The Interlopers

15

THE PHONE BOOTH WAS PRETTY exposed, standing near the highway in the bare dirt parking area serving a small roadside restaurant, now closed for the night. However, I didn't have much choice. I wanted to get a warning message through as soon as possible, now that we were a reasonable distance from the scene of my latest crimes, and this was the only facility we'd encountered in over an hour. Up ahead, according to my information, were some sixty miles of construction work, where the highway through the coastal mountains, formerly a gravel road, was being rebuilt and paved.

My chances of finding any kind of a suitable communications center along the torn-up stretch didn't seem promising; and while Mr. Smith's fine young men were supposed to be keeping a cautious watch over me and reporting my progress and my problems, I never like to count on other outfits to do things right if I can get our own people on the job. After everything that had happened tonight, if I loused up the mission, it didn't seem likely that it would be on account of a mere phone call.

I drove into the lot, therefore, and jockeyed the rig around until I could more or less cover both cab doors from the booth. The girl beside me stirred uneasily.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Just making sure I can nail you if you make a break while I'm on the phone." I looked at her and put a mean grin on my face. "You remember that guy back there with the hole in his head? I hope you appreciate that I made that shot left-handed-and while he had the drop on me, or thought he had. I'm even better with my right hand. Give it a try if you like. I'll bet you don't make ten yards, measuring from the sill of the car door to the nearest point of your body, wherever it falls."

I waited, but she made no response, and I went over to the booth and called our relay man in Vancouver, keeping an eye on the truck and the highway at the same time, as best I could.

When Vancouver answered I said, "Eric here. Three packages, perishable. Francois Lake. McAllister Lodge, Cabin Number One. Got it?"

"Got it. Sounds like you've been a busy little man. What do you want, a pickup-and-disposal squad?"

"Not if it can be avoided. If they just disappear, people will ask questions I'd rather not have to answer. How much international pressure can we apply through channels? It would be very nice if the local authorities could give out that the boys obviously killed each other off, for reasons unknown. I've got it set up to look that way, more or less. A mystery man who rented the cabin is being sought for questioning, but not very hard, since it's all cut and dried. Can do?"

"I'll forward your recommendation. It's supposed to be a hands-across-the-border job, so maybe we can swing it for you. Anything else?"

"Yes. What the hell is NCS?"

The man in Vancouver laughed. "If I knew that, I certainly wouldn't blab it over the phone. The Northwest Coastal System is one of the biggest secrets on this continent since the Manhattan project."

"Sure," I said. "A secret everybody knows except the poor suckers trying to protect it, like us."

"Not me, friend," said the man in Vancouver. "And not you. Protecting systems is other people's work. We're protecting a man, remember?"

"Keep talking."

"Never mind NCS. We want the Woodman, and we want him dead; dead enough so that he can't fire his little rifle a few months from now at a very well-known gent- exact identity not yet determined-about to assume a very important office. It's been a rough summer and we'd hate to see a worse autumn. This country just can't take any more snipers mowing down any more popular citizens. If it happens while election hysteria is still upon us, indications are that the lid will blow off. Our job-your job-is to head the Woodman off at the pass, and to hell with NCS. You don't have to announce this to Mr. Smith and his merry men, but on the other hand, you don't want to forget it for a moment. Message received?"

"Received and understood," I said. I'd been about to ask a silly question about the mysterious Woodman to whom he'd referred, but when he'd repeated the nickname I'd caught on: it was just one of the in-jokes that circulate through an organization like ours, easy enough to dig if you remembered that wood translates to Holz in German. I just said, to put it on the official record: "In other words, I have now been instructed that chopping the Woodman down to size takes priority over dealing with secret information no matter how priceless and irreplaceable."

"You have been so instructed. Sleep well."

"And pleasant dreams to you," I said. "Eric out."

I hung up. No cars had passed on the highway, and Pat Bellman hadn't moved. I got back on the seat beside her and drove off, keeping an eye on the big, truck-type mirror on my left, the one outside the cab she couldn't see me watching. No lights appeared in the glass, but I kept catching ghostly hints of movement far back on the road behind us. Well, that figured.

I mean, the girl beside me had seemed like a very competent person when I'd first met her in Pasco. She'd set me up for murder with cold-blooded efficiency. Yet tonight she'd treated me to a brainless-ingenue performance that would have shamed a high-school melodrama. She'd walked in on me too carelessly, acted too shocked and stunned by the gory scene in the cottage, and lost her dinner too dramatically.

Lots of girls in the business can blush and weep and faint on demand. A determined young lady, trying to create an impression of total helplessness, might even manage to puke as required. I hadn't believed her act even before I'd spotted a car running dark behind us. Now the question was: just what did she and her accomplice have in mind for me, and where did they intend to try it? It occurred to me that there was no reason for me to await their pleasure.

