The Poisoners (2 page)

I picked the side on which the apparatus jungle seemed slightly less impenetrable, and stood looking down at her, remembering how we’d met. As Mac had indicated, she’d been involved, in an amateurish way, on the wrong side of a job I’d been doing down in Mexico. Afterwards, needing some female help on my next assignment, I’d put her to work for us. Perhaps because I’d known her first by her real name, before there was any question of her joining the outfit, I’d never been able to think of her as Ruby, the corny code name she’d been given later, presumably because of her red hair. Ruby always sounds like a tart name to me, and she was no tart.

She was a bright kid with a lot of guts and a lot of spirit, but you’d never have guessed it now, looking at the pinched little face below the neat white cap of bandages. There seemed to be bandages under the hospital gown as well. Her eyes were closed. I couldn’t help remembering that I had, after all, got her into this racket—all the way in, on a permanent, professional basis. Even if her alternative had been prison, it didn’t seem, at the moment, like something of which I should be very proud.

I reached down for the nearest hand, first making sure it was connected to no vital wiring or plumbing. It was cold and limp and unresponsive in my grasp. Her eyes remained closed.

“Annette,” I said softly, “Netta…”

She didn’t move. I glanced at the doctor who’d brought me up here. He moved his shoulders very slightly, as if to say that nothing I could do—nothing anybody could do—would hurt her now.

“Hey, Carrots,” I said, “snap out of it! This is Matt.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the eyelids came up very slowly as if infinitely heavy, and her eyes looked straight at me. I felt a very slight pressure of the cold fingers, just enough to tell me she saw me and knew me and was glad I was there. A moment later the eyelids dropped once more. I stood there holding her hand as long as I figured there was still a chance that she was aware of my presence; then I laid it down gently and went over to the chair in the corner to wait.

Three hours later they declared her officially dead.

When I came out of the hospital, it was dark. A damp, chemical-smelling mist put haloes around the street lights and motel signs. I picked up my suitcase and a newspaper from the motel office and went up to my unit, located at the end of the second-story balcony.

I set down my burden outside the door and, hands free, checked the knife in my pocket, a folding Buck hunting knife that’s a little bigger than I like for casual wear, but I’d had to leave my previous edged weapon behind on a job last fall, and this had been the only replacement available at the time. Having got it nicely sharpened and broken in, I was reluctant to change again.

I also checked the little five-shot, .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver reposing inside my belt forward of my left hip, butt to the right. The clean-cut boys of the F.B.I. carry them way over on the other side for a fast draw, and I understand they’re real good at it, but I’m seldom in that much of a hurry, and I want my gun where I can reach it with either hand, to use it or ditch it as circumstances require.

Having given anyone waiting for me in the room plenty of time to get nervous, I made my entrance cautiously the way the book recommends in times of uncertainty. There was nobody inside. I retrieved my suitcase and closed and locked the door, frowning thoughtfully. I’d been playing it safe by assuming the worst: that Annette had run into somebody who was part of a dangerous organization, political or criminal, and that this organization was now, since I’d got to see her before she died, very much concerned about who I was, what I’d learned from her, and what I’d do next.

That was the only safe theory for me to act upon, but I had as yet no evidence that it was correct except a man reading a paper who might have been just what he seemed. My histrionics and precautions might be a total waste of time. Annette could have been shot by a jealous lover who subsequently went home and blew out his brains, or by a drunken thief who ran for the Mexican border a hundred-odd miles away. If so, I’d have a hell of a time getting a line on the solitary murderer unless the police turned him up for me.

If an illicit organization was involved, however, and if it could now be goaded into revealing itself by taking action against me, I was in business, if I survived. In any case, I had to make my plans on the basis of the toughest opposition possible: say, some kind of undercover outfit run by a gent with brains, an outfit familiar with firearms and, perhaps, with other gadgets as well.

I glanced around casually but made no search. I had no desire to find the bug if it was there, as I hoped it was. I’d certainly made it easy enough for them to plant one on me. I’d loudly announced the number of my room and given them over three hours to work on it. If they couldn’t take advantage of their opportunities, to hell with them.

