The Vanishers (13 page)

“I saw you!” she breathed. “I woke up in the middle of the night and you were still gone, so I dressed and slipped out to see if maybe I could help you in some way. Help, my God! I saw you, I tell you! I saw you kill him and carry him inside. The poor boy never had a chance. You caught him from behind and murdered him in cold blood.”

The old directional fetish. I have never figured out why clobbering a northbound victim when you’re standing south of him is so much worse than annihilating one heading south, but they’ve all got this thing about front and back, as if it matters to a corpse which side it was killed from. But at least I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating when I thought I saw something move by the motel’s back door.

“You never listen,” I said. “I told you any resemblance between me and a nice guy was strictly accidental. Now stop talking sentimental nonsense and pack your things. Washing your face wouldn’t hurt, but it isn’t mandatory. We’re getting out of here.”

We left Oslo by the harbor road that continues south down the coast for a little, after which it forks and you have to decide whether you’re going to keep on along the water—the eighty-mile-wide sound between Norway and Denmark called Skagerrak—or turn inland. Either way you’ll hit Sweden.

Driving, I spoke without looking at my companion: “In case you’re wondering, the second guy is resting peacefully in the same room as his defunct partner. No, I didn’t kill him, I just used some sleepy-stuff on him that’ll give us roughly a four-hour start on them, unless somebody doesn’t believe the
Forstyrre Ieke
sign I hung on the doorknob. It does mean ‘Do Not Disturb,’ doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t speaking to me, except for monosyllables like that. We were driving along the four-lane highway in sparse morning traffic and weak misty daylight. She sat silent and pale beside me, still in her jeans and turtleneck, but she had taken time to wash her face, put on a touch of lipstick, and do up her hair. But she’d done nothing about her air of horrified disapproval.

I said, “Reach into my right-hand jacket pocket, please. Take out what you find there.”

She hesitated, and put her hand where I’d asked her to. She glanced at me sharply, startled, and drew out one of the silenced automatics. Holding it very gingerly, keeping the muzzle away from both of us, she drew back the slide just far enough to expose the chamber and released it again.

“Good girl,” I said. “Your lady-cop friend did a swell gun-safety job on you. No cartridge in the breech, right? Now take a good look at that gun, because it’s what that poor boy you were weeping for was going to use to kill you with.”

There was a lengthy silence. Astrid licked her lips and spoke at last: “Matt, I do not understand.”

“What’s so hard to understand?” I asked. “We agreed that Bennett likes the job he usurped when my chief went missing, and wants Mac to stay right where he is, disappeared, vanished. In the end, killed; at least I’m sure Bennett hopes so and will take steps to see that it happens. In the meantime, any potential rescuers have to be wiped out, along with any potential assistants who may know too much. Which means you. The late James Aloysius Harley, whatever his real name may have been, was issued that neat little pistol for the job. Which job he will unfortunately be unable to perform because I just wrang his neck for him. Wrung? Wringed?”

“Don’t, Matt!” She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize… But how could you be
sure
?”

“Sure that they meant to kill us?” I shrugged. “If I’d wound up murdering an innocent bystander, I’d have been sorry as hell; but not half as sorry as if he’d murdered me. In this racket, if you wait until you’re absolutely, for-sure certain, you generally wind up dead.”

She said stiffly, “I don’t think I could ever take such a casual attitude towards human life.”

“And it makes you feel very virtuous,” I said. “But you wind up owing your life to a wicked, careless, homicidal creep like me.”

After a moment, she shrugged, dismissing the subject, and turned to look at the passing Norwegian scenery of small, hilly farms—I’d have hated to plow some of those fields without a surefooted mountain horse, to hell with tractors.

“Where do we drive now?” Astrid asked at last.

I said, “That’s what Bennett will want to know, when he learns that his boys have lost contact. Among other things they’ve lost, like lives and guns.”

“What do you think he’ll order them to do next, Matt?”

“Let’s look at it from the point of view of the guys behind us. By the time they dispose of the body and call in a suitable replacement and get back into the action, they’ll know we have a considerable head start. Say we can average fifty MPH on these highways, four hours lead time will put us a couple of hundred miles away, roughly three hundred kilometers using the local unit of measurement. What direction? Well, they’ll also know that we’ll be heading north eventually, since we seem to have a thing about a certain Arctic community. They could just relax and set up shop there and wait for us to come to them. However, they won’t be very happy doing that.”

