The Poisoners

by Donald Hamilton

“I’m going after them, naturally.”

  “But what about the car?”

  “To hell with the car. We’ve got our own transportation all set to go. I thought we might ride this one down a ways and save some walking, but we can’t waste any more time on the heap. If anybody wants to use the road, they’ll just have to drag it out themselves, if they can’t get around it somehow.”

  Bobbie said coldly, “I think the simple fact is that you can’t get it out of here, either, in spite of all the expert noises you’ve been making. Isn’t it?”

  I regarded her for a moment. I’m not in the habit of doing things just because pretty girls tell me I can’t, but my instinct is always to tidy up as I go along—which was why I’d taken time to deal with the two men who might have threatened our retreat, later. Now I had the uneasy feeling that leaving the Chrysler stuck there was untidy and might just possibly cause us trouble eventually, although I couldn’t see how. I sighed, studied the near rear wheel for a moment, and squatted down beside it. Bobbie got out and stood over me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Letting some air out of the tires,” I said. “It’s an emergency measure, and I probably wouldn’t have had to do it if certain people hadn’t dug us such a deep hole to get out of.”

  “Lay off, Helm,” she said. “We can’t all be great boondocks drivers like you, if you are one. What’s accomplished by letting the air out, anyway?”

  “It’s simple physics,” I said. “With half the air pressure, it takes twice the tire surface to support the car, right? And with twice the amount of rubber on the sand, you’re half as likely to sink in. Check the glove compartment, will you, and see if by a miracle these boys carry a tire gauge.”

  They didn’t, of course, so I had to estimate the pressure by eye—if you get it too low, these newfangled tubeless tires will come away from the rim and let all the air out, leaving you in worse shape than before. When I’d lowered the pressures all around as far as seemed safe, I told Bobbie to stand by to push, if necessary. Then I got behind the wheel, started the engine, and tested it cautiously in reverse. The big sedan lifted slightly before the wheels began to slip, and I slapped it into drive and caught it as it rolled forward again, and kept it coming, very gently, out of the hole and on across the wash to solid ground. I cut the lights and waited for Bobbie to catch up and get in beside me.

  “Well,” she said, “well, that doesn’t prove anything! Probably I could have done it, too, if I’d known about the soft-tire trick.”

  I grinned. “There’s what we call a good loser! Crank down your window and use your eyes and ears. I don’t want to overrun Tillery’s bunch by mistake.”

  But they had close to a forty-five-minute start on us, and we never caught a glimpse of them ahead as we picked our way slowly along the rudimentary road, in the dark, until the ruts started to swing left to pass inland of some dark hills, presumably the high ground guarding the north end of San Agustin Bay. Here I turned the big car off the road to the right and took it several hundred yards across country into a bunch of scraggly trees with one dead giant spreading bare white limbs against the sky, a good landmark. I parked the Chrysler facing back along its own tracks.

  “Now you wait here,” I said. “And I mean here. If I jump somebody up there, I don’t want to have to worry that it’s you playing Indian again. I’d better take the drug kit, and where the hell did the handle of that jack get to…”

  “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful, darling.”

  I looked at her for a moment. The long blonde hair shone dully in the darkness of the car, but her face and expression couldn’t be seen beneath the wide brim of her hippie-hat.

  “Sure,” I said. “Hell, there are only three of them, aren’t there? Sure, I’ll be careful.”

  21

  Half a mile from the car, I stopped to catch my breath and look and listen. From up here I could see the ocean shining faintly off to my right. I got the impression that over in that direction—westward—the ground dropped off steeply to the shore, or maybe straight to the water. Well, that’s what the aerial shot had indicated.

  Ahead of me, the top of the brushy, rocky ridge I was climbing was jagged against the sky, coming to a kind of peak to the left. If I remembered correctly, that rudimentary peak stood watch over the head of San Agustin Bay; and beyond it the ground sloped down to the dunes along the shore and the road curving in from the south.

