The Intriguers

VII.

The ranch is supposed to be absolutely safe, a place where even the most unpopular agent, sought by platoons of professional rub-out men of assorted hostile nationalities, can relax and rest, secure in the knowledge that nobody can reach him. This means, of course, that you don't just drive up to the gate and blow your horn when you want in.

I stopped in Tucson to make the necessary phone call. I got the conditional all-clear, meaning that I could proceed along a specified route out of town, not necessarily in the right direction, until, at a certain specified point, I passed a parked ear. The car would indicate, by its open door, that my clearance had been confirmed and I was free to head for my destination in the desolate country west of town. If the door of the vehicle was closed, I'd have to spend a day trying to shake whoever had been spotted tailing me, and call again tomorrow.

When I reached it, it wasn't a car but a pickup truck, but that was a permissible variation. Its hood was up and the driver was performing an invisible and probably unnecessary operation on its insides. The door on the driver's side was open. 1 drove past and kept going.

At last Martha stirred uneasily and glanced at me. "This isn't the way to the ranch, is it?" she said. "I've never been there, but it's west of Tucson, isn't it? We're heading kind of south and east, aren't we?"

"That's right," I said. "Have you had any training, Borden?"

"Why… why, not very much, yet. Why do you ask?"

"There's a mirror on your door but you haven't even glanced at it once. We've had a tall since about twenty miles north of Nogales." When she started to turn her head to look back, I said, "That's pretty poor technique, too. Not that it matters here, you can't see out the rear window and they can't see in due to that junior-grade ocean liner we have rolling along behind, but it's best to get in the habit of doing things right. Use the mirror if you want to look."

"But who is it? Who'd want to follow us?"

"Who'd want to shoot at me yesterday?" I asked dryly. "All I know is that it's a white Ford Falcon with Arizona plates, kind of old and nondescript, the sort of car nobody looks at twice. Let's hope it's just what it seems, and nobody's stuffed any surprises under the hood. They probably haven't. They probably figure anything with four wheels and a rubber band can keep up with us, the load we're dragging. We hope."

"I… don't understand."

I glanced at her impatiently; she was really pretty slow. I said, "Look, doll, that pickup truck gave us the all-clear, right? He sent us on through to the ranch, in spite of the fact that we've got a tail on us nobody who was really looking could have missed!"

"I still don't understand!" she protested. "What are you driving at?"

"It smells," I said. "If you've got company trailing along behind, you just don't get cleared to that place. Hell, that's exactly what all the monkey business is supposed to prevent. But we were cleared, tail and all. 1 think we'd better go on the assumption that something's awfully wrong inside that fancy fence, out there west of Tucson, that's all wired up with bells and whistles and closed-circuit TV. I think we'd better figure that there's a reception committee waiting for us, and that it's not just a bunch of friendly doctors and nurses and trainers concerned with nothing but our welfare. And the boys astern, well, I think we'd better assume they're a pair of sheepdogs assigned to herd us into the right pen and make sure we don't go astray between here and there."

The girl beside me shook her head sharply. "You're imagining things; you must be! From what I've heard, the ranch is the last place in the world where anybody could-"

"The last," I said, "or the first. The one spot I might drive up to, dumb and happy and unprepared for trouble."

"You mean… you mean you really think somebody has gone so far as to take the place over, just to set a trap for you?" She shook her head once more, unbelievingly. "Aren't you getting delusions of grandeur? Why would anybody consider you that important?"

I said, "We don't know what came first, the takeover or the trap. Maybe they'd already moved in on the ranch for other reasons-maybe they were after Lorna-and when I called, they just decided to let me walk into their arms, a kind of bonus. As for my importance, a certain gent in Washington considered me important enough to send you to me with passwords and secret lists and stuff, remember? And somebody considers me important enough to be shot, and I've got a pair of very persistent shadows astern. Until I find out why all this is happening, I'm going to be the most paranoid character you ever met, seeing murderers amid conspirators behind every greasewood bush in Arizona..

"What is it?"

I was watching the left-hand mirror as I drove. I said, "It looks as if our friends back there figure I've gone far enough in the wrong direction. Obviously, I'm planning to pass up the opportunity to attend their ranch barbecue as the guest of honor. Now, since I'm being so unsociable, something drastic's got to be done about me and they're just the boys to do it. At least they seem to think they are." We were pretty far out of the city now, and you lose civilization fast in that part of the country. I looked approvingly at the endless, empty landscape studded with sinister-looking dark rocks and weirdly shaped cacti. I said, "Isn't that a lovely hunk of real estate, for people in our situation?"

"What do you mean? It's so bleak and barren it scares me. There's absolutely nothing there."

"That," I said, "is exactly what I mean, doll. Hang on, now. Here they come. Let's see what they want."

It was a dirt road, but reasonably wide, as they are out there where all it takes to make a road is a bulldozer or grader and a man to run it. When it washes out, the once or twice a year it rains, they just call the guy with the blade and he runs the route again. The little white car was coming up fast in the mirror. I had plenty of room to give it plenty of room, and I did.

