew about each other, the better. Nick took a chair against the wall, with an ashtray handy, and watched.
He knew most of the men by sight. With some he had exchanged an occasional word. All were seconds in command, either deputy directors or some such title, of their respective services. Only Hawk, as chairman, was top dog in his kennel.
Nick Carter lit a cigarette and checked them off: CIC, FBI, Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Treasury, Secret Service and CIA. The DD of the latter was a smallish, red-haired, foxy-looking little man with intelligent, cold eyes. He wasted no time. As soon as Hawk called the meeting to order, the CIA man stood up.
"Everybody here has been familiarized with the problems, sir. I took that liberty while we were waiting for you."
Nick saw his Chief's mouth tighten. They had been about ten minutes late. But Hawk merely nodded.
"And," the CIA man went on, "I've conferred with the Director himself since we broke up last night." He smiled around the table. "This morning, rather. I don't know about you other people, but I had a hell of a lot of explaining to do at home!" There was subdued laughter, joined in by all except Hawk. He merely nodded again, looking gray and worn, with flaccid lines around his mouth. The CIA man, in flagrant contrast to Hawk, wore a freshly pressed suit and a clean, starched white shirt. He looked showered and shaven. He would, Nick thought, have an apartment right here in the building. AXE had no such luxuries.
The CIA DD stopped noodling around. He picked up a long pointer, went to a wall map and pulled it down. Without looking at Hawk for permission, he flicked off the overhead lights. The room was in gloom now except for a glow on the map. The CIA man raised his pointer, brought it to rest within a blue-crayoned circle on the map.
The Red Guard Page 4