The Intriguers

x.

At this hour of the morning, there wasn't much traffic to be heard outside, and no one inside the room broke the silence for several seconds. It was the first opportunity I'd had to examine in good light the female agent I'd just rescued. I was a little disappointed. Martha had described her as handsome, but while striking in an intense, hawk-like way, she didn't attract me much: a lean and leathery lady with a rather thin and bony face turned reddish brown by recent sunburn. Her khaki pants were grimy and torn at one knee, and her khaki shirt was grimy and lacked a button-not the strategic top button that seductive movie females always manage to misplace in times of stress, but one lower down.

I reminded myself that after hiding out two days and nights on the Arizona desert, she could hardly be expected to be a flower of fashion, and in fairness I should reserve judgment. However, my initial reaction wasn't favorable. Of course, I may have been prejudiced by her domineering manner.

"Mr. Helm? Matt?" It was the girl sitting on the bed. Lorna and I turned to look at her sharply. She flushed, disconcerted by our sudden attention. "I… I don't understand."

"What don't you understand?"

"Daddy said that you didn't know… that nobody knew…

It seemed odd to hear Mac referred to in that casually familiar way. I said, "Your dad isn't that stupid. What he probably told you was that nobody was supposed to know his real name. But I doubt that a man smart enough to manage a menagerie of snoops like us would ever kid himself that he could prevent them from doing a little snooping on their own time, As a matter of fact, I learned his name kind of by accident. One day, several years ago, I saw a car I had reason to believe was his personal transportation, parked in downtown Washington. He'd used it a few months earlier to send me help when I needed it in a hurry. it was a Jaguar sedan with a radiotelephone installation, a little too expensive and conspicuous a vehicle to be kept around for the use of ordinary agents, but fast, which 1 guess was why he'd risked lending it out in this particular emergency. Anyway, I couldn't resist waiting around to see if I'd guessed right. After a while, Mac walked up, got into the Jag, and drove off. I tailed him to a house in Chevy Chase. The rest was just a matter of basic research: Arthur M. Borden, respectable civil servant, exact field of employment unspecified, with a wife and one child, female."

There was a little silence, then Martha said, "My mother died two years ago."

"I'm sorry."

Lorna ended another awkward pause by saying briskly, "Well, I was checking old civil service records on another matter entirely when I came across a handwriting that looked familiar. The signature was A. McGillivray Borden, and there were papers on file-interoffice memoranda and such-signed McGillivray Borden, or simply Mac Borden. Apparently he disliked the name Arthur in his younger days. That was long before he got into this particular line of government work, before World War II."

Martha Borden licked her lips. "It would seem… it would seem that grown men and women would have better things to do than sneak around prying in matters that are none of their business!"

I said, "Hell, we work for the guy. We put our lives on the line when he says 'put.' Anything about him is our business. If he wants to be anonymous around the office, fine, none of us is going to blab what he's found out, but if a time ever comes when a little additional information is needed, we've got it. And I think he knows we've got it."

"Why would you expect to need information like that?"

I said, "I already have needed it, and so have you. if I hadn't recognized the name, and looked at you a little harder, and realized who you really were, you'd have been in a tough spot once I came to the conclusion that, with your attitude, you couldn't possibly be any kind of fledgling agent working for Mac in any capacity. And I'm willing to bet he was counting on that when he told you to use your real name."

After a moment, Lorna spoke abruptly. "That bottle does not have to be brought up to body temperature, Mr. Helm. It's not as if it were rare old brandy."

I'd forgotten the whiskey bottle I'd picked up once more but had not used. "Sorry," I said, pouring a drink and handing it to her.

She said, as if there had been no irrelevant interruption, "There is also the consideration that your father is not supernatural, Miss Borden. We respect him, but we do not attribute unearthly powers to him. Specifically, we do not consider him murder-proof or kidnap-proof."

"What do you mean?"

"There are people all over the world who have reason not to like him very much," Lorna said. "He could be shot down in the street today or turn up missing tomorrow. In either case, there would be decisions for us to make. If he were killed, we might want to avenge him. If he were to disappear, we'd certainly want to find him. In either eventuality, we'd need a better starting point than a three-letter nickname."

"Well, Daddy hasn't died or vanished yet, thank God," Martha said. "He was still answering his phone this afternoon-I guess that's yesterday afternoon now. Matt talked with him. But, as a matter of fact, he does seem to be expecting trouble, serious trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" Lorna asked.

"I don't really know. He didn't say. But if worse comes to worst, he's planning to do just as you say: disappear, for a while at least."

"That figures," I said. "He's a sitting duck as long as he stays in Washington. If Herbie Leonard feels secure enough to take over the ranch by force and send the extermination squads after individual agents like me, he's not going to hesitate to try for the head man when he figures the time is right. "Whiskey?"

