by The Cool War
In the office, Jessie had turned on the heater against the morning damp, and swept the collating table clean. She was laying out a kit of tools and gadgets Hake had seen before, but not here: an instant camera, a box of various printed forms, bottles of inks, soft cloth pads. One of the instructors had run through them for the class Under the Wire. It was strange to think of Jessie being there, no doubt many years before him.
She glanced up. “You look all right to have your picture taken,” she observed.
“Are you going to tell me why?”
“Of course I am, Horny, only now hold still a minute. No, not there. Move away from your diploma. I don’t v/ant to have to bleach out anything on the wall—there.” Jessie’s little camera clicked, and in a moment she spun out half a dozen passport-sized photographs. “Bruises show,” she said critically. “Can’t be helped. Now you do me.” She looked around for a different bare wall, found one and handed him the camera. “I fooled you, didn’t I?” she said.
Hake got her in the viewfinder and waited till her expression was at its smuggest before pushing the lever. “Well,” he said, “if I’d used my head I would have figured out you were the one who recruited me. I knew you used to work for the government.”
She retrieved the camera and sighed, studying the pictures. “What a youth-oriented culture we live in, Horny. They retired me six years ago—of course, you never really get out of the Team; you’ll find that out. But they put me on inactive status, except for odd jobs now and then. Like checking you out.” While she talked she was trimming the edges of the pictures. “We’ve been promised an age of enlightenment, you know, when we show we’re worthy— but it seems a long time coming.” Mournfully she rummaged around in envelopes of printed forms. Then she brightened. Nothing could permanently dampen her mood. “Anyway, I’ve got one good mission left in me! And we’re going to do it.”
“‘We?’”
“You and me, Horny—and others. This is a big one. I got my orders by pouch, six o’clock this morning.”
She was so very pleased with herself. As she trimmed and pasted and stamped, every movement as sure and easy as turning the church mimeograph, from time to time she broke into an uncharacteristic grin. “Get a haircut, Horny,” she advised, “All these pictures look too much like you, it’s not convincing.” She chuckled reminiscently. “First covert operation I went on,” she said, “they gave me a picture of the wrong woman! Curmudgeon was my case officer then, new on the job, and he screwed it up. Big mission, too. Actually,” she said, peering at him over her glasses, “it was a little like yours in Germany, you know? I was targeted against this fellow in South America. We wanted to get him in trouble with his wife, so my job was to give him a little something to take home to her that she wouldn’t like…” She bit off a piece of magnetic tape and rubbed the end smooth, smiling to herself.
“Did you have trouble?”
“Oh, you bet I did! Six months taking the cure myself when I got back.”
“I mean for having the wrong picture.”
“Oh, no. Tell the truth, I don’t think he even looked at my face. Of course,” she added seriously, “it’s not all fun and games, Horny. The sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be. This new one could tilt the whole balance of payments back where it belongs! But it’s good to be alive again!”
And that was something they shared, Hake thought; he had been as dead as old Jessie in his wheelchair, and this new life, with all its adolescent agonies, was an unearned rebirth.
She looked up with a sudden frown, back in character. “But you watch yourself, Horny! The Team is a little worried about you, you know. Can’t blame them. Getting yourself involved with that woman, getting your car blown up by terrorists— Oh, you better get out of here while you can, Horny. Let things settle down. You’ll thank me in the long run. You were dying on the vine in this dump. Sign here,” she added, handing him an Illinois driver’s license made out to “William E. Penn.” She said, “That’s you, for the purposes of this mission. Practice signing a couple of times first so you’ll get it the same on all of them.”
“All of what?”
“All your ID, dummy! Passport. Social Security card. Credit cards. Visas for Egypt and Ai Halwani. Then go eat. By the time you’ve had your breakfast I’ll have all your documents ready, and mine too. So open the church safe before you go. I can’t take this stuff back to my room— and you don’t want me to leave it out here for anyone to see, do you?” Picking up a new set of forms she said, “And get rid of that girl right away.”
