The Intriguers

Xix.

Carl joined us at the motel back in Amarillo, Texas, after stalling long enough on the road somewhere to start me worrying that, perhaps, he'd changed his mind about coming at all. That was undoubtedly just what he'd intended.

He arrived at last, however, bland and unapologetic, and we had a briefing session that lasted well past dawn. By that time, the girl was curled up asleep on the bed nearest the wall, and the motel room was saturated with Carl's cigar smoke and littered with his discarded beer bottles- he'd cleaned up the supply of Carta Blanca I brought from Mexico in the boat's ice chest. That didn't worry me. I knew that his capacity for beer was practically limitless, which was more than I could say for my own.

"Anything else you need to know?" I asked as we broke it up at last and moved towards the door.

"Are you kidding? There's everything else I need to know. Only you can't tell me." He grimaced, looked down at the soggy stump of his latest stogie, and mashed it out in the ashtray on the little table by the door. "But I've got the names memorized, both lists, and the date. And the fact that it's supposed to look nice and accidental. Did you notice something about those lists, Eric?"

I threw a glance over my shoulder at the sleeping girl, in a supposedly meaningful way, and said, "Stop blocking the doorway and let me get some fresh air, will you?" I moved past him, out of the air-conditioning into the warm new daylight. As he joined me, pulling the door closed behind him, I said softly, "I'm paid to notice things about lists and so are you. But we're not paid to talk about what we notice in front of Tom, Dick, Harry, or Martha. If you know what I mean."

"She's sound asleep. Anyway, I thought you said she was his daughter." Carl studied me narrowly. "Maybe there is something else I ought to know, after all."

I regarded him for a moment, a tall man, a big man, in jeans and a thin, gaudy sports shirt that was unbuttoned far enough to display a fairly hairy chest. It's getting so the men are going in for these pectoral peepshows just like the women-unisex, I suppose. He was a couple of inches short of my own height of six-four, but constructed along considerably huskier lines. He had a long, square-chinned face that showed a good growth of blond stubble in the early-morning light. His hair was yellow and wavy, and his eyes were so blue it almost hurt to look at them-so intensely blue they seemed unnatural. Maybe they were.

I moved my shoulders casually. "Security clearance isn't hereditary, you know," I said. "Even Mac is quite aware of that. He's passed the word that all numerical information transmitted through the girl should be factored minus twice, just in case. Code double negative. Got it?"

The blue eyes watched me steadily. "Got it. Throw away two. Does Lorna know?"

Normally, I wouldn't have told him about a part of the operation that was somebody else's responsibility, but I've seen too many complicated jobs loused up because some security-happy would-be leader of men didn't trust his subordinates with facts that later turned out to be vital. I once killed a woman because nobody'd trusted me enough to tell me she was on my side, even though I'd asked. As it turned out, she'd been on both sides, but that didn't make me feel any better at the time.

Anyway, it seemed to me that under these special circumstances, everybody who was stuck with this last-ditch assignment was entitled to just about all the facts I had, which didn't really overburden them with information.

"Lorna knows," I said, and went on, lying a little, "it's not that Mac doesn't trust his kid, or that I don't. It's just that, well, she isn't cleared and we can't take chances. As for what you noticed about those lists of names, tell me your idea and I'll tell you if it agrees with mine."

He nodded. "Five pairs of names in my bunch." he said. "Five cities. New Orleans, where I was supposed to be. Chicago. Bangor, Maine. Knoxville, Tennessee. Miami. And that's all, east of the Big Miss. Funny, isn't it?"

"It seemed that way to me," I said. "Not one name from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, where you'd expect a kind of concentration."

"And not one solitary name from Washington, D.C., where you'd expect business to be really booming. Well, I suppose if it were our business, we'd have been told. The one good thing about him is, he generally knows what he's doing. At least I try to cling to that thought. Well, I'd better be on my way."

"Two questions first," I said. "Satisfy my curiosity. I gave him to you. Rullington. Why didn't you take him?"

