The Devastators (17 page)

Vadya said, “I think it’s time we got rid of this, don’t you? We don’t want interference by the British.”

Before I could give her an argument—I couldn’t think of a plausible one—she’d thrown the little transmitter into the nearby stream. Well, I wasn’t too eager to have Stark right on our tail myself, but I found myself feeling a little more hopeful about the guy. He might turn out to be of some use eventually.

I closed up the compartment, and set the overnight case behind the seats, along with a picnic lunch supplied by the hotel, and our thermos bottle, refilled. If everything went according to plan, I wouldn’t be at liberty long enough to do much eating or drinking, but I couldn’t let it look as if I were anticipating captivity. The sandwiches and coffee indicated, I hoped, that I was innocently looking forward to a full, energetic, outdoors day spent searching for a place called Brossach.

“Give me course and speed,” I said as we drove away, “and estimated time to target.”

“Turn right when you reach the highway,” she said. “Go on through the town of Ullapool and several miles further—she didn’t give me the exact mileage—and turn left toward the coast on a little one-track road. The sign is supposed to say Kinnochrue. They’ll be lying in wait for us somewhere on that road.”

“Sure,” I said. “Well, let’s hope they make it good. I have a reputation of sorts to maintain; I can’t just fall into their arms or they’ll know it’s a plant.” I paused to give the right of way to a couple of shaggy sheep, and swung the Spitfire onto the main road. Presently I glanced at the mirror and said, “Well, there’s one of them already. Our little tan Austin-Cooper from London, with only one man aboard. He must have had a long, sad, lonely ride up here, grieving for his lost friend, the guy you finished off in Nancy Glenmore’s room. I guess he’s supposed to shepherd us into the trap.”

Vadya had her purse open and was studying the mirror inside. She said, “I don’t recognize him. He is too far away.”

I said, “Quit your kidding, doll.”

She laughed softly. “Very well. I do recognize Basil, although I never did know him well. I guess I was just… well, ashamed to admit that we have people like that, self-seeking, ambitious, and cowardly.”

“I never heard that Basil was yellow.”

“He did not have the courage to keep faith with the Party!”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“Furthermore, he did not have the courage to die in a situation that required his death. The details do not matter—it was hushed up, of course—but that is why he became a traitor. He knew that his career with us was finished so he switched his allegiance elsewhere; now, finally, to the Chinese. A cheap, dirty little turncoat, but well trained and quite clever. Do not underestimate him.”

“I’m not likely to,” I said. “He made a sucker of me in London. Almost a dead sucker, or a kidnaped one.” I glanced at her, and said, “Talking about kidnappings.”

“Yes?” Her voice was cautious.

“You have Winnie, don’t you?”

After a moment, she glanced at me. “Yes. I have her.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Framing poor Madame Ling like that? Where’d you get the woman to impersonate her?”

“As you said yourself, an Oriental stooge is no harder to find than an Occidental one, in a cosmopolitan city like London. As you also said, I wanted you to myself, but of course you could not be permitted to know I had arranged it, so I threw the blame on Madame Ling.” Vadya laughed. “I did not think I could get as much… cooperation from you, if you had a wife along.”

“And the kid, Nancy Glenmore? Did you have her disposed of, too. For the same reason?”

Vadya was not offended by the question. She merely shook her head. “No. Basil must have ordered that. I might very well have done it, but I did not. And your little blonde playmate is quite unharmed and will be released as soon as I can get word to the people who hold her. Are you angry?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m mad as hell I let you out-bluff me when I had that strap around your neck.”

She laughed. “You are a sentimentalist, my dear. I knew you would not kill me, or even hurt me badly, no matter how threateningly you talked.”

I grinned. “Crowe-Barham wouldn’t agree with your opinion of me. He thinks I’m an uncouth Yankee brute. If he’s still alive, poor guy. You didn’t happen to get any word on him from Madame Ling?”

We hadn’t discussed the details of her telephone conversation the night before. Sleep had seemed more important, once she’d let me know that contact had been established and satisfactory arrangements made.

