Matt Helm--The Interlopers (27 page)

However, it really made very little difference whether she was now going to spill her guts through weakness, or whether she’d already betrayed me to Holz because she was working for him or with him. In either case, the man knew or soon would know all he really needed to know about me: my name. It made me feel no better to remember that I’d supplied her with the information, at a time when it didn’t seem particularly important.

So far Holz had given no sign that he recognized me, but that could be just part of the cat-and-mouse game they like to play. My dossier was in files to which he had access, I was quite sure. With the name, he’d be bound to make the connection, if he hadn’t already. Knowing for whom I really worked, he’d know what I’d been sent here to do.

“All right. Up, you!” It was the man called Jack, sticking his head in the canvas doorway. He was addressing me.

I said, “Sure, if you tell me how.”

He knelt to untie my ankles. “All right, come along and no funny business!”

The big tent to which he took me was warm and comfortable, with a fire crackling in the sheet-metal stove. The elderly Indian was busy cooking something that reminded me I hadn’t eaten since early morning. At the rear of the tent, some planks had been laid across impromptu trestles to form a table. The chairs were just chunks sawed off an eighteen-inch log. Jack kicked one of these up to the table and wrestled me down on it with unnecessary force.

I was beginning not to like the man very much, but I had to admit that, despite the plump appearance I’d noted this morning, he was no weakling. Besides, he didn’t look nearly as soft and flabby in the rough clothes he was wearing now. I decided that he wasn’t as much plagued with incipient obesity as he was simply built round to start with.

Holz was sitting on the other side of the table, on another improvised stool, or chopping block. In front of him lay a number of exhibits: Grant Nystrom’s .357 Magnum revolver and holster, the Buck knife I’d picked up in Prince Rupert, and two black dog collars. There was also some other gear, including a fine, scope-sighted, bolt-action rifle and a box of 7mm Remington Magnum cartridges. They’re all Magnums these days, rifles and pistols both.

“Well, Mr. Nystrom?” Holz said.

“Is that a question?” I asked. “If so, rephrase it, and I’ll decide whether or not to answer it.”

Jack swung a hard fist to the side of my head and knocked me off the log. I picked myself up with some difficulty, since my hands were still tied. Jack slammed me back down on the primitive chair.

“Don’t talk like that to Mr. Wood,” Jack said mildly.

I didn’t say anything. Holz waited a little; then said, “These are the collars we got from the dog and from the two boys in the delivery truck. They are worthless, as you doubtless know. Where is the real one?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jack knocked me off the log once more, and I went through the routine of getting up and being rammed back into my seat.

When he was through, I said again, “I don’t know.”

Jack started to raise his fist. Holz shook his head. “No,” he said, “that’ll be all, Jack.”

“But, Mr. Wood…”

“That’ll be all.”

Jack shuffled out reluctantly. The Indian at the stove continued his cooking, oblivious of the rest of us. I faced Holz across the table, remembering that he’d killed, among a lot of other people, a colleague of mine called Kingston—but I hadn’t been fond enough of Kingston for it to matter here. Holz’s soot-black hair and mustache looked phonier than ever. Then I realized they were supposed to look that way. It wasn’t a question of deceiving anybody now, it was a matter of preventing anybody from recognizing him later.

Shave the toothbrush from the upper lip, wash the dye and stickum out of the slick, shiny hair, throw away the silly, gold-rimmed, schoolteacher glasses, and you’d have a different man, one nobody who’d seen him in Alaska would find even slightly familiar. He had the dead-white, coarse, rather thick-looking skin with large pores that often seems to grow in eastern Europe. His eyes were a slaty gray color. They watched me steadily across the table. Abruptly and surprisingly, he gave a little laugh.

“Well, Mr. Nystrom, are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?”

“That was the type of interrogation you expected, was it not? I didn’t want to disappoint you.” When I said nothing, he went on, “Of course, we are no longer interested in the dog’s missing collar. We know that all five studs contained nothing but substitute messages. Four substitutions were engineered by the young men in that very interesting mobile laboratory, and the last one by me. I, of course, took personal charge of the real information from the final drop. From the young men in question, I got the material from the previous drops. They’d kept it in an ingeniously hidden safe in their van, the location of which they were persuaded to disclose to me.”

