I saluted her with my champagne glass. After a moment she smiled and returned the gesture, but her eyes were troubled.
I went on: “Now consider Mr. Bennett. After receiving a serious setback to his career through no fault of his own, as he sees it, he’s managed to fight his way back to the kind of powerful position for which he is, he feels, superbly qualified by talent and experience. In this position he has at his disposal the services of a gang of rabid wolves like me, who don’t much care whose throats they mangle as long as they get to taste a little blood… What’s the matter?”
“You are not like that, Matt.”
I grimaced. “It’s sweet of you to say so, but you don’t know what I’m like, Mrs. W. You’ve only seen me on my best behavior. Anyway, Bennett’s right where he wants to be now, in full control of a government agency pretty much like the one I helped smash for him a few years back. The appointment’s only temporary, in Mac’s absence, but do you think for a moment that Bennett’s going to let it be taken away from him if there’s any possible way he can prevent it? If Mac fails to return, he’s got it made.”
“But how can he prevent—” Astrid fell silent, and looked at me in a startled way. “You can’t mean—”
I said, “Bennett knows that he probably doesn’t need to take direct action against my chief. All he has to do is prevent help from finding and reaching him wherever he’s being held. Okay, maybe he can break out on his own. Maybe. But he’s not young, and he’s had no active field experience for a long time. He’s counting on outside assistance. If Bennett has his way, it won’t be forthcoming.”
Astrid was watching me warily. “So you think Mr. Bennett is going to order you off the… the rescue mission?”
I shook my head. “No. Because he knows me reasonably well after our previous disagreements. He knows I wouldn’t obey any such order he gave me. He’s got to have me taken out if he wants to leave my chief stranded without help. And as I think I told you, there’s also another agent involved, a guy we call Joel, who’s got to be dealt with somehow.”
Astrid licked her lips. “‘Taken out.’ That means killed, does it not?” She studied my face. “You are serious, Matt? You truly believe that this government official who has assumed temporary control of your organization will actually give orders to have an agent—his agent for the moment—murdered just so he can keep his new job? You think that somebody in your agency, somebody with whom you have worked perhaps, will accept those instructions and come to kill you?”
I said, “You just don’t understand the kind of homicidal creeps you’ve got yourself mixed up with. Sure I believe it. When the man points the finger and says make the touch, we make the touch. Of course it depends a bit on who gives the order. I wouldn’t kill just because a jerk like Bennett told me to, no matter what authority he claimed. I wouldn’t trust his motives or his good sense; but there are younger agents around who’ll go on the word, without question, like killer Dobermans. That’s the way they’ve been trained.”
Astrid shook her head. “That is what is wrong with an agency like yours. Perhaps it serves a useful purpose in the right hands, but in the wrong hands it becomes a terrible weapon; so would it not be better for it not to exist at all?”
I shrugged. “I’ll let the political scientists field that one. In the meantime, my job is to get my outfit out of the wrong hands and back into the right ones. That means, for a start, following the orders I’ve been given and hoping the guy who gave them knew what he was doing. Well, he usually does.”
“It is good to see a little faith in this mistrustful world.”
“Don’t think Bennett’s driven only by ambition,” I said. “He’s got a full charge of hate working on him, too. Hate for Mac, who gave the orders, and hate for me, who carried them out. It wasn’t just a matter of losing a lot of prestige and status; there was physical humiliation, too. Our interrogation teams play rough. I’m the man who had him put through that, on Mac’s instructions. I’m the man who saw him sitting unshaved in his grubby underwear afterwards, with his head in his hands, broken and cooperative. He wouldn’t settle for just calling me off the assignment even if he could. Joel, maybe, but he wants me dead. Along with Mac.”
“I see. That is why you try so hard to… to shake anyone who follows us.”
I laughed. “Mrs. W, you are really a very naive lady.”
“What did I say that was funny?”
