Such Men Are Dangerous (8 page)

“That’s nice.”

“Uh-huh. There are other things we can try. We can let them load the plane and then knock it out of the skies. The plane will be a jet. We know this, too, because the plane is already in this country. We know everything about the plane because they stole it from us. Don’t interrupt me. We know everything, that is, except where they’re keeping it. But we’ll probably spot it when it takes off, and we can probably keep interceptors on its tail. But they’re not idiots on the other team, Paul. They won’t cooperate by flying over water. They’ll stay over land, and we’ll have to try for an intercept over relatively unpopulated South American terrain. We asked the computer to estimate chances of a successful intercept and guess the probably casualties. It blew three transistors. We’ll try for that intercept if push comes to shove, but we look on it as a last line of defense.”

“Go on.” My head was aching for the first time in months. I wasn’t used to hearing people talk. “Go on,” I said. “Now explain why you can’t throw a battalion of marines and paras around the place.”

“We could.”

“Of course you could.”

“And they’d take all our pretty toys and use them on us.”

“They wouldn’t have the manpower to hold out.”

“Right. We’d win. But they’d probably last as long as they could, and it would be expensive for us. We might try it anyway. More likely, we’d try to use para divisions to cut them off when they try loading the plane. Again, it’s something that would probably work, unless there was a foulup somewhere along the line. Which might happen.”

“If they already stole the weapons and a good-sized cargo jet, I’d say foulups have a tendency to happen.”

“You’re not the first person to notice that.” He chuckled. “Paul, let me save time. You’re not going to think of a line of defense that either a man or a machine hasn’t already suggested. Some have been ruled out and some are in the planning stage. None is ideal. An ideal operation would recover the weapons intact with no loss of life on our side and no publicity. If it doesn’t work, then the other procedures come into play one by one. What we want you for is the first step, the ideal play.”

“Which is?”

“They stole ’em from us, and now we steal ’em back again.”

“Who is we?”

“Two men. You and me.” He watched my eyes. “No clever answer?”

“No.”

“You on the inside, an unknown. We know they must have men in our camp but no one will know about you. You on the inside and me on the outside. You don’t know the physical plant, you can’t visualize it, but you can take my word it’s feasible. It can be done.”

“I’ll take your word.”

“No immediate doubts, No great show of surprise?”

“None.” I stood up. “I saw it coming.”

He looked worried.

“I made a mistake,” I told him. “I should have drowned you before. All I had to do was do nothing, leave you there in the water. I could have used you for fishbait and your boat for firewood and no one would ever have come looking for you. No, don’t get up. Don’t even try, or I’ll knock you down again. They don’t know you’re here. They lost interest in me the day I checked out of the Doulton. You’re all on your own.”

“Paul—”

“Shut up. This isn’t an Agency job, it’s your job. All yours. The last time I saw you, the only other time I saw you, you told me my trouble was that I learned how to think. Don’t forget it. You told me I wouldn’t take a black pill. I won’t take one with a sugar coating either. You want me for something, then you give it to me straight and I say yes or no.”

He started to get up. I let him get most of the way, then kicked his feet out from under him.

I said, “There are two things you can do. You can stick to your lie or find a new one, and if you do I’ll know it, and I’ll take you out and drown you. Or you can start over without the frills and do it right. It’s your move.”

“You would drown me.”

“You already knew that.”

“We had a meal together, we talked, and you would drown me.”

“Oh, cut the shit.”

“You’re a beauty. They never should have let you get away. I knew it the day I talked to you, I saw things that wouldn’t fit on their graphs. I knew you’d crack and I knew you’d mend, and—”

“Leave me out. Let’s hear it.”

“Sure,” he said. “You may not like it, but this time it’s straight. And it’s a honey.”

It wasn’t bad. Everything was about as he had described it, he explained, except that the United States government wasn’t in on it. Both the military and the civilian intelligence people had it on very good authority that the whole shipment had already arrived in South America, and the Agency was busy rushing men to that area to try to minimize the damage.

