He unlocked the door to the outer shop and crawled through it on his hands and knees. There was no light out here now. Nick crawled for the front entrance, the Luger jammed into his waistband. He reached the front door and lifted himself enough to peer out through the half glass. The street outside was dark but for the light of a single street lamp some thirty feet to his right. No one passed. Nothing moved. A line of small shops across the street was dark except for an occasional night light. Where were they?
One of them was in a doorway across the street, and now he made a mistake. He turned his back and cupped his hands, but Killmaster saw the tiny flicker of the lighter as the man lit a cigarette. The AXEman's lips curled in professional contempt. Once, on a stalk, he had stood for five hours without moving, his breathing controlled by Yoga, until the enemy had given up in despair and come to him. And had died. It made all the difference.
So now he knew. There was at least one of them out there. He felt around for the door knob, found it and the lock, and clicked the door open an inch. There was no glow from across the street now. The man was cupping the cigarette in his palm.
Killmaster had not counted on the street light to his right — he chided himself for forgetting the detail — and it meant that the gunner over there was going to get at least one good shot at him. No help for it.
The Luger was in his right hand. Nick launched a terrific kick at the door. It smashed open and back against the store-front glass. The sound was like a bomb in the quiet street. The front window fell in bell-tinkling shards to the pavement. Nick went out the door in a running crouch.
He had gone ten feet before the Tommy gun across the street opened up. The gunner's shooting was poor; he had been taken by surprise and forgot to lead the AXEman's crouching, zigzagging, sprinting figure. Lead hammered on the pavement at Nick's heels.
Nick snapped three fast shots across his body at the doorway as he made for a tall barricade of garbage cans on the pavement just ahead. More slugs spattered off the sidewalk, whanged off an iron railing, ricocheted in high whining screams off the old brick fronts. Nick went diving into the shelter of the pyramid of garbage cans, found a hole, and began firing back at the scarlet stutter coming from the doorway. He had a couple of extra clips, as always, but they were not a factor. He would not get to use them. This had to be gotten over with fast. It already sounded like the Battle of the Bulge — there would be cops swarming around in a very few minutes. He wedged the Luger into the hole between the garbage cans, holding it with both hands, and took careful aim at the doorway. He kept his eye on the door of the Army & Navy store for a split second, saw nothing, then began firing at the gunner over there.
More lead came hosing back at him. The man was desperate now, knowing as well as Nick did about the police and time, and machine-gun lead ate into the cans in a steady, probing stream, up, down and across. The din was terrific as the heavily loaded cans absorbed the rain of lead.
Nick was firing back carefully now, aiming with great care, a shot and then a glance at the door of the Army & Navy store. He snapped off a shot. The clip would be nearly out now.
He saw Fan Su's slim figure dash from the front of the store and turn left, running as though hell yawned behind her. The gunner across the way was disconcerted for a moment; then he sent a hail of lead after the fleeing girl. He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway in his anxiety and bewilderment, and Nick drew a careful bead on the blobby shadow with the spurting gun. He was not much of a praying man, Nick Carter, but he muttered a little one now. And pulled the trigger of the Luger.
The shadow lurched and sprawled toward the gutter. In the sudden silence, Nick heard the clatter of the Tommy gun as it went skittering across the pavement. He was on his feet then and racing after the girl. As he passed the door of the Army & Navy store he saw another dark figure lying in the entrance. So the other bastard had been in there. Fan Su, and the stiletto, had taken care of him. Good girl!
Lights were popping on all around now. The ominous wail of a siren began in the distance. More than time, Killmaster thought, to make our departure for good.
Fan Su was waiting for him in the mouth of a narrow alley a block and a half down the street. He very nearly missed her. She hissed at him as he went pounding past. A light went on just over her head, back a way in the alley, and he saw her, spent and shaken, leaning against the wall. Her lovely face was drawn and there was a wild look in her eyes. Without a word she held out the stiletto.
