The Silencers

by Donald Hamilton

  “I have no doubt he told you many things, Mrs. Hendricks,” Wegmann said, “which you, to repay the grudge you bore him, promptly related to us, as he expected you to do.”

  “But—”

  Wegmann gestured towards the hut from which came the sound of machinery. “Please. Your feet should be able to carry you now... Yes, what is it, Naldi?”

  The scientist’s face showed indignation. “Why didn’t you tell us this earlier? Why did you let us... If he had no films, what was the point in setting such an elaborate trap? You deliberately let us make fools of ourselves capturing and searching—”

  Wegmann said gently, “Dr. Naldi, you have never needed my permission to make a fool of yourself. The search was unnecessary of course. If you’ll remember, I kept saying it was a waste of time. The capture, however, was absolutely necessary.”

  “But why, if there were no films?”

  “Quite simply,” Wegmann said, “because these two people had managed to obtain too much information about me to be left alive to talk, afterwards.”

  “You’re going to kill them?” Naldi sounded shocked. Wegmann laughed and gestured towards the apparatus in the tower. “My dear doctor, how many people are you helping me kill with that? You’re being naive!”

  “But that’s different. That’s... unfortunately, it is an essential step towards saving thousands of other lives, maybe millions. This is just cold-blooded murder!”

  “Now you are simply playing with words,” Wegmann said impatiently. “And I have a question for you, doctor. It has been reported to me that yesterday you tried to get Dr. Rennenkamp to further delay the test. Would you mind explaining why?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I had you arrange for one delay. It was necessary in order to get them out there precisely today. But another delay would have been fatal to our plans. You know that. Why did you try to talk Dr. Rennenkamp into another postponement?”

  Naldi licked his lips nervously. Then, abruptly, he drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He spoke firmly, “Because I thought in another week it might be safe for them to make the shot. At least the risk would be much smaller; my instruments show that conditions are rapidly becoming much less critical. I thought, if I could get the old fool to hold off another week, just a few more days, we wouldn’t have to go through with this terrible—”

  “Naldi,” said Wegmann, “you are a sentimental fool.” He must have made some kind of a signal, although I didn’t catch it. There was a sharp, explosive noise from the church tower, almost coincident with the crack of a rifle bullet going past and the unforgettable sound as it struck home. Naldi pitched back into the snow, dead before he fell.

  “All right, Mrs. Hendricks,” Wegmann said calmly. “That way, if you please. Follow the tracks carefully. We do not wish to disturb the snow unnecessarily.”

  Gail stared at him in a stunned way. Her eyes were very wide and her face was very white; the little freckles on her nose showed plainly. She turned her shocked stare towards the body at her feet. Dr. Naldi’s bifocal lenses looked blindly up at the morning sky, askew in the dead, dark face. There was only a small spot of blood on the front of his coat. Gail made a choked sound and turning, stumbled away.

  Wegmann gestured to me to follow. I obeyed, aware that Gunther and two men were covering the jeep station wagon he had driven here which had a ski rack on top for camouflage and my truck with white canvas that would presumably make them look like snow-covered boulders from the air. Maybe they had an extra sheet for the body. The other two men seemed unaffected, but Gunther looked a little sick.

  Three men here, I thought, one in the tower with a rifle and Wegmann himself—five so far. Well, I’d offered myself as bait according to instructions. I really couldn’t complain because too many had taken up the offer.

  Ahead of me, Gail slipped to one knee, then picked herself up again awkwardly. Her bound wrists looked unreal and theatrical. The thing up in the tower looked phony, too, like something in a science-fiction movie. I paused under the church tower and looked up. From this angle, I couldn’t see the rifleman, but the gadget itself was clearly visible.

  “Nervous little beast, isn’t it?” I said, with a backward glance at Wegmann, who was following at a discreet distance.

