Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  He didn’t say a word. His mouth moved but that was all.

  “You’ve got ten seconds, George.” If he wanted me to call him George this was a good time to start. “It shouldn’t take you more than three sentences. When your time’s up you go under, so you’d better finish before I get bored.”

  The words came out of him in one uninflected stream, no punctuation anywhere. But it only added up to two sentences.

  “The government still has the stuff in a warehouse. It won’t be shipped but we can steal it and split two million cash.”

  SEVEN

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I wore work clothes into a barber shop in Orlando. I was cleanshaven but shaggy. I walked out with a crewcut. I took a bus to Jacksonville, and in the men’s room of the Greyhound station I changed to a suit and covered the crew cut with a wig. In Jacksonville I rented a Plymouth from a national car-rental agency, using a Florida driver’s license made out to Leonard Byron Phelps. I drove the car to Atlanta and destroyed the license as soon as I had turned in the car. I flew to New Orleans, where I disposed of the wig. I used three different airlines and as many names to reach Minneapolis. I slept on planes and dozed in terminals, but didn’t stop at any hotels en route. In Minneapolis there was a foot of snow on the ground and a raw wind that never quit. I had three double whiskeys at a downtown bar and spent sixteen hours at a Turkish bath. I did a little sweating and a lot of sleeping, but I made sure I fitted in a massage and alcohol rub. The rubdown made my suntan a little less pronounced.

  The tan was the one thing that bothered me. It would have made me conspicuous anywhere, but in that part of the country at that time of year it drew stares from everyone. I had a cover to explain it—that wasn’t the problem. It was just that I wanted to avoid being memorable. My shape and size are ordinary enough, my face is forgettable, and the tan was the only thing that got in the way.

  I had tried a skin bleach earlier. I bought it in a Negro neighborhood in Atlanta. It was a sale the clerk may never forget. I tried it out in a lavatory, testing it on a portion of my anatomy which I rarely expose to the public. The effect was blotchy and unnatural. I suppose repeated applications might have had the desired effect, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

  I took a bus to Aberdeen, South Dakota, a town with twenty thousand people and one car-rental agency. They gave me a two-door-Chevy with heavy-duty snow tires, and the clerk said he guessed there wasn’t much snow where I came from. I showed him a driver’s license that swore I was John NMI Walker, from Alexandria, VA.

  I had not known there was so much snow in the world. It came down all the way to Sprayhorn, a fifty-three mile drive that took me almost three hours. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with it. I found the motel, the only one in the little town. They had a room for me, but the girl on the desk said they hadn’t expected me until the following day.

  I told her the office must have made a mistake. It was my mistake, I was early, and the reservation telegram that Dattner had sent from Washington had been according to plan.

  The room was better than I had expected. Wall-to-wall carpeting, a big double bed, and three thousand cubic feet of warm air. I unpacked my suitcase. The closet got two dark suits with Washington labels and the uniform of a major in the United States Army. The dresser got most of the rest.

  I had two sets of identification. My wallet was crammed with the paraphernalia of John NMI Walker, everything from credit cards (Shell, Diner’s, Carte Blanche) to army stuff. Only the government papers suggested that J. NMI W. was a military type. They gave my rank as major, all except one dated three years ago which had me down as captain. The new rank had been inserted in ink, with initials after it.

  Every shred of Walker ID was counterfeit. It was all high quality, but there wasn’t anything there that an expert couldn’t spot as phony.

  My other new self, Richard John Lynch, substituted quality for volume. Mr. Lynch had no credit cards, no driver’s license, no auto registration, no checkbook stubs. Mr. Lynch didn’t even have a wallet. All he had was a flat leather pass case that held a simple little card with his name, picture, fingerprints and description. The name was his and the rest were mine.

  Mr. Lynch’s identification announced only that he was an accredited agent of that very intelligence Agency which employed George Dattner and which had decided against employing me. And Mr. Lynch’s ID was the genuine article, absolutely authentic in every respect. There was only one way on earth that anyone could possibly discredit Mr. Lynch’s ID, and that was by pointing out that no one with his name, face, or fingerprints had ever worked for the Agency in question.

  I had dinner down the road, then drove back to the motel. I was gone a full hour, but no one tossed my room during that time. I checked rug fibers and powder flecks, and everything was as I’d left it, and nobody is that good. I stretched out on the bed. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on my door. I asked who was there, and a voice called, “That you, Ed?” I said he had the wrong room, and he excused himself and went away.

  They were certainly slow, but after all I hadn’t been expected until the following day. I prowled around the room looking for bugs. I didn’t find any, but couldn’t swear there were none. According to George, any tap operation involving someone who was presumably hip included more than one device. There were always one or two obvious mikes for the subject to locate and one or more subtle ones for him to miss. My room at the Doulton, for example, had had a very clever lamp on the bedside table, along with the more noticeable gimmick in the ceiling fixture.

  Unless military intelligence hadn’t picked up this procedure, and he thought they had, then the absence of readily identifiable listening devices meant a room was clean. It didn’t matter. I would treat the room as bugged regardless.