The unnaturally blue eyes hit me with a cold blue gaze. "You know damned well why I didn't-when you gave him to me unconscious, with hours to go before he came around. Any pigs I kill, I want them to know it. And you were counting on it, don't pretend you weren't. Next question."

"Why the wire?"

He grinned abruptly, showing big, white, even teeth. "Hell, man, I like guns. I wouldn't want to give them a bad name by shooting some slimy cops with them, when there are so many other interesting weapons around." His grin faded as abruptly as it had come. "Those big-bellied bastards! They dish out gallons of self-serving propaganda about how the world is going to hell because more and more people are killing more and more crummy policemen. Doesn't it ever occur to them that it just might be because more and more crummy policemen are killing more and more people? Ah, hell! You shouldn't have got me started on that. Do you want to know something funny, Eric? I used to think the police were on our side. That's what I tried to teach my kid, anyway, after her mother died and I had to make like both parents. So the cops she'd been taught to trust went and shot her in the back while she was trying to get to safety inside the girls' dormitory!"

"It was an accident, Carl!" I said. It sounded just as ineffectual as when Rullington had said it to me.

"Accident, hell!" he snorted. "Cops aren't supposed to have accidents like that! If there's a choice between risking the life of an innocent citizen and getting killed, a cop is supposed to stand right there and die, goddamn it! Hell, you and I, Eric, we've both had the cyanide capsule between our back teeth, ready to take a bite of death just to save our native land a little embarrassment. Show me the place in the Constitution that says we're supposed to give up our lives for our jobs and our country but a lousy policeman is supposed to live forever!"

As he said, I shouldn't have started him on that. I was getting pretty tired of temperamental agents: Lorna with her morbid philosophy, and Carl with his vengeful prejudice. I studied the big blond man grimly, hoping that no unfortunate highway patrolman had occasion to stop him for speeding during the next day or two. He was a bomb set to go off at the sight of a badge.

"Eric," he said.

"Yes?"

The brilliant blue eyes stared at me hard out of the unshaved face. "You were pretty rough back there. You know that."

"Hell, I was sticking my neck way out, amigo. I had to jolt you before you lopped it off."

"You jolted me," he said coldly. "Maybe I'll forget it, and then again, maybe I won't."

The whole damned outfit was crawling with prima donnas, male and female, each one considering himself or herself the toughest, smartest thing to inhabit the continent since the sabertooth tiger became extinct. There was only one way to handle that.

"Sure," I said. "Any time we've got nothing better to do, I'll be happy to discuss it with you again."

His grin flashed on once more, like a nervous neon sign. "That's safe enough to say. When does he give us that much time? Tell me something: why do we do it for him? 1 quit, even if I quit to the wrong man. Why don't I just tell you to tell him to go to hell?" He didn't wait for a reply, which was just as well since I didn't have any. He glanced towards the motel room. "Tell the Borden kid goodbye for me. I won't wake her. Ask her to give my regards to her parent, when she rejoins him wherever it is you're taking her." It was the one thing I'd held out on him, as on Lorna; it was a responsibility they didn't need. Carl grimaced. "That cold-blooded human spider spinning his lousy webs of intrigue!" he said. "And you're pretty damned spidery yourself, come to think of it. Auf wiedersehen, Eric. Maybe."

I didn't like that. I didn't like anything about him, the way he was. II was like dealing with nitroglycerine, ready to explode at a touch. But I particularly didn't like that qualified auf wiedersehen-which means, in case you're not up on your German, 'until we see each other again.' If he wasn't really expecting to see me again, 1 hoped he'd get his job done before he went and got himself killed in some berserk damn fool way.

I watched him drive off. Then I turned, and went back into the room, woke up Martha, and told her she could finish sleeping in the station wagon. By nightfall, we were well into Louisiana, on our way to Florida, and the car radio had informed us that the vicious strangler of Fort Adams, Oklahoma, an elderly gent named Harvey Hollingshead, captured by diligent police work on the part of the local sheriff's office, had wound up the case very neatly by dying of a heart attack in his cell after confessing to his crimes.