The Vanishers

by Donald Hamilton

  He waited for my answer. I hesitated, but it was no time to be tactful. I said, “Well, I can make a guess. Patriotism and loyalty are corny words these days. Patriots are out of fashion. Faith and trust are out, lie detectors are in. It’s the time of the fink and the snitch and the traitor, sir. If I were planning to vanish you, I’d first send some known Commies to see you, on one pretext or another. I’d plant a few bits of evidence here and there to establish your subversive associations. It doesn’t take much, these suspicious days. After that, when you went AWOL, nobody’d believe you hadn’t defected, even after a lifetime of patriotic service.” After a moment, when he didn’t speak at once, I said, “Well, nobody’d believe it except a few naive and trusting characters in this outfit, who’re also suckers for Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. It’s amazing how gullible some folks can be.”

  “Thank you, Eric.” After a moment, he went on: “Your guess is quite correct. After certain rumors had come to my attention, I investigated discreetly and learned that I’m currently supposed to be very depressed and angry at the scanty recognition my work has received over the years and the way our organization is forever being slighted, financially and otherwise. Furthermore, some peculiar characters have presented themselves here for interviews in recent months, supposed journalists, informants, and job applicants. I’ve made a point of taking on a couple of the last-named in spite of their questionable records. Very incriminating, for me. I’ve sent them out to the Ranch for screening and indoctrination with, of course, the special cautionary code in their induction papers.”

  The Ranch is our agent training, maintenance, and rehabilitation center in Arizona. It’s a fairly tough place, and I wouldn’t want to arrive there with that little watch-this-guy mark on my record.

  Mac went on: “I’m afraid they won’t be made very happy, and there will have to be a couple of training accidents after this is over, very bad for our safety record. However, at the moment their presence reflects unfavorably on my judgment or, if you want to be suspicious, my loyalty—the fact that I’ve admitted such dubious individuals to a highly classified government training area under my control.” He paused, and went on: “Not to mention letting an obvious tap on my office telephone go unreported and unremoved.”

  “That’s why we’re using this elaborate communications system?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re planning to let yourself be defected, then?”

  “Your grammar is still deplorable, but the answer to your question is yes. I have sent a good many agents down similar rabbit holes in the past. This time I am the logical ferret. You’ll point out that it’s a long time since I’ve operated in the field. Well, that leaves it up to Joel and you to look after your helpless superior, doesn’t it? You remember Joel; you worked with him once out West.”

  “Yes, sir. I remember Joel.”

  “I thought you would. A good man. I know you won’t mind working with him again.”

  “No, sir.”

  He was throwing it at me fast. The fact was that Joel wasn’t a very good man, in my opinion. While technically competent enough, he was one of those scheming characters, ambitious for preferment, who’d hog the credit for success any time he could manage and try to slip out from under the blame for failure. I can work with anybody I have to, and there had been no blowup to jeopardize the mission; but I’d let Mac know how I felt afterwards. For him to now tell me calmly that I wouldn’t mind working with Joel again was another clear signal: this line, too, was bugged, and we had an audience somewhere that we were trying to impress with the brotherly spirit pervading our undercover organization.

  He went on: “Actually, the two of you will be operating independently. He will be covering me, rather carelessly of course. After he’s lost me, however, he’ll pull up his socks and do his best to find me. Maybe he’ll succeed. But in case he doesn’t, you’ll be working at it quietly from the Watrous angle. Let us hope that at least one of you picks up a reasonable trail leading to a place being used as a detention center for all these kidnapped people, soon to include me.”

  I said dubiously, “You’re making some rather optimistic assumptions, aren’t you, sir? What makes you think all the kidnappees wind up in the same place and, if so, that it isn’t just a large grave with room for one more? You.”

  He had an answer to that, of course. Once he’s got a plan made, he’s got answers to everything. He’d never admit that he was betting his life on a hunch. Well, he often plays his hunches, and often they’re very good; but I was glad it was his life he was gambling with, for a change, instead of mine.

  A little later, picking up gas just off the freeway farther north, I called him openly from a pay phone, using the normal office number. I let him give me my Hagerstown directive officially, for the benefit of whoever had made arrangements to listen in on that phone, maybe the same snoopy character who’d bugged the other, maybe not. Life was getting very complicated. It happens any time you get near Washington, D.C.

  2

  Living at seven thousand feet, as I did for many years out in Santa Fe, New Mexico, you tend to get snobbish about your mountains. I mean, snowcapped two-mile-high peaks are a dime a dozen out there; and they kind of spoil you for appreciating the puny geological formations people like to call mountains east of the Big Miss. Still, I’ve always considered the Shenandoah Valley to be a pretty fair scenic experience, even if it’s on a somewhat smaller scale than what you get out West.

  The weather was sunny and springlike. The Interstate was in pretty good shape, which was more than could be said for some I’d driven on during the past week. The traffic was moderate except for a bit of congestion near the Washington turnoff, which didn’t delay me greatly. I had plenty of time to let the little car drive itself on cruise control while I considered what I’d been told over the phone; and particularly what I hadn’t been told.

