Matt Helm--The Interlopers (30 page)

I drew a long breath and lay there waiting for something that would give me a clue to what was going on. There was no more shooting, and for a while nothing moved, either below or on the high slopes I was watching. Then I saw a distant horseman fording the river below camp—a horsewoman, rather. I couldn’t actually make out the face or the sex at the distance; but the rider was dressed in a yellow-brown outfit. Pat Bellman had been wearing her familiar denims when last seen. Davis had been in jeans and a dark green windbreaker; Holz in his checked wool lumberman’s rig.

Watching Libby approach along the trail, wondering how she’d worked it, I almost forgot the man I’d come several thousand miles to meet. I was warned by a hint of movement at the very edge of my vision, high up around the mountainside where the stony slope ran up against a perpendicular wall of solid rock. Looking that way intently, I saw nothing for several minutes; then Holz came into sight once more, moving diagonally toward me. Obviously he’d been hiding high above the spot I’d expected him, just a little too far around the curving hillside to see me as I sneaked into place. Maybe my psychological warfare had had some effect after all, making him too nervous to stay in the one place.

He was using his rifle as a crutch, cautiously, as he made his way downward, limping. There was a bloody handkerchief bound around his right thigh. He was in a hurry now, taking few precautions, angling down across the rocky stuff toward the spot I’d figured he’d choose, but still too far away for a good shot. Besides, with only two cartridges, I wasn’t about to monkey with a moving target. Sooner or later he was bound to stop.

Below, Libby was approaching the pond. A good distance behind her, just crossing the river, I saw Davis flogging a horse—my reluctant mare, by the looks of it—in pursuit. I didn’t try to figure out what had happened to cause all this activity. I just returned my attention, and my mind, to Holz.

He slid and scrambled the last few yards to the outcrop at the head of the rockslide—and disappeared from sight. Apparently there was a hole among the rocks I couldn’t see from my angle. He simply vanished, leaving me without a target. I steadied the cross hairs of the scope on the rock against which I’d seen him last, and waited.

Libby was just starting across the rockslide below him, down near the shore of the little lake. She was riding the big buckskin that had belonged to Jack. For a girl who’d claimed to have died in the saddle yesterday, she looked very good on it, erect and confident. She’d left her raincoat somewhere, and she was carrying one of the lever-action guns in her hand.

She had to check the buckskin and let it pick its own way across the rocks. I saw her glance back occasionally, apparently hearing Davis hammering down the trail behind her. There was no sign of Holz. I didn’t know what he had in mind and I didn’t let myself speculate on it. I’d done enough telepathy for one day. I just waited. Libby had made it across the rocks and was starting into the trees on the far side of the slide when Holz’s rifle fired and the buckskin went down.

I was aware of Libby throwing herself clear and rolling aside, still clinging to the carbine, but now I was concentrating on the telescopic sight four inches in front of my eye. Suddenly my target appeared, clear and sharp in the field of the glass. Holz was leaning over and around the rock on which I’d been focusing, aiming at something off to the right that he’d apparently not been able to cover from his safe hiding place. I realized that he’d waited until the last possible moment to take Libby, hoping that Davis would come into his view, too. Now he was reaching far around for the second target…

I drew a long breath, let it out halfway, and held it. I put the cross hairs in the right place and added trigger pressure very gently, letting the piece fire itself when it was ready. There was a lot of noise and commotion. None of those Magnums, pistols or rifles, are gentle guns. Two hundred and fifty yards away, Holz lay for a moment quite still. Then, too soon for me to fire again, he slid limply off the rock out of sight. His weapon remained behind, neatly balanced on the ledge he’d been using as a rest.

I was up and running, watching the shadowed hole into which he’d disappeared. I swung high up the slope, trying to find an angle from which I could see the bottom of the crevice. Finally I found it and saw him lying there in the shadow, apparently dead. At a hundred yards I stopped and went to one knee. The sitting position is steadier and the prone steadier still; but I couldn’t get down any lower and still see my mark. Kneeling, I took careful aim and fired my last cartridge.

