by Buck Sanders
“Okay,” she said. “This time, you’ve made your speech. And whether you blew it or not is largely irrelevant. But I’m going to make one stipulation, here.” She was totally serious. “I want to see everything on Rashid Haman, or Maggie Leiber. Everything.” Her tone suggested that she already found the task unattractive. “I spent nearly a year living with her, working with her—do you have any idea how hard all this is to accept on a rational level?”
“My point exactly,” said Slayton. “The first broad stroke—in fact, an ideal starting point—for concealing your identity is misdirection. And perhaps the greatest, and therefore the most effective, misdirection is to make the enemy think you’re the opposite sex. Saves a lot of trouble when it comes down to the other particulars, which are all artifice anyway. If you could succeed where she succeeded, the frostings on such a misdirection are fairly simple.”
He knew he was still speechmaking. Perhaps he needed to get it all off his chest—though he would have hated to admit it in those terms. He broke the silence by adding, “And yes, Shauna, I’ll show you everything you want to know. If anyone is entitled, you are.”
She touched the lump on his head, gently. “You look like hell,” she said.
Slayton said, “No, I’m okay.” Whereupon he let his eyes roll up and sank beneath the surface of the water with a gurgle and a theatrical show of bubbles.
“I ought to hold your head under,” she said, mostly to the bathroom.
After more frothing, Slayton’s mouth surfaced and he said, “I only go down once, not three times, you know, so if you’re going to save my ass, don’t wait. Glurg!” It left ripples behind when it sank.
“Nut.” She nodded her head in sober judgment. And then she climbed into the tub, overflowing it, straddling the surprised Slayton. She was fully clothed.
Arms came out of the water and pulled her down to his waiting mouth.
She had intended to catch a bath before dinner anyhow.
The table consisted of Shauna and Professor Willis, Ben Slayton and Wilma Christian, who managed to keep her mouth shut and be civil to Shauna.
“The pivotal element was the American trainees,” said Slayton. “They were all under Maggie’s orders, of course, but I attributed stunts to her that were accomplished by them. I didn’t consider it until you showed me the pictures taken on the dock, Wilma.”
“What ‘stunts,’ Mr. Rade—I mean, Mr. Slayton?” Willis had long since washed away his shock at Maggie’s true identity with his more characteristic curiosity.
“The stunt with the forklift, for example,” he replied. “It was pulled off by a man from the very next section of the warehouse, entering and leaving through a door concealed by all the junk. That door—” (which had turned out to be located directly beyond the position of the cart upon which Slayton had leaped to safety) “—was the reason he could get away without being seen. It was also a beautiful implication of the workers in the warehouse, since we never suspected the rooms were linked.”
“An intricate sensibility for plans with many layers,” Wilma said.
“Like the coffin boxes,” said Shauna. “One inside the other.”
“Right. If everything had turned into the disaster it was supposed to, later, she knew I’d remember lots of little details and damn myself for not figuring it out sooner. Part of her game—and, of course, one does such things only when one is confident of winning.” He punctuated this with a sip of his wine, a passable Rhineskeller.
“Haman implicated Bassam, whose only value was being an available victim,” Shauna said. “As soon as he got actually involved—by handling the cobra and planting it, under her orders—he was useless as a diversion. So she eliminated him in a manner designed to cause the most confusion and get the most things done in one fell swoop: she primed him, with threats of revealing his identity and her leverage as Haman, and then pointed him at Ben. His coming after Ben provided a new scapegoat—namely me, since I was the one who suggested he consult Maggie on the Arab work crew in the first place.”
“And when I suspected Shauna,” said Slayton, “the first person I tried to probe was Maggie. Direction was easy after that. A plant in Shauna’s room—if I had really had it together about Egyptology, Professor, I would have known the statuette was a phony, and that would have discounted Shauna. But I didn’t think. Everything on the tour, every artifact, had to be accounted for, which meant anything that expendable had to be fake. And since you found the fourth Canopic jar, we have to assume the one I tossed out the window was fake, too. I’m afraid that despite all this violence, Egypt’s heritage is intact—and not much good as a propaganda victory.”