  I watched television for two hours without paying attention to it. There was one channel and the reception was terrible. I listened to the news on the chance that it would have something important to tell me. It didn’t, and I went to sleep when it was over.

  I was up well ahead of the sun. I showered and shaved and put on Maj. Walker’s uniform. The fit was good enough to be true and not too good for a cover identity. They tossed the room while I had breakfast, and I would have known it without the rug fibers or powder. They put a pair of socks back on the wrong side of the drawer. That was good enough to mention to George, if I ever saw him again.

  At eleven o’clock I got in the car. I was supposed to have arrived that morning around ten, and my orders called for me to report to my new commanding officer immediately upon arrival. That was fine, I was back on schedule. I drove through the center of Sprayhorn and northwest toward the base. I had my wallet in my hip pocket, my orders on the seat beside me, and my Agency card in the inside breast pocket of my jacket. I drove six miles. The snow had stopped during the night, but there was enough of it on the road to make the drive an ordeal. I had to concentrate on it when I would have preferred to spend the time reminding myself who I was. I was an Agency man pretending to be a career officer. George insisted it was much easier that way, that double covers reinforced each other. I wasn’t so sure.

  The compound would have been hard to miss. It was the only thing on the road besides snow. A fifteen-foot fence, barbed and electrified, circled it. Rectangled it, if you prefer. Inside there was a lot of empty ground and three concrete block buildings. They were all about the same size, and they were all about forty-five feet tall, and none of them had any windows. There were also soldiers all over the place, all in heavy brown overcoats, none performing any apparent function.

  A sign reappeared every fifty yards along the fence. It announced that all of this was the product testing division of the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation, that admittance was restricted to authorized personnel, and that the fence was electrified. The last statement was true, the middle one misleading, the first a lie. There was no such thing as the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation and probably never would be, since the phrase
was gobbledygook. Admittance was restricted specifically to military personnel specifically assigned to the base, the correct name of which was Fort Joshua Tree. It was named for a longdead general who would have been sickened by the things inside the place, a far cry from muskets and cavalry sabers. New times, new customs.

  There was a corporal at the front gate. We played the salute game and I gave him my orders. He told me where to park and which building to enter. I parked where he said, received and returned salutes, and showed my orders to another corporal in the entrance hall of the appointed building. This kept happening until I reached the offices of General Baldwin Winden. His secretary announced me over an intercom. He said he wasn’t expecting me, and the secretary said something about misdirected memos and took my orders inside. I opened the intercom and listened to them discuss me. My tan was mentioned, damn it. The general and his secretary tried to figure out who or what I was and decided that asking me might save time.

  “I don’t know what he’s doing here,” I heard the general say, “but if it says he belongs here, that’s all that counts.”

  The military mind. Nothing ever changes, orders are always orders. Extraordinary.

  I went into the general’s office. We saluted each other, and I made a point of doing nothing until the secretary went away. I figured he would listen in on the intercom, but that was fine with me. When the door closed I said, “General Baldwin, I—”

  “Winden,” he said. “Baldwin’s my first name, Major.”

  It wasn’t a slip on my part. It was the sort of bad prep military men liked to expect from civilian agencies.

  “Hell,” I said. “They never get anything right.” I put a finger to my lips, moved it to my ear, then pointed at the walls and ceiling. He looked at me as though I was bucking for a Section Eight. I handed him my Agency ID. He flipped it open and did a take that was almost too good to be true. You could almost see a cartoon-style light bulb over his head.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Have a seat, Mr. Lynch. You know, I’m not surprised. Something about those orders didn’t ring true.” Oh, sure. “Sit down, tell me what I can do for you. Oh, we can talk here, sir. Oh, don’t you worry now, we can talk here, sir. This is United States Army property, there hasn’t been a civilian on the grounds since the fence went up. Except for your sort of people, of course. Sit, sit …”

  I sat. I had wondered what sort of general they would pick to run a candyass warehouse in the middle of South Dakota, and now I knew, and he was better than anything I could have dreamed up.

  “So you came to see us,” he said. “Well, well, what can I do for you people? Hmmm?”

  “You can find me something innocuous to do for the next three weeks,” I said. “If there’s an empty office, put me in it and pile papers on my desk. If anybody asks, I’m Major John Walker and I’m doing something confidential. Don’t tell anyone otherwise, not even your secretary. And don’t—”

  “Now one moment, sir! Now one moment!”

  I stared at him.

  “You have no authority here, sir. None! You are a civilian, sir, and you have no lawful right to be here, let alone furnish me with instructions. No right at all! You are a civilian and we are military and—”

  I stood up, and he stopped talking. Just like that. I wondered if General Tree was as much of a washout as this moron.

  I broke the silence. I said, “If you want to order me out, for Christ’s sake go ahead. I left the middle of a Brazilian summer for this. They put me up here in Eskimoland and issued me a pretty little soldier suit and forgot to put an overcoat in my bag. I’m supposed to spend three fucking weeks doing nothing waiting for something that isn’t going to happen. I couldn’t sleep last night and I had a stinking breakfast this morning and the clowns who searched my room this morning did everything but autograph my pillow. You can’t want me out of here as much as I want to get out of here, sir, and I’m sure this is God’s own country in the summer, but—”

  “Sir!”

