Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “Señor?”

  The man was standing at the end of the porch, motioning Havens toward him with a flipperlike action of his left hand. He was wearing a dark blue overcoat and a gray felt hat, which went rather strangely with his heavy handlebar mustache and his two day old beard. The clothes looked out of place here—not the man, just the clothes. You had the impression that any moment he would step sideways and out of them, just like out of those sets that photographers use at state fairs, where you stick your head through a hole and appear as a turn of the century dandy balancing on a unicycle. Havens followed obediently along.

  There was a barn about seventy yards behind the main house. It looked as though no one had painted it in years, and some of the boards used for siding hadn’t been cut quite straight, so here and there weird slithering chinks appeared in the outer walls. Another man was standing in front of the door, with his shotgun slung across the crook of his arm, as if he had been posted guard.

  It was dark inside. There were three or four horses in stalls right near the door; you couldn’t see them properly, only the flicker of shadowy movement within the closed up pens, but they were pacing back and forth and whinnying nervously—at intervals there would be a sharp rap of a hoof against the partition. Probably all the shooting had set them off.

  Or maybe not. At the other wing of the barn, at the end of a rope that had been slung across the roof beam, hung a strangely sinister mass that twisted slowly around from one side to the other like a set of wind chimes on a still day.

  Havens took a step forward. As his eyes adjusted to the dim, filtered light, he saw that the mass was human, was a man tied and hanging by his leg—just the one; the other was splayed out at a grotesque angle. He could smell the blood long before he recognized Suñer.

  They had beaten his head almost to pulp. They had made a game of it—the blood smeared two-by-fours were lying in a little pile under the body. It could have been almost anybody. Havens wasn’t sure, not really sure, until he read the label on the inside of the suit coat—Adams & Co., New York—and noticed the polish on the fingernails of one hand.

  “Cut him down.” His voice wasn’t much more than a hoarse croak. He turned on his heel and went back to the house.

  “They are no especting us, no?” The man in the gray felt hat smiled at Havens, showing a row of fine white teeth as even as bathroom tiles. He held up a couple of fingers. “Only two kill. Five them, only two us.”

  Havens nodded, finding himself at a loss to do more. He had only fired a gun at another human being once before in his life, four months after he finished his training at Quantico, when a numbers runner in New York had panicked and tried to shoot his way out of a raid and Havens had hit the guy in the knee. He had even thought about quitting the Bureau over that one—everyone treated him like a hero, but he had felt like something very different—and now he had blown two men to pieces with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Probably for these guys it was like hunting jackrabbits.

  He went back into the house and sat down next to where Gomá was lying on the floor, his eyes still wide open and the expression on his face registering a kind of surprised outrage.

  “Is this what you thought you were getting into when you went to war, pal?” Havens asked, leaning forward in his chair to study the dead man’s alarmed countenance. “Me neither.”

  But he must have grown up some since the numbers runner in New York, because the major emotion that he experienced as he looked down at Gomá was a sullen, fretful resentment. The son of a bitch had forced him to shoot, and he had needed Gomá alive.

  So what did he have? In a way it had been kind of a relief to find Suñer hanging out there in the barn—you come storming into a place and blow everybody away, it’s nice to know they had it coming. And Suñer with his head beaten in validated everything that Suñer alive had had to say about Agustin Gomá. So at least it hadn’t all been just smoke screen. At least they had come to the right place to get the right man.

  And at the right time too. Havens had been more than a little afraid of finding the place deserted, but Gomá was still here. He hadn’t yet crossed over into the United States and picked up von Niehauser, because if he had he wouldn’t still have been lounging around with his bodyguards—he would have been halfway to the freighter or the submarine or the God only knew what else that was probably waiting around at that precise moment to take its cargo back to the Reich.

  So everything was perfect—except that Gomá was too full of number five birdshot to tell anybody anything.

  And then Havens glanced down at the floor and saw what it was that Gomá had been trying to burn when he had run out of time. It was still folded, and the edges were pretty badly scorched, but it remained more or less intact.

  It was a map.

  28

  It was one of those extremely detailed topographical maps, on a scale of about an inch to the half mile. The upper half was burned so badly that it simply fell into tatters when Havens tried to unfold it. There really wasn’t any way of seeing how the surviving fragments related to one another.

  But the lower section was still in reasonably good shape. He spread it out on the floor and found Gomá’s hacienda marked with a square of heavy pencil. There was another pencil stroke, stretching straight north until it began weaving its way through a line of mountains and then disappeared into the map’s charred edge. Havens could look out the window and see the mountains; they weren’t more than four or five miles away.

  And beyond them, somewhere, von Niehauser was waiting.

  “Could you take a car through there?”

  He stood on the porch with the man in the gray felt hat, who seemed to be the only one of them who understood any English. The man shook his head apologetically.

  “No, señor, un caballo—you need a horse.”

  He grinned, as if he thought the sound of the word was funny to beat hell.

  “Can you and the others come with me?”

