The Vanishers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Think about Astrid, and you’ll see that what I said makes sense of a lot of things,” I’d said. “We’ll talk about it in the car, later. Sleep tight.”

  One thing you learn in the business is to sleep anywhere, day or night, under any circumstances, even with a nude blonde flouncing around the stateroom and making a big thing of visiting the miniature bathroom and preparing her bed and thrashing around in it to make herself comfortable—and me uncomfortable, she hoped; but I was asleep before she stopped squirming over there. The next thing I knew, she was shaking me awake and saying that dinner was in half an hour; if I wanted to eat before we landed I’d better get dressed. I refused to discuss business of any kind over the meal. Now she was still pouting. For a bright girl, and one who’d proved herself to be fully adult in various important respects, she had some childish reactions.

  The lights of Turku faded behind us. It was a relief to be on the road, headed in the right direction, even though I knew from the map that this fine dual highway wasn’t going to last very long. Like the Norwegians and Swedes, the Finns aren’t very generous with the four-lane stuff. Unfamiliar with local night-driving customs, I took it easy; and we rolled sedately through a country of dark evergreens, and frozen lakes that gleamed gray-white in the night. As a final precaution against being intercepted, I’d rejected the coast road as too obvious, and angled inland instead to pick up, eventually, the main thoroughfare north from Helsinki, Highway E4, the same road that I would have taken if I’d headed straight north through Sweden, although I was now catching it at the other end, the Finnish end, and running it backwards.

  “Actually I gave you a slightly bum steer,” I said after we’d driven for a while. “Astrid really is Mrs. Watrous; she did marry the guy. But she is not now, and was never, Astrid Sofia Land, of the Finnish family Landhammar.”

  “I do not understand. How could she deceive everybody…” Then Karin glanced at me sharply. “How did you find her out?”

  I said, “She flunked two tests I tried on her.”

  “Tests?”

  “Yes. First there’s the artillery test. Very useful these days when most females—at least in the U.S., I don’t know about other countries—pride themselves on fearing and hating guns and not knowing anything about them. In order to determine if you have a normally gun-phobic American girl on your hands, you simply toss her one of those fearful pistols unexpectedly and see if she panics properly. Astrid Watrous didn’t.”

  Karin grimaced. “That is very ingenious, if rather cruel. I am afraid that, although I am not an American girl, I would not have reacted calmly to your frightening test. I am glad you did not try it on me.”

  I said, “I didn’t need to. I saw the way you handled that crazy derringer of yours, as if you were holding a live tarantula; so I knew that whatever you were, you were nobody’s trained agent. Astrid, on the other hand… I didn’t give her time to think, and she reacted instinctively, catching the weapon and flipping it open expertly to see if it was empty or if I was totally insane, playing catch with a loaded revolver. The first girl I tried that stunt on dropped the gun as if it were hot and practically wet herself. Not Mrs. Watrous.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course there are a few people around, both male and female, who are sensible about guns, even though they have no professional dealings with them. If she’d let it alone, I’d still be wondering a little; but she didn’t. She knew she’d betrayed herself, and she quickly improvised a story about how she’d been given an instant course in gun-handling by a policewoman friend. She gambled on using the name of a real person, hoping that if I did check up, at this distance, I’d be satisfied when I learned that a certain Mary Alice Linderman did exist and had graduated in the same class. But my informant dug a little farther and learned that Linderman was never a policewoman. She’s Mrs. Vincent Marchesi now, happily married to a chemistry instructor at the university from which they graduated, she has two babies, and she wouldn’t dream of letting a filthy firearm in the house. Anyway, Astrid’s story was phony from the start. You don’t develop gun reactions like that in one outing with a friend; and a session with a police revolver wouldn’t have told her how to check out an automatic expertly, as she did later. Obviously, she’d been subjected to some pretty stiff firearms training, and she was trying to cover up because she didn’t want me asking where. Which was not the response of an innocent girl who’d simply joined her college pistol team; and the real Astrid Land hadn’t.”