He was thinking about Al Halwani—wasn’t that the place Gertrude Mengel had mentioned in the hospital?— but he flared up. She stopped him. “It has nothing to do with your sex life—badly though you handle it That’s orders.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“So you can flush your toilet in private. There should be instructions for you on the tape by now.”
He didn’t have to get rid of Alys. She was nowhere in sight.
He made sure of it by looking in every closet and behind every door, but she was gone. No doubt she had left by the back way. It wasn’t a permanent solution; her bags were still present.
Alys intended to return, and it was evident that she had no doubt he would let her in. She had had no doubt the night before, either, and she had been right; why, Hake demanded fiercely of himself, why is it that everybody else in the world knows exactly what they want of you and knows you will give it to them?
He had no answer. So he did what Jessie had wanted of him, and had known he would do. He retired into his bathroom, placed his thumb on the lever and flushed the toilet.
“Well, Hake,” said Curmudgeon’s curmudgeonly tones from the hidden speaker under the flush tank, “must be getting a little hot for you in Long Branch, eh? All right. You’re leaving in three days. We’ve arranged your substitute, same guy as last time, and Jessica Tunman will provide you with documents. Take this down. Friday, fly to Egypt with Tunman. Reconnoiter the installation marked on the map in A1 Halwani. Then proceed surface transport to A1 Halwani City. Once there you will apply for a job at A1 Halwani Hydro Fuels at 1500 hours on the 23d. When hired, start work; your language skills will give you priority. You will be contacted with further instructions…” There was a long pause. “I’m waiting,” said the recorded voice.
Hake said quickly, “I understand and will comply.” The tape shut itself off, and there was silence in the bathroom.
It was still a dangerously silly way to conduct the business of a spy agency. But his orders were clear.
A1 Halwani.
And Leota would be no more than a thousand or so miles away.
The day dragged past. His mind was on the other side of the ocean, but he managed to get through the round: the two-mile run, the barbells, attending to correspondence with Jessie (her eyes glittering with joy, her pencil dawdling as she took his dictation, but insisting nevertheless that they had to continue with their regular duties until it was time to leave). She went home early. “Woke up before my time this morning, Horny. I need to catch up some sleep.”
He changed quickly into the sweatsuit and jogged his remaining mile on the beach in the dwindling daylight. A1 Halwani Hydro Fuels. The balance of payments. What payments ever went to A1 Halwani? For hydrogen, just a trickle. That’s all hydrogen amounted to.
Oh, sure there was a time when there was a constant torrent of gold flowing into the Near East, A1 Halwani included. But that was when oil flowed out. When the Israelis blew out the oil domes and set fires raging out of craters a half-mile across, oil stopped. Not all of it. But only a trickle survived. So the oil sheiks had gone to where their Swiss bank accounts were, and the fraction that survived, unburned and undamaged by radioactivity, was now operated by whoever remained on the scene to operate it—sometimes quite strange people. It was not enough to affect anyone’s balance of payments.
And who would you pay it to? Oil had been the only reason there was for cities i
n places like A1 Halwani, Abu Dabu and Kuwait. When the reason disappeared’ the cities died. The nomad people became nomads again. The buildings were still there, and the hotels, and the museums and concert halls and hospitals. But there weren’t any jobs, were there? He tried to remember the postal cards he had seen. That didn’t suggest a thriving metropolis. A few tourists to keep the hotels scratchily alive. And, yes, over the years immigrants had come to the Persian Gulf—the kind of kids, like old Gertrude Mengel’s sister, that had once been called “hippies,” political refugees, writers, people who did not hold regular jobs but could subsist almost anywhere that was cheap. A1 Halwani was a little like Paris in the 1920s, and a lot like the Greek islands in the 1960s. Part Greenwich Village. Part Haight-Ashbury. And if they were managing somehow to squeeze out a few dollars by making and selling liquid hydrogen to the more prosperous countries, who would begrudge them that?
