The Interlopers

13

I TOOK A CHANCE AND LET THEM catch me by surprise. I mean, having no inkling of their presence-well, admitting none-I walked right into the trap, just like any of those handsome, brave, bone-headed movie operatives who are forever strolling casually into dark rooms and getting clobbered by sinister gents hiding behind doors.

This was another of the housekeeping cabins popular up here, and the room into which I sauntered innocently, dog at heel, was actually the kitchen. To my relief, the guy who stepped out behind me didn't actually clobber me. Maybe he was afraid of what the dog would do if he used open violence, or maybe he just didn't like hitting people over the head unnecessarily. Anyway, he merely told me to set down the fishing tackle I was carrying, very carefully, and put my hands up, which I did.

Then he hit a switch and the lights came on, dispelling the twilight gloom of the place. Nystrom Three appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding a familiar-looking.357 revolver-a mate to the one I was carrying-in a gingerly sort of way.

"Close the door quick!" he snapped at the man behind me. "Don't let the dog out!"

I heard the door being shut, but I didn't move or turn my head. There are advantages to dealing with amateurs, but there are disadvantages, too: they're much more likely than pros to blow your head off accidentally. You don't want to do anything to startle them as long as they're pointing firearms in your direction, since as a rule they've never bothered to learn how much trigger pressure-or how little-it takes to make their guns go boom.

I stood very still, therefore, while the man behind me reached around to get my.357 from its trick holster. Hank was sitting beside me, looking up and whining softly. He knew something was wrong, but he was a hunting dog. Just as the technical aspects of espionage were out of my line, so the K-9 routines were out of his. Pheasants he could handle, ducks were his meat, but these oddly behaving human beings baffled him. Instinct told him he should be doing something about them, but he'd had no training to tell him what.

Nystrom Three had stepped into the little kitchen. As his former role required-the role he seemed to have abandoned now-he was a tall, skinny character with whitish hair, probably bleached for the part just like mine. For two men who were supposed to look like the same man, we didn't look much like each other. At least I hoped I didn't have that nervous, shifty-eyed, slack-lipped look.

"Careful!" he snapped, as the other man moved behind me, doing something I couldn't see. "Don't take your eye off this guy! Don't forget, he's the bastard who stalked Mike Bird and killed him in cold blood: one shot from that hand-cannon at a hundred and fifty yards."

That eighty-yard shot was getting longer every day, I reflected wryly; but the attitude of the two men, particularly the one I could see, bothered me. I mean, I had been operating on the assumption that they couldn't intend anything very drastic here, since I had collected only two of the five little tinfoil wafers Pat Bellman presumably had her eye on. Figuring that they needed me to get the other three, and knew it, I'd let myself be captured to see what kind of deal or arrangement they had in mind. Besides, I had plans for them, too, and this was the kind of discreet, off-the-road place I thought Mac would approve of. But there was a tenseness in the room that didn't bear out my reassuring theories.

The man behind me said, "Hell, if you're scared of the guy, let's finish him off now and get out of here with what we came for, before somebody comes."

I drew a long, cautious breath. Scratch another bright idea. Obviously there was something very wrong with my elaborate reasoning. The boys were playing for keeps.

"There won't be anybody," Nystrom Three said. "The other cabins are empty, and the people running the lodge have gone out for the evening. I heard them talking. And we're supposed to make this character tell us who he represents and what he's up to before we get rid of him. But first let's make sure he's got the stuff we want. Get the collar off the dog."

The man behind me laughed shortly. "That's sixty-seventy pounds of solid black pooch, and it's got big white teeth. You're supposed to be our dog expert; you get the collar off."

"Don't be a fool," the tall man said irritably. "It's a Labrador; it won't hurt you. They're very friendly dogs."

"Swell, you prove it. Show me how friendly it is. Take the collar off it."

"All right," Nystrom Three said contemptuously, "all right, if you're afraid, you watch the man. I'll handle the dog."

He stepped forward quickly and grabbed for Hank's collar. It was no way to approach a strange dog, gentle or not, particularly one that was already suspicious. The pup dodged, jumping back and to the side; and crouched there warily. The muscular tail slashed from side to side in a very unfriendly fashion. I was a little startled, myself, to see my happy young retriever pup suddenly transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a junior-grade black panther about to spring.

"Friendly, is he?" the man behind me said softly. "With friends like that, who needs enemies?"

"Come here, you dumb mutt!" Nystrom Three was getting mad. He made another grab for the pup and got another lightning-like sideways jump for his pains. He took another step forward. Hank, trapped in a corner, showed his teeth in a snarl that, for his age, was really quite impressive. All along his back, the black hair stood on end; and when the tall man reached for him once more, he gave a sharp, savage little bark, and snapped at the outstretched hand warningly, indicating clearly that the next time he wouldn't miss.

Nystrom Three jumped back and yanked out the revolver he had put away.

