The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  He whirled to face the road leading uphill. Like him, I'd heard a small clicking sound from that direction, where somebody had accidentally kicked a loose rock that had bounced against another rock. I slipped over that way, and there was my female ally sneaking down the primitive track in her fashionable pale yellow pants suit, carrying her wide-brimmed hat in her hand. I guess she'd taken it off when she hid so he wouldn't spot it among the rocks. Well, that was bright enough, but what she was doing now wasn't. She'd been told to stay put until I came for her. She gave a little gasp as I slid down beside her.

  "Twenty yards more and you're dead," I said. "He's got a gun down there and he's nervous as a wet cat. Just scale your hat out there and see."

  "My hat?" She sounded as if the sacrifice was unthinkable and I was a beast for even suggesting it.

  "Okay, but get over between those rocks and cover your face with your arms. It's only in the movies that ricochets don't splatter a lot of stuff around." I waited until she was reasonably well sheltered, selected a rock about the size of a grapefruit, and rolled it down the road. He fired three times. I thought only the first two shots were intentional; at least they were the only ones that came our way, whining off the rocks and spraying splinters everywhere. The third was one he'd tried to stop but couldn't get the message in time to his over-anxious trigger finger although, realizing he'd been tricked, he'd already relaxed his aim. I lowered my arms and brushed dust out of my hair. "You see what I mean?" I asked.

  Mrs. O'Hearn was upset. "What's the matter with him?" she demanded indignantly. "He's supposed to be a ... a kind of officer of the law, isn't he? Can he just open fire on anybody like that, without warning or anything?"

  I grinned. "That's my girl. Just keep the law clearly in mind, doll. Somebody has to."

  "I'm not your girl, Mr. Helm," she said stiffly, "and I'm not anybody's doll. A six-foot, hundred-and-seventy-pound doll? Don't be silly!"

  Being shot at seemed to have given her some gumption and an unexpected sense of humor. I said, "Sorry for the familiarity, ma'am. Could I respectfully request that you stay right here for a few minutes?"

  "What are you going to do?"

  "If he likes to shoot, let's keep him shooting, by all means. I doubt he's overburdened with ammunition; it would spoil the drape of his haberdashery. In the Volksie, perhaps, but not on him. I've never seen the routine used effectively in real life, but there's always a first time. Now stay put so I know where I have you, please."

  I sneaked off to the left, since that was the side of the cars he'd been on when last seen. When I found a place from which I could cover the area, and peeked out cautiously, he was still there, although he'd moved between the vehicles for better cover. I didn't even ask myself why he hadn't taken this opportunity to slip away; I didn't have to. The answer was plain in his natty sports coat, sincere tie, sharply creased slacks, and shiny shoes. I had him trapped as completely as if I'd built an eight-foot chain-link fence around him, charged with fifty-thousand volts. He was a city boy, probably an eastern city boy. His car was his sole link with civilization. The idea of leaving it hadn't even occurred to him. What, strike out on foot and walk five miles to the highway? Through the desert?

  I took out my .38 Special, aimed it at the sky, and pulled the trigger. He whirled and shot at the noise, twice, knocking chips from some nearby boulders. I stood up and laughed at him.

  I'd hoped my appearance would draw a last hasty shot—that is, I hoped it was his last—but he just crouched there gripping his revolver with both hands, the way they're taught nowadays. I'm old enough to have learned one-handed, and it still looks peculiar to me. The shot I wanted didn't come.

  "Drop it or use it," I shouted. "Last chance for the kewpie doll."

  His face was shiny down there, although the day wasn't hot. I wondered again about the cause of his fear. It would be nice to think that I have such an awe-inspiring reputation, in Washington and elsewhere, that trained security agents turn green at the thought of confronting Horrible Helm in person. Honesty compels me to admit, however, that most of my fellow government employees have never heard of me; and those few who have mostly consider me just another of those weirdo spooks operating out of just another of those weirdo spook shops that waste the taxpayers' money playing "I Spy." Even though this guy had a little more information about our activities than most, he was taking it too big. He just had to have a guilty conscience to perspire so hard, about something that concerned me or my organization. I didn't like to think what it might be.

