The Interlopers

24

IN THE MORNING, IN THE TINY bathroom of the stateroom we'd finally put to use, I shaved, after a fashion, with a dainty, pink lady-type machine supplied by Libby. I'm not partial to those power mowers, even the gentleman-type ones, but it did a halfway decent job, and I didn't figure folks up there on the last frontier would be too critical of a few remaining whiskers. As I was finishing, several shocks ran through the ship.

"You'd better hurry," Libby called from the other room. "We seem to be docking."

I came out of the cubbyhole to find her fully clad, packing her suitcase. I got my shirt buttoned up and tucked in while she was completing the task; then I picked up the single item of luggage and followed her out into the corridor and down the stairs, which were crowded with people hurrying to their cars. When we reached the deck below, one of the big landing doors was open, and the ramp was being lowered into place.

Libby made her way to the yellow Cadillac, unlocked the trunk, waited for me to place the suitcase inside, and slammed the lid. She was back in her mannish corduroy pantsuit, but it still didn't make her look noticeably like a man. Her short, dark hair was a little tousled-we'd slept too late for her to take much time with it-and her face looked pink and young and sleepy.

"Wait for me at the border," I said. "Or I'll wait for you. They don't open it until eight anyway, I heard somebody say. There'll be time for me to stir us up something to eat in the camper before they let us through."

"I'm not hungry," she said and hesitated. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. "Matt."

"Yes?"

"It was nice," she said. "Whatever happens, last night was nice."

I looked at her for a moment. She wasn't the sweetest, gentlest woman I'd ever met, or even the most beautiful. I still wasn't quite sure of her motives and loyalties. Nevertheless, we'd managed to share something special for a few hours-something a little different from the enjoyable but meaningless man-woman stuff we'd indulged in previously-but it wasn't the sort of thing you could talk about without spoiling it.

"Yeah," I said. "Nice. Be careful, doll. We don't know what we'll be running into on shore."

This was a lie, of course. I knew-or hoped I knew- exactly what we'd be running into: a professional killer named Holz. But I couldn't warn her further, no matter how nice it had been. I just turned away and squeezed between the parked cars to the camper and checked on Hank. There wasn't time to let him out for his morning airing. The first cars were already driving off the ship, including, I noted, an old white Plymouth station wagon.

I told the pup to hold everything, closed the door on him, and took a quick look under the truck to see if any bombs had been added or any brake lines or steering linkages removed in my absence. I checked the engine compartment. Even commercial vehicles are encumbered with a lot of Mickey Mouse gadgets these days-that big, rugged, powerful truck engine was decorated with a cute little automatic choke, for God's sake! Apparently modern-day truck drivers are considered too stupid and feeble to pull a knob out of a dashboard. But there didn't seem to be any gimmickry that hadn't been there before.

Well, I didn't really think the Woodman would go the sabotage or explosives route. There are guys who like to see guys blow up or fall off cliffs by remote control, and then there are guys who prefer to have them die, if they must die, with neat little personalized holes in them. Having studied his dossier carefully, I'd come to the conclusion that Holz, like me, belonged in the latter category.

Still, I was glad when the engine started without extraneous fireworks. Presently I was driving away from the ferry slip in the misty morning twilight, in a slow-moving line of cars winding along the shore, headlight to taillight. At the first suitable spot, I pulled out and turned the pup loose.

Libby's car passed without slowing up. Pete's station wagon was somewhere up ahead in the parade. The converted Ford delivery van rolled by with two up front, but the visibility was too poor for me to make out whether young Smith or his bearded partner was driving. Where the rest of the boyscouts were-the ones who were supposed to be keeping tabs on me and anyone who approached me-I didn't know or care, as long as they stayed out of my way. I had to admit they'd done a pretty fair job of it so far. Their moral attitudes might be childish, but their tailing techniques seemed to be adequate.

I let the pup sniff and explore happily along the stony beach, wet with the night's rain. He'd been locked up on shipboard a long time and deserved a run. It was chilly standing there on the shore-after all, these were Arctic waters. Ahead were the lights of the town of Haines; behind was the ferry dock. As I looked that way, the Matanuska pulled out and headed up the bay for Skagway and the end of her northward voyage. I was on my own once more, doing my own navigating. When Hank had fired both barrels and become thoroughly reacquainted with terra firma, I loaded him back into the camper and cruised through the sleeping town in the vague, slowly growing light.

Watching the rearview mirrors, I saw Pete's station wagon pull out from behind a darkened filling station and fall into place close behind me. Apparently he was going to stick to his open-surveillance routine, hoping it would make me mad or scared or guilty. It was too bad. I mean I admire loyalty as much as anybody, but the guy was overdoing his devotion to his defunct comrade. He was crowding me.

The delay had let the cavalcade of cars from the ship pull ahead of us. We had Alaska pretty much to ourselves as we pulled out of town on a paved two-lane highway that followed the bank of a sizeable river upstream. I could see the water gleaming through the trees, an odd, murky, milky, light blue-green color, rippled with current eddies. I jacked up the speed as civilization, such as it was up here, dropped behind us, and looked for a suitable spot to teach friend Pete that tailgating is bad driving.

What I needed was a reasonably sharp curve, and a reasonably steep drop-off on the left, or river, side of the road. I found just the right spot after a few miles. I took the curve fast, hit the brakes just beyond, switched on the right-turn signal, and veered over as if to park.

