The Menacers

1

I ALWAYS FEEL A little bad about smuggling a firearm through Mexican customs. The boys in khaki make their inspection so nice and casual you feel you're taking advantage of their courtesy. Of course, if you're found in their country later with an unregistered gun, particularly a revolver or pistol, and most particularly a big.45 auto-the Mexican Army caliber-they'll throw you in jail and lose the key, but that's a chance you take in a good many countries with much less violent histories than Mexico.

Mine wasn't a.45, just a little.38 Special, and it was pretty well hidden in a compartment designed for the purpose, so I wasn't really worried when the man approached my suitcase. I needn't have given it a thought. He saw that I stood innocently ready with the key, so he didn't even make me open it. He just hefted it briefly to determine, perhaps, if I was packing any large gold ingots or weight-lifting equipment. A moment later my bag was on its way out to the plane on the ramp.

I had to wait half an hour longer, with a lot of other people, before they'd let me aboard. The Juarez terminal building isn't air-conditioned; however, Mexican beer is very cooling and it was good to be working again after spending most of the summer at the goddamn ranch.

The goddamn ranch-we hardly ever call it just the ranch-is located in Arizona, which is no place to be in summer. But even with ideal weather, the goddamn ranch is no place to be. It's where we're sent when somebody decides a thorough mental and physical overhaul is required. I wasn't really in bad shape, but 1 had collected a scar or two, and perhaps a disturbing memory or two, since the last time they'd checked me out, and that spring there was apparently nowhere in the world that my talents were needed for the moment, so 1 was shipped to Arizona for a good going-over.

I'd finally managed to get myself sprung by claiming urgent personal business in nearby Santa Fe, New Mexico-well, it's only some five hundred miles away-but not before I'd been given the works in every department from psychiatry to marksmanship. I was so damn healthy and efficient and dangerous I could hardly stand myself. I'd been in Santa Fe, where I'd lived in a previous incarnation, trying to tear myself down a bit at the local bistros with the help of an attractive acquaintance of many years' standing-named Carol, if you must know-when word had come through, never mind how, that I should transport myself to Mexico City immediately by the most direct and rapid method available.

This happened to be, to start with, a small commercial prop plane that fluttered down to El Paso in an erratic manner, touching earth here and there on the way. From the El Paso airport an eager taxi driver had rushed me south across the border into Juarez and halfway through Mexico, it seemed, before he caught up with the elusive Juarez airport somewhere far south of that city and collected his seven bucks fare.

He could have saved some of his Stirling-Moss-type efforts. I had time to spare, plenty of time in which to show my passport to the Mexican immigration man and receive my tourist card from him, and to smile at the nice customs official who passed my suitcase containing the little Smith amp; Wesson revolver and some other gear that he'd probably have found interesting, had he come across it…

The Aeronaves de Mexico plane also had a few stops to make, so we didn't reach Mexico City until well after dark. I got into a taxi with some other people-they have kind of communal airport cabs down there-and gave the name of the hotel at which I'd been instructed to stay. The driver wasn't sure he'd ever heard of a hostelry called the Monte Carlo, but I had the address, and he finally managed to get himself going the right way on a narrow, dark, grubby one-way street in an older part of town. He pulled up dubiously before a tremendous, dark, shabby doorway above which burned a small illuminated sign with the right name on it.

Well, it's only in the movies that a man in my profession gets to spend all his time in the best hotels surrounded by the most beautiful girls. I retrieved my suitcase, gave the man some U.S. currency since I didn't have any pesos, and approached the great doors cautiously. I mean, I supposedly had the word straight from Washington, but codes have been compromised before. There are, unfortunately, a few people in the world who don't like me, and one of them could be in Mexico, D.F.-which is what they call their capital city, the equivalent of our Washington, D.C.

It was, in other words, a good place for a trap, but nothing happened when I stepped inside. I just found myself in the spacious lobby of what had once, obviously, been a magnificent luxury hotel, now grown rather old and tired. A polite individual in a neat dark suit came around the desk to introduce himself as the manager and to ask, in perfect English, if I was Mr. Helm, Mr. Matthew Helm, who had a reservation.

When I said I was, he had a boy relieve me of my bag, and personally escorted me up a great marble staircase guarded by a fine brass railing that was nicely polished but didn't look as if, after all these years, it would bear a great deal of weight. He established me in a room with a ceiling at least fifteen feet high and made me promise that, if anything was needed for my comfort, I would call him at once.

