The Infiltrators (2 page)

“You’re not… I mean, you can’t be taking me back to answer new charges! God, they haven’t dreamed up something else to try me for after all these years, have they? I can’t… can’t be locked up again, it would kill me!” She stopped herself and grimaced bitterly. “Not that
that
would be such a fucking loss! What’s left to lose?”

“Having you get killed is exactly what we’re trying to avoid,” I said. I expected some response to this, some sign of fear or curiosity, but there was none, so I went on: “No, you have nothing further to fear from me or the authorities, Mrs. Ellershaw, I assure you.”

Then we were outside. It didn’t seem to mean much to her. She took no deep breaths of the fresh air of freedom; she gave no sign of appreciating the sunshine unobstructed by prison bars and walls. The shutters had come down again, and her face was expressionless. The car towards which I guided her was a rather flashy little Mazda RX-7 sports job, silver-gray, but she accepted it without comment as a perfectly normal vehicle to find outside the penitentiary gates—but again there was that faint, rather pitiful double take when I opened the door for her, reminding me again how long it had been since she’d last received such small courtesies, or any courtesy at all.

As she entered the low-slung vehicle a bit awkwardly—it takes practice, and her last sports-car ride had to be almost a decade behind her—I couldn’t help noting that there was, after all, something left of the strikingly attractive young woman I remembered. Her ruinous experiences had failed to affect the lovely shape of her legs, unspoiled even by her dull stockings and cheap shoes.

“You don’t have to know that,” Mac had said when I asked what the hell it was all about. “We don’t need to know that, so we have not been told.”

His voice was dry. We often get limited instructions like that; and almost invariably it turns out that the information that was withheld was exactly the information the agent involved should have had to keep him from stepping on the wrong toes or digging up the wrong dead bodies or shooting the wrong live bodies and making them dead. Or getting shot himself. But they do keep sending us out blindfolded and with earmuffs on. Security, they call it.

It was a rather shabby second-floor office with a window that looked out on a rather run-down part of Washington, D. C. The light from the window made it difficult to see the face of the man behind the desk, but it didn’t matter. I knew what he looked like, having worked for him—or with him—longer than I cared to remember.

It was always hard for me to realize, seeing him, that I was looking at one of the most dangerous men in the world. With his neat gray hair and striking black eyebrows, in his neat gray suit, he could have been a banker or broker, a little worn by worrying about interest rates or investments or the gross national product. However, I knew that his real worries, now and always, concerned life and death, mostly death. The polite word for our function—well, our primary function—is counter-assassination. When some government agency, any government agency, comes up against a hostile operative too tough for them to handle safely and legally, an expert killer, they send for us to deal with him unsafely and illegally. Sometimes they ask us to handle other kinds of risky problems as well. Sensibly, they prefer to lose one of us rather than one of them.

“Good old need-to-know,” I said. “One day we’ll wake up and find the commissars running the country, and well have no idea how it happened because somebody’d decided that we didn’t need to know.”

Mac said, “It’s interesting to know that you’re thinking along those lines, because the person you’re to pick up at the federal penitentiary for women at Fort Ames, Missouri, was convicted of spying for the Russians—or rather, of helping her husband spy for the Russians. The husband disappeared, along with another female who was involved, a known Communist. The wife got eight years. She’s being released in a few days.”

I frowned. “Fort Ames? What the hell is that? I thought the maximum-security federal ladies’ pen was at Alderson, West Virginia.”

“Officially it is,” Mac said. “Unofficially, there’s an old state prison at Fort Ames that has been rebuilt and restaffed to meet the requirements of certain government organizations like, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Federal Security for female inmates whose preservation is considered essential to the nation’s safety. The trouble with Alderson is that even though it’s designed for women guilty of the most serious federal crimes, it’s pretty much an open prison. Apparently it has been determined that women are, for some reason, much less likely to escape than men, and even the worst female offenders don’t require the strict security measures necessary in a male institution. I’ve heard Alderson referred to as a ladies’ seminary and a country club. Yet the system seems to work; there are very few escapes.”