"It… it's all bloody! I killed him from behind."
Nick snatched the weapon from her. There was a tiny verge of dead grass at the alley mouth. He plunged the stiletto into the soft, fog-damp earth to clean it, then grabbed her and began to pull her through the alley.
"Run," he commanded savagely. "Run! This damned alley has to come out someplace."
She clung to his arm as they sped down the alley. Nick sheathed the stiletto, holstered the Luger, and thought that it was a pretty good alley. A fine and lovely alley. It had come along just in time. He glanced back once, in time to see a police car slash across the alley mouth, its fed light flashing. They would be searching the neighborhood in a matter of minutes.
There were four corpses back there that he would just as soon not have to explain.
Chapter 5
Killmaster decided to break trail then and there. He did not even go back to the rented car. He and Fan Su emerged from the alley half a block from an all-night cab stand. They took a cab to the Ferry Building, then another back to the Mark. They took a third cab to a low bar on Kearny Street that Nick had used before. Nick dismissed the cab a block from the bar and they waited until it vanished before entering the place.
They had a couple of drinks, some bad food, and cleaned up a bit in the washrooms. Fan Su had a little blood on her, but managed to get most of it off. Nick's suit was presentable enough after a good brushing. Later they took another taxi to an outlying bus station and caught a late bus to Los Angeles. The bus station was in a shopping center, and Nick bought a cheap plastic raincoat for each of them. His money was beginning to run low.
The bus was only half-filled, and they found a pair of seats away from the others where they could talk. Fan Su, her slim body close to his, her head on his shoulder, filled him in on a few matters that had been puzzling him.
When she had decided that AXE, and Nick Carter, were the only ones who could, or would, help her carry on with Undertong, she had decided to come to the States to plead in person. She had stumbled into the old CIA code but had no way of using it, no pipeline into CIA. CIA had used her, and Undertong, for its own purposes — Nick well remembered the affair of smuggling a defecting Red general out of China — but CIA had no real faith that a viable underground could be established in China.
Fan Su had never forgotten Nick Carter. It was he, and AXE, who had bailed out both the CIA and Undertong and gotten the general out of China through Hong Kong. But she had no means of contacting Nick, either. They had said goodbye after that week together, never expecting to see each other again. Then the miracle!
"I have a brother," she told him now. "A half-brother, really. His name is Po-Choy — that is not his milk name, any more than mine is Fan Su, but it will do — and for a long time he has been in the Red Guards. He still is, but he has become very disillusioned with the Reds and I have managed to recruit him for Undertong. It was not easy, I have been working on him for a long time. He is a very serious and sincere person, Nick. Much younger than I am."
Nick smiled down at her in the dim bus. They were well south of San Francisco by now, running fast along the coastal highway. "Okay, Grandmother. Go on."
She squeezed his arm. "It was a bit of a problem, you see. When Po-Choy finally did decide to come over to Undertong, he came over all the way. I had a terrible time making him stay in the Red Guard — he was a Commander and very valuable to us, to Undertong. I finally convinced him and he went back to Peking, but to work for our side now. And that was the mira
cle — in Peking he recruited a file clerk in the office of Yee Ling!"
Fan Su paused and Nick knew it was for dramatic effect, but the name meant nothing to him. He told her so.
He saw her smile. "Maybe not, but this Yee Ling is very interested in you. He is a very high officer in their Counter-intelligence and he keeps a special file on you, darling. The Carter file. There is a standing reward of one hundred thousand dollars on your head."
"I'm flattered." He was also a trifle vexed. He wondered if Hawk knew about the Carter File and the reward, and was sending him into China anyway. Probably. To his boss a job was a job and the best, the sharpest, instrument must be used.
"Po-Choy also found out, through the clerk, about a bookstore in San Francisco that the Reds have been using as a drop. A store owned by a man named Sun Yat. At the time I speak of he was already under suspicion of being a double — this was a little over two weeks ago."