  Behind and below me, I could no longer make out the gaunt tree skeleton marking the Chrysler’s hiding place. The curvature of the hillside blocked it from sight I drew a long breath and started to resume my cautious climb, but checked myself, smelling tobacco smoke. It annoyed me slightly. I mean, after all, I’ve got my professional pride. Hunting three armed men in the dark was a challenge. Hunting any number of men, armed or unarmed, who were stupid enough to reveal where they were hiding by smoking on the job, was like stalking sheep in a pasture, hardly sporting.

  There was a moderate breeze from the direction of the sea. I worked into it slowly until I’d spotted the guy, squatting in the shadow of a small tree. I couldn’t tell much about him until, presently, he straightened up to stretch his cramped muscles. He tossed aside the glowing cigarette, his heedless gesture indicating that he’d grown up in fireproof surroundings of asphalt and concrete.

  After a minute or two, he got a fresh smoke from his shirt pocket and lit it. He tried to shield the flame by turning towards the tree and cupping the match in his hands, but I got a glimpse of his face in the brief flare of light. He wasn’t one of Sapio’s bunch. That made him, presumably, one of Warfel’s.

  Well, I’d kind of expected Frankie to station some guards to cover his landing operation, whatever its purpose might be, but this man seemed like a pretty poor sentry in a pretty useless spot. However, I reflected, it was probably unreasonable of me to judge a bunch of Los Angeles hoods by strict military standards of strategy and discipline.

  I considered putting the guy out of action—still cleaning up as I went along—but Warfel would probably miss him if he didn’t return to the beach at some prearranged time; and we were supposed to be operating on the principle that Mr. Warfel was not to be warned or worried in any way. He was supposed to reach U.S. waters with his happy-dust in a peaceful and unsuspicious frame of mind, to meet Charlie Devlin and her skin diver and her arrest warrant.

  I couldn’t help thinking that I seemed to be spending more time, and taking bigger risks, solving Charlie’s problems than my own, which was kind of ironic, since she’d originally been assigned to help me. However, I still had a hunch our problems were intimately related in some way, although I would have hated to try to explain the precise relationship to a critical audience, say a gentleman known as Mac…

  I didn’t like bypassing the sentry and leaving him behind me, but doing it was no trouble at all. He never looked up from his satisfying carcinogens. Fifteen minutes later I was on top of the ridge, discovering that whatever its actual geological origin might have been, it looked kind of like the remnant of a round volcanic crater, the south and west sides of which had crumbled and washed away over the centuries. Below me was Bahia San Agustin in the weak moonlight: a pretty little bay with a pretty little beach, on which were parked a small white Jeepster and a big, dark, covered, six-wheeled truck.

  I’d apparently made it just in time: the guest of honor had already arrived at the party. A few hundred yards off the beach lay a white-painted ketch sixty or seventy feet long, quite a sizeable yacht—a ketch is the one with two masts, the shorter aft, but not so far aft as to make it a yawl. In case you’re interested, if the shorter mast is forward, it’s a schooner, and if there’s only one mast, it’s a sloop or cutter, but please don’t ask me to explain the difference. It’s a fairly delicate distinction, I gather, and seafaring men have been known to come to blows over the subject.

  The Fleetwind, despite her racy name, was a rather chunky-looking, stubby-ma
sted tub that looked as if she’d have to depend on her diesel in anything but a strong and favorable wind. I’d wondered from the start why Warfel had got himself a motorsailer, always a relatively slow type of craft, instead of picking up a jazzy twin-screw cruiser that would have had more glamor and could have made the Ensenada run in half the time. But obviously he’d had a reason, and now I was learning what it was. He had a cargo to handle that rested easily on the low flush deck of the big ketch, but would have been awkward or impossible to manage on the high, flimsy cabin top of a cruiser-type vessel. Besides, in this deserted anchorage, with no dockside crane available, the motorsailer’s spars and rigging were needed to get the thing over the side.

  It was a giant metal cylinder that fitted between the masts with only a little to spare. A missile came to mind—people are always mislaying the things nowadays, or letting them go astray—but this object didn’t look as if it were intended to move under its own power. Slightly rounded at both ends, it looked just like a big cylindrical tank for water or liquefied gas, except that if it had been full of any kind of liquid, big as it was, it would probably have rolled the boat over. It just couldn’t be that heavy or they couldn’t have managed it.