Vadya said, “No, even if I’d thought of it, how could I have asked? What interest could I have in your friend? I merely made my offer, we haggled a little over terms, and she consulted her associates and came back to the telephone to let me know what I was expected to do. When we stop, of course, I will point my gun at you.”

I said, “Sure. But be damn certain you don’t do it before we stop, or I’ll have to go through the motions of piling up the car, or doing something equally desperate and messy.”

What I meant was that it’s only on TV that a guy in a fast-moving vehicle, with a steering wheel in his hands and a hot engine under his foot, lets himself be held up by a character with a mere pistol, who obviously can’t shoot since if he does his victim will be sure to wreck the heap and take him to hell for company.

“I will wait,” she said. “Then I will get your revolver. Then they will come up and take you prisoner.”

I asked, “Did the Ling make any provision for communicating with you again if something went wrong?”

“Nothing is supposed to go wrong. But she gave me an emergency number to call, yes.”

“And just how are you supposed to be selling this lonely coastal detour to me?”

“Why, I called our people in London, did I not? And they were very efficient—much more than yours—and discovered that the Kinnochrue road goes on past Brossach, which is a very old castle, crumbling into the sea, only a few stones left on the edge of the cliff. It was the ancient home of the clan McRue, destroyed in one of those bloody Highland feuds you read about. Since this obscure clan died out long ago, and since there is not enough of the castle left to attract tourists, and since it is a long way from the road and the cliffs are not safe, hardly anybody knows about it. So said Madame Ling, pretending to trust me with important information. I am fairly certain that Brossach is not on that particular road, and it may not even be an old castle on a cliff, but that is what I was told to tell you.”

I said, “Well, with luck they’ll take us there, wherever it is. I’m glad we came across the Ling when we did. Or she came across us.”

“What would you have done if she hadn’t?”

I shrugged. “They knew I’d got information from Walling, and they didn’t know I didn’t know what it meant. As long as I headed in the right direction and looked as if I knew where I was going, they were bound to try to stop me. We couldn’t help but run into somebody you could make your treacherous offer to, somewhere along the line.”

She laughed and patted my arm. “Darling, you are an ingenious man and a good poker player, even if you are sentimental about women.”

I opened my mouth to warn her not to count too much on my famous sentimentality; then I closed it again. If she wanted to keep thinking I was a soft-hearted slob, that was her privilege.

I had been warned about the one-lane roads of the real Scottish hinterland, and the courtesies and conventions governing their use. They are, for the most part, smoothly paved and well maintained, but they are barely wide enough for a single car—just narrow little tracks of black asphalt winding through the rocks and heather.

At intervals, there are passing places marked by white, diamond-shaped signs set high on tall posts for better visibility. If a car comes up behind, you are supposed to pause at the next passing place and let it pull around you. If one approaches from ahead, you are expected to wait at the next passing place for it to go by, unless it reaches a diamond first and waits for you.

We’d come through Ullapool, a picturesque but tourist-infested fishing village on an inlet called Loch Broom, where we’d had our first glimpse of salt water on this rugged western shore of Scotland. Beyond, the main road had swung inland again, and presently we’d seen the sign pointing to Kinnochrue and made our left turn, followed faithfully by the squatty tan Austin-Cooper.

Now I was ramming the Spitfire hard along the twisting black track through the coastal hills. I was kind of testing the skill of the guy behind and the capabilities of his chunky little sedan. I had to admit that while my streamlined red roadster looked a lot faster, I didn’t really have much if any edge, mechanically speaking, and Basil seemed to be a pretty good driver. Well, they’re all pretty good until the chips are down; then some get suddenly better and a few get suddenly worse.

I put my foot down harder. The exhaust began to sound raucous and impatient, the wind started buffeting us in the open cockpit, and the tires whimpered in the curves. Basil began to fall back. Of course, there was no real need for him to take chances. He couldn’t lose us on that road; there was no place for us to go. Still, it looked as if he just didn’t have the urge. I could see why he’d had another man to handle the car in London. He could drive, but he wasn’t a
driver
, if you know what I mean. His machinery could catch me, but he never would.