  The range was seventy-five yards, give or take five. That's stretching a short-barreled .38 under the best circumstances possible. I wasn't a bit certain I could hit him unless I took a solid rest against something. I was willing to gamble that he couldn't hit me, even using both hands. Of course there's always the lucky shot; but you can waste your whole life worrying about the guy with the silver bullet that's meant for you.

  "Any time, Lone Ranger," I called. "Fire at will."

  I saw him lick his lips down there and start to shout back, but he thought better of it. I took a step towards him, and another, picking the easiest way down the rocky hillside, sweating a little myself as I waited out the shot....

  "Over here."

  It was a feminine voice from off to the right—my right, his left. A large yellow object came sailing through the air. The BIS man whirled and fired instinctively, and the wide-brimmed hat soared a little farther and settled to the dusty ground. I aimed high and pulled the trigger of my Smith and Wesson. Whipsawed, threatened from two sides, he swung back to shoot at me, but his hammer fell on a fired chamber, telling me what I needed to know. He dropped the revolver and raised his hands. I went over and picked up the yellow hat and brushed it off. Clarissa O'Hearn appeared where the road ducked in among the boulders, and came forward a little uncertainly.

  "I told you to stay put," I said.

  She said defensively, "I told you. I'm not your girl and I'm not your doll." She took the hat from my hands and examined it. "He didn't hit it."

  "No."

  "What are you, a hero or something?" she demanded with sudden anger. "Standing there begging him to shoot holes in you!"

  She drew a long, rather shaky breath. "But what in the world is he so frightened about, Mr. Helm? I mean, you're undoubtedly a dreadful man, but you don't scare me that much, and I scare fairly easily."

  We both looked at the clean-cut young government employee with the horn-rimmed glasses, standing with his hands in the air although no such order had been given. I took the girl's arm and led her that way. When we came up, he faced us bravely for a moment, then looked away.

  "I think it's bad news, Mrs. O," I said.

  Clarissa frowned. "What do you mean?"

  "I think Roger is dead," I said. "He was arrested, you know, just as he expected, and it's the only answer that makes any sense. I think you're looking at your brother's murderer—one of your brother's murderers."

  "That's not true!" the BIS man gasped. "It isn't murder when... He was a government prisoner trying to.... It was incredible. He went absolutely ape; he grabbed a gun from his guard and started to.... We had no choice. He made us kill him!"

  I steadied the girl as she turned sharply and pressed her face against my shoulder.

  six

  Under more favorable circumstances, I'd have been more appreciative of the pleasant armful she made, more feminine and less substantial than she looked. I felt her straighten up, regaining control of herself with an effort.

  "Okay?" I asked, releasing her.

  "Yes," she breathed, "Yes, I'm okay. But..

  "What?"

  "Jack didn't do it! It wasn't his money in those stupid bank accounts! To kill him...!" Her voice broke.

  "I know," I said. I looked at the BIS character, whose arms were obviously getting tired up there, as if I cared. "What's your name?" I asked.

  "Kotis," he said. "Gregory Kotis. Look, Helm..."

  "What did he say to you,
Gregory Kotis?"

  "What?"

  "Jack Salter," I said. It was beginning to add up, but there were still a few numbers missing. "Code name Roger. A handsome chap with theatrical inclinations and the money to indulge them. I believe he'd actually had some Broadway experience before he found a different and more exciting outlet for his dramatic talents with us. But old habits die hard. Roger wouldn't have gone out without a curtain speech, if he could possibly swing it. What was it?"

  Kotis licked his lips. "Salter said... he said we were all dead men. Have fun, he whispered, looking up at us, particularly Mr. Euler, have fun as long as you last. As of now you're the walking dead. Helm will..." Kotis licked his lips once more. "That's all. Then he died."

  After a moment I said, "Old Roger always did have a ghoulish sense of humor. Obviously you didn't take him seriously, or you wouldn't have ventured to tail me out of town all by yourself."