Wilma snickered, across the table.
“The other connection I missed was even more obvious. And it shows a conflict of intention as well, but perhaps only in retrospect.”
“A bomb was planted in Ben’s car immediately after Maggie sought him out and spoke to him directly for the first time. She sounded him out. And the attack in the hotel suite followed another consultation. Ben’s nosing about upset her enough to react immediately. “ Shauna paused. Wilma was still covering a smile with her napkin.
“Okay, out with it,” said Slayton.
“It’s not relevant,” she said. “It’s the Chevy.”
“Oh, god, yes. Two explosions. When I heaved the Canopic jar out the window, it smashed through the front window of a parked car and blew the Car up. It belonged to Groth—the Sparta security guard.”
“The one who was abusing everybody?” said Willis, and Slayton nodded. This time the laughter rang around the table.
“Talk about a grand slam, though,” said Wilma. “When I think about that bomb setup, Ben, I think you’re right. How arrogant and ostentatious could you get? That’s a mind that knows the true value of media.”
There was a renewed silence, which Slayton finally broke by saying, “Now, Wilma, about your story…”
“Hold it!” she said. “Exclusive rights, remember? Unemcumbered access to details. I’ve already talked this over with Mr. Winship.” She lagged for the benefit of the punchline. “You’re just going to have to have faith, Ben, because right now your life is in the hands of the fourth estate.”
Slayton groaned.
“… which needs some TLC from me at the moment if I’m to meet my deadline. We all have our bosses; mine happens to be a clock tonight. I hate to do this, but you guys will have to get along without me—I’ve got to go.” She was looking at Ben directly, and she knew what she was saying. The friendly argument was due for another time.
“Don’t forget,” she added, nailing Slayton. “Coat of Arms. Your treat.” With that, she was gone. Slayton watched her leave, thankful for the escape hatch she had smoothly offered him.
“I’m afraid I must opt out soon, myself,” said Willis. “Without—you know—there’s that much more to be done and the schedule has not gotten any lighter for us.” He seemed to be dealing pragmatically with the whole circumstance. “And as Ms. Christian has graciously offered to drop me at the hotel, and since she in all probability does not want to wait forever for me out front, I suppose I should bid you both good night and thank you, sir, for the excellent dinner. Although I think the name Rademacher suits you, young man, gross fabrication or no.”
“More German and disciplined, perhaps?” suggested Shauna. Willis seemed to consider it as he left.
Once again the two were alone and in silence.
“Ben, tell me something else. That thing with Bassam, the Arab worker, and poor Ahmed—” she trailed off.
“Bassam,” he said. “Poor little son of a bitch. He was running scared all the way, and the damned irony of it is that he left Egypt to get away from the terrorism there.” He seemed to take a tangent of his own. “It’ll be that way everywhere, if someone doesn’t crack down.”
The anger started to boil up again when he considered the boisterous, lively Ahmed, killed in his own hospital room by the same sorts that attacked him in the
suite. Everyone was under orders. The protection the police provided in the hospital was not as dependable as that afforded by the Sparta men. Then he said, “That’s not really what’s bothering you.”
“I want to know what’s going to happen to—”
“You want the flowery version, or you want the truth?”
She said nothing, meeting his gaze levelly.
“Alright. She’s probably arranged for the local contingent to attempt to spring her within a specified time. But we wanted her too badly for us to fool around now that we’ve got her. Her location will be a secret. There’s probably ten fake leads an hour coming directly from Winship’s office. She’s an international criminal. So many different agencies want her that dividing her up will be the hardest part. And there will be a long time—mentally long—in which she will realize her cavalry isn’t going to show, after which she will do her best to kill herself.”
“Oh.” Her voice had become small and clipped.