  On the other hand, it was heavy enough that the crew was making elaborate preparations for unloading it. The main boom, sail removed, had been angled high into the air for use as a cargo boom, and there seemed to be considerable shipboard activity with ropes and slings and tackles.

  On shore, work was also being done. A couple of long cylindrical pontoons with pointed ends, and considerable lumber, had been unloaded from the six-wheeler, and men were assembling these ingredients into a raft of sorts, at the water’s edge. Other men were laying planks behind the wheels of the truck to keep it from getting stuck in the sand. As I watched, the big vehicle backed cautiously closer to the water. Some planks were transferred from front to rear; and the truck moved another few feet down the beach and stopped, apparently located to everybody’s satisfaction. Obviously; I’d been wrong about it. It hadn’t come to Bahia San Agustin to deliver a mysterious load for Warfel’s boat to pick up, quite the contrary.

  Off to one side, by the jeep, stood two men watching critically. One, roughly dressed, seemed to be Willi Keim alias Willy Hansen, although I couldn’t be absolutely certain at that distance. The other, taller and much stouter, in neat city clothes, didn’t have the right shape to be Frank Warfel. I thought I could detect a mustache on a bland Oriental face, even in the poor light, but that could have been because I was kind of expecting to see a mustached Oriental. I was expecting the Chinese, Charlie Chan-type character with whom, I’d heard, Beverly Blaine had made contact in San Francisco—at the meeting that had been watched by Jake and his assistants, who’d lost the man afterwards in the streets of Chinatown.

  I was expecting this particular man because I knew just such a man—although he had not been wearing a mustache when I’d seen him last—and because this was just the kind of secretive scientific monkey business in which he specialized. He was known to us only as Mr. Soo, and I’d encountered him twice before. The first time had been in Hawaii where I’d saved his life, more or less out of necessity, along with my own, and then turned him loose because he might have proved an embarrassing prisoner—we’d had some turncoat trouble with one of our agents that we didn’t particularly want publicized. The second encounter, if you could call it that—I’d seen him but he hadn’t seen me—had taken place in Alaska where I’d again let him go free, this time because we’d gone to considerable trouble to plant some false data on him, or, more accurately, on a handsome lady who had his confidence.

  I’d wondered, from time to time, just what had happened to the attractive woman known as Libby, when our deceit was finally discovered, and to Mr. Soo. Apparently, I need not have worried about Mr. Soo. He’d overcome the professional setback somehow, and here he was—if it was he—doing business as usual, presumably for his old firm, the one with headquarters in Peking. The question was, what business?

  I frowned at the dim scene for a moment longer, but I was wasting time. My curiosity would just have to wait. Warfel might be coming ashore at any moment, and although the project didn’t particularly appeal to me, it was my job to keep him safe. I crawled left towards the peak of the ridge until I was high enough that, looking back along it, I could see all of it. Tillery was easy to spot from up there. He was lying among some rocks industriously using night glasses. Beside him was Sapio, with the Thompson.

  Well, it was nice to have them located, but the guy who really concerned me was Jake. He was undoubtedly the man who’d do the actual job, with his big rifle and its odd-looking sight. Tillery and Sapio were present only in an executive capacity, I figured, to give instructions and make sure they were carried out successfully, and perhaps to take a hand in discouraging pursuit, with the tommy gun, afterwards.

  Anyway, Jake was the only one who worried me a little, as competition or opposition or whatever you choose to call it. He was a working pro in more or less my own line of endeavor. The other two might have been tough once, but they were desk slobs now or the syndicate equivalent. Well, in a dark alley or a vacant city lot they might still be formidable, but out here in the open—in the kind of terrain I’d grown up in—I didn’t figure they’d give me much trouble once I’d managed to take care of Jake.