Martha frowned. "What?"

"Do you want a drink?"

"Oh. Oh, no, thanks… Well, all right, just a little one. Matt, what's happening? What's it all about?"

I handed her a glass, lightly loaded. "I was hoping you could tell me."

She shook her head. "No, Daddy kept saying that the less I knew the better, except for the names I had to memorize for you. He said he was giving you enough information so you could figure it out, as long as I was sure to tell you the code was double negative."

I saw Lorna check a slight start and glance my way. I nodded minutely and spoke to the younger woman: "Okay, you've told me. Let's try to work it out from what we know. There's obviously a lot of political power involved. Somebody wants something big and is going to great lengths to get it. Well, we know what Senator Love wants: she wants her mail delivered to a certain address on Pennsylvania Avenue. In a Latin-American country, she'd be setting the stage for a coup d'etat by making sure of the army. Here in the US where we don't change governments that way, she seems to be going about it a little differently. She's apparently making sure of the nation's intelligence services well before election time. How she plans to use Herbie Leonard and his newly conquered undercover empire remains to be seen, but obviously her first concern, and his, is to make certain he's actually in solid control. That means eliminating any oddball organizations that might not go along with the big takeover, like Mac's Murderous Mavericks and their notoriously independent chief."

Lorna frowned, sipping her drink. "I'm rather surprised they haven't struck at Mac already."

"Maybe they have," I said.

"That's, silly!" Martha protested quickly. "He sounded perfectly all right when we… when you talked with him, Matt. A little tired, but otherwise all right."

"Maybe that's what got him tired, ducking knives and bombs and bullets," I said, and went on before the girl could speak again: "Look, Mac's been taking care of himself for a long time. I suppose he can be hit-anybody can – but it'll take more than a white-haired Washington glamour boy to do it. Leonard is ambitious and he may even be smart in his own way, but his genius, if any, is political, not homicidal. Hell, he's tried for me twice, or his boys have, and I'm still here. I suspect Mr. Leonard is discovering the hard way that good men in this particular line of endeavor are hard to find. Where's he going to recruit the necessary talent? He can't afford to deal with the syndicate, that would be political suicide, and there's only one government agency that really specializes in this type of work-and that's the one he's trying to eliminate."

Martha said sharply, "This type of dirty work, you mean!"

I grinned. "That's our girl. Keep after us. Maybe some day we'll straighten up and fly right."

"But it's… it's horrible! These times, when civilization has at last turned the corner away from war and violence, to think that a government organization run by my own father She ran out of breath and stopped.

I looked at Lorna. "What times do you think the kid is talking about? Have you seen us turning any corners lately, Miss Holt?" I used the cover name I'd been told about.

"Mrs. Holt, if you please, but you may call me Helen," Lorna said graciously. "Well, the body count in Vietnam was down just a little in the last newspaper I read at the ranch. And those people in the Middle East weren't killing each other much on that particular day. And the police hadn't shot or beat up any blacks or students within the previous few hours; and only one policeman had got killed that I noticed. Maybe things did seem just a little better, but I wouldn't say we'd actually turned a sharp and decisive corner, no."

Something she'd said screamed for attention. I frowned, realized what it was, and asked, "The cop you said got shot. Where did it happen?"

"He wasn't really a cop, just a sheriff's deputy. And I didn't say he was shot. Actually, he was garroted, strangled to death. In Fort Adams, Oklahoma. That's where they had those student riots recently, I believe. Apparently somebody's been giving extracurricular courses in how to use the old piano-wire noose. Why?"

I hesitated, and shook my head. "Never mind."

Martha, who'd been trying to speak, broke in hotly: "You're so terribly, terribly amusing, both of you! It's very easy to make fun of the little girl, isn't it? The little girl who has the naпve and romantic notion that human life is something valuable and… and kind of sacred…

I started to say something and checked myself. Lorna made an odd little sound in her throat and turned to the dresser and splashed more whiskey into her glass. She stood there for a moment regarding her sunburned features in the mirror, without affection. She spoke without turning her head.

"Do they all live in a dream world, Helm?" she asked softly. "Don't any of them ever wake up?"

I didn't say anything. Martha stirred angrily and blurted, "I don't want to wake up! Not if being awake will make me like you!"

Lorna, still without looking around, said, "Miss Borden, what is the one thing we have plenty of in this world? What is the single material that is not in short supply these days?"

"I don't know what you mean!"