  “No, señor.” He shook his head again, but this time he was looking not at Havens but at the mountains behind him. “The border there. We stay here.”

  Havens was clutching the map in his hand. The trail that Gomá had sketched out for himself was clear enough—all he had to do was look up to see the notch in the mountains through which he had planned to enter the United States. Everything was perfectly clear.

  He took one of his Bureau business cards out of his wallet and scrawled a note on the back: “I’m following this trail. Start the search.” Then he copied out the name and the address of the field supervisor in El Paso. Charlie Rice would have brains enough to know what to do.

  He handed the card and the map to the bandit in the gray felt hat. “Can you take these to this man?” he asked, pointing to the name on the back of the card.

  “Si. This I can do.”

  . . . . .

  The Mexicans thought he was insane to go heading off into the mountains with nothing under him except a horse. They pointed to the blackening line of the southern horizon and assured him he would be dead by the next afternoon if he allowed himself to get caught in the storm it prophesied. But in the end they saddled him up, gave him a carbine and hunted through the hacienda for a fleece lined jacket and a pair of leather gloves. One of them even gave him his hat.

  “You loco, señor,” he said, holding his hand up above the horse’s neck as he offered it to Havens. “But you fight good—como un mexicano, eh?”

  Havens took the offered hand and shook it, strangely touched.

  The mountains were colder than he had imagined. The wind came rushing down the steep rock faces like water—it was easy to believe that a man could die up here.

  By a quarter to six he had reached the summit of the long, snaking pass, where the trail was no wider than a footpath and sometimes seemed to disappear altogether in the rubble of countless rockslides. The light was beginning to fail, so he dismounted from his horse, a chestnut mare with a single white stocking, hardly larger than a po
ny but tough after the fashion of Mexican horses. They walked along in single file, as if they had been friends for a lifetime.

  In the dim, reddish, sunset light, the mountains were the color of tobacco and as barren as the craters of the moon.

  How far had he gone? Six or seven miles, no more. He was past the charred edge of Gomá’s map, and all he could do now was to follow the contour of the land and keep his eyes open. Either he and von Niehauser would run into each other, more or less by accident, or they wouldn’t. There was nothing either one of them could do about it now.

  There was a hopelessness to it all. They had been dueling all this time over the secret of the most terrible weapon in the history of the human race, and it hardly seemed to matter very much. Havens had left eight dead men behind him at the hacienda, two of whom he had killed himself, and von Niehauser was at the end of his own long trail of corpses—what were they doing? What was it, except a contest to see who would have the honor of turning the world into a cinder?

  You can develop a feeling about someone, even if you’ve never met him. Havens had only seen von Niehauser for a few seconds on a street corner once, had read the bare outline of his life in a military dossier, and had seen the remains of his victims, but he felt as if they were connected by some invisible thread of sympathy, like Siamese twins who had remained strangers. He didn’t need a map—they had all those miles of mountains between them, but they couldn’t have avoided each other if they had wanted to. That was what this whole sorry business was about, not bombs and the fate of Europe. What did all the dead they had left behind them care about any of that?

  He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the sky was vastly darker behind him than in front. He could feel the wind right through his heavy coat, just as if he were standing there naked. The Mexicans had been right—there was a hell of a storm coming.

  He wondered what it would be like to freeze to death in a place like this, to fall asleep huddled against the side of a cliff face and turn to stone. It was possible that no one would ever find him up here. He could vanish as completely as if he had never existed. And then the world would have to work out its own destiny, without the eager guiding hand of George Havens. Somehow the idea pleased him. To step down once and for all from being personally responsible for the salvation of the species—who the hell did they think they’d been kidding?

  The horse nudged him on the back of the arm, as if to inquire what was slowing things up, and Havens turned around and ran a hand down the animal’s nose, wondering what her name was or if people bothered with names for leathery old ranch ponies like this one. He hadn’t been on a horse more than half a dozen times in his life, but this one hadn’t taken advantage of the fact and for that he was obscurely grateful.

  The darkness was almost total now. There was only the moonlight, and that could play funny tricks on you. He could hear the wind whining high up in the rocks; soon it would be impossible to go on and he would have to find somewhere to stop for the night. The Mexicans, who probably already thought of him as a dead man, had nevertheless packed up his horse with some food and a sleeping bag. They had told him he was crazy not to wait for the storm to pass, but if he lived it would probably be because of them. They were good men.

  There was a twinkle of light ahead. It probably didn’t mean a thing, but later he would get out his field glasses and have a look.

  He would have bet anything that von Niehauser wouldn’t be waiting for the storm to pass.

  He looked down at his feet and was a little shocked to discover that he could no longer see them. He could walk right off the face of a cliff at this rate—it wasn’t going to help the war effort any if he ended up a mangled corpse in some gully. He couldn’t feel his feet either. It was time to knock off. There was a flashlight in the saddlebag—those guys had thought of everything—so he would poke around until he found someplace where at least he could get the horse out of the wind.

