Standing there, I watched Astrid emerge from the restroom and open her purse to get out some money. Smart girl. Credit cards have names on them; but a twenty is anonymous. I was counting rings. The suspense was considerable; but on the tenth ring, as prearranged, the instrument was picked up at the other end.
“Me,” I said.
It was no time for a lot of secret-agent nonsense. If there was someone at the other end who didn’t recognize my voice, we had real trouble.
Amy Barnett’s voice said, “Well, I’m glad me finally got around to calling this super-duper secret number. I’ve been waiting around here for practically hours; I thought maybe I’d misremembered the instructions Dad gave me. Matt, are you all right?”
I said, “I didn’t know you still cared.”
She spoke impatiently: “Don’t be silly; I wasn’t asking for myself. But Daddy seems to have run into big problems in Washington.”
“What problems?”
“You know he flew up there to form… well, I guess you’d call it a caretaker government in the absence of the man you all call Mac, who’d suddenly gone missing.”
I said, “Yes, we knew that was coming; that’s why I alerted Doug.”
“It didn’t work.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, it didn’t work?”
“Daddy said to tell you that the king has departed as expected, but the scheduled royal succession has hit a snag. If that makes sense to you.”
“Did he name the snag?”
“Yes. He said it was somebody you knew better than he did; somebody with reason not to like your and Daddy’s organization in general, and you in particular. That was why he was especially worried about you. He said that if you remembered a man named Bennett you could probably figure it out for yourself.”
“Oh, Jesus!” I said. “Just goes to show what being softhearted gets you. Bennett? I should have shot the pompous, scheming, big-nosed bastard while I had the chance.”
“You mean there’s one bastard you didn’t shoot when you had the chance? I thought you were the clean-sweep man.” Her voice was expressionless, but it was of course the rock upon which our relationship had crashed, her uneasy suspicion that I was basically a homicidal maniac. She went on: “Anyway, I’m supposed to help you set up a rendezvous with an agent called Joel. I suppose that’s a code name, like your Eric. Joel will brief you in detail.”
Bennett’s name explained a lot of things, of course. If he’d managed a political coup and taken over Mac’s desk in Mac’s absence, shunting aside Doug Barnett, who was a good agent but no politician, he’d have the agency dossiers at his disposal; it was no wonder the white Honda had picked me up so fast. So now we had two hostile forces to deal with, the kidnappers who’d taken Mac, and Bennett, who’d usurped Mac’s position in the agency and was apparently using it to settle old scores. With me, and presumably others.
Which left one big question mark: Joel. Now that Mac had vanished, as expected, Joel was supposed to track him directly to the lair of the vanishers while I sneaked up on them by another route, the Watrous route, independently.
I said, “First things first. Have you got something for me? I left a name with Mac at the special number, reporting from Hagerstown. I asked to have it checked out. Did he or your pop manage to get a report on it from Research before things went haywire? It would be close timing, but…”
“You’re in luck,” Amy said. “Daddy said it was just about his first and last act as prince regent. He signed for a communication for you, a quick preliminary survey of the problem; they’re still working on it. Unless Bennett has stopped them now, of course. Daddy read it to me over the phone and I took some notes. Just a minute…” I heard paper rustle a thousand miles away. “Oh, here it is. How do you pronounce that name, anyway?”
“Leesanyaymee, more or less.”
“Well, you called it Finnish, and you were right. Lysa doesn’t mean anything in Finnish, apparently; but niemi means ‘cape’ or ‘point.’ Like Rovaniemi, a sizable city in northern Finland, on a point where two rivers meet. There’s a query here: how reliable is your informant?”
“Totally unreliable, but with a charming Finnish-Swedish accent.”
“I suppose she’s blonde.” Amy’s voice was tart.
“What else?”
“Young and pretty, too, I bet.”
“An old hag of thirty-two.”
“An old bag of thirty-two, did you say?” Amy laughed shortly. “Well, to proceed, the name is Finnish, but the town is on the Swedish side of the border.”
