The Vanishers (35 page)

Over an hour passed before I caught the first glimpse of them filtering into the trees around the clearing. I only spotted two, but there were probably more. Then I heard them coming down the road from Lysaniemi. A gray van of some kind appeared—I have a hard enough time sorting out all the look-alike passenger cars these days; I don’t even try to keep track of the various vans—and came to a halt by Crown’s little blue sedan. Several armed young men jumped out, four to be exact, followed by Bennett himself. So far, so good. We were face-to-face, or would be in a moment, and nobody’d gone off half-cocked and started shooting up the premises.

I saw that Bennett hadn’t changed much in the years since I’d seen him last: a moderately tall, middle-aged gent with graying hair that was clipped quite short where it grew at all, but his barber really didn’t have much to work with. There’s always something tough-looking about a skinhead, particularly a tanned skinhead, like one of the meaner Caesars. That’s probably why he had it cut so close. The shorn stubble of hair was, perhaps, a little grayer than when I’d last seen him, and the figure was perhaps a little thicker than I remembered it; but not much.

He was wearing natty cord pants, a tan wool shirt, and a tan ski jacket. There was also a neat brown necktie, not as silly as it sounds, since in those formal European countries the gentlemen often put on ties even to go hunting. He was merely following local custom. The outfit looked a little like a military uniform, and the resemblance was probably not accidental. Bennett gestured, and his squad spread out in a skirmish line and moved toward us. I noted that he let them get a few steps ahead before he followed along. Despite his tough haircut, he’d never been what you’d call an overeager leader of men when there was danger involved.

While all this was going on, I’d been leaning against the Audi in plain sight, an interested spectator. At the moment, I was sharing the last beer with Karin, who stood beside me. Our well-secured prisoner sat in the back seat of the Audi. Karin looked a bit concerned, watching us being surrounded.

“There are so many!” she said.

“I make it eight, but I could have missed a couple out in the brush. Ten minimum, counting our tied-up friend and Bennett himself. Flattering that he thinks he needs those odds to deal with me, don’t you think?”

“But what are you going to
do
?”

“You’ll see. Just stay behind the car, here, and get your head down if things start getting noisy…”

But Bennett was approaching now, and the time for idle chatter was past. He came up warily while his youthful centurions formed an armed ring around the car, covering us. Bennett looked at me for a moment, and then at the hood of the car. Except for my personal .38 in its clip-on holster, and Karin’s little derringer, I had our entire arsenal piled there. I reflected that it was amazing the number of guns a man could collect just traveling through foreign lands minding his own business. Of course, it depended a little on the business.

I said, “Sorry, we’re all out of beer. You boys will have to keep on down the road if you’re thirsty.”

“Put your hands on top of your head, Helm!”

I ignored him and went on, “Karin, this is the Mr. Bennett I’ve been telling you about. Bennett, this is Mrs. Karin Segerby, born Stjernhjelm, a distant relation of mine. She’s also the widow of the late Frederik Segerby, one of the directors of Segerby Vapenfabriks AB, otherwise known as SVAB. You may have heard of it.”

“Are you trying to hide behind a woman’s skirts?”

I said, “No. Just pointing out that molesting her could cause you trouble. She’s only here as a favor to me, paying me back for something I did for her. She’s not involved. You’ll be smart to leave her that way.”

He bowed towards Karin. “I have no quarrel with the lady. As for you…” Bennett glanced at the pile of weapons on the Audi’s hood. “Do I gather that you are turning over those guns as a preliminary to surrendering? That shows more sense than I thought you had.”

I said, “No, no, you’ve got me all wrong, amigo. Although I’m usually a very modest guy, today I thought I’d do a little boasting to the boys. Showing off my trophies, so to speak. That .25 sleeve gun doesn’t count; it’s mine. I didn’t want you worrying about a hideout weapon. What you see is what you get. But those two automatics with the hush-tubes, which you’ll recognize, I took off your two characters in Oslo, Lindner and Harley. One of the .38s I took off your sneaky pal Joel after I’d shot him. The other, and the knife, I just got from your boy Crown, who you see in the rear seat of the car unharmed. And that big Browning HiPower I took off a couple of folks you don’t know, but you should; you have things in common. They don’t like me, either. Or didn’t. Unfortunately, they’re no longer with us.”