  The sleeping bag was one of those quilted, feather filled things that made you feel like a caterpillar larva. He didn’t imagine he would get much sleep—you didn’t sleep when you were lying on a sheet of rocks as sharp as ax heads—but once he had shivered himself warm he was comfortable enough. The only part of him that was exposed was his face. The horse was hobbled behind a pile of boulders that formed a sort of natural stable. He could hear her snorting every once in a while. They would last it out together until the morning, but after that everything was up for grabs.

  If there was a big blow tomorrow, Charlie Rice would keep his troops at home. He hadn’t been filled in on just how high the stakes were–Groves had forbidden that; the man had a perfect mania about security—and he wasn’t going to risk anybody’s neck just because Havens had assured him that finding this spy was “vital to the prosecution of the war.” That was the phrase he had used: “vital to the prosecution of the war.” Groves had seemed to think that would be enough.

  So nobody from the El Paso office was going to take a chance on freezing to death. They would wait until the howling stopped, and then they would put the chains on the wheels of their jeeps, and maybe a couple of spotter planes in the air, and see what they could find. Havens couldn’t really blame them.

  The only problem was that von Niehauser didn’t operate like a civil servant and wasn’t likely to pay much attention to anybody’s convenience, including his own. In a couple of days, when things had settled down, they could doubtless box him in quite nicely; but in the meantime a good lively storm might just give him his chance.

  Charlie was a jerk. They were all jerks, the whole Bureau. They didn’t have a clue about how to deal with a man like von Niehauser.

  And he was a jerk himself. What was he doing, sitting out here in a mummy bag, thinking that all by himself he had any chance of making the difference? He was just as potty as the rest of them.

  The twinkle of light was still there. He had had his look and hadn’t learned very much. In the dark there was no way of being sure, but, whatever it was, it was probably a good three miles away.

  It was an artificial light, and it was steady—that was all he could say for sure. He would look again in the morning.

  With his back propped up against the smooth surface of the rock face, Havens watched the faraway glimmer and thought about how tired he felt—this would be the second night in a row with little or no sleep—and wondered why he was so goddamned depressed. This was what he had wanted, to be in on the war. He wasn’t shuffling papers anymore, or explaining to little old ladies in White Plains that the country hadn’t been invaded, that the Brownies were merely having a weenie roast; he was in on the main action, just as surely as if he were actually on the bridge of that aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea. He was doing what he did best in the world, tracking down spies, and he had come to hate every minute of it.

  Maybe von Niehauser really was different from all those gold stars on his Bureau efficiency reports, those poor clowns with whom he’d played cowboys and Indians before the war. Maybe now he was being reminded of his human limitations. Maybe that was what bothered him.

  Or maybe, just maybe, he really didn’t want to catch von Niehauser. You can come to identify too much with your quarry; that can happen too.

  Or maybe he was just tired. God, the look in Gomá’s eyes as the life leaked out of him! Was he likely to forget that any time between now and the day he died? He wondered if von Niehauser, who had killed at least four people that he knew about—and killed them standing close enough to know how they smelled—if he carried around any ghosts like that, or if he had gotten used to it. And what could his life be like if he had gotten used to it?

  But Havens wasn’t a hardened butcher of men—it was all new to him. At the time, at the moment when he had pulled the trigger, they had been nothing more than targets; it had been like shooting clay pipes at Coney Island, except that these clay pipes could shoot back. It wasn’t until after, when he had had a chance to catch his breath and look around him, when h
e had been able to stop worrying about getting his head shot off in the next five seconds, that he had felt anything except a kind of crazy exhilaration—hell, he had enjoyed himself.

  But it was a little different when you were looking down into a man’s face and he seemed to be asking why you thought you had the right to do such things.

  He sat listening, filled with a sudden uneasiness, but there was only the wind. It seemed to be high above him, as if it were skimming the mountain peaks—at least, that was how it sounded. In the darkness he couldn’t see if the air was carrying any snow, and he was too sheltered to feel anything except the cold. Probably what he heard was the forerunner of tomorrow’s storm.

  He wondered if von Niehauser could hear it. He wondered if it scared von Niehauser, or if there was only the one chicken heart between them.

  It was the blank spots in a man’s biography that made the difference. Nobody—at least, nobody this side of the Atlantic—had any idea what von Niehauser had been doing with his life since the outbreak of the war, but those must have been the years that had turned him into whatever he was now. Probably, given his family background, he had been a soldier. Was that what war did to you?

  Havens’ eyes were beginning to sting, so he held them closed for a moment. It didn’t make any difference; he couldn’t see anything either way. He tried to remember what von Niehauser had looked like. He sat there with his eyes closed, trying to conjure up the image of a man he had seen for just a few seconds, over two weeks ago.

  The Bureau had found a photograph—a snapshot taken at an honors banquet in Berlin in 1936, the property of a German refugee who was presently working on cyclotrons in California. It showed a slim, rather naive looking young man in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigarette while he talked to his table partner. It wasn’t the face of a murderer; it seemed to have only a remote connection with the face Havens had seen that afternoon in New York. The two might have been father and son.