I put my foot on the brake as a roadside sign flashed into the headlights, advising of a campground ahead. Pat Bellman glanced at me quickly but did not speak.

"Chow time," I said. "Your friends kind of interfered with my dinner and I'm getting hungry."

The camp turned out to be located on a fair-sized stream. I swung in, found a suitable parking space along the bank, and placed the rig so it was reasonably level. There were no other truck-type campers here, and no trailers or tents, either. We had the place to ourselves.

I escorted Pat to the rear of the camper, hitched the pup to a chain outside, and ushered the girl into the little cabin. There was a dinette forward that converted to a double bed, if you needed a double bed. Aft, stove and refrigerator faced sink and clothes closet across a narrow aisle. A space heater, and various racks and lockers, were ingeniously fitted into the remaining space.

Pat made her way forward and sat down on one of the dinette seats, shrugging off her denim jacket. I sat down to light the stove. Nystrom's choice of camper was decidedly limited in headroom, perhaps on the theory that a man six-four is bound to bump his head, anyway, so he might as well get a low unit, easy to drive, and learn to do his indoors chores sitting down. After a little, as I juggled pots and pans and groceries, the girl on the other side of the booth looked up.

"You're going to kill me, too, aren't you?" she said dully. "Just as you killed all the others. My God, they're all dead, all of them! I'm the only one left."

Outside, as if to call her a liar, Hank hit the end of his chain suddenly, shaking the camper. I looked around, putting a frown on my face. At the edge of my vision, I was aware of Pat Bellman grasping the edge of the dinette table tightly, starting to push herself up. She was obviously trying to think of some way of keeping me from going out there, or looking out. Then she forced herself to relax, with an obvious effort.

I rose deliberately and went to the door, crouching to avoid the low ceiling. I looked out at the black pup, almost invisible at the end of his shiny, galvanized chain.

"What's the matter, Hank?" I called loudly. "You got nightmares or something? Lie down and go to sleep."

I saw that he was eating something. As I watched, he licked up some invisible scraps from the ground in front of him. Considering the contents of the collar he was wearing, it was the obvious play, but that didn't make it any easier to take. I realized that I'd become quite fond of the mutt in the week or so we'd been together. I reminded myself that it was always a mistake to get sentimentally involved with your partner in a mission; and that applied whether your partner was human or animal.

"You be quiet out there, hear?" I said, deliberately turning my back on the pup and his unauthorized midnight snack, not to mention the stuff he had around his neck. The priorities had been assigned. We were protecting a man, not a system-and not a dog, either.

I saw Pat Bellman's face go smooth with relief as I pulled the door shut behind me. I stopped to fiddle with the stove, to give her time to get her expressions sorted out, before I returned to my seat facing her. Outside, the pup jangled his chain once more, either picking up a new tidbit or cleaning up the final scraps of the one he'd just swallowed. I looked at the girl across the table; the girl who'd claimed to be a dog-lover, who'd already had one good Labrador shot, along with his master.

"Hi, Skinny," I said. "Under other circumstances, this would be nice and cozy, don't you think?"

She didn't smile. "What's your name?" she asked. "What's your real name? I think I'm entitled to know that before you kill me. And who you're working for."

"The name is Nystrom," I said. "Until the job is finished, that's my real name. And I work for a man in Washington whose name wouldn't mean anything to you."

"Are you trying to make me think you're employed by the U.S. government? A killer like you? I don't believe it!"

"That's your privilege," I said. "How do you like your eggs?"

"What?"

"Eggs."

"Oh, I couldn't… Well, all right. Sunny-side up. Two. And three strips of that bacon. And black coffee, lots of black coffee. And some toast if you've got it. Lots of toast." Apparently she felt the need to explain her sudden hunger, because she laughed brightly. "You've kept me so busy chasing you that I've hardly had time to eat. I guess my last real meal was the one you bought me in Pasco. I really shouldn't have let you pick up that check, should I? After all, it was my invitation."

From not talking at all, she was now beginning to talk too much. I saw her steal a glance at her wristwatch and look up quickly, clearly hoping I hadn't caught her at it.

"If I were to try to talk you into sparing my life," she said, "If I were to try, where should I start?"

"I told you where. I'd like to know who's offered you fifty grand for what." I glanced at my own watch as I turned toward the stove. The time was a few minutes after ten, if it mattered, and apparently it did. I went on, "Oh, and there's another question I'd like an answer to. Why did you send your boys after me tonight?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't act stupid, Skinny. You know I've made only two of my scheduled five contacts. Yet you sent a couple of fumble-fingered goons to grab the dog collar tonight instead of waiting until it held all the information you wanted. They were going to grab it, they were going to question me, and then they were going to dispose of me. It seems like a pretty shortsighted performance. Who was going to get the rest of the stuff for you if you had me killed?"

