I made it.
18
Outside, it was night. Mist made dandelion-haloes around the parking-lot lights and a steady drizzle was falling. As I drove away, I was aware of Ross’s man trailing along behind in an undernourished-looking Japanese station wagon. It occurred to me that it would be pleasant to live in a manner that didn’t necessitate forever watching the mirrors to see what was coming up astern, except in a peaceful, traffic-conscious way. Well, I was committed now. I was going to give it a try.
I didn’t think Mac really expected me to succeed. The decision is not, at this end, irreversible. He’d done his best to stop me, he’d made it quite clear that I was welcome back, all of which was comforting to the ego; but I had a distinct feeling that he was used to agents dropping out to try the peaceful life, and I didn’t have him too worried. Maybe they even ran office pools there in Washington on how long it would be before good old X-14 or Q-36 returned to the fold, bored stiff.
I didn’t think I’d be bored stiff. So far, of the brief life I could remember—omitting a few pleasant youthful recollections—about half of it had been spent in a hospital, and the other half in the violent ward of a booby hatch partly converted to other uses. It was time for a change. I wanted a world where a gun was something you picked up only when you wanted to match wits with a duck; a steady ordered world in which you delivered your photographic efforts to the client on time and then drove home to find martinis in the pitcher and dinner in the oven…
Dinner was in the oven, all right. I could smell roast beef as I stepped through the kitchen door. The martinis weren’t mixed yet, but gin, vermouth, and Scotch had been set out on the counter, plus a little jar of olives, a pitcher, and the appropriate glasses. There were two other glasses as well, with hollow stems. I grinned, remembering my thought that she was basically a chiffon-and-champagne girl. I peeked into the refrigerator, or fridge as Kitty liked to call it in her Canadian-British way, and there was the bubble-stuff, cooling. Moving into the other room, I found candles on the table set for two by the window. Her intention was obvious. After our undignified wrestling match on the living room floor, she wanted to show me that there were more gracious and pleasant ways of achieving the same object.
“Kitty,” I called, expecting an answer from the bedroom where she’d gone, presumably, to change into something nice and glamorous after making the dinner preparations in her jeans. There was no answer.
I stood inside the living room doorway for a moment, frowning. I took a step forward, and an odd glint of light from one of the windowpanes caught my eye. Instinct made me step back quickly; instinct made me reach for a weapon I didn’t have. Cautiously, I sidled around the room towards the dining nook, feeling naked and vulnerable and suddenly very scared, but not for myself. I kept out of range of the window until, from a safe angle, I could see it clearly: the single, small, starred bullet-hole a little off-center in the dark, rain-spotted glass.
I looked down at last. I knew what I would see, and she was lying there, of course. The one-shot boys don’t miss. There wasn’t any immediate shock. My mind just went coldly to work on it. He’d apparently got her as she stepped to the window to pull the curtains. A .30-caliber rifle, I judged, fired from the freeway embankment up the street. Probably, they’d used a van and pulled out on the shoulder up there, feigning engine or tire trouble. A van because you can’t see into it much. He’d have arranged himself comfortably in front, the little round man who was reliable as a clock; and he’d have used the vehicle’s windowsill for a rest. Two hundred yards give or take twenty. Telescopic sight. At that range, not long for a trained sniper, it could have been done with iron sights, but these optical days there isn’t a rifleman in a thousand who knows how.
Ovid hadn’t gambled. He was a pro. He hadn’t fired while she was moving around the table attending to the last-minute details. He’d known she would come to the window to close things up as darkness fell, giving him a perfect target, and she had. I remembered waiting like that once in a Central American jungle; waiting for my target to step into the clear and stand perfectly still because you don’t try for moving targets at five hundred meters. I remembered… Remembered?