He drew a small white envelope from the pocket of his heavy wool shirt and shook five tinfoil disks into his hand, answering one question posed by Mr. Smith’s compulsive secrecy. I’d never been told exactly what juggling tricks were being performed in the fancy lab van, but apparently it had been a simple disk-switch routine that you’d think could have been performed in an ordinary family sedan—if you didn’t know the way things worked in Washington. After a moment, Holz replaced the wafers in the envelope and put the envelope back into his pocket.

“Persuaded,” I said. “As a matter of curiosity, which one did you persuade?”

Holz smiled faintly. “That is a stupid question. You know perfectly well that the young fellow with the beard was the tough one of the pair. It was easy to determine. Any captive who wastes his breath telling me what I cannot get away with is obviously a fool and probably a weak fool. The bearded one kept his mouth shut; the other one babbled dire threats and promises of violent retaliation. So we started with him. It did not take long. He soon told us everything—well, almost everything.”

“What didn’t he tell you?”

“He didn’t tell us about you, Mr. Nystrom. His principles were at stake, it seems. He could be persuaded to tell us about things, inanimate objects, but he wouldn’t betray, as he put it, people.” Holz laughed shortly. “They draw all kinds of high-principled lines, these foolish young men.” He raised his slaty eyes to study my face. “Are you going to be afflicted by principles, Mr. Nystrom?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I lost my last ones years ago. What do you want to know?”

“The collar. Just out of curiosity, I would like to know where it is.”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said, which was technically true. I might guess, but I didn’t know.

Holz stared at me for a full minute. Then he shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Very well. I’ll accept that. Will you give me your real name?”

“Sure, why not?” If he didn’t get it from me, the way things were, he’d get it from Libby. I might as well get the credit for frankness. “The name is Helm, Matthew Helm. Cross-filed under the code name Eric.”

“Ah. I thought there was something familiar…”

He stopped. There was a lengthy silence. Well, it was about time he made the connection. As it was, my professional pride was hurt. I’d thought I was better known in the circles in which Holz moved than his reactions had indicated.

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” he said at last. I didn’t say anything, and he went on slowly: “What are you doing here? If I remember the dossier correctly, counterespionage is not your line.”

“Another organization had a dead man to match,” I said. “They needed to borrow a trustworthy agent, six-four, a hundred and ninety, blue eyes, white hair. The personnel computer doubled up in agony and vomited up my name. The hair was bleached, and here I am, Grant Nystrom at your service.”

Holz heard me out, but he didn’t seem to be listening very hard. His eyes, narrowed, were studying me intently, and I knew that he knew, instinctively, what I was there for. I also knew, suddenly, that he wasn’t going to act upon this instinctive knowledge because he, too, had his professional pride.

The sensible thing for him to do was to pull out his little Spanish gun, or load up the big 7mm, and shoot me through the head right now. But if he did that, right after being informed of my identity, I might, in my dying moments, have thought he was afraid of a fellow pro named Matt Helm. Or
he
might have thought he was afraid of me, and that would not do. So, to reassure both of us, he was going to behave toward me exactly as he’d planned from the start. Well, we all have our weaknesses, dogs or pride or whatever.

“And the lady?” Holz said at last.

I gave him the story Libby had given me, watching him to see what it meant to him. “She works for the same department as the bearded guy you got and his talkative friend, the people who drafted me for this play acting. She was planted on your San Francisco people some time back, I gather. She recruited Nystrom for them—the real Nystrom—and gave him the sex treatment, and he responded very well. She had him under perfect control and pumped him for information at will, whatever information she couldn’t get herself as a member of the cell in good standing. She was probably the one who recommended trying this impersonation when he got killed, but I don’t know that for sure. She did come along north to give me a hand in playing the role, and as you know I found her especially useful in Seattle.”

“Yes,” Holz said, “but that man of ours, Stottman, was apparently not deceived.”