“So it does exist. I wasn’t quite sure somebody wasn’t kidding me.”
“You’d better apologize to your blonde. It’s a small village up in the wilderness well north of the main road through the area, Highway E4. That’s the one that runs around the Gulf of Bothnia from Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, up to Haparanda at the very top of the gulf, and then down to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. If you’ve come up through Sweden, you turn off E4 before you come to Haparanda, which is on the border, at the little town of Porkkala, spelled with two ks. You take an unpaved road inland a hundred and twenty miles in the general direction of the North Pole, which isn’t actually so awfully far away. You’ll hit Lysaniemi, a metropolis of a hundred and fifty inhabitants, it says here, shortly after you cross the Arctic Circle.”
I frowned at the phone. “Miles? Last time I was in Scandinavia, they worked their distances in kilometers.”
“Just a minute, let me check my notes.” There was a pause; then Amy’s voice said ruefully, “So sorry. You’re perfectly right. A hundred and twenty kilometers it is. Point six two miles per kilometer, right? Roughly seventy-five miles.”
“And this is the only Lysaniemi they were able to find?”
“How many do you need?” Then she said quickly, “I’m sorry, Matt. Smart aleck me.”
I said, “The trouble is, the damn’ name came to me too easily. I don’t trust anything I’m handed on a platter like that. Here I was expecting to have to work like hell for it, and it was whispered in my ear before I was well started on the operation. I have a sneaky feeling that people are being very cute at my expense or think they are: Let’s have some fun with the stupid government mercenary who carries his brains, the few he’s got, in his trigger finger. Not an entirely original estimate of my character, is it, Miss Barnett?”
She laughed softly, way down in Florida. “I never called you stupid, Matt.” She hesitated, and changed the subject: “What about that Joel person? What should I report to Daddy when he calls back?”
“Tell Doug that Joel will have to catch me at Dulles Airport. National Flight three-oh-seven to Kennedy, departing two fifty-five. Say I’ll see him at the gate; it’s too late to set up anything more complicated. And I’d better put it on the road right now if I’m going to get there in time to talk at all before we board.”
“Matt, be careful.”
“Aren’t I always?”
I heard her laugh disbelievingly as I hung up, but I don’t know what she found so funny. When a man in my line of work lasts to my age, he’s got to have been very, very careful. Astrid was waiting in the car. I got in and drove directly to the nearest freeway. Turning my back on Dulles Field, southwest of the city, where I was expected, I headed for the Washington/Baltimore International Airport, northeast of it, where I wasn’t. The New York connection there was by way of Frontier Flight 74 to LaGuardia. Not quite as convenient for catching a transatlantic flight, but safer.
Like I said, careful.
7
Flying SAS first class across the Atlantic is about as good as it can get, which still isn’t very good. I mean, no matter how much they pamper you, it’s a long, long flight; and comfortable or not, you’re still six or seven miles up in the air with several thousand miles of ocean, several thousand feet deep, beneath you, and not a damn’ thing you can do if things go wrong.
When the stewardess—excuse me, the female flight attendant—offe
red me a drink, I took two of her toy bottles of Scotch, J&B, if it matters, and poured them over the ice she provided, and drank gratefully. Cashews on the side. Back in the cheapo cabin, they probably had to settle for lower-class peanuts.
“Why, you are frightened!”
I glanced at the woman beside me, who’d gone to sleep, exhausted, immediately after having been led to her seat and helped with her seat belt. She’d slept through the inevitable preflight delays, and the taxiing, and the further waiting, and the takeoff, and the circling to the right course, and the climb to cruising altitude; but now her eyes were open. She’d obviously been watching me for a while.
“Welcome back,” I said. “Would you care to have something to drink, too, or is that medically contraindicated?”
She smiled. “I do not think it is contraindicated; at least the doctors said nothing about it. If that is Scotch, I will have some. Unless you have already drunk up all on board in your terrible panic.”
“Oooh, what a sharp tongue it has when it’s conscious,” I said. “Whatever happened to sweet, supportive little girls who encourage their men in moments of weakness?”