By the time he trotted back up the beach it was dark. In the street lights he saw Alys Brant, peering curiously into a car parked near his door. The car turned on its lights and whined away as he approached, and Alys greeted him by handing him a sack of groceries. “Do you like chicken a l’orange, Horny? And you do have a wok, don’t you? Or a big frying pan will do.”
“I thought you didn’t like to cook,” he said.
“I want to earn my keep.” She took the key out of his hand, unlocked the door and preceded him inside. “Just for a little while, you know, Horny. And I’m really awfully grateful to you for putting up with me.”
He really ought to get her out of his life once and for all. But the damage was done. Anyway, he would be off on another mission in a few days. Anyway—anyway, Hake admitted to himself, the idea of letting somebody else cook his dinner again was not unattractive. He postponed conversation and headed for the shower. The hot water felt good. The toilet was only a toilet, with no new confusion to add to his life. And by the time he was dressed again Alys had dinner waiting.
She seated him, flushed and smiling. There were candles on the kitchen table, and a bottle of white wine. “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing today, Horny?”
He cut into the chicken, which was in a soupy, sticky sauce. “I guess so.”
“Of course you do. I spent the whole afternoon at a travel agency, looking at South Seas folders. Tahiti! Bora Bora! Don’t they just sound marvelous? How do you like your chicken?”
“It’s very line,” Hake lied gallantly. But at least the stir-fried vegetables were edible. “I thought you were going to your aunt’s.”
“Oh, she’s as much of a drag as Ted and Walter. She’d just tell me I belong with my husbands. I don’t have to go to New Haven to hear that. But at least I’ll be out of your way before you go to Cairo.”
Hake dropped his fork. “How the hell do you know I’m going to Cairo?”
“The tickets were in your pocket when I hung up your coat, dear. Is that all you’re going to eat? I didn’t make any dessert, but we could just have some more wine…”
Hake said tightly, “Those tickets belong to a friend of mine. Old Bill Penn. We were, ah, in seminary together.”
“The passport was there too, dear, and it had your picture on it.” She smiled forgivingly.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” he said. He doggedly bent to his food.
They ate quickly, and after Alys cleared the plates away she stood behind him, her fingers on his neck muscles. “Poor old Horny,” she said, “all tensed up. You’re like iron.”
It was true enough. He could feel the strain in the shoulders and arms, across the chest, even in the abdomen. All the muscles he had painfully built up since the days in the wheelchair were now turned against him. “I could make all that go away,” she said softly.
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Silly! I didn’t mean sex—although that’s always good, too. And I’m just not strong enough to massage you when you’re like this.” She was kneading his shoulders very agreeably, but now she stopped, just resting her hands on him. “No, we’ll just relax you, Horny. We’re going to relax every muscle of your body. You’re going to be all relaxed, and we’ll start with your feet. You can feel your toes relaxing now, and—”
He sat bolt upright. “What are you doing?”
“I’m just relaxing you, Horny,” she said sweetly. “I learned it in college. It’s not really hypnotism, just a kind of suggestion. Do you feel your toes relaxed? And your soles of your feet, they’re getting all comfortable and relaxed too, and your ankles—”
“I don’t watit to be hypnotized!”
She let go of him and sat down again at the table. “All right, dear,” she said. “Let’s try something else. Maybe you should just let it all out. Tell me what’s getting you all up tight.”
Hake swallowed the rest of his glass, reached for the bottle and then checked his hand. “I don’t want any more wine. I want some coffee.”
“It’ll just get you more tensed up, Horny.”
“I need to be tensed up! And you’re leaving here toni— tomorrow morning at the latest,” he added.
“Whatever you say, of course, dear,” she said, heating water for his coffee. “Well, if this is to be our last night together, let’s make it pleasant, shall we? Do you want to look at my travel folders?”