“Why not?”

“That’s their backup, their last line of defense. If they miss me there, I’m gone for good. And I’ve threatened their leader; they can’t afford to let me slip through to carry out my… What did you say?”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I didn’t sense a great deal of sympathetic interest in my homicidal activities.”

“Please do not rub it in. What did you say you would do to Mr. Bennett, kill him?”

I grinned. “I’m going to have to switch girls. This one’s learning too much about me. Sure I said I’d massacre him. I said, what did he expect when he sent people out to assassinate me, a bouquet of roses? I said that his termination will be my next job, self-assigned, after I’ve finished the one assigned me by Mac.”

She hesitated. “I don’t want to criticize, Matt, but what do you gain by making wild threats like that.”

“Bennett isn’t the bravest man in the world, and he has good reason to know, if other people don’t, that I don’t generally make threats I have no intention of carrying out. If I say I’ll go hunting, sooner or later I’ll go hunting. Him.” I gave her another cheerful grin. “I’m putting pressure on him, sweetheart, turning on the heat. He may have felt calm and uninvolved, sitting there in Washington sending out the guns; now I’ve made it personal, him or me. And he’s not forgetting that I came after him once before and got him. Unfortunately I let him go, but with his life definitely on the line this time, and that old grudge gnawing at him, there’s a good chance he’ll fly over here to handle the troops personally. Which will be fine for us since, while he’s a good enough administrator and a hell of a politician, he’s not all that great a field man; he’ll have them all running around in panicky circles trying to intercept us everywhere. Meanwhile, we’ll be sitting tight and let them wear themselves out trying to figure where we’ve got to.”

“Sitting tight?” she said. “Where? And why did we get off the plane in Norway instead of continuing on to Sweden, if that is where we are going anyway?”

I said, “We stopped in Oslo because the place where I want us to hole up temporarily is near Stockholm. I didn’t want us to draw attention that way by disembarking there. This way we’ve got running room enough to make sure we arrive with no fleas or ticks or chiggers stuck to us… Ah, here’s our junction ahead.”

The highway sign by the roadside gave us a choice between driving straight ahead to Gothenburg, or turning left to Stockholm. I turned left, and we found ourselves on a narrow, winding, little two-lane road through the mountains. Presently I pulled out at an area marked with a large P, white on blue. P for
Parkering.

“What’s the matter?” Astrid asked. “Why have we stopped?”

“Give me that .38 I lent you, please,” I said, gathering up the rest of my arsenal. “My God, I can’t seem to take a step these days that somebody doesn’t present me with another firearm.”

The hiding places I found around the car weren’t very original, and any good drug sniffer could have located them in two seconds flat; but if we were subjected to that much of a search, it meant we were in trouble anyway.

“Okay, here we go,” I said, getting back behind the wheel. “Swedish customs may not even make us open our suitcases, but there’s no sense in taking chances. Keep your fingers crossed and hope that the Sleeping Beauty I left back in Oslo hasn’t awakened prematurely and sent some friends to intercept us at the border.”

Actually, we still had well over an hour of driving on that slow little twisty road before Sweden appeared ahead. Then we came to a frozen lake on the right, surrounded by snow and evergreens. Across the highway from this pretty scene was a mass of restaurants, filling stations, and souvenir shops. Just over the hill was the frontier, which consisted of no gate or barrier, just several uniformed gents standing by the roadside in front of a building that sported the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag. They waved us over. One officer came up to my window and asked for our passports, glanced at them, and handed them back.

“You have rented this car in Oslo?” He spoke in English. “Where in Sweden do you travel?”

“We’re heading for Stockholm,” I said.

“Be so good as to open the trunk.” When I’d got out and done so, he said, “And that suitcase, please… Very good. That is all, thank you so much.”

I took my time closing the suitcase properly, and the trunk lid, and getting back into the car beside Astrid. It didn’t seem like a good time to display any haste, or show any relief. After the border installation had disappeared from sight behind us, Astrid drew a long, shaky breath.