  “It is only seeking now,” he replied. “When it finds what it is seeking, it will lock on and commence tracking. It will report distance, direction and speed of flight to the instruments inside the church. When a certain switch is thrown, it will also assume control. We will be able to steer the big bird towards us, or to send it away—say to a suitable target far across the valley.”

  “When it takes off like that,” I said, “assuming that it does, won’t the range officer hit his little red button and blow it up?”

  “The range safety officer will undoubtedly close the destruct circuit, or try to,” Wegmann said. “He will be very much surprised, no doubt, when nothing happens. He will be even more surprised to discover that his test missile is armed. I have taken a long time to build my organization here, Mr. Helm, and it is a very good one. I have planned this demonstration well. Dr. Naldi merely helped me to select a suitable target. Your newspapers will have a great deal to write about in the next few days.”

  “When does the show start?” I asked.

  “The bird flies at ten,” he said, and gestured with the gun he still held—my gun. I found myself wishing that I’d thought to sabotage it in some way before passing it to Gail, but that would have been a dead give-away if discovered. “Please keep moving,” Wegmann said. “Mrs. Hendricks is getting ahead of us. Don’t try any clever delays or diversions, I warn you. I have a use for prisoners. There is someone I wish to keep occupied and unsuspicious for the next hour or so—you have that long if you are careful. But the exact number of prisoners does not really matter. I hope you understand.”

  “I read you,” I said, “loud and clear.”

  Wegmann raised his voice. “Mrs. Hendricks. That’s far enough. Wait for us there.”

  She stopped and waited at the door of the hut. I could feel the vibration of the machinery inside as I came up. Gail glanced at me briefly and looked away. A little color had returned to her face. She brushed snow off the knee of her pants. Wegmann reached us, waved us back with the gun, and opened the door. The noise of a big gasoline engine, along with the crackling hum of the generator it was driving and a breath of warm air smelling of hot oil and grease, came to us strongly.

  “You will be comfortable in here, I hope,” Wegmann said hospitably. Then he leaned forward and shouted to somebody inside. “Company, Mr. Romero!”

  There was no answer, but he signaled us forward anyway. I followed Gail inside. The windows were blacked out; the only illumination came from a forty-watt bulb on a cord attached to one of the round log rafters— vigas they are called in that country. The machinery took up half the space in the little building. Inside the place, it made a fearful racket. I looked around for the man to whom Wegmann had yelled, assuming he’d be an engineer or mechanic on watch.

  For a moment, I saw no one. Then Wegmann stepped past us and kicked at something in the corner.

  “Don’t play possum with me, Mr. Romero!” Wegmann shouted. “Here are some friends to keep you company. They’d like to ask you about an incident involving a gray Oldsmobile, haha!”

  The bundle of clothing stirred and revealed itself to be a rather small man in a gabardine topcoat that was liberally smeared with the dirt and grease of the floor. His black hair, rather long, hung lankly into his face which—under the dirt—was quite pale except for some spectacular bruises. He had a small, black moustache. I was looking at the man who’d tried to run us off the road up in San Agustin Pass. I was looking at the M.C. of the Club Chihuahua.

  24

  I didn’t let myself try to figure it out. One thing you learn early in the business is not to waste cerebral energy trying to solve the problems for which answers are already available at the back of the book
. Our cellmate, whoever he might be, would undoubtedly tell us his sad story in due time—if we lived that long.

  In the meantime, flat on my face on the dirt floor, I was busy using all the old muscle-tensing tricks to get a little slack for my ankles, which Wegmann was busy tying up. He gave me nothing that could really be called an opening—which was just as well. It wasn’t him I wanted, but things were running pretty close now, and if I had seen a chance I’d have been very tempted to take it. There might be better ones later, but then again there might not.

  “All right, Mrs. Hendricks,” he shouted over the noise.

  Gail hesitated and dropped awkwardly to her knees.

  Wegmann gave her a shove that dumped her on her face, yanked her legs out straight and lashed them up.