"They were right," Nick said grimly. "He was working for us, indirectly and through another five drop. He's dead now!"
A faint shiver ran through her slim body. "I know. I read about it. I–I must have been in his store about an hour before it happened. I went straight to Chinatown from the airport. I took a terrible chance, but I was desperate. I had to get in touch with you, Nick! I had the old CIA code, you see. I was gambling that if I could get a message through to your people in that old code, eventually it would be deciphered and you would contact me."
His admiration was genuine. "You're a gambler, all right. But the real gambler is, or was Sun Yat. I don't understand that at all. He actually told you about the second drop, the acupuncture doctor? Gave you a recognition signal? Was he drunk, crazy, or what?"
"He was frightened to death," she said. "But he was also high on opium. I could smell it on him. But for that I don't think he would have spoken a word to me — he would have thrown me out or killed me! And I must have acted, and looked, pretty genuine. He finally gave me the address of the doctor and a signal — lung huo. Dragon fire. But I was to speak in Pia Hua, in Mandarin. Then he pushed me out the door. He must have been killed not long afterward, by the story in the papers."
Killmaster nodded without speaking. It was like that at times in his profession: an hour, a minute, a split second made all the difference.
"I went straight to the needle doctor," she went on. "He was still open. Since I had the password, he was not too concerned. I gave him the coded message — I had it already written out — and he said it would be in Washington the next morning. I was to return the following afternoon, late. I did and, well, you know what happened. Two of them were waiting on each side of the door when I walked in. I never had a chance. They took me back to that little room and showed me what was left of the doctor — I never knew his name — and of course they had tortured everything out of him. They knew that I had sent a message to Washington and that someone would probably contact me. So they waited, very patiently."
"I walked right into it," said Nick. He wondered now about the curare on the needles. Had it been curare after all? At this distance he thought not. He was not really much of a toxicologist. They would have used a drug to knock him out, not kill him. He would not have been killed until he was squeezed dry. It had been a very narrow thing.
"The needle doctor didn't die easily," he said now. "He gave them my recognition signal, too. Poor bastard."
Fan Su huddled closer against him. "They do terrible things. We do terrible things. We are all so insane, so mad, Nick, that at times even the most terrible and irrational acts seem right and sane. And to live with death so constantly, always to know that we are only a heartbeat away from it, I wonder how any of us remain sane? If we do! I am not always sure about myself."
"Only one answer to that," said Killmaster. "Tell yourself that you're in a bloody fight for survival — then don't think about it anymore." Then, because he wanted to lighten her mood and because he remembered, he said: "And cheer up — you sound like a first-year course in philosophy at Bennington."
Fan Su put up a hand to stroke his cheek. "You remembered that — that I went to school in this country? Even the college!"
"There is very little about you that I have forgotten," he said. He began to remember other things, then, but pushed them out of his mind. Not now, not yet.
Something had been bothering him and now he knew what it was.
"You knew that Sun Yat was suspected, was marked. Your Peking contact told you that. You could have warned him. Why didn't you?"
It was a little time before she answered. When she did it was with a sigh. "I know. I thought about it. Then I remembered that he was a double agent — and you know you can never really trust a double. I decided to say nothing. To let them kill him, if that was what they intended. I didn't consider it as losing one of ours, Nick, but as killing one of theirs!"
It was a side of her character, a flinty side, that he had not seen before. He thought about it for a time. When he looked down at her again she was asleep against his shoulder.
When they got into Los Angeles Nick made a phone call from the bus station. They waited in the coffee shop for an hour. At the end of that time a Blue Star taxi pulled in at the curb and sat there with its Off Duty sign on.
Nick winked at Fan Su, who was having her third cup of coffee. "Just like New York."
"I don't understand."
"Don't worry about it — it's an in joke." He went out to the taxi. The driver was a surly young man with a stubble of beard and wearing a plaid sport shirt. He scowled as Nick approached. "You can't read, Mister? The sign says I ain't working."
