When I finished I walked over to the old fisherman and we chatted for a few minutes. Like most of them, he was alone on his forty-five-foot boat. Some take their wives, and a few hire paid hands, but they like to work alone. I like fishing-boat skippers, they're some of the last of the really independent citizens in this country.
He admired Witch. She looked nice with her fresh paint and varnish, everything trim despite what we'd been through. He'd never been aboard a yacht before, so I showed him around Witch before accepting a big glass of rum and pineapple juice back on his boat. I drank half of it, thanked him, and asked about the weather. The old captain spat, tossed a fishtail to the gulls, and pointed across to the south shore of the bay where the Coast Guard keeps a small station. There was a red triangular flag flying, and I looked sheepish. I should have spotted it on the way in.
"Hoisted her about an hour ago," the captain said. "Figure about fifty knots of wind out there by morning. Just my luck, the rest of the fleet's down catching fish."
"Yeah. Thanks." I looked at the small craft warning and thought about what it meant. We didn't have any too much time to get to Los Angeles, and it looked like we'd have to put out into that. How, I thought, now just how in hell do I get myself into situations like this? But of course I already knew the answer.
Chapter Two
It was early April and it was raining in Seattle, but that wasn't my problem. Rain in Seattle isn't a problem, it's a condition. My problem was what to put on my income tax form where it said "occupation."
Actually there wasn't much choice in the matter. I filled in "consulting engineer," which was true as far as my intentions were concerned but a lie in fact. What made it a lie was the state of the engineering business in Seattle. With Boeing on one of its periodic layoffs there were five engineers looking for every project, and while I'd been independent a lot longer than most of them, the competition drove the fees down to nothing. I couldn't be too mad at the fee-cutters—anything was better than welfare from their point of view—but it didn't leave much for me.
So, what with the competition and the slump in building and the rest of it, my real income didn't come from the engineering business at all. What money I got, and it wasn't much, came from the CIA and that's why I had no real choice about the occupation blank on the form. You don't write "semi-employed spy" on a government form. Besides, the checks came from a systems engineering company for "professional services"; I couldn't prove they were from the Agency at all.
The semi-employment was my own fault. Harry Shearing and his local counterspies had made it clear that I could work a little harder for them if I wanted to. The problem was with me. I didn't like what they were doing. The CIA isn't supposed to be in the counterespionage business and has no domestic authority at all, at least not on paper, and I wanted no part of their work here. I knew they worked in the U.S. because I had got roped into a couple of their operations, and I'd found out that the FBI was willing to overlook some trampling on the Bureau's charter as long as it got results and the trampling didn't get out of hand.
So I was semi-employed, which meant I didn't have a current assignment but they owed me money to clean up debts from the last time I "cooperated" with the Agency. The main debt was Witch of Endor, the prettiest little thirty-four-foot cutter I'd ever seen. The Agency was making good on the promise to keep up the payments on her, but that didn't pay my rent. If I hadn't had a couple of good years before the slump I'd have been on welfare myself.
I got the income taxes done with no more fraud than most people use, drew myself a beer from the cooler monstrosity some super-salesman got to me with, and waited for the phone to ring. The mail had already come with its grim score: Bills 5, Checks and new projects 0, so there was no hope there. I wasn't really expecting the telephone either, but after you pay all that money for an ad in the Yellow Pages you can hope some fingers stumble over you as they walk their way through.
I was about to draw my second beer when the thing did ring, and it took some self-control to let it go a couple of times before I picked it up. "Crane Engineering, Paul Crane," I told it.
"Hi, Paul. Janie. You busy?"
"Not really." Not too busy for you, I thought. Janie Youngs was the reason I'd have had to put "semi-employed" instead of "retired spy" on the form if I'd been truthful. I was still taking her to parties where the left-wingers in Seattle hang out, not so often now as I had back when my great adventures were just over because she'd met some other creeps to squire her around and I didn't get to see her as much as I'd like to. That's the way it was supposed to work, but it didn't make me feel any better. With my ex-wife gone off crusading somewhere east—thank God—Janie was the only female around who'd give a damn if I dropped dead some rainy afternoon. I liked to think she'd miss Paul Crane and not the junior counter spy I hadn't turned out to be.
"I have to see you, Paul. Right now, can you come?"
"Where?" I glanced at my watch, a little after one. "There's nothing my answering machine can't take care of, but I'd hate to miss a client. Don't have any right now."
"I think," she said carefully, "we can take care of that problem. Meet me at the colonel's house as soon as you can get there."
"Yeah." That meant business, which was great, but it was a disappointment too. I thought it over for a second. "Sure, doll. I take it I'm supposed to come alone."
"You know how. Bye." The line went dead and I put the phone back on its cradle. I couldn't have asked her anything if she hadn't hung up, the first thing they taught me was never to trust a telephone.