“No,” I said. “But it took him a little time to get his message across to the rest of you by way of Pete. I can’t tell you the lady’s real name. She never told me.”

Holz nodded, apparently satisfied. After a moment, he smiled faintly. “For what you are, you were remarkably easy to catch, Mr. Helm.”

I shrugged. “I got careless, I guess.”

He said a strange thing then. He said, quietly, “It’s a lonely life, my friend.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t speak for a little, and I could hear the night breeze going through the trees outside. The canvas of the tent stirred and subsided. The old Indian shoved a couple of sticks of wood into the stove, and juggled some pans to catch the heat exactly right.

Holz said, “I was in prison once, Mr. Helm. Well, I have been there more than once, but this time it was intentional. I was assigned to reach and silence a certain prisoner. First they put me in a cell alone, for observation. It was not a very clean or well-run place. There were, among other things, rats. One in particular considered my cell his territory. As the weeks went on, I made friends with him. It was something to do. One day the guard came in unexpectedly. My rodent friend had lost, to some extent, his fear of man; also he’d learned that visitors usually meant food. He came too close, and the guard stamped his boot, once. It was what the man had come in for, to deprive me of that bit of companionship. I killed him.”

I didn’t say anything. Holz waited a little and went on: “I couldn’t help myself, Mr. Helm. I struck once and he was dead. It was a blow that, in my role as prisoner, I should not have known. It blew my cover instantly. It wrecked my mission and almost caused my death. All for a small, dirty, brown rat.”

There was another silence. I didn’t speak. Anything he wanted to give me, I was happy to take. He’d already given me more than he should have. He’d given me the clue to his sad, soft way of talking. He’d told me I was dealing with a man who’d been in the business too long.

He said gently, “I am explaining how I knew you would come to the cry of the dog, after traveling with him for a week. It is a lonely and dirty business. We take what friends we can get, do we not, Mr. Helm?” After a moment of silence, he went on more briskly, “Jack will escort you back to your tent. You will live, if you do not try to escape, until the plane arrives tomorrow afternoon. There may be some further questions they’ll want to put to you or the woman. This impersonation of yours has worried them greatly. They may even take one or both of you away with them alive, but I would not count on that. Good night, Mr. Helm.” He waited until I had reached the door, where Jack had appeared as if summoned. Then he said, “Oh, just one more thing.”

I watched him rise and come to me. He was smiling faintly. He said, “Now I remember the dossier more clearly. I think I will take that belt. Since you are going nowhere, you should have no trouble keeping up your trousers without it.”

Well, it wasn’t unexpected. These days the belt trick is only good for amateurs anyway, and for all his sadness, he was no amateur. Back in the tent, I told Libby as much as she needed, to know. We were fed and given a tarpaulin to lie on and a couple of blankets to wrap up in. Huddled together for warmth, still in our damp clothes, we lay and listened to the rain start up again, pattering on the canvas above us.

“Matt?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did he ask about the collar?”

“Yes. I told him I didn’t know where it was.”

She sighed. “I suppose he’ll question me in the morning. I’m not looking forward to it. Have you got any bright ideas for getting us out of here.”

“No,” I said. “Not any.”

I didn’t, either, now that the belt was gone. There should have been some way I could take advantage of the weakness Holz had shown me, but I couldn’t think of an appropriate lever.

I lay beside Libby, wondering who the hell she really was. I mean, there in the big tent just now it had been clearly established that she had not been in communication with Holz, after all. I was as sure as I could be of anything that my name had come as a real surprise to him tonight; yet she had known it for the better part of a week.

I must have gone to sleep. The next thing I knew, something energetic had burst into the tent like a cyclone and my face was being licked by a cold, wet, affectionate tongue.

The pup was crazy with happiness at having found me. He was all over me—all over both of us. Libby woke up with a gasp.

“What—”

“Shhh!” I hissed. “It’s just Hank… Easy now, Prince Hannibal. Relax. You’ll have them all rushing in here…”

“You mean he’s followed us all this way?” Libby sounded incredulous. “My God, how could he? We must be forty or fifty miles from that filling station… Ouch, can’t you keep him off my face?”