Bennett frowned. “I don’t understand what you’re driving at. Are you trying to frighten…”

I said, “The boys have probably been wondering why you had to use ten men to chase down one lonely little me. I’m just showing them that you were perfectly justified in taking every precaution. I’m clearly a very dangerous fellow. How many people have I killed and disarmed in the past week? Just count the guns. Move over, John Wayne, Wild Bill Hickok, here comes Helm. Obviously, you need to have a lot of manpower along when you go after a lethal character like me. Hell, I might hurt you if you tried to track me down all by yourself. Better to lose a few expendable agents, right? Like Harley and Joel, both dead trying to rid you of that nasty character called Helm…”

“Disarm him!” Bennett snapped.

He was realizing, belatedly, that he’d let me talk too long. The boys were listening too carefully. In any organization like ours, legends grow about the senior operatives who manage to survive, passed along in whispers to the new boys:
Hey, that’s Barnett, who had to blow up his own boat on that Bahamas operation and almost went up with it.
Or Fedder, or Rasmussen, or Helm. They weren’t going to switch sides because they’d heard a few interesting things about me; but they weren’t going to pass up a chance to study me in action, at least for a little, like young wolves learning from one of the old lobos they hope to replace eventually.

Bennett snapped. “Well, Bradford? I told you to take his gun!”

The dark young man addressed didn’t move. Nobody moved. I went on talking. I was in a rut, of course, employing the same needling tactics I’d used on the girl called Greta—just about the same that Karin had used to prod Astrid into disastrous action—but why change a winning, we hoped, game?

I said, “You’re right here in front of me, Bennett. Why don’t you take my gun? Come on, come on, all that’s required is a couple of long steps and a short reach. If you live long enough to reach.” I grimaced. “Isn’t it about time we settled this for good, amigo? You aren’t after me because I’m a defector; nobody believes that dumb story. You’re after me because you once had to make me a humiliating official apology after you’d made a particular damned fool of yourself. You also want me dead because later, when you were trying to hunt me down just like this, I trapped you neatly on a mountain road and threw you to an interrogation team that made you spill every last thing you knew about the folks with whom you were working at the time—rather unpatriotic people, as it happened, but they were your associates and you sold them very cheaply. And you particularly want to kill me because I saw you after the I-team was through with you, sitting on a little stool in your grubby skivvies with tears running down your face, pleading with me to let you live; and I was a damn’ fool; I did, one of the worst mistakes I ever… Ah, that’s better! Go for it, amigo! Reach for it. Shoot me down like a dog—if you think you can make it!”

I hadn’t been sure I could give him the idea: but his hand did move. Then it hesitated, and failed to complete the angry arc it had started that would sweep aside the ski jacket and bring out the gun that rested in a forward-slanting holster on his right hip, FBI fashion. It’s a good enough draw, if you’re sure your right hand will always be available to do the work. I prefer the gun in front of my left hip, where it can be reached with either hand, although it’s kind of a tricky, twisty maneuver with the left. Bennett drew a long breath and straightened up.

“Pretty obvious, Helm! A desperate last minute stratagem, trying to goad me into a ridiculous gun battle now that you’re caught…” As he said it, I saw him start to consider it seriously. I hadn’t believed it could be that easy. I mean, I’d thought I would have to spit on him or urinate on him to get him mad enough to accept the idea; but there it was in his head, full-grown. He cleared his throat. “On the other hand, as you say, it
is
about time we settled this for good.”

“What’s on your mind, amigo?”

I knew exactly the melodramatic plan, born of hatred, that had come into his mind, but I wanted him to be the one to say it.

He spoke contemptuously: “You seem to think that pile of firearms proves what a dangerous man you are! But how many of the owners of those guns did you meet honestly, face to face, Helm? If I know you, most of them were taken from behind or from ambush.”

I said, “Christ, this is real life, not a TV show! What am I supposed to do, stage a Wild West facedown every time some chair-bound moron like you sends a trigger-happy idiot after me?”

“Maybe you wouldn’t be so brave if you had to stand and face a pistol in the hand of a man who knew how to use it!”

