The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  "You're all set to go, Matt," said the salesman. I'd never seen him before we commenced negotiations, but he'd been giving my first name a workout from the moment he'd learned it. "I even managed to promote you a license plate on short notice; I've got a friend over in the Department of Motor Vehicles. Your registration's in the glove compartment." He patted the hood as we stopped by the husky carryall. "She's been all checked over, and you've got a full tank of gas, thirty-one gallons; it's the oversized tank, remember. And don't forget what I showed you—she's in four-wheel drive all the time. There's no messing around with the front hubs like on the old jeeps. If you really need traction, just pull that transfer-case lever into lock, low or high. But don't leave it there when you get back to dry pavement or you'll strain something." He shook my hand. "Thanks for the business, Matt, and good hunting."

  I glanced at him sharply, suspecting irony, but he was obviously quite sincere. Nobody'd been at him yet. He didn't know that, instead of being the hunter, as in the original script, I was now the hunted. He really wasn't a bad guy despite the Matt-old-pal act I'd found a bit jarring after my months overseas where they address their customers more formally. At least he was conscientious and knew his business. You'd be surprised how many of them can't begin to tell you the gas tank capacities or rear end ratios of the high-priced dreamboats they're trying to peddle.

  I climbed to the lofty seat—those 4WD jobs ride a bit higher than even regular trucks. I turned the key in the ignition and the big V8 up front came to life with satisfactory promptness. The salesman gave us a farewell salute as we rolled magnificently off the lot and onto the street, pausing to let a battered old Volkswagen go by, almost too small for us to bother about; but we were tolerant, we didn't squash tiny insects unnecessarily.

  It had been some time since I'd sat at the wheel of a commercial vehicle, and I'd forgotten how much better the view was from up there. I could see right over most of the traffic ahead. For all its size and weight, and its stiff newness, the monster was quite responsive. I wouldn't have wanted to try cornering it with a Jag or Ferrari; but then, a sports car or any other car wouldn't last long trying to follow it across country, something I planned to keep in mind. Conspicuous and a bit unwieldy, it wasn't exactly the chariot I'd have selected to cope with the situation that now confronted me, but it did have its advantages....

  She was still where I'd left her: big, timid, sweet-faced Mrs. Oscar O'Hearn. It was something I wouldn't have bet on. After all, she'd completed her mission. She'd warned me. She'd handed over Roger's ten thousand bucks, making me a walking mint. There wasn't really any good reason for her to hang around except that I'd asked her to—there were some questions I thought she might be able to answer. But the Continental was still parked down the side street where I'd left it. She got out when she saw me. I'd told her what to expect, and she could hardly miss the shiny blue beast coming around the corner. I started to pull up behind the Lincoln, glancing instinctively at the rearview mirror as I slowed. In the glass, I saw a Volkswagen turning the corner behind me.

  It was quite obviously the one I'd just missed as I'd left the Chevy dealer's lot, a white bug of uncertain vintage. The front bumper had led a hard life. One fender had had a dent hammered out amateurishly and covered with paint that wasn't quite the right shade of white. I remembered my fleeting thought that Andrew Euler's people wouldn't use a Lincoln where a Volksie would do. Apparently my ESP was in fine shape. It was just my common sense that was lacking. I'd been so intrigued with my new three-ton toy that I'd neglected to take the elementary precautions.

  It was too late to drive on. I'd already hit the brakes; the flash of the tail lights would have told the driver astern where I'd intended to stop even if I kept going. Anyway, there was the lady standing by the big coupe expectantly. He'd have her description and her car's fixed in his mind already; the veriest rookie couldn't overlook a striking combination like that. I pulled up behind the Lincoln.

  The bug rolled past. One man. Brown hair, worn fashionably shaggy but not too long. Horn-rimmed glasses on a boyish, pug-nosed face. One of the clean-cut lads, oozing dedication and sincerity, probably with a high-class degree in something from somewhere, now saving the U.S. from treason and subversion. Not that my eyes are good enough to spot all that with one glance at a passing car, but I'd had a few encounters with security before. It's a calling that seems to draw humorless fanatics, young and old, like red syrup attracts hummingbirds.