“So why wasn’t this particular prisoner sent there? It seems like the logical place for her.” I watched him carefully. “If we’re thinking of the same girl, she didn’t look very dangerous to me the one time I met her. Not in that way. I shouldn’t think she’d require the manacles and leg irons. In fact I’d expect that the big problem with a girl like that, when she found herself behind bars with a lot of common criminals, would be to keep her from dying of shame and humiliation.” I glanced at him. “You do have in mind the young woman I knew as Madeleine Rustin, don’t you, sir?”

He nodded. “Yes. I hoped you’d remember her.”

“I remember her. But regardless of what she did, if she actually did it, I can’t quite see the need for throwing her into an escape-proof dungeon. She was hardly the type to dig her way out of prison with a teaspoon or shoot her way out with a homemade zip gun.”

“Apparently there were other considerations. Her accomplices had got away, and it was claimed that they or the people they worked for had considerable resources. The Office of Federal Security, which handled the case, persuaded the judge that there was considerable danger that they would organize an attempt to free her, or to silence her, not altogether impossible at Alderson. Hence Ames.” He paused, and glanced at some paper on his desk, and looked up again. “As a matter of fact we have reason to believe that somebody still wants to silence her, now that she’s free—well, will shortly be free.”

I sighed. “I see. It’s a bodyguard job, then.”

“In part, yes. We most certainly want her kept alive. But also we want to know why somebody wants her dead, and we want to know the identity of that somebody. We also want to know everything she knows, and hasn’t told, about the disappearance of her husband—Dr. Ellershaw, you’ll remember, was a brilliant young physicist employed at the Center for Advanced Defense Research at Los Alamos.”

I said, “She wasn’t married when I met her, so all I know about the husband is what I read in the papers at the time of her trial. And the facility to which you’re referring is a more or less independent installation, up a side canyon,” I said. “Conejo Canyon. Rabbit Canyon, if you want the translation.”

“The information doesn’t seem particularly significant, Eric, but thank you,” he said, using my code name to emphasize that this was business, and irrelevant linguistic digressions were inappropriate. “But that’s one of the reasons you were selected for this assignment. You’re familiar with the Santa Fe-Los Alamos area, having lived there. And you’re at least slightly acquainted with the female subject.”

I said thoughtfully, “After the time that has passed since Dr. Ellershaw disappeared and his wife was arrested, you’d think any scientific information involved would be pretty damn obsolete. Why this belated interest in an eight-year-old espionage case?”

“Nine-year-old, to be exact. The young woman didn’t go to prison until a year after her husband’s activities were uncovered, what with the trial and the appeals.” He shook his head. “And why she’s still of interest is precisely what we have to find out. Who’s afraid of Mrs. Ellershaw at this late date, afraid enough to still want her silenced? And why are they afraid?”

I frowned. “How about the possibility that she may be innocent, sir? That she may have been framed, and that the people who framed her are scared that, having had eight long years to work on it in her cell, she may. have figured out how it was done to her and who did it?”

He glanced at me sharply. “You keep sounding as if you had some doubts about her guilt, Eric.”

I said, “One year from arrest to prison! Considering the present state of our judicial system, that’s some kind of a record, isn’t it, sir? My God, I know of considerably less important cases that have been in the courts for five years and more. Doesn’t it look as if somebody with a lot of influence worked damned hard to get this girl tucked away behind bars in a great big hurry?”

Mac shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe her guilt was self-evident and her lawyer incompetent so it took less time than usual.”

“I believe she had the top brains of her law firm defending her,” I said. “Anyway, the whole thing’s out of character. Her character. I only saw her that one day, but she had everything going for her. Why would she risk it all like that? She was an ambitious kid eager to get ahead in her profession and not particularly idealistic—hell, when I met her, she was helping to defend a fairly unpleasant murderer even though she knew damn well he’d done the killing. I can’t see anybody selling her the glorious revolution of the proletariat. And she had doting parents wealthy enough to finance a top education for her and, probably, help her out generously if she needed it afterwards. Anyway, she was making a pretty good salary with promises of great things to come. So it seems unlikely she’d do it for money.” I grimaced. “I know, sir, it’s exactly that kind of privileged kids who wind up robbing banks and blowing up things for the Weather Underground or whatever the currently fashionable protest organization may be. But I wouldn’t have expected it of this kid.”