  "Well, I couldn't stop to contact Mr. Euler at his hotel without losing you; and anyway, one gets hardened to melodramatic threats." Kotis tried for a bit of brave nonchalance. "Somebody's always going to get us if it's the last thing he does, and it never happens. It wasn't until... until I got up into this weird crack in the hills and saw the crazy way you'd set the trap.... Just what the hell do you think you're doing, Helm? You're a fugitive from justice. You must know you can't possibly get away with..."

  I sighed wearily. "Mr. Kotis, the last man who told me what I couldn't get away with got a nice, sharp knife inserted into his anatomy, all the way. Don't tempt me. This trigger pulls real easy." After a little, I went on: "So you realized you weren't in a very nice spot, and those melodramatic threats came back to haunt you. Is that why you hit the panic button?"

  He didn't answer that. He said, "Look, my arms are getting tired, can't I—"

  "Any time," I said. "Of course, when you lower them I'll blow a hole in you as big as your fist, but go right ahead if you think it's worth it."

  His arms, about to relax, became rigid once more. He said angrily, "Goddamn it, Helm, you're way out of line! We both work for the same employer—"

  I stared at him, surprised. "You can't have it both ways, amigo. If I'm a fugitive from justice, I'm not working for anybody but me. Anyway, I wouldn't take orders from that self-righteous fanatic you work for, not for a thousand bucks a minute."

  "Mr. Euler isn't..." He stopped that. "I didn't mean Mr. Euler. I meant the United States of America."

  I regarded him for a moment, with a little more respect. I said, "I'm supposed to be a traitor, a high-priced, forty-grand Benedict Arnold. Why waste the patriot routine on me?" I shook my head. "And on the other hand, if we are working for the same employer, as you say, the same country, what the hell are you doing here? Why are you interfering with a government mission and shooting down trained and valuable government agents—all in the line of your patriotic duty? How do you justify that, Mr. Kotis?"

  "Salter was under arrest—"

  "For something any fool can see is a frame."

  "We've got evidence—"

  "Money in the bank? Getting money out of a bank is the hard part; any fool can put it in."

  "He had ten thousand of it on him! If he was so innocent, why didn't he protest at once that it didn't belong to him, instead of drawing it out and sneaking off with it?"

  "Maybe he had the strange notion that if he did protest, nobody'd believe him."

  "We have the sworn statement of a witness who claims to have paid you and Salter and others for services contrary to the interest of—"

  "You see?" I said. "Roger was perfectly right."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If he had protested that the money wasn't his, you wouldn't have believed him. You'd have taken the word of a professional turncoat and professional liar—look up the record of this guy Groening, or Gerber, or Gulick some time—against the word of a U.S. agent with a fine record who'd risked his life for his country a dozen times. Your chief is so eager to get us that on the word of a cheap fink he'll have us arrested and dragged off and shot.... Where?"

  "What?"

  "You heard me. Where was Roger taken so that you could kill him at your leisure?"

  "I told you, it wasn't like that! He tried to—"

  "Never mind how it was." His eyes told me I was on the trail of something important. "I was asking you where it was."

  Kotis hesitated. "I'm not at liberty to tell you where," he said stiffly, at last. "And we were perfectly justified in what we did. After all, he had a gun—"

  "Pretty damned sloppy work, I'd say, letting a prisoner reach a gun."

  "Maybe, but if he was innocent, why did he make a break like that?"

  I looked at Kotis bleakly for a moment. "Break?" I said. "What the hell gave you the idea he was making a break?"

  "I was there! I saw—"

  "And I'm here; and I know a lot more about guys like Roger than you do, my friend. Who do you think you're dealing with, anyway? What the hell kind of tender characters do you think take on our kind of work?"

  Kotis frowned. "What are you trying to say, Helm?"

  I said grimly, "I'm trying to say that you're dealing with a special kind of people, and Roger was just a little more special than most. He was one of the real go-for-broke boys. Impulsive, you might say. Great nations often find such individuals very useful, Mr. Kotis, properly supervised and controlled—these days it's hard to find folks who haven't been brainwashed to think they're supposed to live forever. We grab all of them we can get; even so, it's hard to keep a supply on hand since they are, so to speak, self-expendable. You'll have to check the psychological profile to see how Roger got that way. My guess is he'd always resented being a pretty, rich boy. Maybe he thought he had to prove that a guy could be handsome and wealthy and still be smart and tough and dangerous." I glanced at the woman beside me. "How about it, Mrs. O'Hearn?"