  You know that he has always been a good friend of this organization, Mac had said, speaking of Euler. Like most of the things he'd said, that statement had been exactly reversed from the truth. Actually, Andrew Euler was known to hate our guts with moralistic fervor. It was his contention that a nasty outfit like ours did not belong in the kind of nice, civilized, democratic government for which he acted as self-appointed conscience. In this connection, his attitude was much like that of Mrs. Oscar O'Hearn.

  We'd looked after our own security for years, with reasonable success, but Euler was a reform-type empire builder like so many in Washington. After taking over the Bureau of Internal Security, he'd gradually established it as the nation's sole defense against those who would destroy us from within, a shocking number to hear him tell it. His doomsday approach had impressed enough legislators that he'd finally been given the right to extend his poking and prying into even the darker corners of governmental activity previously forbidden to him, like ours. What he'd learned about Mac's operation had upset him seriously. Its existence, he'd announced, was a blot on the otherwise stainless moral fabric of our nation that should be erased at once.

  A field man myself, I don't keep up with all the bureaucratic infighting that goes on in that town, but reliable sources had reported to me that Euler had succeeded in getting himself slapped down hard. Mac is an old bureaucratic infighter from away back; and he's survived a lot of idealistic reformers. Since then, friend Andrew had refrained from further frontal attacks, but our routine security checkups under the new dispensation tended to be on the vindictive side. Nobody doubted that he was hoping to get something on us sooner or later and make it stick; something, for instance, like three agents with large sums of money in the bank they couldn't, or wouldn't, account for....

  "Some folks wait for the all-clear before they come out of their foxholes," I said as Clarissa O'Hearn came up to the truck. "Others get their heads shot off."

  Her eyes widened, and she glanced in the direction the VW had taken. "You mean—"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "It wasn't your fault; he'd have spotted your car even if you'd been lying on the floor. I goofed. But that's almost certainly a government snoop, maybe one of those you saw at my hotel. I figure he's been to the bank where he learned about the draft made out in my name, payable to Mr. Chevrolet. He was on his way there to ask questions when he saw me driving away and recognized me. He turned around and followed. Of course I should have spotted him behind me; I was just too damned entranced by all my pretty new knobs and levers. You can kick me if you like."

  "Oh, dear," she said helplessly. "Oh, dear, what do you think he'll do? What can we do?"

  "Well," I said, "as soon as he gets to a phone he'll undoubtedly report my contact with a handsome six-foot dame with a twelve-grand turnpike cruiser, Arizona license whatever-it-is. So we'd better not let him get to a phone until we've had time to think this over. I suggest a little ride in the country before he can find himself a booth and a dime...."

  four

  Formerly, leaving Santa Fe southwards, you were out in coyote-and-prairie-dog country almost immediately; nowadays, the town peters out gradually through a dismal twilight zone of gas stations and drive-ins and housing developments that no self-respecting wild canine or rodent would tolerate. The desert is still out there, however; you just have to drive a little farther to find it.

  Checking the mirrors—the outside ones were big truck-style jobs that gave a fine wide-screen view—I saw Clarissa coming along bravely in her royal-blue
chariot, although she was undoubtedly sweating blood at the sizzling velocity of fifty-five miles per hour. Farther back, the shabby white Volkswagen was also keeping station in a commendable fashion, trying to hide itself as much as possible behind larger vehicles. It had no visible radio antenna. There was always the possiblity of a walkie-talkie instrument of some kind, but that was the kind of expensive gadgetry that I hoped Mr. Euler's underprivileged minions had to struggle along without. There was a good possibility, I decided, that I'd detached the guy from his task group—Strike Force Helm?—without anybody being aware of it but him, at least for the moment.