“But I am not very sweet, and you are not my man, are you, Mr. Helm?”
I grinned, and got her table down for her, and wigwagged the attendant, who brought the drink promptly. Astrid raised her glass to me.
“Skål,” she said, smiling at me. “I mean, we had better practice our Scandinavian customs, don’t you think?”
“And our Scandinavian,” I said, “How are you on Norwegian?”
She shook her head. “They have deliberately made their language impossible for other Scandinavians to understand. I do not think they understand it very well themselves. Years ago if one knew Swedish, one could communicate with the Norwegians, and even the crazy Danes a little, but no longer.”
“Yes, I have heard that linguistic purification is the order of the day up there. But you do speak Swedish?”
“And Finnish. Yes.”
“You are hereby appointed official interpreter for the expedition, Mrs. Watrous.”
She inclined her head in gracious acceptance. She’d been very close to collapse when I’d helped her aboard the plane, but the nap seemed to have revived her. I realized again that she was quite a striking woman. There’s always something offbeat and intriguing about a brown-eyed blonde—genuine or phony, I still hadn’t decided which I was dealing with here.
In a small department store in the same shopping center that housed the friendly druggist who did me medical favors from time to time, I’d managed to pick up a couple of inexpensive suitcases and a very basic travel wardrobe for each of us, not because I’d been seriously concerned about how we looked, but because I’d wanted to have some luggage in which to check the guns through, hoping that airlines hadn’t got around to X-raying checked luggage yet, and that Scandinavian customs officers were still as relaxed as I remembered them. Since I hadn’t wanted Astrid to waste her limited strength on shopping, I didn’t even know that the clothes I’d bought her would fit, let alone that she’d consider them acceptable. However, her present costume was holding up well enough to get us across the ocean respectably, so my taste in ladies’ wear wouldn’t be put to the test at once, which was probably a good thing.
She was regarding me curiously. “I should think a man like you, who risks his life in a job like yours, would not be disturbed by merely flying in an commercial airplane.”
“That’s just the point,” I said. “I like to pick my risks; that’s how I stay alive. Here I’ve got no choice. I have to sit in this seat and take whatever dangers the flyboys up front choose to expose me to. Probably none, but how do I know? A Korean airliner got itself shot down a while ago, flying in the wrong place, remember?”
“Yes, that was a terrible thing. They are dreadful people, those Russians.”
I grinned. “There’s a good Finnish reaction. Has any Finn said anything nice about a Russian since the receding glaciers of the Ice Age uncovered their respective countries?”
“But it was cold-blooded murder!”
“Sure. Surprise, surprise. What did you think—what did anybody think—those paranoid bastards would do when a strange aircraft blundered into their airspace in a fairly sensitive area? Jesus, all the corny, outraged noises that were made because Russians behaved in a perfectly normal Russian manner! What I want to know is what the plane was doing so far off the course. Nobody seems to be a bit concerned about that. But if that’s normal airlines navigation, I feel I’m entitled to a few consoling Scotches when I put myself into their hands. One airliner ran into a bunch of ruthless Muscovites; how do I know this one won’t run into a bunch of rugged mountains, or mistake the North Pole for the Oslo airport?”
“Now you are being very silly. SAS has an excellent safety record. There is really no reason for you to be frightened.”
“Yes, Mama, I’ll be brave if it makes you feel better.”
The oversized plane, some kind of monster Lockheed, rumbled on through the sky that was clear and blue at this altitude; but cottony white clouds obscured the world below us. The great circle course shown in the airlines magazine in the seat pocket before me indicated that we’d actually spend considerable time over land before venturing out across the big water; but if one of the eastern provinces of Canada was down there, it was well hidden.
“I do not really understand what has happened in Washington that we must flee like this,” Astrid said at last. “Just because your chief has disappeared, and the person you expected to take charge in his place, temporarily, has been pushed aside by this man called Bennett… Why does that mean that we have to leave the country, Matt?”