Crazy things were suddenly happening in my head. I stood there looking down at the slender body in a hostess garment that was long and pink and filmy—slightly disordered now as she lay half-curled up, half-concealed by the tablecloth. I saw the small pink slippers, and the small pale face, and the blood, but I wasn’t really there. I was in a hundred other places. They came and they went: the places and the people. It was all there, but it was going by too fast for me to study it, like a film spliced by an idiot and projected by a maniac. I remembered…
The projector stopped. Everything came to a sudden halt. There had been a dull, hard sound outside. Stupid, I told myself sharply, they wouldn’t stop with her: if they wanted her they’d want you, too.
I knew exactly what the sound had been. My bodyguard had just left us. Maybe he’d simply been shot; maybe he’d managed to get off a hopeless shot of his own—a warning to me, perhaps—as they sneaked up on him silently, possibly while he bent over the body of his colleague, the man Ross would have left to protect the house, who’d undoubtedly been taken out earlier, before the rifleman moved into position. In any case, my shadow was gone. I knew it as surely as if another dead body had been placed at my feet.
Now they’d be coming for me. Not Ovid. He was a pro. They’d have wanted him to try for me when I returned to the apartment, and he’d have refused. Even if he’d been willing to hang around after his first shot, trusting that the freeway noise had masked the report, he wouldn’t tackle a running shot at a long-legged gent loping through the rain between car and house on a dark night. With a scope-sighted rifle under those conditions you couldn’t even see the crosshairs. And even with his shotgun, he wouldn’t participate in a clumsy frontal attack. He’d consider himself a surgeon, not a butcher; brute force was out of his line. He’d done his part, had Ovid. The rest was up to the ex-Inanook guards. Fifteen men, Mac had said, and one woman if she liked to participate in that sort of thing…
Call it instinct, call it experience—the experience that was just coming back to me in a wildly confused and disorganized way. I knew they were out there. I knew they were coming in. I didn’t try to kid myself I might have heard an auto crash on the freeway, or a neighbor trying to replace a burned-out porch light and dropping the bulb. It didn’t occur to me to try the fire-escape at the bedroom end of the house. For one thing, they’d have it covered, and for another, I wasn’t in a running mood. I looked down briefly, call it a farewell glance if you like, and went to meet them.
They were on the outside stairs when I grabbed the knives out of the rack: the two big chef’s knives I’d spotted the first time I’d walked through. People are always helping themselves to your guns in this world; it seems to make them feel moral as hell. You learn to keep your eyes open for other weapons. There was one eight-inch Sabatier and one ten-incher, a real sword. Both had wicked, heavy, sharp triangular blades that were wasted on vegetables. They were at the door; they kicked it in. They came through it movie-style, two of them, waving submachineguns, for God’s sake! They were really taking their protest movement seriously.
I recognized the nearest; I’d seen him before in uniform, at Inanook, making the outside rounds. I threw the big knife point-first, letting it slip off my fingers; there wasn’t room to put a spin on it at that close range. It flew like a spearhead without the shaft and went hilt-deep into the chest. The chopper, to use the old Al Capone term that has nothing to do with helicopters, which hadn’t been invented then, clattered on the floor. As the man sagged aside, I threw the eight-incher. It got the throat of the guy beyond, a little higher than I’d intended, but why should I admit that? It looked very good, very impressive, very calculated.
That was the idea now, to make it look good. Somebody once called it the death run. The theory is very simple. When the odds
are overwhelming and retreat is cut off, when there’s no place left to go or you just don’t care to go there, that’s the time you let the word get around once more that none of us comes cheap. They can have us any time, but they’ve got to pay the price. The tariff is more than a lot of people can afford. It makes things a little safer for those left behind. Just like the opportunity file, it instills a little respect for the outfit that may save another agent’s life at a later date. Not that I was worrying about respect, or safety, with Kitty Davidson dead in the next room.
I dove for the submachinegun on the floor. With that, I could hose them out of the doorway and off the stairs like dirt. I might even be able to shoot my way clear if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I was doing fine right there, or would be if I could just get my hands on the goddamned chopper, and if they’d just keep coming to me like good little terrorists. I had a grip on the weapon, I was turning it around to fire, when a gun crashed in the doorway and the room kind of exploded and went dark. I went away, but not all the way away. I could hear them arguing above me.