“That’s it,” he continued. “Shauna, when I was thinking of her in terms of Haman the terrorist, I wanted to break her neck myself. Bare hands. But in the exhibit hall, just for a second, I was able to see past her eyes, directly into her soul, like a flash of lightning. She’s locked into the life she chose years ago, and she knew it was a life that offered no recriminations and no compromises if things were to go wrong. Entropy pulls you along after enough time. She could never be anything else; it permeated her life the way the smell of fluoric acid and plastique stayed on her hands when I caught a whiff of it.”
“The smell clued you in?”
“Together with her eyes, yes. And after that second, I didn’t want to kill her, I just wanted her neutralized—and now she’ll neutralize herself, in a matter of days… and don’t shake your head at me, because I know whereof I speak. I’d do the same thing, and we’re not unalike. It’s true. I don’t wish to forget it since there’s too much to be learned. But I would like to stop thinking about it for a while.”
“Me too,” she said, making a helpless sort of shrug. “It will take a lot of time, though. You’re right… she wasn’t exactly a bosom friend, but I—”
“I know,” Slayton said, closing the topic.
“Remember the nine components of man? The Egyptian parts?” she said. “Somehow I seemed to divine that that last part, the ren, wasn’t right with you. Your name.” She sipped. “And you missed your chance to find out about the other parts. Forgive me a question, Ben, but why are you even alive now?”
“Scapegoat,” he said, recalling the intimations of Chalmers, in the basement dungeon of a faceless apartment complex somewhere across town. “The whole setup was very obviously designed to make me look negligent as hell: dead President, destroyed exhibit, film at ten. I owe the nonrealization of that rather bleak scenario to a fellow nobody knows, named Buck Fuller. Henry Fuller. Vietnam vet, just like myself, and probably just like some of Haman’s sinister trainees. There are guys like Chalmers, who are responsible for a lot of the strife in this country… and then there are guys like Buck Fuller.
“And as for my pseudonym, my apologies to you and the Professor,” he added, lightening. “I quite like Rademacher, the more I think of it. I may use it again someday.”
“When you check into a hotel with a strange woman?”
“Not a strange woman. An enigmatic one.”
Her eyes were downcast. “The tour part of the tour commences next week. A couple of months from now it all winds up, in Los Angeles. And that’ll be it.” She ran her finger contemplatively around the lip of her own wineglass. “I have no idea what my life will become after that. The tour is the resolution of the whole thing that began with Willis’ discovery of the tomb, the dénouement. Scientifically, after that, it’s all repetition.
“But right here, right now,” she said, abruptly, “you and I have a night, and beyond that, a week. And beyond that, in the future somewhere, I suspect we may have a few more.”
Like the dancer in the long-ago Tangier cabaret, her eyes now pooled darkly and invitingly. “And I’m satisfied with that. Those in the domain of the gods paid particular attention to the times of twilight, and dawn, and dusk. The divisions and distinctions between darks and lights were finely drawn. The folks in charge now are Nephthys, the evening, and Set, the night. Here, this is for you.”
She came up from her bag with a small charm of solid 24-karat gold. “It’s an ankh, a life symbol. The corniest Egyptian thing I could think of.”
Ben Slayton very often had to graph his life in terms of violence and respite. Now it was life’s turn. He accepted the little ankh. “I take it this is not from Seth-Olet’s inventory,” he said, turning it over and over, pleased with the gift.
“Actually it’s from a local department store,” she said. “In America, they’re practically pop. Like pyramids. And now, I want to go for a long, slow walk in the cold.”
“And check into a hotel using a phony name?” He clasped the ankh tightly in his hand.
“Something like that.” She smiled.
After a traumatic week, Slayton and Shauna were battered and disillusioned, yet very much alive. Slayton kept the ankh in his grip, as they walked out into the chill Washington night.
MYSTERY…SUSPENSE…ESPIONAGE…
THE GOLD CREW
by Thomas N. Scortia
& Frank M. Robinson (B83-522, $2.95)
The most dangerous test the world has ever known is now taking place aboard the mammoth nuclear sub Alaska. Human beings, unpredictable in moments of crisis, are being put under the ultimate stress. On patrol, out of contact with the outside world, the crew is deliberately being led to believe that the U.S.S.R. has attacked the U.S.A. Will the crew follow standing orders and fire the Alaska’s missiles in retaliation? Now the fate of the world depends on what’s going on in the minds of the men of THE GOLD CREW.