On the way out I glanced over my collection of guns and wondered if I ought to carry one, which was just plain silly. If I'd needed to be armed she would have told me, and I was just being a romantic little boy instead of a presumably grown man nearly thirty. I made a face at myself in the hall mirror, switched the telephone to the recording gadget that was supposed to take all my calls "on the first ring, answers them in your voice," and went out to the garage cursing the device. It doesn't cost that much to have a real answering service, and I should have got one instead of the idiot machine. I know I hate to get a machine when I call somebody, and I wonder how many clients I've lost because of the mechanical wonder. Now if you just dared put on a different type of message—once, far too late in a tavern, a buddy of mine and I had constructed messages for the machine to deliver. "This is a recording. In five seconds, you vill leave your name and address. If you do not, vehaff ways!"
Out in the garage I had two choices. My '66 Formula S Barracuda with about a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, or the current reason for financial disaster, the almost new TR. There wasn't much choice, the top leaked on the Triumph—why in hell can't the British manage to have good workmanship to go with their brilliant engineering? I made another face at the sporty little TR and climbed into old reliable. She ran pretty good since the valve job I'd had done, but she needed new rings and I couldn't afford it. The tires weren't too good for wet weather, for that matter, which made me grade-one foul-up boy for the month; I had good radials with rain cleats on the TR, and the top leaked so I couldn't use it in wet weather. In Seattle, yet. You're doing all right, Crane. With genius like that, you're bound to go places.
The colonel lived up on Queen Anne Hill, across Lake Union from the university district where my old house sat smack in the path of a new commercial district. The house was doomed, the owner would get around to having it torn down one of these days. Everything seemed to be going wrong with Seattle, leaving me down far enough for the rain to get to me. When the rain starts to bother you, it's time to leave the Pacific Northwest. The only problem was, where in hell would I go?
The radio news wasn't any better. The Chinese were again calling for a People's Revolution against the Russian Fascists who keep power only with tanks and armored cars and barbed wire, and the Russians responded by calling Mao Tse-tung a philanderer and not only that but he murdered his son in the Korean War. The stock market was off ten points,
the cost of living was up somewhere near the top of Mount Rainier, and unemployment was supposed to be stabilizing at the highest levels in a decade. It was a cheerful drive around Lake Union where they were tearing out the last of a colony of fine old houseboats to replace them with steel and glass high-rise apartments guaranteed to give a view of the polluted water, but it was all right because the mayor had just appointed the fourth commission to deal with the lakes and this one was sure to do something.
Normally I like to drive. It's one thing I'm good at, have been since I used to race sports cars when I was a student at the University of Washington. My old Barracuda might not be the most modern beast on the road, but there wasn't much on the street that handled better, and when properly tuned that big high-compression V-8 is a lot more power than most people realize. Today, though, it was just transportation. I took some corners pretty fast and wound up side streets to the top of Queen Anne, making it impossible for anybody to follow me without being seen. Nobody was, which didn't surprise me. There wasn't any reason to be interested in Paul Crane, unemployable engineer and semi-employed spy.
I don't really know who the colonel is. I've been to his big brick house several times, the CIA people seem to use it for conferences, but the colonel has never been in on them. As usual he let me in himself, showed me to the door of his study, and went off somewhere. His limp was a bit more pronounced this time, maybe it was the wet weather. I bet myself there was a story about how he got it. Although I'd never talked to him more than two consecutive minutes, he struck me as the kind of guy who'd have a hell of a background and a closet full of medals he never showed anyone.
I wasn't surprised to find Harry Shearing in the study with Janie. I don't know what Shearing's title with the Agency is, but he's obviously the boss of the counterespionage operations along the West Coast. I'd only seen him in Seattle, but once when I tried to get him I was told he was in Utah, and another time in San Diego. For that matter, I don't even know where his main office is, although I've seen an office he works out of in downtown Seattle.
Shearing was sitting at the colonel's oriental rosewood desk, an ashtray full of dead Camels pushed off to one side, a cup of coffee dying on the other, and a sheet of paper covered with doodles in front of him. He didn't look six feet tall sitting there, but I knew he was; he's about an inch shorter than me. His dark blond hair was a little longer than the last time I'd seen him, like he was converting from the Prussian brushtop he usually wore to something he could comb.
Janie came over to meet me. With heels she was almost as tail as Shearing, a big stretched-out girl with straight blonde hair curling a little at the shoulders, the short plaid skirt showing about a yard of elegant legs that were no trouble to look at at all. She had her horn-rimmed glasses on, making her look like a bank loan officer, which she was, sometimes. The glasses made her look almost thirty, but I knew she was only twenty-five. They gave her a cold virginal look, and I knew better than that too. She took my arm, just a touch to guide me over to the third party in the room, but she had a way of touching me, not squeezing or anything describable, that made me want to respond if there'd been any way to do it. I was hoping that this conference would end with me seeing a lot of her.
"Paul, you've met Dr. Hoorne," she said positively. If she hadn't been so insistent about it, I would have said no, but as it was I took a closer look before putting out my hand.