It was a big, pleasant room with two double beds, which seemed a waste. Under the circumstances, even one double bed would be fifty percent wasted unless something unexpected happened, and I wasn’t in a mood to hope for it. She’d been a good kid. We’d once had a pretty good time together, not to mention doing a pretty good job together down in Mexico, never mind the top-secret details. I could spend a night alone by way of mourning.

I threw my suitcase on the nearest big bed, tossed the paper down beside it, picked up the phone, and had the office lady get the long-distance operator to put me through to Washington. It took a while. Waiting, I leafed through the paper on the bed, playing the fine old secret-agent game of trying to guess what item or items in the news might possibly have a bearing on my mission here. You have to guess most of the time; they won’t tell you. Security being what it is, you’re seldom given the full background even if it’s known. In this case, of course, it seemed likely that nobody knew the full background except the person who’d shot Annette, and he wasn’t talking, at least not to anybody who’d talk to me.

The afternoon paper on the bed contained practically the same news as the morning paper I’d appropriated on the plane. There was a front-page picture of a hillside giving way due to rain and depositing a movie star’s house gently in the middle of the highway below. There was an interview with a seismologist who predicted that a violent earthquake, long overdue, would soon wipe California off the map. There was an editorial on water pollution, a smog warning, and an interview with a Mexican official who considered that the resumption of the U.S. anti-smuggling campaign along the border, with its harmful effect on the Mexican tourist business, was a clumsy and insulting way of putting pressure on his government to crack down on illicit Mexican growers of marihuana and opium poppies.

Still holding the phone, waiting, I flipped the pages one-handed, looking for the continuation of the story, but stopped at a short column headed: SCIENTIST MISSING. Dr. Osbert Sorenson, a meteorologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, had left his office at his usual time, one evening last week, but had never arrived home. Fearing kidnaping, his family had kept the news quiet until now, waiting for a ransom note that hadn’t come. The police were reserving judgment, but an associate of Dr. Sorenson’s was quoted as hinting darkly that the doctor had received threats from large business interests—very large business interests—opposed to his work for a better environment. It seemed that the doctor was president of the Abolish the Internal Combustion Engine Committee of California, also known as the AICEC, which I’d read something about earlier in the day.

I frowned at the newspaper page, thinking it was the most promising item I’d encountered. Weather, earthquakes, pollution, and drugs were kind of out of my line of work, but I’d had to do with several missing scientists with slight crackpot tendencies during the course of my undercover career.

It seemed unlikely that the theory of the disappearance hinted at by Dr. Sorenson’s colleague was correct. To be sure, the big auto companies had run up a record of abysmal stupidity in dealing with real or imagined threats to their profits, but kidnaping or killing a respectable member of the UCLA faculty would be overdoing it, even for them. And if Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors hadn’t got him, who had?

Anyway, it seemed like an interesting coincidence: a scientist missing in L.A. at roughly the same time an agent turned up dead. It would be a very long shot, I reflected, but if all other leads to Annette’s murderer failed me, I might flip it and take a closer look at the Sorenson case, if only because I was intrigued by the notion of anybody having the nerve to try to abolish the conventional, petrol-powered automobile, particularly here in California where they practically take their beloved cars to bed with them.

A familiar voice on the phone interrupted my meditations. I said, “This is Matt, sir.”

The use of my real name instead of my code name was supposed to let him know that we might not have the wire to ourselves.

“Who?” Mac asked, making sure it wasn’t just a slip on my part.

“Matt Helm, in L.A. Can you hear me all right?”

“I hear you, Matt,” he said, acknowledging the warning. “What’s the situation out there?”

“Not good,” I said. “Have you got your red pencil handy? Scratch Agent Ruby. Our brick-top just left us.”

There was a little pause. “I’m sorry to hear it,” Mac said at last. “She was a promising prospect. A little erratic and impulsive, but promising. We don’t get too many of them these days.”

“No, sir.”