“You’re dreaming pretty dreams,” I said. “We can’t shake them, not really. Not permanently. They’ve got us covered all the way. We lost them in Hagerstown because I had a car handy they’d overlooked; but they picked us up in Washington right away. Bennett may not be the greatest spy master who ever lived, but he knows how to utilize an organization like ours. His boys moved fast, remember? The minute we picked up your pills, there was the Honda riding our tail again.”
“But you shook them off by your crazy driving, ugh!” She shuddered reminiscently.
“Sure, and we probably got to New York unescorted, but there were only two planes heading for Scandinavia tonight, this one and a Pan Am flight about an hour later. Maybe we don’t have company here on board—we were lucky to get these seats at the last minute—but there’ll be a reception committee waiting in Oslo, I’ll bet on it. And even if we’d gone by way of London or Copenhagen or, hell, Berlin or Rome or Paris, we’d still have had to wind up in a known place eventually. I gave Lysaniemi to our Research section before I knew how badly things were going to be screwed up. Even if we should manage to shake off Bennett’s boys and girls temporarily along the way, all they have to do is head north and park their little asses on the Arctic Circle north of Haparanda—well, Porkkala—and wait for us to drive by.”
She studied my face, frowning. “But then why are you making such big efforts to escape their surveillance?”
I said, “There are two ways of going here, dumb or smart. Dumb, I’d pretend I don’t have any idea we’re being followed. I’d have us moseying along happily as if we were quite unconscious of all the folks trailing along astern. But that would make everybody very nervous. I mean, I’ve been around for a while, and I didn’t make it by being totally stupid, and Bennett knows it. So he’d be asking himself uneasily what I was planning to pull when I thought I’d conned him into getting careless; and he’d throw double teams into the action, backups behind backups, just to make sure nobody relaxed because I was making it look so easy… Hey, look, we’ve got water down there.”
“What did you expect, the Sahara Desert?”
“In one of these contraptions, I never know what to expect,” I said.
“Tell me about the smart way.”
“What? Oh, sure. I’m building up Bennett’s confidence. Here I am, Superagent Helm who played all kinds of hell with him a few years back, doing my best to shake his people and failing. Ha, they’re one step ahead of me the whole way; maybe I’m not as bright as I was cracked up to be. Every time I lose them, they pick me up again and, haha, they still have their ace in the hole, the fact that they know where I’m going, where I have to go eventually. Lysaniemi. Except that we’re not going there, at least not now.”
“Matt, I don’t understand—”
“First things first,” I said. “You’re doing fine, you’re a brave little heroine, but I can’t see dragging you across the Arctic tundra in your present condition. I happen to have a large assortment of relatives all over Sweden. With one of the phone calls I made from Washington while we were in the clear, I arranged for us to move into a nice old country place that’s been in a certain branch of the family for generations… What’s the matter?”
She’d made a small movement, as if what I’d said had surprised her. She shook her head quickly. “Nothing. I guess I had simply resigned myself to being dragged around the world until I collapsed completely. A rest would be very nice, thank you.”
I said, “The villa happens to be standing empty at the moment. I won’t guarantee the plumbing, it’s ap
t to be a bit old-fashioned, and I doubt there’ll be freezers and microwave ovens in the kitchen; but it shouldn’t be too bad. We’ll feed you up and take you for walks in the Swedish spring woods; and in the meantime, we hope, Bennett’s boys and girls will be freezing their tails off up in Lapland, where it’s still winter, waiting for the great undercover genius to walk into the deadfall they’ve prepared for him.” I grinned. “We can’t shake them; let’s see if we can’t outshuffle them. Bennett thinks he knows me. He forgets that I know him, too. I know that he’s not a very patient man.”
8
The night didn’t last very long, since we were traveling eastwards to meet the sun at a speed approaching the speed of sound. It seemed very soon that the drawn shades went back up to show that there was once more blue sky outside the cabin windows instead of the brief blackness into which we’d flown. Well, traveling the other direction, the way they usually time it, you get no night at all, just a king-sized day.