  “Yes, that is rather revealing,” Karin said. “And the other test?”

  “Let’s call it the aristocracy test, although it wasn’t exactly a test,” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t something I sprang on her deliberately, like that revolver. But I began to notice that she had some very odd reactions to our screwy family. Here’s a girl whose own family, in America, stuck to the old Finnish ways closely enough that the American-born daughter still speaks with an accent; the daddy is hipped on Scandinavian history and the girl has the old sagas at her fingertips. Is it likely that she wouldn’t have learned to be proud of her own aristocratic ancestors? Yet she didn’t seem to know quite how to cope with us obsolete noblemen and our obsolete titles. Hell, she practically panicked at Torsäter when we were going in to meet all the barons.”

  “But she was already acquainted with Olaf and me,” Karin protested. “She had been given plenty of opportunity to see that we were…”

  “Just ordinary folks?” I said when she hesitated. I shrugged. “Well, maybe; but that was back in the U.S. The idea of encountering aristocracy in the mass, in its native habitat, kind of threw her. It wasn’t the gee-ain’tit-wonderful response of a naive American girl about to get to mingle with some real honest-to-Jesus sirs and Honorables. But it was a perfectly natural reaction for a young woman who’d been brought up in an altogether different way, under a totally different system.”

  Karin licked her lips. “Yes, I think I see what you are driving at.”

  I said, “Astrid was apprehensive and wary the way somebody’s wary who’s been taught since babyhood about the evil aristocrats drinking the blood of the slaughtered hero-workers and laughing fit to kill. It wasn’t the reaction of a girl, even one born in America, who’d been brought up to remember a family tree full of high-class Landhammar ancestors. But it was a good Communist attitude; and while they’d undoubtedly run her through that tough Americanization process they use over there on agents they’re hoping to plant on us, it hadn’t covered dealing with the nobility, since that’s not a common problem in the U.S. of A. She’d retained the proletarian instincts hammered into her as a child, when she’d learned all about the innate wickedness of the upper classes, particularly the titled upper classes.”

  Karin thought for a little. I was aware of her shaking her head beside me. “But her parents… She was on her way to visit them when she got sick in Hagerstown. Well, she had planned that, up to a point; she knew she would not complete that journey; but she had visited them many times before. It is not possible that they would not know their own daughter!”

  “That’s just the point. They do know their daughter. They know where she is; they knew where she was. And she was not in Washington, D.C., or Hagerstown, Maryland.”

  Karin said, “You mean that the real Astrid is a… a hostage somewhere? All this time?”

  I said, “A few years back, Mr. and Mrs. Land moved from the town in which they’d lived, all their later lives to the town where you called them. A town where they knew nobody, and nobody knew them—or their daughter. This happened shortly after Astrid Land had visited northern Europe. She’d toured Scandinavia, with particular emphasis on Finland, the land from which her parents had emigrated. She’d also made a side trip that’s pretty standard for American visitors to Helsinki who want to catch a short, safe glimpse of Communist Russia: she’d taken the package tour overnight to Leningrad. I have a hunch that if somebody checks up on that particular group of tourists, they’ll find that one parti
cular young lady missed the return trip, perhaps hospitalized due to a sudden illness. She came back with a later group—a group that, not having seen her before, didn’t realize that the Astrid Land who’d gone into Russia wasn’t the Astrid Land who came out.”

  “And the real Astrid… That is why her parents moved, because they were told to move? I see. They were needed to support her identity, so they were ordered to make a new home where no one would realize that their ‘daughter’ was now an impostor, a Soviet agent. And they obeyed because the real Astrid was a prisoner in Russia and would suffer if they did not cooperate fully.” Karin drew a long breath. “Yes, that is understandable. And when I spoke to them on the telephone and found them so upset because the false Astrid was so sick in Hagerstown—of course I did not know she was an impostor at the time—it was not because they loved her so much, they probably hated her; but if she died, what would happen to their true daughter, languishing in Soviet hands, when she was no longer needed to insure their cooperation?”