"But I wasn't really…" She stopped. "I mean, I didn't really…"

"You didn't really what?"

"They weren't really trying to kill you."

I said, "I was there. I heard what they said."

"They were just supposed to talk as if they were going to kill you. To scare you. And then I'd have come in and stopped them and you'd have been grateful and…" She grimaced. "All right, maybe it was silly. But that's the way I was told to do it. You're not the only one operating under orders, Mr. Nystrom, or whatever your real name is.',

"I see," I said. "So you'd been instructed to grab the available stuff now, and then try to get me to cooperate gratefully to bring you the rest, because you'd saved me from your terrible thugs." I laughed. "Whose brainwave was that?"

"I can't tell you."

"Sure you can."

"He… he'll kill me if I talk."

I put a plate down in front of her. "I'm right here, sweetheart, dangerous old me. Where's this other guy? What can he do to you that I can't?" I set my own plate on the table, dumped a fistful of implements between us, and sat down. "Dig in," I said.

She took a bite, and started to speak, and stopped. We ate in silence. Not until she had cleaned off her plate thoroughly did she look up and say. "He was Chinese. A Chinaman named Soo."

I regarded her small tomboy face across the table. She was telling the truth now, and I thought I knew why. She was telling the truth because for some reason she had to keep me talking in here for a certain length of time, and if I caught her in a lie I might get annoyed enough to break off the conversation. What she'd said was highly interesting. I guess I should have felt kind of vindicated and triumphant. After all, I'd suggested the possibility of Chinese involvement to Libby Meredith, who hadn't seemed very impressed by my logic. But the fact that my guess had proved correct didn't intrigue me as much, at the moment, as the name that had been mentioned.

"Soo?" I said. "Kind of a stout Charlie Chan type with a precise way of speaking English?"

"Yes, do you know him?"

"We met over in Hawaii a year or so back. If it's the same Soo. Did he by any chance tell you that his name wasn't really Soo, but it would do for purposes of reference?"

"Why…why, yes, that's exactly what he said! It must be the same man. What was he doing in Hawaii?"

"Just about the same as he seems to have been doing in San Francisco or wherever you met him: making trouble for decadent capitalist nations like the U. S. of A. for the benefit of a certain People's Republic of the Orient." I grinned. "I saved his life out there, in a manner of speaking, but I don't suppose the debt really weighs on him. Well, well. Good old Peking Soo. With fifty grand to shell out for what?"

"For information on the Northwest Coastal System, naturally."

"How did you happen to meet him?"

"He looked me up. He'd heard of me from some characters I'd met, political types."

"I don't suppose I have to ask what brand of politics."

She shrugged. "There's no bore as deadly as a Marxist bore. We didn't have any more to do with them than we could help. But they sicked Mr. Soo on us."

"We?" I said. "Us?"

She hesitated. "At the University, I'd got to know some pretty bright people, several of whom later wound up working in some pretty hush installations. In fact, there was a kind of group of us that used to get together and experiment with… well, never mind that. It was just experimental. We weren't hooked or anything, but you like to try anything once. Anyway, even after we all graduated, we'd still meet from time to time, those of us who could make it."

"Did Mr. Soo use your experiments for blackmail?"

"Oh, no. Nothing like that. He just laughed his slick laugh and said he enjoyed meeting young people with inquiring minds. And then he started dropping hints…" She moved her shoulders awkwardly once more. "Of course, some of the characters I'm talking about, the bright people, turned out to be totally square about things like security and loyalty and patriotism, real conformist jerks. I was kind of surprised. I mean, you know a guy for years and you still don't know how he's going to react to…"

"To treason?" I said.

She made a sharp little gesture. "Why make with the loaded words? Anyway, the rest of us… well, as far as we're concerned, that kind of stuff is strictly for laughs these days. What's to betray, what's to be loyal to, Nystrom? You start getting an attack of ideals about something, peace for instance, and a cop comes and beats you over the head with a club, right? And these were pretty bright people, too bright to go around demonstrating in the streets and getting their brains knocked out. Even if you take your ideals that seriously, why buck city hail when you can dig the foundations right out from under it and get paid for doing it?"

I said, "Did you work this out in advance, or did it take Mr. Soo to help you see the light?"

She said sharply, "We didn't need any help to see that things were all wrong and getting worse! It's fairly obvious, isn't it, that the older people who've been running things have made a mess of them and just won't admit it…"

I said, "Personally, I don't trust anybody under thirty. But then, I don't trust anybody over thirty, either."