The man behind me said quickly, "If you shoot, we'll have to get out of here fast. I thought you wanted to ask this guy some questions."

"All right, what's your suggestion?"

The unseen man nudged me with his gun. "It's his dog; let him take the collar off it… Go on, friend. You see how it is. Either you take it off your live dog, or we'll take it off your dead dog. Make up your mind."

I made a show of hesitating, and shrugged resignedly. "All right, all right, don't hurt the pup. And go easy with that gunbarrel; you're bruising my kidneys. And I'm going to have to get down on my knees. Your animal-loving friend has got him all worked up. I've got to get down to his level to win back his confidence. Okay?"

"Okay, but don't try anything."

I knelt on the floor. "Hank," I said, holding out my hand, "Hank, come! Come on, there's a good dog. Come!"

The pup didn't like it. At the moment, the human race held no attraction for him, any part of it. Things were all wrong in this room and he knew it. Even I might have gone wrong while he wasn't looking. However, in the past week or so, he'd got into the habit of obeying me, and he'd had good training before that. He came.

When he reached me, I scratched his ears for a moment, speaking to him soothingly and telling him what a good dog he was. Then I unbuckled the black leather collar with the shiny studs. I held it for a moment, then abruptly flicked it across the room, sliding it along the linoleum right through the space between the tall man's feet.

"Hank!" I snapped.

Other hunting dogs may go on the command "fetch," but a retriever goes on his name. The pup went charging across the room after the collar, a black missile aimed straight at Nystrom Three.

Another characteristic of amateurs, and one I was counting on, is that while they're likely to shoot when they shouldn't, they almost never shoot when they should. The tall man didn't fire in the second during which he could have stopped the pup. The man behind me didn't fire either, in the fraction of a second it took me to pivot and cut his legs from under him. Then I had the little knife out of my pocket. I flipped it open one-handed and drove it home, once to disable and a second time to kill.

Across the room, there was a lot of scratching and several human gasps of fright. When I looked, Nystrom Three was on the floor, apparently sitting on top of the dog collar. He obviously thought he was being torn to shreds, and maybe he was, a little, but all the pup really wanted was the object he'd been sent after. In spite of earlier disagreements, he had nothing personal against the man, but he was a retriever and he'd been ordered to retrieve. Anybody who got in his way would just have to suffer the consequences.

He seemed to be trying to dig the collar out from under the fallen man, who seemed to be trying to get away from him, but they were working at cross purposes and neither of them was gaining. I suppose it was funny, but I wasn't laughing. For one thing, I had blood on my knuckles, and for another, the tall man was still waving the revolver around wildly, and there was no telling when it would go off and hurt somebody.

I started forward, but the mess untangled itself before I could get there. The pup got his collar and came trotting toward me proudly, and Nystrom Three sat up and aimed the Colt.357 at me with the obvious intention of, at long last, using it for the purpose for which it was designed. I figured my chances, and they were pretty good. If he'd ever fired the gun before, the tremendous recoil of the Magnum cartridge had probably scared him into a permanent flinch that would keep him from hitting anything; and if he hadn't, well, it takes a good man, in a time of crisis, to make good his first shot from a totally unfamiliar weapon. I didn't have him figured for a good man, with a gun or anything else.

Still, nobody likes to be shot at. As I decided that a dive to the left, toward the bedroom door, was a slightly better gamble than a dive to the right and the kitchen sink, I felt the familiar, sweaty sensation of fear. After all, experienced agents had met their deaths at the hands of clumsy amateurs. It could happen to me. I braced myself to move as the gun lined up, waiting for the last possible moment, so that he'd miss his first shot and, I hoped, not recover from the outsize kick in time for a second.

But before I got to carry out this strategy the kitchen window broke with a dramatic crash. Amateur to the last, Nystrom Three stopped aiming at me and swung that way. I mean, a pro would first have shot the man under the gun and then turned to look.

I didn't look. Whoever had smashed the window could wait. Before the tall blond man in front of me could look back in my direction, I had him. I had his gun clamped firmly in my left hand; and I held it away from me while my right hand did the work with the little knife. I made quite sure of him, before looking toward the broken window.

Stottman's face, and his.25 caliber automatic, were watching me from the opening. The pudgy man and I stared at each other for a moment, while I caught my breath.

"You're pretty handy with that sticker," Stottman said calmly. "You're pretty handy with lots of things, for a mere courier. And it's funny that your dog doesn't know boats, isn't it? And that your girlfriend has been driving her yellow Caddy almost eight months, but you didn't recognize it. Don't you think that's funny, Mr. Nystrom?"

It was obvious that he'd found the answers for which he had been searching. He had enough to go on now, and he'd never give up until he'd demonstrated to his superiors that I was not the man they'd sent on this mission. There was nothing else to do, so I shot him through the head with the dead man's gun, left-handed, before he could pull the trigger of his little pocket pistol.