"Kneel beside me facing aft, Borden," I said. "Watch them for me. We'll see what they have in mind. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, first, but if you see a gun aimed this way, holler and duck."

They were pretty childish about it. I mean, I was tooling damn near forty feet of rig, at least three tons total, along that primitive road at a good clip. They put their little compact right alongside that onrushing mass of metal and fiberglass, just as if they didn't have good sense…

"The man in the right hand seat has a gun!"

"Here we go," I said. "Hang on."

I put my right foot all the way down. The big, lazy, 454-cubic-inch engine kicked into second gear and went sluggishly to work, like a sleepy elephant. It didn't have any sudden, exciting urges, but it did have some power if you were willing to wait for it. The little white car stopped gaining and just hung there, approximately level with my trailer hitch.

In the mirror, I could see the strained face of the driver. I knew he was doing his best to push the pedal through the firewall, as the sickening realization came to him that a lifetime of TV-watching had just led him badly astray. On TV, the guys with the guns just drive up alongside the guys without and start shooting. If they hit, the other car obligingly goes off the road in a harmless direction, but some telepathy-or just plain common sense-was telling the driver behind me that this wasn't going to happen here. First of all, he wasn't going to make it alongside; and if a bullet did hit me, he sensed I was fully prepared to use my last second of consciousness and my last ounce of strength to dump my whole big outfit right into his lap.

The man beside him raised the gun but didn't shoot. At least he was that bright. It was an ordinary.38, as far as I could make out in the mirror, and the ballistics of that cartridge aren't sufficient to drive a bullet through car metal and safety glass at the sharp angle I was carefully maintaining. We thundered down the wide dirt road side by side. The driver got the little Ford up to sixty-five, and then seventy, at which point either his nerve or his power ran out. I held the big rig steady right beside him. I saw him give up and glance over his shoulder to see what his chances were of braking hard and getting out from under.

"Matt, slow down, there's a curve…"

"I see it," I said.

It was what I'd been waiting for. It was a nice, sweeping right-hander with a bunch of the jagged lava rocks out in the desert beyond it. I held the speed to the last possible moment and hit the brakes when the other man did, staying right with him. Nobody was going to do any violent braking in that dirt. The curve was on top of us. I let up on the brakes and got onto the accelerator once more, judiciously, powering through the bend and taking the whole road to do it, sliding left and shutting the door on the little sedan.

I was too busy to see what happened to it.

The station wagon and trailer came around reluctantly. At the last moment the trailer swung out and hooked a wheel in the shallow outside ditch and I thought I'd lost it, but it came back again, slashing back and forth across the road behind us like the tail of a giant dog. Then it was rolling straight once more, and we had it made.

"Report," I said, letting the speed drop gradually to safer levels. I got no answer. "Damn it, Borden, report!" I snapped, still too busy to look around.

"You… you killed them!"

"Details, damn it!"

"They went off the road and hit a rock and flipped. The last I saw they were still rolling and bouncing. it was horrible!"

"Any fire?"

"I… I couldn't see any."

"Okay," I said. "I guess we can go back and take a look, as long as there isn't a lot of smoke and flame to bring spectators."

"But you killed them!" she breathed. "You just… just ran them off the road in cold blood and killed them!"

I glanced at her. Her face was white and her eyes were wide and accusing. I drew a long breath, and said, "I didn't ask them to come charging after me with waving pistols, did I, Borden? What was 1 supposed to do, just sit there and let them shoot me? And you, too, for that matter?"

"Don't try to justify it by claiming that you were protecting me, Mr. Helm!"

I was struggling to get turned around. At one time in the distant past, I'd got pretty handy with a horse trailer, but although those two-horse jobs are surprisingly heavy, particularly when loaded, they aren't very long, and I still had a little trouble backing a fifteen-foot boat on a seventeen-foot trailer.

"Justify, hell," I said, when we were headed back the way we'd come. "The world is a big and dangerous place, sweetheart. I can't make it any smaller, but I can make it slightly less dangerous, for me, by making damned certain that anybody who tries to kill me gets only one crack at it. Maybe whoever's behind this get-Helm routine will get tired of sending out a fresh murder crew every twenty-four hours… Here we are. If you're coming, you'd better put some shoes on. Arizona is a hell of a prickly place to go barefooted."

The little Ford was a total loss, lying upside down among the rocks. The driver seemed to be suspended inside by his seat belt; his gun-wielding companion wasn't visible. I found that one on the ground where he'd been thrown, off to one side. His neck was broken and his face was pretty badly cut up, but I could see that lie was-or had been-another young and eager character, clean-cut and square, like the handsome rifleman I'd drowned. It made me feel old and wicked, as if 1 were waging war against the Cub Scouts of America.

"Who is he? Is he dead?"

Crouching beside the body, I looked up at Martha Borden who, shod at last, had come up behind me.

"He's dead," I said. "As for who he is, I have a hunch I'm not going to like it when I learn the answer to that question."

1 got the wallet out of the hip pocket and found that I was perfectly right. The first identification card I came to told me that I was looking at what remained of Mr. Joseph Armistead Tolley, age twenty-four, special agent of the Bureau of Internal Security of the Federal Information Center of the United States of America.