  “Something like that,” I said, watching the road unrolling in the headlights. The forest was black on either side, and there was no traffic in sight for the moment. “If you’re so smart, can you figure out what her target was? Who her target was?”

  “Target? Oh, you mean the person in whom she and her Russian superiors were interested?” Karin hesitated, and glanced at me sharply. She spoke in tentative way: “Astrid married Alan, did she not? She must have been sent to spy upon his work.”

  “I have no doubt the Russians are interested in oceanography, but there’s no evidence that Dr. Watrous was engaged upon any project important enough for them to go to great lengths to put a beautiful lady agent in a position to spy upon his research.”

  “Beautiful?” Karin made a little face. “I have never thought her terribly attractive, Matt.”

  “You’re not a man, honey,” I said. “And you’re stalling. You know damn’ well who Astrid’s target was. You.”

  Karin didn’t seem to find the idea outlandish. She said thoughtfully, “Yes, I have wondered. Although he spent considerable time in Washington, and was related to me, Alan Watrous never showed much interest in Frederik and me until he became married; then they gave us a big rush, if that is what you call it. Obviously, it was she who wanted very much to make friends with us. I wondered why at the time, but I dismissed it as just a general interest in her new husband’s aristocratic family.”

  “I’d say her interest was focused very specifically on you.”

  Karin shook her head dubiously. “If the people behind her really wanted to… to seduce me, would they not have sent a handsome man?”

  “Maybe they felt that was too obvious,” I said. “Or maybe, having studied the situation, they came to the conclusion that although you fought with your husband about his work, you really loved him too much to be a good prospect for the gigolo approach.”

  There was a little silence; then Karin said quietly, “Yes. But I did not realize quite how much I had loved him until he was lost to me.” Then she spoke more briskly: “But with Astrid, it is such a complicated thing! She could simply have come to Washington and arranged to meet us socially, could she not? She did not have to obtain for herself a position at the Oceanic Institute and scheme to marry the man in command because he was my relative. And do you not mean that her target was really Frederik and his company, through me? And how does Laxfors come into this conspiracy? I thought that was supposed to be the Russians’ true objective; but Laxfors was not even built when Astrid first took employment at the institute.”

  The little girl was smarter than she let herself look; she asked some good questions. I said reprovingly, “You’ve been thinking. You’ve got to watch that; it can be habit-forming.” After a moment I went on: “I’m beginning to realize that we’ve been looking at this thing backwards. In the Russky master plan, Laxfors was an afterthought. I think their original objective was, and still is to a great extent, Segerby Vapenfabriks Aktiebolag. SVAB.”

  Karin frowned. “But why? It is by no means the biggest…”

  “That’s just the point. SVAB is a respected family concern, not a great soulless corporation. If you’re a Swede, even if you’re firmly opposed to war and munitions of war, you can’t help being just a little proud of this solid Swedish company competing successfully with the multinational giants.”

  Karin sighed. “Yes, I have felt that myself, even when I disapproved. You mean that a scandal touching SVAB would be more disturbing to the country and the industry?”

  I nodded. “I’m theorizing now, but I think I’m close. The Russians are obviously exerting deliberate pressure on Sweden. There have even been suggestions here, I’m told, that they’re studying the feasibility of an Afghanistan-style takeover. That may just be Swedish paranoia talking, caused by living in the shadow of the bear so to speak; but there’s got to be a motive behind the submarine probes and other unsettling Soviet actions. It’s a testing and softening-up process of some kind; and strikes and scandals have always been weapons in their arsenal. So they give a female agent impeccable Scandinavian credentials: a fine Finnish family, marriage to a titled Swede. Then they have her move in on the rebellious young wife of one of the directors of SVAB, establishing a friendly and understanding relationship with the younger woman. Finally they look around for some way to use the idealistic girl’s distaste for her husband’s business to decoy her to her destruction, and his.”

  “Laxfors?”