  I caught a hint of movement farther down the curving rim of the old crater, if it was a crater. Moonlight glinted on a rifle barrel, and there he was. He’d picked a spot that was within easy rifle shot of the landing area, at least by daylight, but it was fairly low, one of the few places where the ridge looked easily climbable from the beach. I didn’t get it at first, and then I realized that I’d underestimated Tillery’s sense of strategy. The rifle would fire, Warfel would fall, and after a moment of shocked surprise, the gang on the beach, would rush the tempting low spot from which the shot had come. That would place them on the steep slope with hardly any cover, cold meat for the chopper on the crest. A couple of raking bursts from the flank, and the few who remained alive would become too interested in staying that way to think about further pursuit.

  Well, there was my pigeon and it was time to get at plucking it. I headed down into the brush, working my way slowly and silently—well below the spot where Sapio and Tillery lay—and almost ran into a man leaning against the trunk of a tree with a carbine slung on his shoulder, presumably another of Warfel’s lookouts, but what the hell was he doing way down here where he couldn’t look out at anything?

  It worried me, but I had no time to brood about it. I sneaked by him silently and kept going until I figured I was directly below Jake’s position; then I moved upwards very carefully, to discover I’d gone a little too far. I was out in the rocks and brush to seaward of him. From here I could hear the beat of the surf on the promontory off to my right. I could hear another, less reassuring sound: the put-put racket of a small outboard motor in the bay. It could be driving a dinghy bringing Warfel ashore.

  I could see Jake quite plainly. He lay between two rocks, screened, from the bay side, by some of the coarse grass that grew in tufts here and there along the ridge. He had not yet put the rifle to his shoulder. If his target was approaching, it was, apparently, still out of range.

  From my side, he had little protection. It would have been an easy shot if I’d been allowed to make the noise. I yearned for a silencer, dart gun, death ray, or bow and arrow; but wishing was getting me nowhere. There was no easy way of sneaking up on him where he lay; the ground was too open around him. I’d have to make him come to me.

  I picked a suitable ambush site behind and below him. It took me some time to work my way to it, long enough for the outboard to cross the bay and fall silent, but Jake still did not lift the rifle. Either Warfel hadn’t come ashore this trip, or he wasn’t offering a good enough shot yet. I laid the jack handle from the Chrysler where I could grab it fast, and tossed a small rock down the hillside to land far below me.


  I saw Jake stiffen slightly and lie there listening. I let a couple of minutes pass; then I tossed another stone, not quite so far, as if somebody down there were sneaking closer, very slowly and rather clumsily. Jake looked around uneasily. Seeing nothing, he glanced down at the beach in front of him, out of my range of vision.

  Apparently he found nothing urgent down there; he backed away from the edge and rose, holding the rifle ready. He came towards me cautiously, scanning the brush for movement, pausing every other step to listen hard. I had a small stone, like a marble, between thumb and forefinger. When he paused five feet away, I flipped it after the others. He froze, looking that way. I came out of the bushes low and broke his leg with the jack handle.

  22

  I was taking a chance, of course. He might have yelled and alerted half of Baja California—including Sapio, nearby, with the submachine-gun—but I was counting on Jake and his tough professionalism and he didn’t disappoint me. His mental computer was programmed for silence, and the sudden pain got only a sort of choked, moaning grunt out of him, as he came down on top of me.

  Something hard struck me in the small of the back: the butt of the falling rifle. It hurt, but I didn’t mind. If the weapon had hit the ground first, it would have made more noise; it might even have been discharged by the shock. But everything worked out well; and I threw the big man off me and came to my feet as he struggled to hands and knees and tried to rise. I had plenty of time to reach down and give him a judicious tap behind the ear with the short iron bar I held.

  Then, standing above him, I had a fight with my conscience, but it wasn’t much of a fight. I mean, the question was which injection to use to keep, him quiet—the temporary or one of the permanents—but the answer came quite easily. To be sure, I’d promised myself the pleasure of watching this man die in agony, back when he was beating on me in Bobbie’s hotel room, but that had been merely a psychological crutch, to help me face the ordeal with fortitude. Actually, I didn’t have a great deal against Jake. He’d knocked me around a bit, but I’d walked into the situation with my eyes open, and it had all been strictly in the line of business.