The older woman said quietly, "We're running out of clean air and water, are we not? And not only clean water. I read in the same newspaper that in the capital city of New Mexico, practically right next door, they are not watering their lawns or washing their ears this summer because they have hardly any water, clean or dirty. We are running out of important metals and minerals. Some areas of the world cannot produce enough food to support their populations adequately. Fuels of all kinds are becoming scarce. In fact we are running out of just about everything, Miss Borden, with one spectacular exception. What is the one resource that's practically unlimited'?" The girl licked her lips and didn't answer. Lorna said, "The one thing we have plenty of, my dear, is people."

Martha licked her lips once more. "Assuming that what you say is true, Mrs. Holt or whatever I'm supposed to call you, what's your point?"

Lorna sipped her drink, still studying the tanned, aquiline face in the mirror. Her voice remained very soft. "We are going to have to take a long hard look at the so-called sacredness of human life in the very near future, if the race is to survive. We are going to have to apply a little logic to the problem, instead of continuing to wallow in the sentimental humanitarianism currently fashionable. And the simple fact is, Miss Borden, that on strictly logical grounds we should consider war a tremendous, if rather inefficient, blessing. We should look at the yearly traffic toll as a great, beneficial contribution to population control. We should applaud every suicide as a public benefactor voluntarily yielding up his place on this crowded planet and making it available to somebody else."

I didn't like it. When they start thinking deep thoughts, and particularly when they start talking about them, they're apt to get kind of unreliable in action.

I said, "Hooray for cancer and emphysema. Bring on your drugs and cigarettes. Cut it out, Lorna. You can solve the problems of humanity some other night. Right now let's tackle something important, like who's going to sleep where."

She paid me no attention, and neither did Martha. The younger girl said, "You must be crazy, Mrs. Holt! That's a terrible way to think!"

Lorna shrugged. "I'm not crazy, just realistic. The basic trouble with your generation, Miss Borden, is that you will not face the facts. Subconsciously you realize that you're mostly superfluous-that the world would be much better off if only a fraction of you had been born-but you can't bring yourself to admit it and face the logical consequences: that your lousy little lives are not particularly valuable, let alone sacred. There are too many of you. Anything that plentiful can't be worth much, can it?"

1 said, "Damn it, Lorna, shut up! it's too late at night-"

"No," said the woman at the dresser, gulping down the last of her drink and reaching for the bottle again, "no, it's not too late at night, and no, I will not shut up! I am fed up to here with children who consider themselves something special simply because they happened to be born. And I am particularly tired of the hypocritical attitude towards death they all display. They live on death. Every antibiotic they take-and they gobble penicillin like candy – kills millions of living organisms. The slaughterhouses of the nation run knee-deep in blood to supply them with hamburgers and hotdogs. Even if they're vegetarians, they're eating bread and cereal and salads from fields protected by lethal farm chemicals that murdered countless innocent insects that had a perfect right to exist-and after all, a stalk of wheat or a head of lettuce is a living thing, too, something they carefully ignore. This girl is right now sitting in a motel room which was undoubtedly constructed on the graves of hundreds of small living creatures, slaughtered and dispossessed by the cruel bulldozers

"You're here, too!" the girl protested.

"My dear, I'm not carrying on a crusade against death. You are. It's the great fashionable cause of modern times. The Victorians thought sex was horrible, but they accepted death. You accept sex, but you think death is perfectly dreadful. That makes both of you hypocrites. No life is any more sacred than any other. Why should you be more important than a streptococcus or a mosquito, just because you happen to be a little more highly developed from one point of view-your own? Either all life is sacred, which is ridiculous, since most life forms, men included, have to live by preying on other life forms; or no life is sacred, not mine, not Helm's, not yours. 01. course, his and mine are a little more sacred than yours-"

"Why?" Martha demanded. "Because you're older? That's just silly!"

Lorna started to drink from her replenished glass, but frowned and set it aside carefully. She gripped the edge of the dresser, staring at her image in the mirror. She spoke, still without turning her head.

"Not because we're older," she said slowly and deliberately, "but because we make our lives more valuable by making it damned tough for anyone who tries to take them away from us. But they could have your life just by reaching out for it, couldn't they, Miss Borden? You wouldn't defend it. You've backed yourself into a philosophical corner from which you can't strike back; and even if you could bring yourself to do it, you wouldn't know how. Which, my dear, makes your life about as valuable as that of a sick mouse, worth only the slight effort required, by anyone who doesn't mind messing up his boot heel, to stamp down hard. And in the truly overcrowded world that's coming, those who aren't prepared to fight will get stamped on, girl, and that goes for nations as well as individuals. We haven't turned any peaceful corners and I can see none ahead. I see just a very tough battle for room enough to live in halfway decent fashion…

Her voice stopped abruptly. Her fingers released the edge of the dresser; and she slid to the floor in a dead faint.