Vadya said tartly, “I hope you are enjoying yourself, darling.” She had to speak loudly to make herself heard over the noise.

I glanced at her and grinned. “What’s the matter, are you scared?”

“Of course I am scared,” she shouted. “You are driving like a fool, and I have no particular desire to die.”

“Neither does he,” I said, jerking my head backwards. “Which is what I wanted to find out… Ooops!”

I hit the brakes and swerved into a providential passing place barely in time to miss a big Morris sedan that had appeared out of nowhere—at least it looked big on that skinny little road. Then we were off again, while Basil had to wait at a passing place up the line for the larger car to go by. That gave us an additional lead as we charged the next rise hard enough to feel the car kind of lift as the road dropped away beyond the crest—and there they were.

They must have had somebody on a height to give the signal we were coming; they were already busy setting a Volkswagen Microbus crosswise down there. It was plenty big enough to block the road completely. On either side, the shoulders dropped off into rank, soggy-looking grass and brush studded with occasional nice big boulders.

In a jeep, or maybe even a rugged American pickup truck with plenty of clearance and low-gear pulling power, I might have considered an end run nevertheless. In a fragile, low-slung sports job with high-speed gearing, it was out of the question. Even if I got it down from the road intact and right side up, I’d never get it back to the pavement again beyond the roadblock. It would either sink belly-deep in the peat bog or disembowel itself on a rock.

They’d seen us now. The driver of the bus had set his brake and was running for cover, and there were a couple of men on either side of the road, waiting to close in on us when we came to a halt. But between them and us was a white diamond on a post, marking a rather skimpy passing place.

I said, “Hang on, doll. This may work. If it doesn’t, it will still look as if I’d given it the old college try.”

She said something that I didn’t catch. We were really flying down the narrow strip of pavement now. All you could hear was the scream of the exhaust and the howl of the wind. The passing place was coming up fast. At the last moment I stood on the brake and rammed the gearshift lever into low. As we came sliding up to the wide spot, while we still had momentum, I got off the brake, cranked the wheel all the way over, and hit the accelerator hard.

It’s a trick we used to play long ago, in our folks’ flivvers, on snowy roads back home. If you swung the heap hard and really goosed it, you could skid it around in its own length. If you chickened out, you wouldn’t spin far enough, and you’d jump a curb or clobber a couple of parked vehicles. If you hit it too hard, you’d do a complete three-sixty, and go sliding on down the street, spinning end for end. But if you did it just right, you’d have made a neat U-turn using hardly any street at all.

This wasn’t snow, of course, but I saw a little gravel in the turnout that might help, and the Spitfire had a much smaller turning circle, and a much faster steering ratio, than the cars I used to play with. After all, I’d picked it for its spectacular maneuverability; now was the time for it to show its stuff.

For a moment, however, it seemed as if we’d go flying off the bank and out into the rocky field: I couldn’t break the rear wheels loose. The car simply tracked around tightly, shuddering and protesting, in a circle that, small as it was, was several feet too wide for the space we had. Then the straining rear tires hit the gravel and went sideways with a jerk and we were spinning nicely. The tail of the car whipped completely around. I caught it at a hundred and eighty, overcorrected and almost lost it, and fishtailed wildly before getting it back under control. Then we were heading back up the slope.

Basil was not yet in sight. We came over the crest again, turning about five thousand in third gear—about fifty m.p.h.—and saw him just approaching the passing place that we’d used to avoid the Morris. I suppose I should have let him reach it, but I remembered a girl who’d died of poison, probably at his orders, and I saw no good reason to be nice to Mr. Basil. Besides, sitting in an open car, a perfect target, I had to keep him too busy to use a gun until we were out of range. He might shoot better than he drove.

I raced him for the white diamond, therefore, taking the revs clear up to six thousand before I grabbed high gear. He wasn’t a real driver, as I’ve said. He couldn’t see that if he slowed down, he was lost. He
had
to reach the wide place first, if he wanted to avoid a real sudden-death showdown, but still he tried to hedge his bets and make the crash a little less terrifying if it should come.