A man wanted to kill me, or finish killing me. It seemed like a very intelligent idea, from his point of view. I’d heard his voice before but I couldn’t remember where. A woman said no. I didn’t recognize her voice. She used some very unladylike words. As she stood over me protectively, her long skirt brushed my face. I was all for the man. He was only showing good common sense. I’d have killed me, if I’d been in his place. I’d got five of them so far and I was proud of it. I’d damned well get some more if they let me live, all of them if I could, down to the women and children, the dogs and cats and pet parakeets, and he knew it.
I felt very objective about it. I was entirely on his side, he had all the best and most professional arguments, but the woman won.
19
I woke up remembering, but it wasn’t all that great. Of course I had a tremendous, thundering headache that prevented me from enjoying my newfound memories in full. However, the fact was that except for a few scraps of information of current interest, I hadn’t really missed any of the stuff badly while it was gone.
The psychiatrist at the hospital, Lilienthal, had told me that would be the case, when he was trying to reassure me about my amnesia shortly after I’d been delivered to his doorstep by helicopter express. He’d explained that, as a rule, the condition bothers other people more than it does the patient. They tend to consider him a weird medical curiosity; he just thinks of himself as a perfectly normal guy who’s got a slight gap in his recollections, which he soon learns to live with…
“Matt.”
It was a girl’s voice, slightly and intriguingly accented. For a moment I knew a surge of incredulous hope; then I knew it wasn’t that girl’s voice, I’d never hear that again. This was a different accent, not Canadian but very faintly oriental.
“Matt, or Paul, or whatever you’re calling yourself now, wake up, damn you! Eric? Come on, snap out of it. I’m going nuts cooped up in here with a lousy corpse. Please wake up!”
It wasn’t exactly Far East verbiage; but the face I saw, and recognized, when I opened my eyes, was Asiatic enough although it was liberally streaked with occidental dirt. At least I didn’t think I’d been transplanted halfway around the world while I was out. I licked my dry lips. I wanted to ask what the hell she was doing here, wherever here was, but the question didn’t come out that way, maybe because in spite of my shiny and efficient new memory I had a moment’s difficulty recalling her name.
“Who… what corpse?”
“Well, when they dumped you in here, I was sure you were dead!”
“In where?”
My eyes were starting to pick up details beyond her, but there wasn’t much to see. At first glance, it seemed to be a dim, cold, empty void of a place, like a cellar, illuminated only by a round skylight forming part of a trapdoor giving access from above. An iron ladder led up to the trapdoor. There were certain rippling watery sounds, however, and some uneasy hints of movement, that cast doubt upon the cellar theory.
“I don’t know where,” said the girl leaning over me. “I was on the floor of the car with somebody’s feet on me all the time we were driving. Some kind of crummy barge tied to a falling-down dock on a very muddy river. Close to flood stage with all the rain, I think. A couple of other boats tied up at a nearby float; very funny-looking, beat-up old boats. A boom to hold some logs. Lots of current farther out, if it matters. There seemed to be all kinds of stuff drifting by out there, everything from beer cans to telephone poles. A high rocky shore. A little rocky island to shelter this half-ass harbor or whatever you want to call it. The moon peeked out for a moment just as they were bringing me aboard in the dark. We’re up front, in the cargo hold or whatever you call it. The barge has a goodsized house or cabin at the back, but it looks like a do-it-yourself project. Not a real pilot-house, if you know what I mean. I saw only three men but there could be more. I saw one woman—that unwashed Market bitch with her symbolic Afro and her so-casual horseblanket and her long, frayed denim skirt. Firearms galore, including some very nasty little full-automatic numbers, straight magazines, skeleton stocks.” She stopped briefly to catch her breath. “End of situation report, sir. At your service, sir. Questions, sir?”
I grinned painfully. “Hello, Wong,” I said.