  “So,” he shouted. “Now, I will leave you... Oh, make no elaborate, self-sacrificing plans about sabotaging that generator as the hour approaches, Mr. Helm. There are fully charged storage batteries in reserve, adequate to operate our equipment over the critical period. Stopping this machinery will merely deprive you of light and heat in here.”

  He stood up and looked us over, went over and rechecked the bonds of the character named Romero and left us alone with the noise and stink. Well, at least we weren’t freezing.

  “Gail,” I called when the door had remained closed a reasonable period of time.

  She turned her head to look at me. There was dust on her cheek and a kind of hopelessness in her eyes. She said something, but I couldn’t make it out. I rolled over once, which brought our faces close together.

  “He had him killed!” she gasped. “Naldi. One minute Naldi was standing there and then... and then he was dead! Like that!”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just like that. Now, listen...”

  “You lied!” she cried. “From the start, you lied to me, tricked me, made love to me, used me...”

  “Sure,” I said. “And you lied to me, tricked me, made love to me and double-crossed me.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. Then she made a small, short, bitter sound that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell with the noise.

  She said more calmly, “He’s going to kill us, too, isn’t he? If we don’t... What can we do?”

  It occurred to me she’d come a long way from the pampered Texas beauty who’d frozen in panic in San Agustin Pass. Like most people, it had turned out, she had a lot of hidden talents, some good, some bad.

  “Listen closely,” I said. “Something Wegmann said makes me think we’ll have company in here pretty soon, and I think I know who it’ll be. When he comes, you blow your top. Flip it good, understand? You can’t stand being tied up, you’re revolted by this filthy floor, you’re going crazy with the terrible noise, get it? Make a goddamn spectacle of yourself. Create a diversion. Okay?”

  She hesitated. “Do you think... do you think it will work?”

  “What will work? Don’t worry about anything like that; that’s my department. Try to be a real actress, glamor girl. You’re a woman in terror for her life. Don’t think about your lousy pride, or your appearance, and don’t, for God’s sake, give one thought or look to me or what I may be doing. That’ll wreck it instantly.”

  She was silent again. Her eyes studied my face for several seconds. Her tongue came out to moisten her lips.

  “All right,” she breathed. “All right, Matt.”

  I said, “And now let’s get over and confer with the mysterious gent behind you. If you roll over twice, you’ll be just about there.”

  “All right,” she said again, but she didn’t move at once. “Darling,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You lousy, calculating bastard.”

  I grinned at her. “You bitch,” I said. “You dirty, doublecrossing bitch.”

  She gave me a funny, shaky little smile, lying there, very close to me. Then she hunched herself around a bit, preparing for the awkward journey back into the corner. I saw her start and turn her head quickly. The man called Romero reared up just beyond her, having apparently made the trip while we were talking. His lips moved. I shook my head to indicate I couldn’t hear a word.

  It took us several minutes to get all three of us sitting up cozily, heads together, so we could converse above the engine noise.

  “All right,” I said to Romero, “let’s start with you. You’re a ham with a mike and a cheap tuxedo, telling the girls to take it off all the way. You’re a lousy mountain driver. What else are you?”

  “Listen—” he began angrily.

  Then he checked himself, grinned and spoke one word. I stared at him. I don’t mean that it proved anything conclusively. In a government the size of ours, you can’t supply a universal, reliable recognition signal for all undercover agencies; there’d be a leak somewhere. Anyway, I guess we just don’t trust each other enough to put our fives in each others’ hands, which is what it would amount to under certain circumstances.

  But there is a word of sorts, changed from time to time, and he had the current one. So, probably, did every foreign agent from Maine to California. As I say, it didn’t prove a thing—except that it made a lot of things that had happened make sense at last. I gave him the proper countersign. His eyes widened slightly.

  “Jim Romero,” he said.

  “Matt Helm,” I said. We don’t use the code names with outsiders, “Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re driving?”

  “Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re kicking?” He grimaced. “My God, what a foul-up! Did you have any trouble with Peyton?”