He was full of it now, eager for it. It was his brainstorm, and he couldn’t wait to translate it into action. He was beginning to disturb me. This headlong rush towards a life-or-death confrontation was out of character. Well, perhaps he was good with that thing on his right hip, and, having read my dossier in Washington, knew that I was no split-second
pistolero.
The long-range rifle is what I do best. But there’s more to it than skill; and I’d faced a lot more guns than he had.

“A man like you?” I sneered. “Hell, there’ll never be a day when a desk-jockey in ice-cream pants could worry me! Face to face or back to back or any damn’ stupid way you want to set it up. If you really want to die today, I’ll be happy to oblige you.” I shrugged. “Of course, I’m not dumb enough not to know that you’ll have a sniper out in the brush to save your neck when the time comes, but I’ll play your game anyway. Your boy will have to shoot damn’ straight and fast to keep me from taking you down with me.”

“No sniper.” Bennett was being very honorable now. He looked around. “You heard me, men. This is between Helm and me, and I want no misguided help from anyone, is that understood?” He gave it a little time to sink in; then he said, “Very well. Now let’s see if we can agree on the details of this remarkably foolish business…”

Ten minutes later we were walking together side by side far out in the big muddy field; and I knew how the old-timers had felt stepping out into that dusty Western street… but of course they hadn’t. I’d done some research on the subject once, back when I was in another line of work, and I’d found no evidence anywhere that the formal walk-down of the Western movies had ever occurred in real life. It’s a myth, a latter-day invention like the
buscadero
belt of the legendary two-gun killer, and that holster-thong that every movie gunman ties around his thigh before heading for the big showdown. Real old-time Western holsters were flimsy things hanging loose on sagging cartridge belts, flapping wildly when the cowboy rode the kinks out of his bronco in the morning.

It took two hands to draw a gun back in those days, one to pull it and the other to hold down the ill-fitting leather pouch so you could wrench the weapon free. Just as I was going to have to use two hands here, because my fancy little secret-agent holster was made for clipping on conveniently and ditching quickly, not for staying solidly in place while the piece was being drawn. Well, at least it would get my left arm out of the way. I once knew a man who got excited, shooting to the left from a cross draw as I intended to, and blew off his own left elbow.

The ground was soggy underfoot; Bennett was getting his shiny leather boots muddy. It annoyed him and made him want to get the thing over with.

“Pick a likely spot, Helm,” he said. “A man can’t always choose where he dies, but you have the privilege today, within limits.”

“I think we’re far enough from the cars,” I said, turning to face him. “Wave your hand at your boy when you’re ready.”

The signal to draw and fire was to be a blast on the Audi’s horn. The stillness was what got you, up here. I remembered it from last time. No birds singing, no squirrels chattering in the trees. Just an endless, cold, silent land under a low gray sky. The land of my ancestors, and I’d trade it in for sunny New Mexico any day in the week and twice on Sunday. Facing Bennett, I watched him raise his arm. It was a damn’ silly business, of course, but men have died in crazier ways in crazier places. But what was his edge, what had made him suddenly so brave and eager? Could he really be that good? If so, Mrs. Helm’s little boy was in real trouble. Then his arm came down, and I remembered the odd way his shirt had bunched under the armpit as he raised it, and I knew…

The man on the horn gave us a short three count, and sent the musical notes wavering through the Arctic air-well, the barely sub-Arctic air. I made the smart right pivot necessary to align my weapon with the target as it was holstered. Simultaneously, I put both hands to my left hip to grasp the holster with one and the butt of the .38 with the other. Yanking out the weapon, I fired as it came clear. Trick shooting, not seeing the sights, not seeing the gun, even; not seeing anything but the oval of the face that was my mark. Wishing the bullet home; and if you do it right, with enough concentration, you can toss a marble into the air and hit it with the pellet from a BB gun held at the hip. It seems like magic. Just how it works, nobody’s ever told me, but it works.

That is, it works if you’re in practice. I wasn’t. I hadn’t been to the Ranch for a while, and they don’t drill you on that kind of instinct shooting, anyway. They think one-handed marksmanship should have gone out with Aaron Burr, even though he did a pretty good job on Alexander Hamilton; and they want you to see the gun barrel, at least, if not the sights. I felt the muzzle blast sting my left hand, still holding down the empty holster. I felt the sharp recoil of the lightweight little monster of a weapon, and I knew I’d missed.
Concentrate, you stupid bastard! You’ve got to THINK that slug home, remember?