"Funny!" she said bitterly. "That's all people like you can do when challenged: make jokes!"

I caught that quick sneaky glance at the watch once more as I refilled the coffee cups. It would have been nice to know how much time we had to kill and what was supposed to happen when it was up. Obviously she was stalling desperately, trotting out all the youth-versus-age and world-we-never-made clichйs and rationalizations; as well as all the excuses and justifications they always have, young or old, for selling out.

I'm not saying that some of her points weren't valid. I'm just saying that it gets kind of monotonous, to a man in my line of work, the way they've always got it worked out so neatly, all the clever folk, when they hand the stuff over to the enemy-whatever it may be and whoever he may be-and walk off with the cash.

Somehow, they're always saving the world by betraying a piece of it. I bet myself that in a minute this girl would come up with some ingenious twist that would clinch the argument, proving that actually she and her friends had been working in behalf of the human race as a whole, and that the fifty grand was just incidental to the whole shining scheme of world improvement.

But she fooled me. She said, "We don't make jokes. We don't think it's funny, Nystrom. We think it's a dirty, fouled-up mess that's been left us, and there just isn't a damn thing that can be done about it now. It's too late now, so we might as well make a little money any way we can and have a few kicks while we can, before the whole thing blows up with us…"

Well, you can take a few more yards of that and cut it to fit. It was too bad in a way. I have some sympathy for the misguided young coffee-shop intellectuals, but they don't really tug at my heartstrings. But I couldn't help remembering this girl at the river with a fishing rod in her hand. Whether or not it had been an act for my benefit that particular morning, at some time she must have been truly fond of the outdoors to have learned the techniques so well. She undoubtedly had other talents and virtues; she might be straightened out if somebody wanted to take the time and trouble-and could talk the California police into overlooking an accessory-to-murder charge. Neither was likely. She might be worth saving, but nobody was going to bother. Certainly I wasn't. Saving young doomsday cynics from themselves wasn't what I'd been sent up here for. Quite the contrary.

I caught a glimpse of my watch as I reached for the coffeepot once more. I was surprised to see that it read well past eleven. We'd been playing her delaying game for more than an hour. It should be enough, I decided. Anyway, I'd learned what I wanted to know, as much of it as I could expect to get from her, and I was tired of games. I didn't particularly want to see her go into the sexy Mata Hari act I figured had to come next because it practically always does.

I refilled our cups once more, put the pot back on the stove, and said, "Actually, I may not have to murder anybody else tonight, if I can persuade you to show some sense for a change."

Her eyes widened slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Bellman, I'm a pro," I said. "Three of your friends have already died trying to take me. They haven't even come close." This wasn't quite true-it had been close enough in that cabin before Stottman took a hand-but we weren't dealing with truth here. I went on harshly: "Why don't you get smart before it happens to you?"

She licked her lips. "I… I don't understand…"

"Sure you do. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Now listen closely. I've got orders concerning you, but I'm allowed some discretion. Suppose you give me your word that you'll beat it out of here and go straight home without talking to anybody, taking your friend outside with you…', She was pretty good. She didn't really start; she just sat very, very still for a moment, holding in the start that wanted to betray her. After a brief delay, she managed to put a puzzled frown on her face.

"My friend? I don't know what you mean!"

I went on as if she hadn't spoken. "Of course, the whole deal depends on what he fed my dog. I suppose that's why you've been stalling, to give it time to take effect. If it was something like strychnine, to hell with both of you. But if it was just a harmless knockout drug to let him get that collar, we can work it out. Signal your boy to come in here unarmed, with his hands up, bringing the collar with him. Promise you won't talk, and tell me what the pup got and what the antidote is. I'm kind of fond of him; besides, I'm going to need him for identification again, farther up the line. You do that, and I'll forget my orders and turn you both loose." I looked at her across the table. "Well, what do you say?"

She was back in control once more. She gave me the straight, level, clear-eyed look of the accomplished liar. "Honest, I don't know what you're talking about! There were only the four of us, and three are dead. I'm right here. Who's left to be prowling around outside? You're just imagining things."

It was what I'd expected, of course, but it was still too bad. If she'd accepted the deal, I'd have been stuck with it. Maybe I'd even wanted to be stuck with it, a little.

"Sure," I said. I rose and pulled out the short-barreled Colt revolver. "Sure. So let's go out there and look. If I'm wrong, we'll find nothing but an empty campground and a sleeping pup… After you, Miss Bellman."

I gestured with the gun. With her eyes on the weapon, not speaking, she rose stiffly and moved to the door and looked back. I nodded for her to open it, and she did.