“Wrong Chinese girl, sah,” she said, burlesquing the accent. “Me not Lo Wong, me Sally Wong. Lo Wong my sister… Ouch, that’s pretty corny, isn’t it? I must be scared or something. And talking about unwashed bitches, I wonder what they used this hold for before it became a detention cell. Or maybe I’d rather not know.” She grimaced, pushing her short black hair back from her dirty face. “Darling, we simply must stop meeting like this. A hospital room, a rusty barge… I thought that was a pretty good act I put on for you at that hospital. Poignant. Touching. Remember?”
Her voice was a little breathless. It obviously meant a great deal to her to have somebody to talk to at last. It couldn’t have been fun, being locked up in the dark for hours with a man she thought dead.
“I remember,” I said. “What’s a Blossom?”
“What?”
“Operation Blossom,” I said. “According to our mutual friend, Herbert Walters, that great frontier aviator—bush pilot to you—it’s the next explosive project scheduled by the PPP. Does the name mean anything to you?”
She frowned at me for a moment in the dim light. “Oh. You mean it’s all come back to you? You do remember… How come?”
“Easy,” I said. “Next time you meet a poor amnesiac, just shoot the girl he’s planning to marry, right through the heart. If you use another bullet to crease his cranium lightly, it helps. Everything will came back to him. I guarantee it.”
Well, at least I could talk about it now. I no longer wanted to kill the whole world because of it. I guess it was a step in the right direction.
Sally Wong was staring at me in surprise. “You mean the Davidson? Were you actually planning to marry that cold snow maiden mourning chastely for her… Oh, damn, I’m sorry, Paul. It just popped out. You know I didn’t like her, but I didn’t mean…”
“Hush your mouth, Wong,” I said. “The lady is dead, dead, dead.”
“I said I was sorry.”
I said maliciously, “You weren’t such a hot snow maiden yourself, as I recall. I can’t remember anything about you and me worth remembering, sweetheart, except several months of gentlemanly self-control, an exercise at which I do not normally excel. At least I don’t like excelling at it. It was a hell of a frustrating mission all around for a virile gent like me, particularly since I’m not dimensioned for sleeping on people’s living room sofas. That was where I seemed to get parked wherever I went, the past six months, with the frigid dame snoring peacefully in the next room.”
“I don’t snore,” Sally said calmly, “and I’m not frigid, but… well, you can’t expect me to get serious about a man who just won’t take my work seriously.”
“Oka
y, and I can’t be expected to get serious about a girl who takes my work too seriously.”
She laughed. “Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with your memory now, Paul. We’re right back where we left off, fighting again.”
“Make it Matt,” I said. “That cover has served its purpose, and this is no place for a peaceful cameraman named Madden. Helm’s the name, ma’am. And the subject is still Blossom. Operation Blossom.” I tried to sit up. She helped me. I winced and said, “Oops, don’t tip it or the brains will all run out through the crack. I think it’s time for somebody to kick me in the tailbone for a change and give my poor headbone a rest.”
It took me a moment to catch my breath from the effort and to let the throbbing pain subside. I could see her clearly now, kneeling beside me, small and pretty in her offbeat Chinese way—well, I don’t suppose the Chinese consider it offbeat—but I was remembering that, as I’d indicated, we really hadn’t got along too well in spite of the lovey-dovey act we’d put on in public as long as the mission required it. She’d had the attitude common to a lot of people with high moral principles; for the good of mankind they’re sometimes willing to strangle their finer feelings and make reluctant use of a nasty specialist like me, but that doesn’t mean they have to approve of him or respect his talents. And, on the other hand, I’ve never been able to appreciate the sublime arrogance of folks who feel they were put on earth just to save other folks from themselves, which seemed to be her main goal in life.
Fortunately for her, she was no longer wearing anything as expensive and vulnerable as the neat suit, blouse, and nylons in which she’d visited the hospital, it seemed a hell of a long time ago. She had on sturdy blue jeans and a blue quilted ski parka. Both were fairly well coated with greasy rust-brown goop from the walls and floors of our prison. In spite of her basically durable costume, she managed to project a bruised-flower image that reminded me painfully of another female I’d once liberated in moderately dilapidated condition—but of course this one wasn’t liberated yet.
The Terrorizers Page 14