“But it isn’t there, Paul. It’s still in the States. I know it, and I have to be the only person who does. Nobody came and told me. There was data coming across my desk, miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything concrete. You could feed the whole mess to a computer and not even find out what time it was.”

But he sensed something, enough to make it worth his while to take a quiet little trip west. He nosed around and found out he was right. He already had me traced as far as Florida. A private investigator placed me in Key West, and he did the rest of the detecting himself.

“You remember that conversation we had? I was talking to myself as much as to you. I could put this package on the right desk and come out neck deep in glory. I don’t want glory anymore. I’d rather be up to my neck in money.”

He figured a half share would come to a million dollars. A half share was all he wanted. With that kind of money around, all of it tax-free, it made no sense to haggle over a split. A million dollars was a footnote in an administrative budget. It was also his present take-home pay for the next eighty-seven years and seven months. And it was one half of what he was certain he could get from a well-heeled refugee group in Tampa.

“They’re in the same camp as the good guys who were originally set to receive the stuff. That’s the real beauty of it, Paul. They’re on the same side. The goods go to their original destination, the U.S. comes out clean, our friends down south avoid getting themselves atomized, and you and I cut up a two-million-dollar pie.”

There were more details, fine points. I let him finish. Then he asked me what I thought, and I said I wanted to think it over, and he told me that was just the answer he hoped I’d give him. He finished his last cigarette, and I walked him down to the boat to get his other pack. He opened it and flipped the strip of cellophane away. I didn’t say anything about it. He lit up and asked me if I didn’t feel chilly. I said I didn’t, that I rarely noticed temperature changes. He said he wished his clothes were dry. I waited until he had finished his cigarette and flipped it into the water. It was amazing how quickly he forgot to behave.

“Beautiful out here,” he said. “Really beautiful.”

“It is,” I said.

Then I spun him around and stabbed three fingers into his gut two inches south of his navel. I pulled it enough so that nothing would get ruptured. He doubled up in agony but couldn’t make a sound. That’s one of the nice things about that particular jab.

The next thing he knew he was on his back in two feet of water, just about halfway between the top and the bottom.

I kept him under for maybe ten seconds. His eyes were open, but it was impossible to catch his expression in that light, not with the water in the way.

I pulled him up and let him sputter and breathe. I didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t. Then I stuck him under again.

Ten more seconds and I brought him up. I had never before seen such terror on a human face. I wasn’t doing anything to him, he wasn’t even swallowing any water, but that hardly mattered. He was in very bad shape.

“You’re about to go down for the third time,” I told him gently. “The third time is the charm. You seem to think that you have to tell me what I want to hear, but all I want to hear is the truth. Forget about persuading me. Concentrate on staying alive.”

He didn’t say a word. His mouth moved but that was all.

“You’ve got ten seconds, George.” If he wanted me to call him George this was a good time to start. “It shouldn’t take you more than three sentences. When your time’s up you go under, so you’d better finish before I get bored.”

The words came out of him in one uninflected stream, no punctuation anywhere. But it only added up to two sentences.

“The government still has the stuff in a warehouse. It won’t be shipped but we can steal it and split two million cash.”

SEVEN

T
HE
F
OLLOWING
M
ONDAY
I wore work clothes into a barber shop in Orlando. I was cleanshaven but shaggy. I walked out with a crewcut. I took a bus to Jacksonville, and in the men’s room of the Greyhound station I changed to a suit and covered the crew cut with a wig. In Jacksonville I rented a Plymouth from a national car-rental agency, using a Florida driver’s license made out to Leonard Byron Phelps. I drove the car to Atlanta and destroyed the license as soon as I had turned in the car. I flew to New Orleans, where I disposed of the wig. I used three different airlines and as many names to reach Minneapolis. I slept on planes and dozed in terminals, but didn’t stop at any hotels en route. In Minneapolis there was a foot of snow on the ground and a raw wind that never quit. I had three double whiskeys at a downtown bar and spent sixteen hours at a Turkish bath. I did a little sweating and a lot of sleeping, but I made sure I fitted in a massage and alcohol rub. The rubdown made my suntan a little less pronounced.