Pete, rounding the curve right behind me, had no real choice. He was too close to stop; he had to swing around me, or try. Maybe he even thought I was actually parking. As he came up, I threw the long shift lever from fourth to third, the real acceleration gear. I put my foot down hard, and all four barrels of the big carburetor opened wide, and all two hundred and forty horsepower-truck horsepower, remember-came in with a roar. The pickup leaped forward just as Pete drew abreast.

He tried to make it clear, but he didn't have a chance. The old station wagon had neither the power nor the gears. He couldn't get past me and he was going too fast to drop behind. I put my cab door even with his front wheels and, slightly ahead of him like that, holding it there, moved deliberately left across the highway. He didn't even try to ram. I guess the big truck-and-camper rig towering over his flimsy passenger job looked just too massive and invulnerable, and maybe it was. Anyway, trick driving was apparently not his specialty. He just let himself be herded across the road and over the bank. It was finished in an instant.

I looked into the left-hand mirror… He could have ridden it out alive, but I saw no reason to go back and look.

Some sixty miles farther on, I came upon the little white Canadian customs-and-immigration building that marked the international border. The geography up there is pretty scrambled, with a strip of U.S. territory-the Alaska panhandle, so-called-running down the coast for hundreds of miles and Canadian real estate inland. Since there are no roads along that rugged shoreline, we now had to leave the U.S. and head across the Canadian interior, through British Columbia and Yukon Territory, to pick up the northern end of the Alaska Highway, which would then lead us back across another international boundary into Alaska proper.

The customs man had apparently just got out of bed. The office was open, but there was a line of cars still waiting to be processed through. Libby's convertible was parked at the side of the road a little back from the mob scene. I stopped the truck behind it, and she came over and joined me in the camper, reacting in typical feminine fashion to Hank's muddy feet and affectionate tongue.

"You really ought to teach that dog some manners," she said, wiping a smudge off her corduroy pants.

"He's just being friendly," I said. "Down, Stupid. The lady doesn't like dogs."

"You can say that twice," Libby said. "My God, that poodle they saddled me with in Seattle! The idiot bitch was carsick all the way to Pasco and back, and I was a total wreck by the time I got rid of her-well, you saw me."

Her voice was a little challenging. We were proving something. Perhaps we were demonstrating that, even if last night meant something, I was going to have to take her as she was. She wasn't going to be a hypocrite, no matter how nice it had been. She wasn't going to pretend to be a dog-lover, or anything else, to please me.

When I didn't rise to the challenge, or come to the defense of our four-footed friends-even my own four-footed friend-she sighed and said in a different tone: "I was beginning to worry about you, darling. What kept you so long?"

"Why, Hank had a lot of business to attend to, after two days on shipboard," I said. "And then there was a slight accident down the road."

"An accident?" After a moment, she glanced at me quickly. There was an odd, savage, expectant little gleam in her eye that I'd seen before. As I've said, she wasn't the gentlest lady I'd ever slept with. She licked her lips. "That man you called Pete? I saw him waiting for you at that filling station as I drove by. Is he… is he dead?"

"I didn't stop to check," I said.

"What do you mean, you didn't stop to check?" Suddenly her voice was harsh. "You fool, if you made a try at him and he's still alive-" I said, "Sweetheart, you are the damndest girl for just wishing people dead. If you feel all that homicidal, why don't you get out and do a little murdering on your own?"

I grinned as I said it, but she didn't smile back. Her voice remained angry as she said, "But now that you've confirmed his suspicions by trying to get rid of him, he can ruin everything!"

It had been a mistake, after all, not to go back, or at least to tell her about it. I'd forgotten that this girl didn't know, as I did, that whether or not Pete's suspicions were confirmed didn't really matter, since he'd already communicated them to somebody else, who was acting on them or soon would be.

She didn't know, and I was not authorized to tell her, that this was just the way my assignment had been planned a long time ago-well, it seemed a long time ago. She was thinking of a different operation with a different objective, and I couldn't put her straight. That Mr. Smith and his people and his counterespionage mission were just a cover I was using for a totally different job wasn't information I could entrust to anybody, certainly not to a girl who claimed to be working for Smith.

To cover up, I had no recourse but to get nasty. I said, "With all due respect, Miss Meredith, I'm just a little tired of your trying to use me as a lethal weapon-and then complaining when I fail to pile up the corpses in large enough heaps to suit your bloodthirsty taste!"

She looked at me coldly. After a moment, without speaking, she rose from the dinette seat in a dignified manner-at least it would have been dignified if the camper had had about six inches more headroom. The crack on the head didn't improve her temper. She just glared at me and pushed past me and went out of there fast. I heard her, outside, running around the rig to her car. The forward window, giving a view ahead through the cab and windshield, showed me the Cadillac lurching away to join the diminishing line at the customs office.

I drew a long breath and turned back to the stove. After a little, I noted that she'd been checked through. Obviously still mad, she was out in the left lane, highballing it past the slower traffic before she was out of sight. Well, that might be all right on smooth U.S. pavement, but the Canadian roads up here, I'd been told, were very much unpaved and had to be treated with respect, particularly if you were driving a vehicle designed for glamour rather than durability.

But that was her problem. I really had no business worrying about it. It was time for me to remember once more the maxim of the profession: What happens in bed has absolutely no bearing on what happens elsewhere. No matter how nice the night had been, it was daytime now.

I sat down to eat. Afterward, I went through the border formalities and, alone on the road, headed toward the Alaska Highway a hundred miles away, thinking about Holz and just how he might be figuring to take care of me, now that he had me available in open, empty country instead of on a crowded ship.

At least that was what I was supposed to be thinking about.