After he'd departed, taking the bellboy with him, I looked around my quarters. I decided that I liked the place. It wasn't just another nylon-carpeted cell in another chrome-plated beehive. It had character. It also had clean sheets on the beds, and a full complement of working plumbing in the bathroom, including that practical European gadget known as a bidet. I was inspecting this curiosity when the telephone rang. I went back into the bedroom and picked it up.

"Seсor Helm?" said an accented voice in my ear.

"This is Helm," I said.

"You seem to be in the clear so far," the voice said. "Nobody's tailing you that we can see. How do you like your accommodations? Very picturesque, don't you think, amigo? Hah! These people with their urgent missions, they expect one to perform instant housing miracles in the middle of the tourist season! Anyway, in that grand old place you can probably trust your phone; nobody'd bother to bug it since nobody stays there any more. I have a call for you. Just a minute." There was a silence as the relay man worked on the connection. He was a man I would probably never see, and if I saw him I wouldn't know him, and that was the way he liked it. His voice reached me again, speaking to someone else: "I have Helm on the line now. Go ahead, sir."

"Eric?" said a faraway man whose voice I recognized, using my code name, as was his custom. At least I thought he was far away. I figured he was probably calling from Washington, but of course he could have been right around the corner, modern communications being what they are.

"Eric here, sir," I said, and we went through some mandatory secret-agent stuff to satisfy the rule book.

Mac said, "You have a reservation on Mexicana Airlines Flight 906 leaving at eight-twenty tomorrow morning for Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlбn, Guaymas, and Los Angeles. You will get off at Mazatlбn, which is, I believe, a west coast port, beach resort, and sport-fishing center, of some seventy-five thousand people. An agent will make preliminary contact with you at the airport. You will check into the Hotel Playa Mazatlбn, about three miles north of town, and behave like a vacationing tourist until she gets in touch with you again."

"She?" I said.

"Your contact is female, brunette, under thirty, and not unattractive, I'm informed. She is going under the name-it may be her own-of Priscilla Decker. She will be wearing white linen trousers, a flowered silk blouse, dark glasses, and one of those crazy palm-leaf hats that are sold on the beach. The adjective is not mine. I thought female trousers were not approved for public wear in Mexico."

"They aren't," I said, "and hooray for the Mexicans. But a lot of U.S. tourists couldn't care less if they offend the backward natives."

Mac said, "You have been described to the lady. When she sees you, she will remove her glasses and clean them briefly to give you the privilege of looking at her face. You will mop your forehead with your handkerchief as you pass."

"You're sure I shouldn't carry a red hibiscus in my teeth, sir? And simultaneously whistle a few bars of 'La Cucaracha,' just to show I can do it?"

Mac said gently, "As you will gather, this is a cooperative venture. The lady is not one of ours, nor is the man with whom she is working. We must follow the wishes of their department in the matter of identification. Just be sure you can recognize her. And don't be surprised if there's a bit of hostility. Nobody likes to be superseded on a job."

"I'm taking over from her?"

"You are taking over one phase of the operation from her and her male partner."

"And the nature of the operation, sir?"

"This, we are informed, does not concern us. We are to concentrate on our assigned duties."

"Which are?"

"There is someone to be brought out of Mexico; someone with certain information. An interview has already been taped, and the tape is safely in our hands, but some people at Los Alamos would like to check further, by direct interrogation."

"So it's a simple escort job on the face of it." I frowned at the wall of the room. "What's so tough about it that we were called in, and what are the boys on The Hill up to now, and who's the character they want to talk to, a stray scientist of some kind?"

"You ask too many questions, Eric." Mac's voice was mild. "I repeat, the nature of the Los Alamos project, by official decree, does not concern us."

"Yes, sir," I said. "Sorry, sir."

"I can tell you, however," Mac went on, "that the subject of your assignment is not a scientist, just an individual named O'Leary who happens to have witnessed a phenomenon of interest to a special research team that has established temporary headquarters at Los Alamos. I should mention that for various reasons friend O'Leary is not eager to make the journey."

"That's nice," I said. "That helps."

"I should also add that other people from other parts of the world are apparently interested in the phenomenon observed by this O'Leary, extremely interested, to the extent of being willing to spend large sums of money, and perhaps a few lives, to obtain a detailed description."

"Yes, sir," I said. "And that's where I come in, to protect this valuable specimen of humanity? Body-guarding is hardly my specialty, sir."

"And protection isn't exactly what we have in mind, Eric. The people already on the job would probably serve quite well as protectors."