“I will never, ever make a successful criminal,” she said. “I am certain my expression was very guilty. I kept thinking of all those pistols.”

“You did fine,” I said. “Watching the handsome officer trustingly with your big brown eyes, obviously quite certain that such a nice young man would never do anything to distress pretty little innocent you.” I grinned. “Well, we’ve made it into Sweden. Now all we have to do is find our hidey-hole and pull it in after us.”

Perhaps because we were soon out of the mountains, the main highway across this part of Scandinavia was considerably bigger and better in Sweden than it had been back in Norway. While it was still only two lanes wide, they were larger lanes, with generous paved shoulders.

I wondered idly, as I drove, why anybody would waste so much asphalt out there on the edge of the road. Then I saw two cars roaring at me side by side, one passing the other in spite of the fact that I was right there in plain sight in the other lane, coming the other way. I noted that the driver who was being passed had swung out onto his shoulder of the road to give the other guy some room. In self-defense I eased over to put the right-hand wheels of my car onto the paved extension on my side of the road, and the passing car shot through the space we’d opened up between us. I hadn’t finished swearing at the driver for being such a reckless jackass when the same thing happened again.

Okay, I could take a hint. Obviously the Swedes didn’t believe in the docile, follow-the-leader driving technique favored in the U.S., where it’s considered pushy and immoral to pass another car on anything but a multilane freeway. (Hey, Mister, where’s the fire?) Coming up on a slower vehicle, I tried it myself. Sure enough, when he spotted my ever-burning headlights moving up in his mirror—I still felt uncomfortable at having all those lumens expending themselves in broad daylight—the driver ahead pulled over politely to let me by, and an approaching car took to the shoulder to give me room.

I decided that, although it would send the safety-minded folks back home into screaming fits, it was really a nice, sensible, cooperative way of utilizing a two-lane road to the fullest. I waved my thanks to everybody, as seemed to be expected of me, and settled down to some interesting driving. Beside me, Astrid had reclined her seat fully and fallen asleep. The pavement remained clear and mostly dry, although there was still snow in the fields we passed. They were less precipitous than those of Norway, but they’d never make you think nostalgically of the endless cornfields of Kansas. More like New England. There were numerous lakes with ice on them.

We stopped for an early lunch in Karlstad, on the largest lake in Sweden, called Vanem, an inland sea by local standards, also icebound. The snack bar served a delicious, spicy sausage that would make a bland Yankee hot dog crawl into a corner and hide its head in shame; and there was a little marzipan cake for dessert that far outclassed the soggy bakery goods served in U.S. roadside eateries. Obviously we’d arrived in a backward land that had not yet mastered the modern culinary art of rendering all food tasteless. Afterwards, I took evasive action northwards, just in case Bennett, or whoever was running the local operation for him, decided to gamble on assigning a man or two to watching this main highway east in the hope that, having disabled the pursuit temporarily, we’d be overconfident enough to stay with the easy route clear across the country.

The day remained gray and misty. We ran through a single snow flurry that lasted just long enough to powder the pavement lightly without slowing us down. Dodging from one winding little road to another, we got quite a distance northeast, and then angled back to the southeast. We reached the picturesque university town of Uppsala late in the afternoon, still with no company trailing along behind. I checked this out with a brief scenic tour—well, detour—through the city. There was a massive old brick castle on a hill and a fine cathedral. There was no shadow in the mirror. Beyond Uppsala, we picked up the four-lane highway that, if you wanted to go there, would take you to Stockholm some seventy kilometers away. Forty-three miles to you.

We didn’t want to go there; but I almost missed our exit. I’d been told what to look for, but Uppsala had spread southward since my last visit, so the distance was shorter than I remembered it. The sign appeared before I expected it: Krokvik, translating to Crooked Bay. It seemed an odd name for a community well inland. Actually it was a reminder that geography is not a constant in those parts. The land is rising steadily out of the sea. Nowadays the Baltic coast is many miles to the east, but within historical times it had been much closer, and the small stream we soon crossed, running between high banks, had been a river inlet large enough to be used by the Viking longships. But I found it a bit claustrophobic to be in a country I could drive across in a day, after coming from one where it had taken me the best part of a week to traverse barely half of it.