DOORS
by Ed McBain (B91-937, $2.50)
Meet Alex Hardy. He can plan and execute a robbery with consummate skill. He can seduce a woman with equal skill. But now he is faced with the most beautiful woman and the most difficult job he has ever encountered. Bone-chilling tension.
THE FRENCH ATLANTIC AFFAIR
by Ernest Lehman (B95-258, $2.75)
The S.S. Marseille is taken over in mid-ocean. The conspirators are unidentifiable among the 2,000 other passengers aboard. Unless a ransom of 35 million dollars in gold is paid within 48 hours, the ship and the passengers will be blown skyhigh. A first-class ticket to excitement.
YESTERDAY’S SPY
by Len Deighton (B31-014, $2.50)
Two friends who spied together. But that was in another time and another place—now they fight on different sides. A spellbinding tale of deceit and terror in a world where political reality destroys the most hallowed allegiances.
RECOVERY
by Steven L. Thompson (B93-482, $2.95)
The year is 1982. Max Moss—a daring ex-racer on a specialized American rescue team—is perfect for the death-defying chase in a superspeed car for the recovery of a secret U.S. plane forced down in East Germany by Russian fighter pilots. Everyone is against Max and his partner as they use their wiliest resources to bring the plane’s super-secret, biocybernetic device back to safety.
MEN OF ACTION BOOKS
DIRTY HARRY
By Dane Hartman
He’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan—tough, unorthodox, no-nonsense plainclothesman extraordinaire of the San Francisco Police Department… Inspector #71 assigned to the bruising, thankless homicide detail…A consummate crimebuster nothing can stop—not even the ‘law! Explosive mysteries involving racketeers, murderers, extortioners, pushers, and skyjackers; savage, bizarre murders, accomplished with such cunning and expertise that the frustrated S.F.P.D. finds itself without a single clue; hair-raising action and violence as Dirty Harry arrives on the scene, armed with nothing but a Smith & Wesson .44 and a bag of dirty tricks; unbearable suspense and hairy chase sequences as Dirty Ha
rry sleuths to unmask the villain and solve the mystery. Dirty Harry—when the chips are down, he’s the most low-down cop on the case.
#1 DUEL FOR CANNONS (C90-793, $1.95)
#2 DEATH ON THE DOCKS (C90-792, $1.95)
#3 THE LONG DEATH (C90-848, $1.95–Coming in December)
MEN OF ACTION BOOKS
THE HOOK
By Brad Latham
“The Hook” is William Lockwood, ace insurance investigator for Transatlantic Underwriters—a man whose name derives from his World War I boxing exploits, whose hallmark is class, whose middle name is violence, and whose signature is sex. In the late 1930s, when law enforcement was rough-and-tumble, The Hook is the perfect take-charge man for any job. He combines legal and military training with a network of contacts across America who honor his boxing legend. He’s a debonair man-about-town, a bachelor with an awesome talent for women—and a deadly weapon in one-on-one confrontations. Crossing America and Europe in pursuit of perpetrators of insurance fraud, The Hook finds himself in the middle of organized crime, police corruption, and terrorism. The Hook—gentleman detective with a talent for violence and a taste for sex.
#1 THE GILDED CANARY (C90-882, $1.95)
#2 SIGHT UNSEEN (C90-841, $1.95)
#3 HATE IS THICKER THAN BLOOD (C90-986, $1.95–Coming in December)
ARAB TERRORISTS
seething with hate for western democracy
are enroute to the United States
with blueprints for deadly bombs.
They intend to train American student radicals
in the fine art of terror, develop malcontents
into full-blown assassins.
Warning: Do you know where your children are?
AMERICA’S COUNTER FORCE
is a self-made millionaire, a sportscar
enthusiast, a widower women long to love—