I’d told her as much about the situation as seemed advisable on our flight from Washington to New York; now I said, “Washington is a funny place, Mrs. W. Discreet thievery is perfectly all right, of course—let’s not be unreasonable—but if you’re found with your hand in the till and the news gets out, they’ll clobber you self-righteously to show how they really hate dishonesty, being so honest themselves. Even sleeping in the wrong bed can ruin you if there’s any kind of a scandal; and Heaven help you if you’re found smoking a little pot or—God forbid—sniffing a little coke, at least if your dreadful crime becomes public. The guardians of public morality will bury you. But if all you’re caught doing is betraying your country, no sweat. Don’t give it another thought.”
Astrid studied my face to see if I was kidding. “Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”
I shrugged. “Oh, sometimes they don’t quite have the gall to take you back into the government afterwards, and you’ll have to make it on the celebrity circuit; there seems to be a good market there for traitors. I’m using the term loosely, to refer to individuals who betrayed either the laws they’d sworn to uphold or the country they’d sworn to serve, or both. It seems to be a very safe thing to do. I’ve now been involved in two different cases where a high-ranking bureaucrat allowed himself to become a patsy for folks who, let’s say, were not exactly working for the good of the United States of America or the preservation of its constitution. In each case, even though we’d exposed him thoroughly, the man went on to more prestigious posts in Washington.”
“The Mr. Bennett we are discussing?”
I nodded. “He’s the most recent specimen, yes. We came up against him twice while he was head of a certain undercover agency—you might call it a rival agency—that wasn’t being operated entirely in the public interest. The second time, a couple of years ago, we had him cold on various charges of conspiring and betraying; we could even have made him trouble about his involvement in other kinds of professional behavior including a spot of homicide and attempted homicide unauthorized by Washington. Not exactly the kind of public servant we should cherish, right? Well, his dubious organization was abolished; the FBI took up the slack. However, Bennett didn’t appear to be a very bright guy, and it seemed that he’d merely acted as figurehead while the smart bo
ys did the dirty work. We took care of them; but we decided that Bennett wasn’t dangerous and it was safe to make a deal with him. We agreed to let him tell us some things we needed to know in order to wind up the dirty business, in return for immunity.”
“So he went free?”
I nodded. “The decision was mine, and I’m afraid I was wrong. Apparently the guy wasn’t as dumb and harmless as he acted. Somehow, after we turned him loose, he got himself welcomed back to that screwball city on the Potomac we just left. He even promoted himself a new position with a bit of salary and influence from which, it seems, he’s been keeping an eye on us, the agency that smashed his beautiful government career. Well, his first beautiful government career. Now, with my chief missing, he seems to have embarked upon a second, bossing our outfit…”
I stopped, as our dinners were placed before us, steak for me, fish for her. Having been brought up on fresh-caught mountain trout as a boy in New Mexico, I avoid the tired, mushy stuff that masquerades under the name of fish these days in most parts of the U.S.A. I reminded myself that they do it much better in the European lands towards which we were heading; and I’d better start giving my prejudice a rest. I glanced at the handsome woman beside me.
“What about a spot of champagne, or would that be overdoing it?”
“What else is there to do here but overdo it?” Astrid asked, laughing; but after I’d got us the bubble-stuff, she grew serious again. She said, “So what it amounts to is, you have a new boss, at least until your old one returns. But even if you do not like or respect this Mr. Bennett, is that sufficient reason for us to flee out of the country?”
“I’m not fleeing out of the U.S., I’m fleeing into Sweden,” I said, “By way of Norway, because that’s the way the plane flies. But I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the kind of people you’ve managed to get yourself mixed up with, looking for help with your private problem. Well, by this time you must have some idea of what our outfit really does. Counter-assassination is the polite description; we’re the guys, and gals, who’re sent out to kill the killers when nobody else is tough enough to deal with them. Naturally, with our special talents, we’re also used for other work like visiting pretty ladies in the hospital—pretty ladies with mysterious illnesses.”
The Vanishers Page 6