  A few miles out of town, I swung off the four-lane highway onto a secondary road. The first time I took that road, years ago, it was a real wilderness experience; now the arroyos have all been bridged, and the thoroughfare has been graded, widened, and paved, taking all the adventure out of it. It was a nice morning for driving, however; the kind of day on which, out there, you can see farther than a citizen of the smoky East, or the smoggy West, would believe possible. There was heavy snow on the higher elevations of the twelve-thousand-foot Sangre de Cristo Mountains towering behind us; this winter the skiers had it made. There were even occasional patches of snow in the deeper shade down where we were. Elsewhere the plains were yellow-brown except for the distinct green shapes of the desert junipers, very individualistic and antisocial little trees growng well apart from each other.

  I led my three-car caravan through an old mining town and up through the hills beyond and down the other side, more or less driving by the seat of my pants. The new-road construction had changed things around a bit since I was last there. I was heading for a spot in the next range of hills that I remembered. Presently I pulled off onto a ranch road and stopped to open a gate in a barbed wire fence. I got back behind the wheel to drive through it, leaving room enough behind the truck for the Continental. After getting out again and closing the gate behind us, I stopped by the coupe. The power window slid down smoothly. Clarissa's face had a worried look.

  "Should we... I mean, this is private property, isn't it?"

  Respectable people always amaze me. Her whole life as wealthy Mrs. Oscar O'Hearn might be at stake, but the lady was worrying about a spot of trespass!

  I grinned. "What the hell kind of an Arizona girl are you, Mrs. O? Remember the old Western saying: 'Signs are for people; fences are for cows.' I don't see any 'posted' signs, do you? Not that I'd let them bother me if I did, with my career and your reputation at stake."

  "I'm not really an Arizona girl," she said. "I'm a transplanted Pennsylvanian."

  "I know. The rich and aristocratic part of Philadelphia, no less. Your brother was always kidding about what his snooty ancestors would do if they could see him.... Ah, our boy almost overran us," I said, watching the road. "Now he's going to wait back in that dip where we can't see.... Okay. We've still got him on the string. When he starts after us again, it'll take him a little while to work the gate; that'll give us a lead. Now, please do exactly what I tell you...."

  In spite of the changes that had been made in the area, I'd hit the right place. The dim ranch road took us straight into the hills, dwindling into a couple of wheel-tracks running up a shallow wash that gradually got deeper and steeper until it graduated from the arroyo class and became a real little canyon. The bottom was sandy, and the road crossed and recrossed it; a nasty spot to be caught in a flash flood. Judging by the clear sky, there was no risk of that today, but long ago I'd come up here with my family—well, my wife had remarried, so it was another man's family now—looking for a pleasant, private spot for a picnic. The clouds had pulled together up ahead, thunder had started to roll, and we'd got the hell out fast, but for some reason the place had stuck in my memory all these years....

  The side arroyo was just where I recalled it. I cut left across the sandy canyon floor. In the mirrors, I saw Clarissa drive on up the road as instructed, in the big car that wasn't exactly made for this kind of work. Well, she didn't have much farther to go. Fortunately, this kind of work was exactly what my vehicle had been made for. When the wheels started to dig into the sand, I grabbed the big lever sticking out of the floor and dragged it into the locked position, just as the salesman had told me. It worked. With all four wheels pulling hard, we paddle-wheeled across the main canyon, found solid ground again, and crawled up into the left-hand branch until a rock wall hid us from sight.

  Stopping, I took advantage of the pause to get out the adhesive tape and the plastic bags I'd picked up in the drug store, and the two ten-grand rolls of bills, original owner unknown, from my account and Roger's. Working rapidly, I taped packets of money to myself and to the car, in places I hoped weren't too obvious. By the time I was finished, I could hear the doodlebug coming. Then the sound stopped. I moved out to where I could peek around the corner of rock, wondering what was taking our shadow so long. We'd hit nothing below that should have bothered a Volkswagen.

  But he was just being careful, stopping to scout ahead on foot whenever the road, such as it was, looked favorable for an ambush. I saw him stick his head out briefly; a few minutes later I heard the distinctive note of the flat-four motor again. There he came, feeling his way slowly. At the fork, where my side canyon branched off, he stopped and looked around once more. My tracks were clear in the sand—well, that's not quite true. It was obvious that something had been driven across the canyon at some time since the last water had run there and smoothed everything out, but these days people drive jeeps all over the desert, and it's hard to tell the age of wheel-tracks in soft sand. Clear, they're not.