We pulled ourselves together groggily and made the pilgrimage to the john—earlier, they’d passed out tricky little one-shot toothbrushes complete with toothpaste—and were served our breakfasts. Presently, land appeared far below us, a rugged landscape that still, this late in the spring, displayed quite a bit of snow. At last the plane let down gradually to deposit us at the Oslo airport, after which it went on to Stockholm. At least it was supposed to. I didn’t watch it go. It had served its purpose; it had got us safely across the big water. Now I was checking for renewed surveillance. I was also worrying about the guns.
Bringing them had been a gamble, but under the circumstances I’d figured that it would be a bigger risk to go unarmed. Under normal conditions, of course, I’d have left my artillery at home and arranged to have somebody standing by in Oslo to slip me replacements after I’d landed. However, with Bennett holding down the boss desk in Washington, conditions were far from normal; I would get no cooperation from that quarter. I told myself optimistically that Norway wasn’t like certain truly paranoid Third World countries, where a smuggled firearm would earn you a firing squad, or at least a very dark cell in a very unpleasant dungeon. Norwegian prisons, I recalled, had a pretty good reputation.
Like most worries, this one was wasted. Obviously there had been no X-rays; we picked up the luggage without even being asked to open our bargain his-and-hers suitcases, going through customs and immigration; they simply stamped our passports and waved us through. I felt a little guilty about taking advantage of such nice people, but not guilty enough for it to spoil my day.
The man at the Avis counter spoke excellent English, and, although I’d made no reservation, he had a car available: a Ford Golf. This turned out to be a red Volkswagen Rabbit mildly disguised by the addition of a couple of small Ford emblems—they hadn’t even bothered to remove the original VW insignia. The schizophrenic vehicle had two peculiarities. Somebody’d forgotten to equip it with a motor, and the lights went on whenever you switched on the ignition.
I assumed that the feebleness of the powerplant—I’ve exaggerated slightly, there actually was one, but it seemed to be running on two rubber bands instead of the usual four—was due to some kind of Scandinavian government regulations; the ever-burning headlights certainly were. As we made our way into the city of Oslo through the dense traffic, I saw that all the cars on the road were burning their headlights even though the morning was well advanced. Well, maybe it made sense in a region where fog and mist were commonplace and where, at certain times of the year, daylight was limited to a few hours. Still, I found myself wanting to signal all those other drivers and call to them helpfully: Hey, Mac, ya got yer lights on!
“We’ve got company behind,” I said, glancing at the rearview mirrors. “I told you they’d be waiting here to pick us up.”
But Astrid was asleep in her well-reclined seat. She was, I realized, very near the end of her strength. I knew it from the fact that she’d let herself doze off with wisps of blonde hair straggling down her shiny face, and a crumpled shirt-tail escaping from the waistband of her rumpled slacks. She’d put up a very good fight against her own weakness, she’d made it clear to Europe, but it had caught up with her now. I would have liked to keep going, but I didn’t want a basket case on my hands.
I spotted a large motel on the other side of the six-lane boulevard. A concrete barrier stifled at birth any wild notion of making a left turn in the face of that flood of illuminated Nordic traffic. I had to drive several blocks before I found an off ramp that led me to an underpass that let me cross beneath the road and reenter it on the other side, going the other way. Then I fought my way back to the hostelry and went inside. Yes, they spoke English a little. Yes, they had a double room available. Would Herren be so good as to fill out the registration form, placing his passport number where indicated. No, Damen’s passport number would not be required.
So I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Helm, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. I didn’t think a Scandinavian motel would be stuffy about renting to an unmarried couple, but why flaunt it? When I got back out to the car, Astrid was awake and wondering where she was and where I’d got to. She had to steady herself against the car for a moment after I’d helped her out, but she made it to the room under her own power. As I was making sure the door was locked, after setting down the suitcases, I heard her gasp. She was regarding herself in the full-length mirror in the entranceway.