  First there was the case of the two tapped telephones. Clearly Mac was playing one of his clever games, letting somebody know he’d discovered the bug on the office phone and set up an alternative contact number; but carefully giving them the impression that he thought the second number was still secure so the snoopers would believe what they overheard on that line. Just what information he wanted to feed them convincingly, and for what purpose, remained to be seen.

  Then there was the interesting case of the lady named Janet Beilstein, which Mac had thrown at me, ostensibly, as just one instance of what we were up against—but why had he selected that particular disappearance as an example? After a good many years of interpreting his instructions, I knew that he didn’t often talk at random. What had he been trying to tell me here without tipping off whoever was listening in? Well, there was a clue of sorts: when a healthy gent of any age makes a point of informing you that he’s too elderly and decrepit to be a plausible candidate for amorous entanglements, that, as far as I’m concerned, is when you check to make certain the local maidens are all locked into well-fitting chastity belts…

  I’d already, at a morning coffee stop, made the emergency call to Doug Barnett in St. Petersburg, Florida, to set the disaster routine into motion. Doug was supposedly retired and building a new boat in his palmy back yard to replace one he’d recently lost in the line of duty. The agency was paying for the replacement. In return Doug was supposed to hold himself available in times of real crisis. The fact is that nobody really retires from our outfit. There are quite a few old, scarred agency warhorses grazing in quiet pastures in various parts of the country, waiting, maybe even hoping, for the battle bugle to blow once more. Well, I was blowing it.

  “Barnett here.”

  Using his code name, and mine, to make it official, I said, “Abraham, this is Eric. A slight problem in Washington. Contact: 325-3376. Code: arrhythmia. Pass the word. Do you want a repeat?”

  “A slight problem in Washington. Contact 325-3376. Code arrhythmia.”

  “You’ve got it. Good luck, amigo.”

  “Shit, I was ju
st going to varnish the brightwork around the cockpit.”

  “Why varnish? Use teak and let it weather, nice and salty.” There was something I had to ask, and I went on: “How’s Amy doing?”

  Doug Barnett’s daughter and I had spent some time together, having become acquainted on the mission on which he’d lost his boat. However, she was basically a nonviolent girl, and in the end, like others I’d met of that persuasion, she hadn’t been able to resist trying to reform me; a sure way to kill a pleasant man-woman relationship.

  “Amy’s doing fine,” Doug said. “Got herself a new boyfriend much younger and better looking than that ugly tall bastard she was seeing for a while; I forget his name. Schelm or something like that.”

  “Good for her,” I said. “Well, keep your whistle wet and your powder dry. Eric out.”

  That had been in the morning. After hanging up, I’d returned to the car and concentrated on making miles without catching cops or, more correctly, being caught by them. One would think grown men would have better things to do than hiding in the bushes and jumping out to say “boo” at honest citizens. In the afternoon, an hour from my destination, I stopped to fill up again, and to make another call before entering the Hagerstown danger zone.

  This call also went to Florida, but to the other side of the state. I wanted to talk with a reporter on the Miami Tribune who’d helped me out before, when I was operating down in that part of the country. I’d tried for him at my earlier phone stop, but he’d been out. It took them a while to track him down this time; then his voice came on the line.

  “Meiklejohn.” When I’d identified myself, he said, “Oh, it’s the Jack Daniels man.” I’d given him a bottle by way of thanks the last time I’d consulted him. He went on: “What do you want now?”

  “Beilstein comma Janet. An executive-type lady in the computer business, missing. Can you look her up for me?”

  “What’s the matter with your Washington sources?”

  “They’re in Washington,” I said. “It’s a very nosy city, or hadn’t you heard?”

  “Beilstein?” Spud Meiklejohn was silent for a moment, presumably searching his capacious memory. “I remember the story. I’ll have to look it up if you want her undergraduate and advanced business degrees and her complete employment record before she wound up at Electro-Synchronics, Inc., where she worked her way up to executive vice-president. But if you’re satisfied with learning that she’s fifty-two years old and ran off with her twenty-four-year-old tennis pro, and maybe a couple of million, although that’s not been confirmed, there you are.”

  “The pro’s name?”

  “Emil Jernegan.”

  “Had he been around for a while, or did he just appear one day out of the blue, pretty much the way he disappeared? In other words, could he have been planted on her?”

  “Well, he’d been on the job for only about six months before he zeroed in on the lady executive who’d started taking his lessons, very charming and attentive. But there seems to be no real mystery about him. Just another good-looking young tennis bum who couldn’t make it competitively and settled for a country-club job. But there seems to be a slight mystery about the Beilstein woman herself.”

  “Give.”

  “She’d take a few weeks’ vacation a couple of times a year,” Meiklejohn’s voice said in the phone. “She’d come back tanned and tough and healthy, they say, ready to lick her weight in financiers; but she’d never say where she’d been. Or with whom, if anybody. Not really normal for a single woman—well, she’d been married years earlier, but it didn’t take. But most dames back from a glamorous vacation in the sun can’t wait to tell the other girls in the office all about it. Not Mrs. Beilstein. No glowing holiday reminiscences from her.”