The tan was the one thing that bothered me. It would have made me conspicuous anywhere, but in that part of the country at that time of year it drew stares from everyone. I had a cover to explain it—that wasn’t the problem. It was just that I wanted to avoid being memorable. My shape and size are ordinary enough, my face is forgettable, and the tan was the only thing that got in the way.

I had tried a skin bleach earlier. I bought it in a Negro neighborhood in Atlanta. It was a sale the clerk may never forget. I tried it out in a lavatory, testing it on a portion of my anatomy which I rarely expose to the public. The effect was blotchy and unnatural. I suppose repeated applications might have had the desired effect, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

I took a bus to Aberdeen, South Dakota, a town with twenty thousand people and one car-rental agency. They gave me a two-door-Chevy with heavy-duty snow tires, and the clerk said he guessed there wasn’t much snow where I came from. I showed him a driver’s license that swore I was John NMI Walker, from Alexandria, VA.

I had not known there was so much snow in the world. It came down all the way to Sprayhorn, a fifty-three mile drive that took me almost three hours. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with it. I found the motel, the only one in the little town. They had a room for me, but the girl on the desk said they hadn’t expected me until the following day.

I told her the office must have made a mistake. It was my mistake, I was early, and the reservation telegram that Dattner had sent from Washington had been according to plan.

The room was better than I had expected. Wall-to-wall carpeting, a big double bed, and three thousand cubic feet of warm air. I unpacked my suitcase. The closet got two dark suits with Washington labels and the uniform of a major in the United States Army. The dresser got most of the rest.

I had two sets of identification. My wallet was crammed with the paraphernalia of John NMI Walker, everything from credit cards (Shell, Diner’s, Carte Blanche) to army stuff. Only the government papers suggested that J. NMI W. was a military type. They gave my rank as major, all except one dated three years ago which had me down as captain. The new rank had been inserted in ink, with initials after it.

Every shred of Walker ID was counterfeit. It was all high quality, but there wasn’t anything there that an expert couldn’t spot as phony.

My other new self, Richard John Lynch, substituted quality for volume. Mr. Lynch had no credit cards, no driver’s license, no auto registration, no checkbook stubs. Mr. Lynch didn’t even have a wallet. All he had was a flat leather pass case that held a simple little card with his name, picture, fingerprints and description. The name was his and the rest were mine.

Mr. Lynch’s identification announced only that he was an accredited agent of that very intelligence Agency which employed George Dattner and which had decided against employing me. And Mr. Lynch’s ID was the genuine article, absolutely authentic in every respect. There was only one way on earth that anyone could possibly discredit Mr. Lynch’s ID, and that was by pointing out that no one with his name, face, or fingerprints had ever worked for the Agency in question.

I had dinner down the road, then drove back to the motel. I was gone a full hour, but no one tossed my room during that time. I checked rug fibers and powder flecks, and everything was as I’d left it, and nobody is that good. I stretched out on the bed. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on my door. I asked who was there, and a voice called, “That you, Ed?” I said he had the wrong room, and he excused himself and went away.

They were certainly slow, but after all I hadn’t been expected until the following day. I prowled around the room looking for bugs. I didn’t find any, but couldn’t swear there were none. According to George, any tap operation involving someone who was presumably hip included more than one device. There were always one or two obvious mikes for the subject to locate and one or more subtle ones for him to miss. My room at the Doulton, for example, had had a very clever lamp on the bedside table, along with the more noticeable gimmick in the ceiling fixture.

Unless military intelligence hadn’t picked up this procedure, and he thought they had, then the absence of readily identifiable listening devices meant a room was clean. It didn’t matter. I would treat the room as bugged regardless.

I watched television for two hours without paying attention to it. There was one channel and the reception was terrible. I listened to the news on the chance that it would have something important to tell me. It didn’t, and I went to sleep when it was over.