The Intriguers

XXL.

Martha Borden stared incredulously at the armed woman in the bathroom doorway. "Now what do you think you're doing with that silly little pistol?" she demanded.

Lorna shrugged. "Ask Helm. It's his play."

"Matt, have you gone absolutely crazy-"

"Over here," I said. "Hands against the wall. That's right. Hold the pose." Moving in to make the frisk, I apologized to Lorna over my shoulder: "Not that I think you'd miss anything that was there at the time, but she was outside for several minutes getting the candy just now. She could have picked up some kind of a weapon." I went over the girl carefully, finding nothing. "Okay, you can lower your arms and turn around."

Martha's eyes were hot and angry as she swung to face me once more. "Well, that's one way of getting a cheap thrill!"

"Relax, little girl," I said. "I hate to disillusion you, but your body isn't all that stimulating. I've frisked lots more irresistible ladies without blowing a fuse." I studied her for a moment longer, frowning. I wasn't sure, of course. Either she was a hell of a good actress-better than she had any right to be-or I was making an embarrassing mistake; but it had to be checked out. I felt around the edge of the bed where she'd been sitting earlier, and found nothing there, either. "Sit down," I said. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

"Watch it!" Lorna said quickly. We both looked at her, startled. She said, "Don't sit on the candy bars. I guess I will have one, after all."

I raked them all up and handed them to her. She put her gun away and moved to a nearby chair and sat down, carefully peeling a Hershey's with almonds.

Martha asked, "Well, should I sit or shouldn't 1?"

"Sit," I said.

Lorna munched chocolate and nuts and asked, "What's the problem, anyway?"

"There are two problems," I said. "The first is that she knows too much. The second is that she's probably a lousy little traitor."

I made it rough deliberately, so that I could study the reaction. Martha made a shocked sound of protest, but whether or not it was genuine was hard to tell.

Lorna asked, "How do you figure that, Helm?"

I said, "I've been playing along with her to find out what she was going to say. Now we've got to figure out how much of what she's told us was the truth, if any of it was. If it wasn't, we've got to figure out who got her to lie, and what the real truth is."

"Everything I told you was the truth!" Martha blurted indignantly. "You have absolutely no reason to call me a-"

"Every reason in the world, doll," I said. "We'll come to the evidence in a minute."

Lorna swallowed another bite of chocolate and said calmly, "I gather you're not contending that she isn't Martha Borden. You're saying that Martha Borden is a traitor-a traitress, to be precise."

"That's right. The resemblance is too damned close. She's got to be the right girl. Only she's gone wrong. Well, she's not the first kid who's turned against her parents these days."

"What makes you think she has?"

"Like 1 said, she knows too much. A lot of the names she used were those of genuine agents; maybe all of them were. But the really interesting thing is what she doesn't know, or says she doesn't know. She can't tell, an impostor from her own father. At least she pretends she can't."

"What do you mean?" That was Martha, jumping to her feet. "What do you mean, an impostor?"

"Sit down!" I waited until she'd obeyed. Now that I was marshalling the evidence, it looked fairly convincing. I spoke to Lorna. "Suppose you were to dial the special number, Mrs. Holt. And suppose the voice at the other end, a fairly familiar voice, told you he was afraid a gent named Leonard intended to decimate our organization to the last man, what would you think?"

Lorna's eyes widened. "Mac never said that!"

"You're damn right Mac never said that," I said. "But the man at the other end of the line-a line carefully rigged to be nice and weak and noisy-said just that. And the dutiful daughter here listened to him saying it and made no comment. In fact, she's gone out of her way this evening to point out how I'd talked to her father so lie must be alive and doing well. Hell, anybody who knows him, knows Mac couldn't have said a fool thing like that in a million years!"

Martha licked her lips, looking lost and bewildered. "But I… I don't understand! What's the matter with-"

"Oh, cut it out, Borden!" I snapped. "That poor-little-stupid-me line is getting pretty damn stale."

"Just a minute, Eric." Lorna peeled the paper off a second candy bar and spoke patiently: "My dear girl, your father speaks English, not gobbledygook. The word 'decimate' comes from the Latin word for ten. In the old days, if a conquered village misbehaved, the Romans were much nicer about it than we are nowadays. They didn't wipe it out with bombs and napalm. They simply marched a legion into the place and lined up all the male inhabitants. Then they yanked every tenth man out of line and stuck a spear or sword into him. That's decimate, to kill one-tenth of. The word has also been used loosely to mean inflict large losses upon, but it does not and cannot possibly mean to massacre or annihilate. It's logically impossible to decimate to the last man. You'll always have nine men left."

Martha looked indignant. "You can't accuse me of treachery because of a silly old definition that nobody pays any attention to-" I said, "In my previous conversation with Washington, when I called from Nogales, the same gent told me he was disinterested in a certain murderer. He also said that a certain agent was presently in a certain town in Oklahoma and that I was supposed to contact him there. Obviously, they've got a mimic sitting at that phone who's got a pretty good ear but no brains. He's got the voice down pat, but he's been talking Washington gibberish and hearing others talk it for so long, that it simply doesn't occur to him that some people do prefer the English language. And I gave you the direct quotes, Borden, and you didn't even raise an eyebrow. That's when I first began to suspect that everything wasn't as it should be between you and your pa."