The limp figure in the shadows moved abruptly. It rose, swaying, and emptied the pistol in its hand blindly in my direction. Flat on the ground, now, I heard a couple of bullets strike off to the left. One whined directly over me. Then Holz’s gun was empty. He slumped back out of sight. I drew my own revolver and spent a full fifteen minutes making the final approach. I could have saved myself the trouble.

When I got there, he was quite dead, with his empty automatic in his hand. A guy named Kingston was avenged, if it mattered, and a more important gent, exact identity not yet determined, wouldn’t be shot this fall, at least not by Hans Holz. I suppose you could call it a victory. I took the little envelope from his shirt, a box of cartridges from his jacket, and a set of car keys from his pants. I picked up his rifle and went off, leaving him there.

The cook tent looked as if it had been subjected to machine-gun fire. I glanced at Davis and he nodded bleakly. He pulled the flap aside to let me go in. A familiar-looking trenchcoat had been tossed on the table. There was something under the blankets near the stove.

I shrugged off the two rifles I carried—I didn’t need both of them, but you don’t leave good guns lying around outdoors—and went over and drew back the blankets gently to look at Pat Bellman. She was quite dead, of course. I still didn’t know everything about the woman who’d called herself Libby Meredith, but I’d learned enough to know she wouldn’t miss.

I said softly, without looking at Davis, “That’s damn good shooting for a lady tied hand and foot… how did she talk you into turning her loose?”

Davis looked miserably at the ground and didn’t speak.

I said, “Never mind. Don’t tell me. Let me guess. She blackmailed you. She convinced you that if you didn’t untie her she was going to starve to death painfully, or wet her pants humiliatingly, right before your eyes…”

Some muscles in his face twitched, telling me I’d guessed right on the second try. I started to say something sarcastic and bitter to the effect that sacrificing one girl’s life to save another’s kidneys wasn’t really a very good bargain, and that in any case people, had been known to go to the bathroom with their hands tied, but I kept it back.

So they’d turned Libby loose, all the way loose, and Pat Bellman had escorted her out behind the bushes and, of course, looked discreetly away at the critical moment, because even if you’re a woman you don’t stare rudely at another woman answering the call of nature. That moment of inattention had been all Libby had needed to grab Pat’s .30-30 carbine, shoot once, and then spray the tent with rifle bullets to keep Davis from interfering as she ran for the horses.

I looked down at the dead pale face among the blankets and remembered a riverbank far to the south, early in the morning, and a handsome steelhead trout. I remembered a Labrador bitch called Maudie that I’d never actually seen. Well, the girl had had an accessory-to-murder charge to answer to. We’d have had a hard time getting her out of that, no matter how much we owed her, but I’d been prepared to go to work on it, or get somebody else to work on it who wielded a lot more influence than I did.

“Mr. Helm! Listen!”

I listened and heard a distant humming sound, growing steadily closer. I glanced at my watch. The hour was barely noon. Well, Holz hadn’t said
when
in the afternoon the plane was arriving. It buzzed the pond twice, apparently needing some kind of signal to land. Getting no response, it flew away in the direction from which it had come, but not before Davis had made careful notes of its description and number.

When the sky was silent again, we climbed on our horses and headed out with Hank, released from bondage, romping happily around us. Soon we were passing the dead buckskin at the foot of the rock slide. The body of Hans Holz, the Woodman, was of course not visible from below, but I could feel its presence, sad and lonely. For some distance after leaving the lake we saw, from time to time, the small tracks of a woman’s shoes in the trail ahead of us.

I took a few precautions, but I didn’t really think Libby would try to tackle us. She’d fired six times back there in camp, and her weapon held only seven cartridges fully loaded. Like the pro she was, she’d saved one shot for emergency use, but it wasn’t enough to deal with two well-armed men.

Anyway, we were not attacked, and presently there were no more footprints in the trail. Hearing us coming, she must have hidden to let us go by. Hank did act rather oddly at one point; but I whistled him to heel and kept him there for the best part of a mile. We reached the highway shortly after five o’clock and found a welcoming committee waiting. Apparently young Smith—Ronnie Ryerson, to give him his right name—had got on the radio and called out the reserves after Pat and Davis had headed off into the bush to rescue me. Our arrival interrupted a great debate as to whether or not a second rescue mission should be dispatched.