“Heavens, I look like something dumped out of a wastebasket!”
The sight of her reflection seemed to dispel her weariness. She started to reconstruct her disintegrating image in a systematic way.
“Did you take your early-morning pill?” I asked.
“Is it due? I’ve lost track, with all the time zones we’ve been through.”
“I think we’re supposed to set our watches ahead five hours, which makes it pill time again,” I said. “I’ll get you some water.”
When I returned, she was sitting on the nearest bed, jacket off, hair tidy, blouse tucked in. I was glad to see that the beds were of normal twin dimensions. Years ago when I was there, the Norwegians often went in for strange, kiddie-sized sleeping furniture, although they’re not small people. Astrid took her medicine and handed me back the glass.
“Well, what is next on the secret-agent agenda, Mr. Secret Agent?”
I showed her a pint of Dewar’s White Label that I’d picked up in the course of my Washington shopping spree and wrapped in my not-yet-worn pajamas as emergency rations, since we were heading for a part of the world where the liquor regulations are almost as tough as, and even more complicated than, the firearms regulations.
I said, “Normally, I’m not a morning drinker, but this day’s all loused up anyway. I’d like for us to share a little Scotch and exchange a few more confidences, if you’re up to it. But if you’re too tired, we can catch up on our sleeping firsthand do our drinking and talking afterwards.”
Astrid said, “I am all right. I simply cannot endure any more airplanes and automobiles at the moment; but I think I would very much like a drink before I sleep. But first of all I would like to get out of these grubby clothes and take a hot bath. Do I have a nightgown or a pair of pajamas in that bag?”
I said, “I hate pajama girls. But you have a nightie and a negligee. K Mart’s best or was it J. C. Penney, with lace that won’t quit.”
“Oh, my God. Save me from a man’s taste in lingerie!” She laughed. “But if you would get them out for me, please? And give me ten minutes?”
“Don’t take too long, or there may not be anything left for you to drink.”
I dug out the garments in question, and the basic toilet kit I’d bought her, and passed them into the bathroom without peeking. Then I broke out the firearms. I checked Karin Segerby’s .22 Magnum derringer and slipped it into my sock, one of the stretchy wool-and-nylon numbers. One size fits everybody from Bigfoot down. It did a pretty good job of holding the diminutive weapon in place. There was a simple up-the-sleeve rig for my own lit
tle backup .25 automatic, which I hadn’t been wearing back home because the situation hadn’t seemed to call for it. I strapped that on. I gave my short-barreled .38 a quick once-over and stuck it back into my bag. Then I poured myself a therapeutic dose of White Label. A doctor once told me that, medically speaking, two ounces were just about right, although he didn’t say just right for what.
I sipped the stuff unchilled and undiluted, since I’d forgotten to check on the ice situation; and I didn’t want to barge into the bathroom for water because the lady would be sure that all I really wanted was to steal another glimpse of the glorious unclothed body that she’d already displayed to me once, dressing in the hospital. She had some rather corny reactions—the proud-beauty syndrome, we’d have called it when I was in college—but I reminded myself that, although I’d hauled her rudely out of her hospital bed, and dragged her almost a quarter of the way around the world, she’d demanded no sympathy and burdened me with no complaints.
When she came out, brushing at the loose blonde hair that reached her shoulders, she said, “Thank you for the toilet things. That was thoughtful. But I must say I feel a little like a bargain-basement courtesan.”
The negligee I’d bought her, like the gown underneath, was constructed of some kind of creamy, shiny, clingy material. It was trimmed with large amounts of lace, or what passes for lace in the lower income brackets these plastic days. Actually, it was a pretty good imitation of the real stuff if you didn’t look too closely. It cascaded enticingly over her bosom, and dripped intriguingly from her wrists. Inexpensive though it was, it didn’t leave me totally unaffected. She was a very attractive woman dressed in a seductive and becoming manner—never mind the price—and it was hard to overlook the fact that there were beds handy.
The Vanishers Page 7