Nick grinned. "I can read. But my wife and I have always wanted to see the oil wells on Signal Hill. I'm a triple-tipper."
The driver nodded. "I'm Wells, sir. Washington alerted us that you might possibly be dropping in for a visit. Is it an emergency, sir? You need a smoke screen?"
Nick Carter shook his head. "Nothing as drastic at that. I'm clean. But I'll need a safe house for a couple of days — for two."
The man who called himself Wells did not blink. "Yes, sir. That's easy. We've got two here. One of them is empty now."
"I'll need money," said Nick. "And clothes for both of us, and a direct safe line to Washington."
"That's all routine, sir. Already installed. Nothing else, sir?"
"Not for the moment."
The driver did not speak again until Nick was paying him. They had halted near the foot of Angel's Flight in the Bunker Hill section. With his change the man handed Nick a key. "Take the car to the top, sir. Half a block to your right you'll find the Ormsby Arms, new apartment house. Top floor is all ours. You'll be 9C. There'll be two phones. One to local depot here, one to Washington. They're marked — but you'll know all that, sir."
Nick smiled and tipped him. Standard procedure. All charades to be played straight through. "Yes," he said quietly. "I'll know about that."
The driver tipped his cap. "Thanks, sir. Call us if you need anything. Anything at all."
Nick winked at him. "I hope I never see you again, son." He assisted Fan Su out of the cab and they walked toward the little funicular. One of the orange cars was about to leave on its one-minute journey up the 33-degree grade.
There was only one other passenger in the car, a Negro. Nick, with the ease and caution of long practice, looked the man over and dismissed him. No sweat.
Fan Su was staring out the window. "This city has changed a lot since I was here last. That was a long time ago. This was all a slum area then."
The AXEman nodded silently. Yes. Everything changed. And yet everything remained the same. Especially Death. It was always there — walking tippy-toe behind you.
As they left the car at the top of the hill she said, with a sad little laugh, "I'm destitute, Nick. No clothes, no money, not anything. All I've got is what I stand in."
They started to the right. "That's the story of my life," he told her. "I've left enough clothes, and laundry, around the world to sta
rt a haberdashery. Don't worry about it. As of now you are the guest of Uncle Sam. You know how generous he is."
She clung to his arm and stared up into his face, her deep-brown eyes pleading. She had dark fatigue circles under them.
"Oh, Nick! You are going to help me, us? Help us get a real underground started in China? So we'll have a chance — at least a hope?"
He glanced around. Nobody was near. "Not now," he said. "Later. I'll tell you all about it later."
Nine-C was an exquisitely furnished three-and-a-half-room apartment. From the picture window Nick could see the snow-capped San Gabriel mountains. While Fan Su took first shower — they were both grimy — he made a swift inspection.
There were two enormous closets. One contained a complete stock of women's clothing, in various sizes; the Other was filled with men's clothing, everything from hats to shoes. On a separate shelf was a box of ammo for hand-guns: 9mm for the Luger; Colt.45; other types from the South American Mendoza to the Russian Tokarev. There were saps and knucks and trench knives. Spare holsters. Pen lights and batteries. A cardboard box of various «bugs» and other electronic gimmicks. In a corner was a pile of luggage ranging from Gladstones to lightweight one-suiters and steel-lined attaché cases. Nick took all this in with a silent whistle of appreciation. He worked out of the States most of the time and was not accustomed to such luxury. Logistics, he had to admit, was on the ball.
Set into one pale-green wall was a small safe. Nick opened it with a combination that every top AXE agent knew. The interior of the safe was much larger than the small circle of steel indicated. Inside were neat stacks of currency of many types and denominations. Affixed to the inside of the safe door was a typed notice: Please sign for amount of currency taken and date. There was a rubber-stamped facsimile signature: DH. David Hawk.
Nick smiled. He wondered how many times, and in what ways, his Chief's signature was taken in the name of red tape?
The Red Guard Page 7