The girl's face was pale. "I really don't understand. Please, I'm not trying to act dumb or anything, but-" Lorna spoke in the same calm and patient voice: "Miss Borden, disinterested does not mean the same thing as uninterested, which is presumably the word for which the man on the phone was fumbling."

"A judge is supposed to be disinterested," I said. "That means he's got no obligations or commitments to the parties appearing before him: he's quite objective about the case. But he's not supposed to be uninterested. That means he's just bored with the whole proceeding, and that is the meaning the man in Washington really wanted to convey."

Lorna said, "And presently does not mean the same thing as at present, Miss Borden; and your father is very sensitive about this distinction."

"But everybody says-"

"Not everybody," I corrected her. "Not Mac. The office girls would catch hell if he heard them telling somebody that he was presently in conference, meaning right now. Presently, to him, means in a little while, as it meant to everybody until a relatively few years ago, when ignorant people started fancying up the language regardless of meaning. The correct, old-fashioned usage is, 'At present, Mr. Mac is in conference, but he will see you presently.' That's what Mac learned in school and what I learned a generation later. The fact that some permissive dictionaries may already have adopted the recent bastard usage doesn't make it sound any less affected and pretentious to his ears or mine." I drew a long breath. "And, honey, contact is not and will never be a verb in your father's vocabulary. Anybody who orders me to contact somebody just damn well isn't Mac, and you know that as well as I do."

"But I don't!" the girl protested desperately. "I mean, all these ridiculous little grammatical distinctions, who cares? Who pays any attention to that stuff these days? I mean, really Mr. Helm, with all the big, relevant issues…" She stopped, breathless, looking from me to Lorna and back again.

I stared at her. The idea that our language had suddenly become irrelevant while my back was turned was difficult for me to grasp. I turned towards Lorna, who seemed to have become the acting referee.

"Is the kid serious," I asked, "or is she putting me on?"

"I don't know. I really don't know." Lorna frowned at the seated girl. "Remember, she'd apparently never heard of Cassandra or Ragnarцk. We have to face the possibility that the young lady is practically illiterate."

Martha jumped to her feet. "I don't have to take a lot of insults-"

"Sit down," I said. "Goddamn it, sit down!"

"But she said-"

"Don't worry about what she said. Worry about the fact that if you can't come up with something that makes a little sense, I'm going to have to take you out somewhere and shoot you."

"Shoot me!" Martha sank onto the bed. "Why.. – why, you're mad!"

"What the hell do you think happens to double agents who get caught? And don't think being Mac's daughter will save you, sweetheart. If you've sold us out, well, he knows the rules, and he knows they go for everybody. After all, he made them."

She licked her lips. "But I'm not a.. – I haven't.. -."

Lorna interrupted. "Just how clear was the voice on the phone, Helm?"

"Not very clear. And, as I say, the guy was a good mimic. On that bad connection, I'd have accepted him as Mac if he'd said the right things." I shook my head. "But, hell, we all know Mac's little language hangups. You can't tell me his own kid-"

"You're behind the times, Eric. Nobody listens to language any more. It's no longer a means of precise communication, it's a club to hit people over the head with; and the exact meanings of words no longer count. 1 think the girl is quite serious. I think she never in her life stopped to listen to how her father talks. Besides, he's been a very busy man as long as we've known him. The chances are, she hasn't had even as much communication as we have."

"You're so right about that!" Martha's voice was stiff. "He's been practically a stranger around the house as long as I can remember. I.. – I was all shook up, a few weeks ago, when he asked me into the study to have a serious talk. I thought he was going to tell me about the birds and the bees, or something, at my age! Instead of which… instead of which he asked me to undertake this melodramatic…

She stopped. There was a little silence. At last Lorna said, "You're forgetting something, Eric. You're forgetting that I was on the list."

"So?"

"So if she'd sold us out, if she'd passed that list of names on to Leonard, or got it from him, he'd have known I was at the ranch. His men would have come looking for me when they seized the place, if only to prevent me from getting away to spread the news of the raid. But nobody came."

I regarded the girl for a moment longer. Instinct told me that she was dangerous and not to be trusted. Depending on anybody with her attitudes was simple suicide. However, I could be wrong in this particular instance. That she'd betray us, and me in particular, if she got the chance, I had no real doubt. She'd think it was her duty to humanity and society. However, her chance might not have shown itself yet. In any case, she wasn't going anywhere I couldn't keep an eye on her, so I might as well pretend to be convinced of her innocence.

"Okay," I said. "My mistake. My apologies, Miss Borden."

"Your apologies are not accepted!"

Lorna said, "When you're quite through snapping at each other, we ought to take another look at the situation. If Leonard has a substitute holding down the office phone, it seems likely that Mac is no longer in Washington. We can hope that lie got away safely and is sitting out the storm in his secret hideout, the one you were just told about, Eric. But that means we're pretty well on our own."

I said, "We'll wait until the stores and restaurants open. We'll need some food, and a car for Lorna, and clothes for both of you-"

"I have my own clothes, thanks!" Martha snapped.

"We're going to try a dramatic disguise, Miss Borden," I said mildly. "We're going to bathe you and put you into a nice clean dress so nobody'll recognize you. Okay?"

She started to protest and stopped, but her gray eyes hated me.

Lorna said, "I suppose we'll be splitting up here, as soon as we're all well fed and respectably clothed. In the meantime, does anybody mind if I try sleeping in a bed, just to see what it's like?"