"I see," I said slowly. "That is, I think I see. But perhaps you'd better be a little more explicit."

"You may run into difficulties, bringing the subject north," Mac said. "And if difficulties should arise, serious difficulties, some people here in Washington want to be quite certain the matter is in the hands of an experienced operator who knows the proper steps to take and will not hesitate to take them." He was silent briefly, and went on: "There is a great deal of sentimentality in the world, Eric, but there is no place for it in our work."

"No, sir."

"I hope you understand the situation. We have the tape containing the essential data. Nobody else has it; we do. The Los Alamos team would like to check the information and perhaps elicit a few more details, but this is not absolutely necessary. What is necessary is that the information must be communicated to nobody else. No matter what has to be done to prevent it, this O'Leary person must not fall into other hands. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

"No matter what has to be done," I repeated, making a face at the phone. "Yes, sir. It's clear. Is there anything else I should know?"

"Nothing that Miss Decker can't tell you. However, you are to keep in mind that our relations with our neighbors to the south have been deteriorating of late, to the extent that there is growing concern about the situation here in Washington. It is felt that a deliberate campaign of alienation is being waged by someone with considerable resources."

I said, "That's not exactly new. The communists have been playing their Yankee-go-home records all over Latin America for years."

"There are indications that their efforts have been intensified recently. So it would be well if you were careful not to give the anti-American propaganda machine anything -to feed on."

I said sourly, "Sure. I'm to sneak into a foreign country with an illegal weapon, perform an illegal abduction-maybe even an illegal homicide-but I'm to be careful not to hurt anybody's feelings while I'm doing it. Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?"

Mac paid no intention to my sarcasm. "Nothing else, Eric," he said. "Well, just one more thing…"

"Yes, sir," I said, when he hesitated uncharacteristically.

He was silent a moment longer, then he asked abruptly: "Eric, do you believe in flying saucers?"

I was proud of my presence of mind. I didn't hesitate. "Yes, sir," I said.

"I said 'Yes, sir.' Sir." It isn't often one has an advantage over him, and I rode it for what it was worth. "I saw one once, sir."

"Indeed? Where?"

"In Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I was living as a solid citizen in that happy period when I was out of your clutches for several years, sir, before you caught up with me again and shanghaied me back into service."

"As I recall, a great deal of duress was not required. What did you see?"

"A luminous, pulsating, greenish object moving steadily over town in a southeasterly direction, just about dusk. I saw it, and so did my former wife- she was still Mrs. Helm at the time-and so did another couple that was in the car with us. We all got out to make sure we weren't just getting reflections off the glass. We watched it until it kind of switched itself off and vanished, up near the mountains. When we got home, a few minutes later, I called the police. The officer who answered asked me politely to wait a moment as he was just taking down another report of the same nature."

"Other people confirmed the sighting?"

"All the way across town. It was in the newspaper the next day. You can check the files if you wish. I think it was some time in fifty-eight or fifty-nine." I stopped, but he did not speak. I said, "I don't claim to have seen an extra-terrestrial space ship crewed by little men with pointed heads, but something flew over the city, and it wasn't any type of aircraft with which I'm familiar."

"Indeed?" He didn't sound convinced. "That's very interesting, Eric."

"Yes, sir. Of course the Air Force continues to insist there's nothing up there. Well, it was a hell of a lifelike hallucination, shared by a hell of a lot of people. It makes one kind of wonder just what the fly-boys are trying to cover up." I paused. "Anything else?"

"No." His voice was curt. I had a hunch he'd had a pep talk ready for me, but I'd made the wrong answer and aborted his little speech on keeping an open mind about strange manifestations no matter how incredible. At least I figured that was the subject he'd had in mind, and I knew he didn't like to have his speeches go to waste. Or maybe he just disapproved of my doubting attitude towards the U.S.A.F. He went on in businesslike tones: "Just remember the instructions. Alive, the subject goes nowhere but Los Alamos. This is the preferable solution. The other is, however, perfectly acceptable. Oh, and Eric…"

"Yes, sir."

"Try to complete this mission within a reasonable time. It is only a favor we are doing to certain people in Washington, who want to make sure the matter is in competent hands. I have another assignment for you, or will have, as soon as I can find you an adequate partner. Unfortunately, young ladies of character and mentality suitable for our type of work seem to be in short supply lately, and our trained people are all engaged elsewhere."

I said, "Yes, sir. If I stumble over a sufficiently bloodthirsty chick, I'll let you know."

I hung up and sat there for a little, thinking about flying saucers, for God's sake.