  “What about Peyton?”

  “He’s my boss on this job. I put him on your trail after I missed you in the mountains. He said, if he saw you, he’d have you watched until the time came, and then pick you up in the general roundup he was planning just before the test.”

  “He won’t thank you for the tip,” I said. “He met with a kind of accident. I kind of had to jump on him with both feet.”

  “So he went for you himself? I figured he’d want the credit of getting those films back.” Romero made another face. “Tough, aren’t you? You and your damn big feet! Where was Peyton’s Man Friday while this was going on?”

  “Bronkovic?” I said. “Why, he was trying to kill me, but the lady, here, got to work with a blunt instrument in the nick of time.”

  “Bronkovic isn’t a bad guy,” Romero said. “Peyton you can jump on all day, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose you have guys like that in your outfit.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but we try not to give them quite so much authority. Just where did you come into this, anyway? What were you doing down in Juarez?”

  He said grimly, “I was doing all right, until you people butted into the case, that’s what I was doing. I had a swell cover as M.C. in the joint, and everything was going fine. Then, first, along came that girl of yours who went over—I suppose she was yours. We may have our Peytons, but at least our female agents don’t fall into bed with the first handsome creep with a fast line... Well, never mind that. She was kind of a nice kid, but mixed-up as hell in both the sex and politics departments: a real naive save-the-world type, fundamentally.” After a moment, he glanced at Grail. “Excuse me, ma’am. I forgot. She was your sister, wasn’t she? I heard you say so that night, up on the stage there.”

  “It’s all right,” Gail said dryly. “We’re all kind of mixed up in my family. If we weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “And then,” Romero said to me, “just as we had things all set up to catch everybody with the goods— Naldi, your girl, Gunther, everybody—this lady comes wandering into the trap with Gunther. Well, that was all right. More grist for the mill, we figured. Then somebody heaved a knife and everything went to hell. None of my people could get where they were supposed to, the way everybody was milling around. You practically ruined me when I tried a fast retrieve—and who the hell were you? You ran off with the lady and the goods, saving the day for the other side
, as it looked to us. Gunther got away in the confusion. Naldi... well, we had nothing conclusive on Naldi, so there wasn’t anything we could do but keep an eye on him. He was too big to grab on mere suspicion. It was a mess.”

  “Tough,” I said. “If your chief in Washington had been willing to cooperate with mine, we might all have got together in time.”

  “Hell, your girl went over,” Romero said. “He wasn’t going to explain our set-up to you after that, maybe putting us all in jeopardy—me, for instance, making love to that damn mike in broken English. Anyway, there wasn’t a damn thing for me to do, afterwards, but take off after you and try to get the films back. I sent a query to Washington on you, of course, but I guess nobody was speaking to anybody by that time.”

  “What films?” I said. “They were sent off the next morning.”

  “How was I to know that. You did have them. At least she did,” he said with a gesture towards Gail. “I was lying there on the stage, groaning loudly, remember, while they were being passed. Wegmann, Carrizozo, the kid said before she died. I heard that. It was a new name to us; I thought it might be a lead. I gave it to Peyton with the rest of it, of course; but he said for me to work on it myself and try to do a better job than I’d done to date. You know that damn, cold, sneering voice of his.” Romero grimaced. “I guess I got over-eager, so here I am.”

  “How did they catch you?”

  “I was watching the filling station. A character in a power wagon drove in and made contact with Wegmann. I followed when the guy left. He came up in this direction. I was doing fine, shadowing him just like the manual says. Then I got stuck in the snow. That damn snow!”

  “That’ll teach you to follow a four-wheel-drive truck with an ordinary sedan,” I said, “and when will you border characters learn the use of chains?”

  “When we get enough snow to practice on regularly,” Romero said, “instead of just being buried in it once every couple of years. I was busy trying to dig out when they jumped me. They ditched the car somewhere and brought me here. It doesn’t make me look very brave and bright, I know. Now let’s hear about you.”