“The sincere peace-lovers and humanitarians have my respect, Matt—I’m in favor of peace and humanity myself—but I get weary of interviewing these warlike young candidates who’d just love to kill all communists by remote control, but wouldn’t dream of getting real blood on their hands. As far as I’m concerned, they fall into the same category as the people who are happy to eat beef butchered by somebody else, but look with righteous horror at the man who goes out into the woods to shoot his own venison.”

That was, I decided, a little homespun philosophy thrown in to make the conversation sound authentic to anyone listening.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Did you get to the hospital in time to talk with her?” He put the question casually.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It wasn’t much of a conversation, but she did tell me something. I don’t know exactly what it means yet.”

“What did she say?”

“I’m calling through the motel switchboard, sir.”

“I see. Does anybody else know what you’ve got?”

“There was a doctor in the room. He was too far away to hear, but he was watching. A Dr. Freeberg.”

“That’s all right. He’s good and he’s safe.”

“I questioned him a bit afterwards,” I said. “As you probably know from the medical reports, she was shot twice: a bullet in the chest and what was supposed to be a finish-up shot in the back of the head. Dr. F. says that either bullet should have killed her instantly—they were 240-grain slugs from a .44 Magnum—but you know how it goes. One guy brushes up against a cholla cactus and dies of blood poisoning and the next fellow absorbs a full clip from an M-l rifle and is back on his feet in a month. She was tough and stubborn and Irish and she made a fight of it. The question is, sir, who do we know who makes a habit of using that much firearm?”

“I’ll check it out. I can’t think of anybody at the moment.”

“Neither can I, sir. I remember just one man who lugged around a cannon that big,” I said, “but he was pretty stupid and I know he’s dead because I killed him. With a cute little .22 target pistol. But the .44 Maggie is not a common caliber in the profession, sir. It’s a bear-hunter’s gun—not that any one-hand weapon is adequate for really big game, but this one comes about as close as you can get. The last time I looked through a catalog, the smallest weapon made for the cartridge weighed over three pounds. Even with that much weight to hold it down, the .44’s got a brutal recoil. It takes a masochist to shoot one, and he’d better be at least a two-hundred-pound masochist, if only just to lug the thing around.”

“We’ll feed it into the fancy new computer they insisted on giving us,” Mac said. “I’ll let you know what comes out. I understand there were signs that she’d been interrogated.”

“Yes, sir. They’d worked her over a bit before they shot her. Was she carrying information somebody might be after?”

“Not as far as I know. I told you she was on leave, and she certainly had access to nothing of importance here before she departed—unless they wanted just general information about our latest training and operations procedures.”

“Well, it could be,” I said. “There’s still a lot of curiosity about us in various foreign government bureaus. You said something about a reprimand, sir, but you didn’t say what she’d done to earn it. It might be significant.”

“I rather doubt it.” He hesitated, and went on: “The details don’t matter, but essentially she did something her own way instead of the way she’d been instructed to do it. Her way worked, as it happened, but it was much more risky and no more profitable.” He waited for me to comment, but I remained silent. I’d never been a great one for following instructions to the letter, myself. He must have guessed what I was thinking, because he said, rather sharply: “When an agent has been with us long enough to develop some professional judgment, Matt, shortcuts are sometimes permitted or at least condoned; but first they have to learn to do what they’re told in the way they’re told to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Whatever she did to get herself killed, she must have done it fast. She only left Washington yesterday.”

“Did she have any relatives or friends in the Los Angeles area?”

“None that we know about.” Mac sighed on the other side of the continent. “Well, I guess you’d better stay with it. We ought to know what she ran into. Oh, and Matt…”

“Yes, sir.”

“Retribution is not our business.”

“No, sir.”

“However, I would say it was bad public relations—bad for our image, as the Madison Avenue gang would put it—to allow our people to be used as targets by any joker with a big revolver. Besides, murder trials tend to involve a lot of publicity that can be avoided by presenting the police with a case nicely closed by the death of the murderer. Under the circumstances, if the matter can be handled inconspicuously, I really see no reason for the person or persons responsible to survive, do you?”