“Not a bit,” he said.
“No, somebody else’s trip is never very interesting, is it?” She poured coffee and brought it to him. Determined to make conversation, she said, “Is Art coming over tonight?”
“No.”
“Oh. He’s good company for you, Horny. You really should have more friends.” When he didn’t respond to that, she tried again. “Do you believe in teleportation, Horny?”
“Oh, God. I get enough of that from Jessie.”
“Well, it’s just funny. I keep seeing this same man all over. He was outside this morning, and he was sitting on a bench on the boardwalk when I came back from the grocery store, and then he was in a car right outside the house while I was waiting for you. Now, he really couldn’t have done that, Horny. There just wasn’t time for him to get from one place to another.”
“You weren’t watching, probably. No reason you should be.”
“Yes, I was. I can even tell you what he looked like. Some kind of Indian, or maybe Pakistani. Young. Rather good-looking, in a way—”
Hake put his coffee down. “Did one of them have a scar on his face?” “Why—maybe. I didn’t look that closely but, yes, I think he did. What’s the matter?”
“Just stay there,” said Horny, standing up. “I want to take a look outside.”
But there was no sign of either of the Reddi twins anywhere outside the parsonage, front or back. Hake stood quietly in the darkness of the porch for a long time, watching everything that moved on the avenue. Cars, some high-school kids, a couple of elderly people tottering toward their senior-citizens’ rooming houses. Nothing that looked like a conspirator.
When he came back into the house Alys was standing in his private sitting room, looking puzzled. “Horny! Do you mind telling me what is going on?”
“Sit down, Alys. I mind. But I’m going to do it anyway.”
He went into his bathroom and turned on the shower, closing the door behind him. Back in the sitting room, he took a seat facing her. “You have to do one of two things right now, Alys. You have to promise me that you’ll keep your mouth shut about everything I’m going to say. Or you have to leave here this minute.”
“Oh, Horny!” she gasped, obviously delighted.
“Damn it! I’m serious.”
“I promise!”
“You used to teach the sports-and-art classes in Sunday school, didn’t you? So you can help me. First off, that wasn’t one man you saw, it was two. They’re twins, and they’re the ones who blew up my car. They don’t fool around. They gave me most of these bruises, and if they know what I’m doing they’ll probably give me worse.”
“Horny!”
“Second,
” he said, “your friend Leota. She’s not as free and easy as you might remember her. In fact, she’s a slave.”
“A slave!”
“In the harem of an Arab sheik.”
“In a harem?” Alys’s eyes were bright as stars.
“Now, that might sound romantic to you—”
“Oh, boy, does it!”
“—but it’s no joke. I’m going to rescue her. You know I’m mixed up in some secret stuff. You’re better off if you don’t know any more than that. But I’m going to take a chance and go from Cairo to A1 Halwani by way of the sheik’s palace, and on the way I’m going to get Leota out of there.”
“Horny! You’re such a nerd. How are you going to do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll do it. Maybe I can even do it legally. Hassabou had no right to take her out of Italy, that was part of the contract, so he’s violating the law. Anyway —I’ll do it. But I need to doctor up some documents before I do, and that’s where you come in. I don’t have much artistic talent. So please, come in the office with me.”
As he was opening the church safe, he called over his shoulder, “You don’t have to do any of this. Outside of the Reddis, there are other risks. You might get in trouble with—the people I work for.”
“You mean the government,” she said, nodding. “Tell me something. Why won’t you get in trouble yourself?”
“Maybe I will. But I’m going to call up on my toilet— oh, never mind that part, Alys. I’m going to put in a message saying that I left early because the Reddis were threatening my life. I think that might cover me—anyway, it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot.” He had laid out the little forger’s kit. He said, “Let’s see. I need to change the date on the Egyptian visa. Call up Trans-Pam and get the first flight to Cairo. Should I change the passport to a different name? Maybe I should. Or—”