  The young BIS man frowned at the blurred tire-furrows and seemed about to investigate them further; then some sounds drifted down the canyon from above and caused him to look that way. There was a lot of back-and-forth grinding up there; obviously a car in trouble, trying to get out. He climbed back into his Volkswagen and headed that way.

  When he was gone, I threw the truck into reverse and backed quickly out of there. I had no room to turn; I just kept her rolling astern through the deep sand and back onto the road. I remembered to unlock the transfer case; the salesman would have been proud of me. I'm not, as you'll gather, a four-wheel-drive expert. I used to think a good man ought to be able to get a conventional vehicle just about anywhere. The few times when a true off-road machine has really been needed in the line of duty, I've always had a trained jeep-jockey assigned to manage it for me. I'd bought this 4x4 merely to give me a nice, safe edge over the unknown hitman—as I'd thought him—in the Lincoln, in the rugged country to which I'd planned to decoy him. Well, it was a gambit that could be applied to cars other than Lincolns.

  I put the truck into forward gear and headed after the Volkswagen. We had him between us now. He was in the bag.

  five

  I didn't drive right up there, of course, even though I don't have a great deal of respect for the Security boys. I picked a narrow spot well below, where the truck would block the road effectively. I set the brake and departed on foot, leaving the carryall locked behind me. If he did manage to slip by me, he'd need two keys to move it, one for the doors and one for the ignition: the newest example of the peculiar modern auto-merchandising principle that the convenience of the cash customer doesn't mean a damned thing as long as you can please the insurance companies and the Feds. Personally, I'd prefer to use just one handy key for everything and take my chance of being ripped off, but I was only the guy who'd paid for the bucket so naturally nobody'd asked me.

  I made my way up there silently, keeping among the rocks. When I peeked out, he was nowhere in sight. There were no people to be seen in the little hollow ahead, just the two cars. There was the Lincoln, empty and locked, barring the road upwards, with tire-tracks showing where it had been run back and forth several times to make the appropriate stuck-in-the-sand noises. Behind it was the Volkswagen, also empty, with the door hanging open. I glanced at my watch and settled down to wait.

  He'd shown promise below wi
th his cautious approach, but he disappointed me now. He wasn't really very good. I'd been afraid he'd outlast the lady, whom I'd instructed to stay in hiding but didn't trust very far. I needn't have worried. Eleven minutes of desert silence was all he could take. Then he came sneaking out from behind a boulder and made a dash for his car. He got it going. He got it turned around although he didn't have much room; even with that short wheelbase it took a lot of backing and filling. Then he was bouncing recklessly downhill past my hiding place. What the hell he thought he was accomplishing I had no idea. I mean, he'd just run the route, hadn't he? He'd seen what kind of a single-track railroad it was. He couldn't possibly believe that I'd be considerate enough to go to a lot of trouble to park my big vehicle off to the side so he could drive away, could he?

  I sighed, and shuffled back down there cautiously, taking my time, and taking no chances. You've got to be careful, dealing with idiots. They're apt to catch you by surprise by doing something so dumb you wouldn't believe a grown person could actually behave like that

  When I got down there, the Volkswagen was stopped, almost touching the truck's massive front bumper. He'd gone just as far as he could go. He was standing by his car, looking around fearfully, gun in hand. I frowned. He seemed to be overreacting to the situation. I mean, those boys are generally pretty cocky, not to say arrogant. They're used to pushing, not to being pushed. I hadn't expected him to grasp, really grasp, that the low, traitorous type he'd been tailing in a routine way had actually set a trap for him. The folks with whom his organization normally dealt didn't fight back, except perhaps with lawyers and words.

  But this guy was in a pants-wetting panic. I didn't like it. He obviously knew something I didn't. He was acting as if he thought I had a very good reason to set traps for him, a reason quite apart from the fact that he was doing his duty as a good little security man. There was only one explanation for his behavior that I could think of....