  “She didn’t take the youthful tennis-playing Tarzan along on these mystery trips?”

  “No. The times he was out of town don’t synchronize at all with the times she was.”

  “Maiden name?”

  “Janet Rebecca Winterholt.”

  I said, “Okay, thanks. That’ll hold me for a while. One fifth of Daniels Black coming up.”

  Meiklejohn hesitated; then he spoke slowly: “Funny the way people have been disappearing lately, Helm. Not really big important people who’d throw the country in an uproar if they went missing. Just kind of medium-prominent citizens good for a few stories; and always with a plausible reason for vanishing.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  He said, “To hell with the thanks and the booze. Just remember me if you come up with something I can use.”

  “You’re at the head of the list, amigo.”

  The Hagerstown Holiday Inn was expecting me, having been alerted by its opposite number in Knoxville to the fact that one unit of business was heading its way. No mystery about that Helm character. He’d received his marching orders, and he was reluctantly making a detour on his way home to look in on a sick dame in whom his agency was interested. The motel was on the far side of the picturesque little city from the Interstate exit, and I had to buck a long string of traffic lights to reach it; but it turned out to be within a few blocks of the Washington County Hospital, as Mrs. Watrous’ temporary, we hoped, residence was called.

  I could have walked over, it was that close, but I didn’t. Nobody followed my car as I drove away from the hostelry that overlooked a four-lane boulevard with a grassy median wide enough to boast some scattered shade trees that were just about to put out leaves. It had been late spring in Mexico and Texas, I remembered; but I’d come a long ways north as well as east. To make sure I was unescorted, I stopped at a shopping center and bought a handful of flowers at an exorbitant price—six tulips at four bucks apiece—and then I got myself lost, not quite accidentally, so that I had to circle around through a maze of little one-way streets to find the hospital. No surveillance yet. It made me feel quite lonely.

  I passed up the parking garage across the street and found an open space along the curb a block and a half away. A little walk wouldn’t hurt me. I entered the hospital by the front door, flowers in hand, asked my question at the information desk, and was directed to the third floor. Room 357. I didn’t ask permission there. I just walked in and looked at the woman in the bed, who was a mess. Well, in a hospital they mostly are, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. But this didn’t look like a patient who was making a fine recovery.

  Astrid Watrous turned her head to look at me. “Platelets!” she whispered bitterly.

  “What?”

  “Red blood corpuscles, yes, those I know. White corpuscles I know. But platelets?”

  “What’s the matter with your platelets?”

  “I do not have them. Only a few hundred per… per something, and one should have thousands. The quinine, it killed them. It happens sometimes, so they say. But why is it that everything that sometimes happens now happens to me?”

  “I know,” I said without expression. “It isn’t fair, is it?”

  She winced. “Now you are cruel. But it is deserved. I am sorry to be so cowardly, but I am not accustomed to illness. It frightens me terribly.”

  The accent was intriguing, and she had the mannerisms of a woman accustomed to admiration; but she was under terrible handicaps here. I judged that under favorable conditions, properly dressed, she could have appeared quite youthful and handsome, but in the ugly cotton hospital gown, lying in the mechanized bed hooked up to the usual intravenous plumbing, she looked thin and plain and middle-aged.

  The bones of the face were good, but they were much too prominent under the drawn gray skin. The brown eyes were dull and sunken. There was a considerable quantity of fine blonde hair spread over the pillow. It was probably spectacular hair in good times; but it was matted and uncared-for-looking now. I wondered if it was real; true brown-eyed blondes are scarce. Her lips had the dry cracked look that goes with serious illness. They looked as if they didn’t fit her mouth very well, and as if she were very conscious of having picked up the w
rong size by mistake.

  She licked the ill-fitting lips and moved them around in her face as if trying to get accustomed to them. She whispered, “Over six feet. Bony. Sarcastic. You must be the man called Helm. Washington said you were coming to help, but how can you help?”

  “I’m the man called Helm. Is there anything you want that I can get for you?”

  “I want to be out of here, but can you get me that? I want to be out before they ruin me completely with their medicines! The runaway heart, that was frightening enough, but…” She drew a ragged breath. “I woke up spitting blood; I must have bitten the inside of my mouth somehow. Just a little, but it will not coagulate properly without the platelets. Who ever heard of those things? They invent strange new small particles all the time! From school I remember only electrons and protons; and look what they do to the atom now; nobody can understand it! And all the idiotic microscopic things they are finding in the blood! But not finding, not enough, in my blood…” She swallowed hard, clearly on the verge of tears. “Look at me! I have the tiny red spots all over me, small hemorrhages under the skin. And they do not know where I may be bleeding inside. Instant hemophilia, all on account of their quinine and their platelets!”

  I gestured towards the drip apparatus connected to the needle in her arm. “What are they pumping into you?”

  “It is only glucose solution now. They do not want to make a new hole in me if I need another transfusion, so they leave the apparatus in place. They wait to see if I start making my own platelets again or if they must shoot more into me… Are those flowers for me?”

  I took a chance on kidding her a bit. “If I can’t find a prettier girl to give them to.”