"Hello, Steen," I said. I looked at him again, and it was Steen Hoorne all right. We'd been together at the university, but he was a graduate in physics while I was in engineering so we weren't close. A couple of times we'd gone over to the Blue Moon for beers after classes, usually with other fellow sufferers from Black Bart's course in technical writing, and I'd run into him at the goofy left-wing parties my ex-wife was forever dragging me to. He'd been just a guy I'd seen around, and I hadn't even seen him around for years.
"Hello. It seems that we are old friends, Paul," he answered. The slight accent I remembered was still there; Steen Hoorne grew up in the Ballard area where the whole population seems to be Scandinavian, and he'd learned Norwegian before he knew English. Not that he didn't speak English as well as any other American, but there was that little trace of an accent, just a suggestion, that got more pronounced after maybe the second pitcher of beer. "Old friends," he repeated, nodding significantly at Shearing.
"We are, huh?" I nodded, exaggerating it for sarcasm. "Thanks, Mr. Shearing."
"You're welcome," Shearing answered. "Have a seat, Paul. How's business?"
"Humph."
"That's what I like to hear. No new clients in the last couple of weeks?" Shearing looked at me intently as he said it, making me realize there was something important about the question.
"Nothing. Things are pretty tight just now."
"Good." He made it emphatic. "You're quite bitter about it, of course. So bitter that you're willing to sell secrets to the enemies of the United States, that is, provided you have any secrets to sell and you can find the buyers."
I sat in one of the colonel's oak and leather chairs, took out my pipe and made a production of cleaning it with my pocket knife. Hoorne took out a pipe of his own and messed about with it. Neither one of us said anything, but Shearing was good at waiting. He picked up his pencil and added a fortified wall to whatever it was he'd been doodling before, sipped at the cold coffee on his desk, lit another Camel . . . . "All right, Mr. Shearing, just what have you got in mind?" I asked. I was well aware that he'd scored a point by making me ask.
"Do you remember what Dr. Hoorne's specialty was, Paul?"
"Lasers, wasn't it? Little ruby red lights that melt holes in things. He was out at Boeing for a while when I was there, he worked in the labs."
"Lasers it is. Besides Boeing, Dr. Hoorne has been at Eglin Air Force Base, Aberdeen, White Sands and Holloman . . . . He's one of the best-known experts on the use of lasers for defense against ballistic missiles. Unfortunately the company he worked for didn't win the contract for that project, so he's been laid off. Terrible waste of a good scientist. Dr. Hoorne is bitter about the whole thing, aren't you, Steen?"
Steen spread his hands expressively. "It is a very disappointing thing, a man being unable to work in his own field." He chuckled. "At least we hope it can look that way. I am almost as bitter about it as you are, Paul."
I looked at both of them with a deliberately sour expression. It wasn't hard to see what they were driving at. "So just who's going to offer to buy our services?" I asked Shearing.
"The Chinese intelligence people, eventually," Shearing answered. "At least we sincerely hope so. Unfortunately, the best offer we have had up to now is from a free enterprise group."
"Eh? You better run it past again from the beginning," I said. I got the junk cleaned out of my pipe and started loading it. Steen was having trouble with his, so I passed my pocket knife over to him while I turned back to Shearing.
"From the beginning," Shearing nodded. "I want the Chinese intelligence net out here on the West Coast. The FBI hasn't been successful with it, and the people in Washington are upset because it seems that the Chinese very shortly expect to get their hands on some important information about our ballistic missile defenses."
"How do you know that?" I asked. The question marked me as a part-time agent, because the real pros know better.
"I can't tell you. The source is not in this country, and I've told you too much when I say that. Anyway, I've got permission to go after the West Coast Chinese net, and I've had Janie working on it through the contacts she's made in the university district. You have some strange friends, Paul."
"Yeah. Strange." He could call them strange. For my money, they were just dull. I don't know what all the modern rebels are like, but the bunch of losers my ex-wife had dragged me around with were a bore. They had only one conversation, what's wrong with the United States, and they played it over and over.
Oh, there were a few pretty nice guys in our old bunch, but most of the go
od ones had long since grown up and got out of that crowd. Nowadays the ones who were left sympathized with the Chinese against the Russians and sat around singing "The East is Red," but that was probably because the real Communist party wanted nothing to do with them. "So she found a contact and you want Hoorne to connect with him. Where do I come in? If I do, which I doubt."
He ignored my last remark. "Not quite. What Janie has run into is a group of disgusted unemployed scientists who seem to be willing to sell their services to anybody who will buy them. They have somehow managed to make contact with the Chinese purchasing agents, but the only problem is that they haven't anything important to sell to get them a meeting with a top man." His eyes flickered over us, rested on me. "You and Dr. Hoorne are going to furnish them with a salable product."
Chapter Three
"Now just a blooming minute," I protested. "I see you coming. Look, you've made me bait for your anti-Chinese operations before and damned near got me drowned. Who tries to bump me off this time?"
"No one I know of, Paul," he said sympathetically. He had good control of his voice and if I hadn't known him better it might have had an effect. As it was, it reminded me of that cartoon cat who's always protesting his innocence. "All we want you to do is help establish Dr. Hoorne's authenticity. Not to mention helping keep Janie out of trouble."
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