They weren’t my people and it wasn’t my job they were talking about anyway. That was all taken care of. I wasn’t proud of it—I’d needed a lot of luck and a lot of help—but it had got done, which was what counted. I gave Davis’ people their little envelope full of ducky little tinfoil wafers, accepted their thanks and congratulations modestly, and checked my watch constantly as the talkfest dragged on. At last I cut young Davis out of the herd and choused him to one side.

“I want a car,” I said. “They took the keys I grabbed, the ones to Holz’s sedan over there, and I couldn’t get it out of this traffic jam, anyway. Get me something to drive, quick. You can come along if you like.”

“Where are we—” He changed his mind about asking questions. “All right, but if you’re thinking of the Meredith woman, she’s being taken care of.”

I refrained from speaking my thought, which was that it would require a hell of a lot of boyscouts, young or old, to take care of the Meredith woman, however you wanted to interpret the phrase. I glanced at my watch again. Figuring roughly three miles per hour for men on horseback, as against two for a woman on foot, we might have only some forty minutes left.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I still want a car. Let’s go.”

It took us twenty minutes to reach The Antlers Lodge. There was no reason to think anybody would recognize the borrowed vehicle, but I took no chances and parked it out of sight. Then I led Davis into the brush at the side of the building, the same cover into which I’d charged incautiously the other day to help a howling dog.

The stuff ran down the hill to a point almost opposite the filling station rest rooms. We made our way there and lay down among the bushes on the damp moss and leaves that soon soaked through our clothes, but I’ll have to hand it to my companion, he: knew how to lie still. Occasionally, like now and when he’d fired instantly on command, back in the camp, he showed real promise. It was too bad he hadn’t learned to follow instructions consistently, but that could be fixed…

Twenty minutes passed, and another twenty, and still another. She was behind schedule, but it had been a long, tough walk, and afterwards there would have been arrangements to make. She couldn’t be blamed for being a bit slow. At last, when it was fully dark, she came.

The big car drew up to the gas pumps and she got out on the right-hand side and headed for the rest room. She didn’t look good. She’d changed from the yellow-brown corduroy outfit, of course—it would have come out of the brush much too tattered and muddy to appear in public—but in spite of fresh clothes, pants and a heavy sweater, she looked tired and bedraggled. She needed a bath, a beauty parlor, and about twelve hours sleep. Nevertheless, despite the show of utter weakness she’d put on for me yesterday, complete with tears, she was by no means crippled or exhausted by her greater ordeal today. She’d eluded the posse sent out to capture her, she’d made contact with her principal somehow; and now she was completing her mission.

At least I hoped the driver was the principal for whom she was working. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his face as he gave instructions to the filling station attendant and came around the car. He walked along the building to the door marked men. I still couldn’t get a clear look at him in spite of the lights above both rest-room doors. He paused with his hand on the knob, stalling, until Libby came out of the adjacent room. She had the dog collar in her left hand, and she was shaking water off the other hand.

“Here you are, Mr. Soo,” she said. Her voice reached us clearly. “Damn it, why do they make those cisterns so deep?” She started to squeeze the sleeve of her sweater, soaked at the wrist.

“You’re sure these are the right ones? There seem to have been a lot of substitutions going on.”

“I told you. Four of them are good. The fifth was probably never transferred—that man who called himself Wood most likely just passed a dummy at the last drop—so I wasn’t able to get it. At least I don’t think he’d use the real information as bait.”

“Too bad. It would have been better if we could have had the complete set. But you have done well.”

As the man turned, I saw the familiar Chinese features I’d known briefly in Hawaii. Everything was perfectly clear at last. Mr. Soo had hired the young interlopers for fifty thousand dollars to carry out the murder-and-impersonation job set up by the female agent, Libby, whom he’d planted in the Russian espionage cell in San Francisco. Apparently Libby’s control over the real Nystrom hadn’t been as great as she’d claimed, and she’d decided to have him killed and use a substitute courier instead.