  I stared at him, and this time he gave me his guarded look. “You’ll be here for three weeks?”

  “I’ll be here until your shipment goes out, which could be any time during the next three weeks but which we both know will be on the fourth of February.”

  “The date has not yet been determined, Mr., uh, Lynch.”

  “Maybe they haven’t notified you.” And, as an afterthought, “Or maybe our information is wrong.”

  “The latter, I’m sure. The date will purposely remain undetermined until the last moment.” If he honestly believed they wouldn’t set the date until they were ready to give him the word, then he was too dumb to live. “Now let me see, Lynch. You’re concerned with the shipment?”

  I just nodded. I had already been enough of a wiseass.

  “But you’re civilian. We should have someone from Military Intelligence.”

  “You probably do.”

  “If that were so, I would know about it.” The hell he would. I told him his boys would probably have a man or a team down any day but that I was under orders to work independently.

  “We have an interest in this ourselves,” I said. “You know the eventual destination of the shipment.”

  He named a military compound in Florida, another in Texas, a third in the northeast, a fourth in California. It was the most obvious breach of security since the Trojan horse. I had trouble repressing a fairly sincere moment of civic outrage.

  Instead, I filed the information. George had thought everything was being routed to Florida, and either he or the general was wrong. I figured anybody would have to pick the general for this honor, but George might have misread something. Four trucks, four destinations-there was a certain degree of logic there.

  I said, “I mean final destinations.” He looked completely blank. This was a whole new concept to him. “Without going into detail,” I said, “The goods will be shipped onward from the places you mentioned. That’s where we come in, that’s where it stops being military and becomes civilian.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “So while the first delivery stage is legally your baby, my team wants me here. I think it’s about as necessary as it is warm, but orders are orders.” There was a phrase he could cuddle up with. “So I have to be here unless you order me out. I’ll try not to get in anyone’s way, believe me. Keep me a secret. A blown cover would look bad. I went five years in the Amazon without getting blown, and I ought to be able to do three weeks in South Dakota.”

  He stood up, and I saluted. He had trouble returning it; I could see it didn’t seem right to him. You didn’t spend your life getting to be a general just to salute camouflaged civilians.

  “I will give you whatever help I can,” he said, stiffly.

  “I’ll appreciate it. I’m bunked down at the motel, and I’m under orders to go on living there. I’m frankly damned if I know why.”

  “Orders,” he said.

  “I doubt that anyone will ask, but my story will be that I’m awaiting assignment of permanent quarters. I don’t think the point will come up—”

  “I doubt it, sir.”

  “—but just in case. Well. Do you have an office available? It will have to be private, but that’s my only requirement. And could I figure on moving in around two this afternoon? Good, very good.”

  I extended my hand, and we shook. I could tell he liked it a hell of a lot better than a salute.

  EIGHT

  THAT AFTERNOON THEY had an office ready for me, and, more important, a heavy overcoat. A few junior officers managed to walk past my open door and take a quick glance inside. This might be simple curiosity—what else could they do for kicks?—or the word might already have gotten around that I was an Agency snoop. It didn’t matter. The on-base intelligence crew was no threat, and if MI was going to send in a team, that was something to worry about later. The possibility always existed that the Agency had an undercover op already planted. George was certain this wasn’t so, but that I didn’t h
ave to worry anyway. My Brazil cover would help explain the fact that he didn’t know me, or I him.

  The only problem with the Brazil background was that I couldn’t speak Portuguese. I had a touch of Spanish, though, and my accent was poor, and if anyone started talking to me in Portuguese I could try answering in the worst Spanish possible. “Never could keep from mixing up Portugee and the old Español, and where I was they were all Indians and we talked the native jive”—and then hit ‘em with a mixture of Cambode hill dialect and gibberish.

  I left the office around four. From Sprayhorn I sent a wire to T.J. Morrison at a hotel in downtown Washington. It was an hour later there, so George would be picking up the wire in an hour or less. He was supposed to have checked in at the hotel around noon, signing in but not going to his room. Now he would pick up the telegram, and then he would never come back.

  I wired: BIRTHDAY GREETINGS AND ALL OUR LOVE, WISH WE COULD BE WITH YOU. KEN AND SARAH. It didn’t mean anything. Any message from me meant only that I was on the spot and everything was going according to plan. The important thing was maintaining contact without leaving any threads dangling that could possibly tie Walker-Lynch to George Dattner. He could communicate with me in any of a dozen ways, because it was to be expected that I would get messages from Washington, but we needed elaborate arrangements for me to reach him.

  That night I hit a few bars until I found one with a colonel’s wife who was looking to get picked up. She was crowding forty and overly fleshed. She was drinking gin and coke. “A traditional drink down home,” she drawled. “If y’all spent any time in Nawlins, Ah wouldn’t have to tell y’all that.”

  I had spent enough time in New Orleans to know that y’all is plural, so either the accent was artificial or she was seeing two of me. Or both. She was half in the bag when I got there and I kept her company through three more gin and cokes and they hit her pretty hard, tradition or no.