  She had a damp handerchief clutched in her hand, and her eyes were red. She nodded. "Jack was always having to prove something, I'm afraid."

  I shrugged. "Okay. Maybe he joined us to show up all those who figured he had to be a pansy because of his looks and money. Hell, I don't know. I do know that the one time I worked with him I kept clearly in mind, as always with guys like that, that I was teamed up with General George Armstrong Custer looking for his Last Stand. I didn't let him find it, but apparently you and your outfit did. That poses a question, Mr. Kotis. Roger needed to get good and sore at somebody before he'd really blow up. Like I told his sister just now, he was a natural-born retaliator; but a bunch of civil servants legally and courteously investigating a peculiar frame-up wouldn't have set him off. Just what the hell did you people do to light the fuse?"

  There was again that embarrassed hesitation. Kotis said, "Why, we... we were just interrogating—"

  I said, "Interrogating. Sure. That's all Torquemada ever did, as I recall. Although he didn't call it interrogation; he called it inquisition. Well, we'll learn the details eventually, don't think we won't, but never kid yourself for a moment that Roger was making a violent break for freedom. For one thing, it's against our ground rules in the case of a legal arrest in this country, even one based on a frame or misunderstanding. For another, if he'd really been trying to escape, being a pro he'd probably have made it. No, I figure you bastards simply annoyed him past the point of no return.... How many?"

  "What?"

  "How many?" I snapped. "How many of you did he get before you burned him?"

  Kotis swallowed. "Three. And one, the guard from whom he got the gun, is totally paralyzed and slowly dying from a bullet in the head. I've never seen anything ... just like target practice. It was horrible. He was just standing there firing deliberately, one, two, three, and they were going down like.... That's when Mr. Euler and I... everybody was charging in there shooting... and then, when we went over, your man was lying there grinning like a wolf. A satisfied wolf. And he told us we were all dead. And died." The BIS man shivered slightly. "I've been tryi
ng to understand... Salter couldn't possibly have hoped... he wasn't even trying to run."

  "There's nothing very difficult to understand," I said. "You took an innocent man arrested on phony evidence, a man trained to kill, and then you were stupid enough to push him around enough to make him even madder than he already was. What the hell did you expect? At that point, all he wanted was to take a reasonable number of you sons of bitches to hell with him, which is exactly what he did. Now, wherever he is, he's having a lot of fun hoping that, after the fancy buildup he gave me with his dying breath, you'll put me in a spot where I'll have to make a few more gory additions to his death list.... Thanks a lot, Roger, old pal!" I grimaced. "Oh, hell, put your arms down before they fall off. How about answering a few questions? I won't ask you anything top secret, I promise."

  Kotis lowered his arms and flexed them gratefully. "What do you want to know?"

  "I presume, in interrogating Roger, you asked what he was doing in this part of the country besides putting illicit money into the bank. What was his answer?"

  "He said he was on the trail of a man, a dangerous man."

  "The name?"

  "I can't remember. Actually, under the circumstances, we didn't take his story too seriously.... Oh, all right, it was German, like an old camera.... Voightlander? No, Ernemann. That's it, Ernemann. According to your agent Salter, this Ernemann was on a deadly mission in Mexico and it was Salter's duty to intercept and dispose of him."

  "And the target of this deadly mission?"

  "According to Salter, the proposed victim was a Mexican general with political ambitions—he's been in the papers from time to time, I think—named Hernando Díaz." Kotis laughed shortly. "Well, that's what Salter said. Not a very likely story, is it: an American agent assigned to protect a Mexican army officer in Mexico. They don't love us so much down there that they come asking us for that kind of help in internal matters. Obviously, it was just Salter's convenient excuse.... After all, we caught him just as he was about to slip across the border south of Yuma."