  “Yes, at just the right moment, the Laxfors question arises. A totally different problem for the Russians, presumably being handled by a totally different undercover team—until somebody in Moscow sees how the Laxfors Project can be combined with the SVAB Project to produce a double whammy: the LSA installation sabotaged by fanatics employing Segerby weapons; and the Segerbys discredited by the terrorist involvement of the girl who’d married one of them, who’d supplied the weapons.” I grimaced. “My family was concerned enough about the bad publicity you might give us to put me on the job; but it’s the Segerbys who should be doing the real worrying.” I glanced at the girl riding beside me. “Maybe they are. Maybe they’ve taken action to stop you, too?” I made it a question.

  She shook her head. “Not that I am aware,” she said.

  We rode in silence for a while. I held the car steady on the lonely forest road—they’re practically all forest roads up there. There had been some stars earlier, but they were gone; and the night seemed to have become darker. I should probably have tried to get a weather report somewhere, in a language I could understand, but it would have made no difference, really, since we had to make the drive regardless.

  “You know that she killed Frederik,” Karin said at last. “Astrid. She shot him down in that parking garage, and only a few hours later came to the apartment to hug me so affectionately and express her deep sympathy for my terrible bereavement!”

  I was a little startled by the revelation. Not the revelation about Astrid. I’d been fairly certain that she’d been responsible for Frederik Segerby’s death, since no other answer made sense, the people involved being who and what they were. But I hadn’t been quite prepared to learn that this small blonde girl had been aware of the identity of her husband’s murderer—well, murderess—and had still managed to play along with Astrid and her associates without revealing her knowledge.

  “I think you’re probably right,” I said, “but what brought you to that conclusion?”

  Karin shrugged. “How can I know? The way she looked at me that morning, perhaps. I simply knew that, she had done it the moment she walked into our Washington apartment the day after the murder. There was no doubt in my mind from the moment I saw the false look on her face: she was the one who had killed him!”

  The legal geniuses would have sneered at that answer, but I don’t discount female intuition; I’ve even encountered some interesting examples of male intuition.

  Karin said, “I came very close to… to attacking her. I w
anted to scream accusations at her, but I had no proof. Who would believe that the respectable wife of the director of the Oceanic Institute was a Communist spy, maybe even a trained Communist assassin? And the terrible thing was that Frederik had warned me, but I had laughed at his warning. He was always seeing reds under the beds, I told him; and he could put his company sneaks to investigating the UFO and Astrid if he wanted to, but they would find nothing, absolutely nothing. But clearly he had been right.” Karin drew a long breath. “So I swallowed my anger and accepted her condolences. I made myself cling to her helplessly, weeping. I forced myself to make tearful sounds of gratitude and treat her as my very dearest friend from that moment on. Ugh.”

  There was a brief silence as the roadway changed and our four lanes shrank to two, but the pavement remained reasonably wide and smooth; however, the Finns don’t let you play that stimulating passing game employing the shoulders of a two-lane road allowed by the Swedes, so it was pretty dull, straightforward driving. I could have used more power getting around a few slowpokes; but there really wasn’t enough traffic to slow us down. I could employ the high beams most of the time, and the headlights were good.

  I steered around a beat-up Saab without slacking speed. I said, “Let’s see how they worked it from the start. You weren’t good seduction material, but you were a member of a very large family that took itself seriously as a family. Okay, find another Stjernhjelm relative in America to work through. There were actually several, they discover, but Alan Watrous looks best; he lives on the East Coast and often has business in Washington. He is single and should be vulnerable. Probably they considered a straight meet-cute pickup of some kind, but in studying the situation they learned about a nice Finnish-American girl from the distant Midwest who’d applied for a job as laboratory assistant, ideal, particularly since she was spending the summer in Europe before coming in for an interview on her way home. So they picked a very bright girl of their own and put her through a massive cram course and either gave her brown contact lenses or bleached her hair, since the chance of their having on tap a smart brown-eyed blonde of approximately the right dimensions aren’t very great.”