“Hardly a kid now, after eight years in Fort Ames,” Mac said dryly. “If she was convicted wrongly, it’s unfortunate, but I want you to bear in mind that her innocence, or guilt, is of interest only to her, except as it affects whatever problems we face out there in New Mexico. Curb your chivalrous impulses, please. We are not in the business of righting wrongs or correcting injustices. What we are interested in is finding out just what is going on in that Rabbit Canyon of yours. What has been going on there for nine years, or perhaps even longer, that Dr. Roy Ellershaw was mixed up in guiltily or stumbled upon innocently? Who considered him enough of a threat that he helped the young man to disappear voluntarily or caused him to disappear involuntarily? Who arranged for the young wife to be arrested and sent to the penitentiary, justly or unjustly, to get her out of the way also? Who, now that she’s being set free, feels threatened enough by her continued existence to arrange for her murder?” Max shook his head. “At least that’s one series of possibilities; there are others. I think the lady is the key. Well, her husband is the real key, I suspect, and if you can persuade her to lead you to him—assuming that she can—so much the better. Otherwise you’ll have to use Mrs. Ellershaw herself; and in order to employ her usefully you must of course prevent her from getting killed. You can have Jackson to assist you. The two of you worked pretty well together on that recent Chicago operation, didn’t you?”

“Jackson’s fine,” I said. “But he’ll need help if he’s going to cover us with any efficiency.”

“He’ll have help, all he requires,” Mac said.

I looked at him for a moment. Unlike that glamorous outfit that operates out of Virginia, we don’t have unlimited manpower at our disposal; but he seemed to be giving Jackson and me pretty much a free hand with such reserves as we did have.

“So it’s a big deal,” I said.

“It could be very big. But we don’t need to know exactly why. Or so we have been informed.”

“I see.” I made a wry face. “Just give it everything we’ve got and don’t ask questions. The fate of the nation rests upon the shoulders of one lousy lady ex-con. Well, soon-to-be ex-con, and I’ll bet it can’t be soon enough for her.”

* * *

Hardly a kid now, after eight years in Fort Ames.
Mac’s rather callous remark returned to me as I guided the little sports car out of the parking lot, with the drab penitentiary graduate I’d once known as a very smart and attractive young professional woman sitting silent beside me, holding her imitation-leather purse on her lap.

It was time for somebody to say something, and I said, “I had a big four-wheel-drive unit for a good many years. Used it for camping and hunting whenever I got the chance; but it started to wear out at last and at eight miles to the gallon I couldn’t afford to feed it any longer, anyway. Brace yourself, you’ll find current gas prices a real shock. So I thought I’d try something different for a change. It’s the rotary Wankel engine, which seems to be a smooth and reliable piece of machinery; and it handles very well. Of course it’s really too damn comfortable for a true sports car. A real sports car is supposed to sound like a boiler factory and ride like a rock and drip water down your neck when it rains.”

She gave no indication of hearing any of this nonsense. She just sat in the bucket seat beside me, unmoving, until at last she turned her head to look behind. I knew what she was watching: the prison was just disappearing from sight back there. When it was gone she settled herself looking forward once more.

“Did you ever catch up with that man?” she asked abruptly.

“What man?”

“The one you were after. When you came to see me that time and I arranged for you to talk with our client, Willy Chavez.” She hesitated, and said with a hint of reminiscent pride, “We got him off, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “But I thought you would, all that high-powered legal talent.”

She said, rather grimly, “I had exactly the same kind of high-powered talent, Mr. Helm, and you can see how much good it did me. It’s not always a matter of who can bring the biggest legal guns to bear. But you haven’t answered my question.”