The Infiltrators (41 page)

He nodded again. “I block the road when I get the word from Jack that Bennett’s car has passed the bend just above us.” He tapped the walkie-talkie he held. “I just checked it out. Communications loud and clear.”

“Did Wally say where Bennett was riding?”

“Rear seat, left side. Behind the driver.”

“Does everybody know that, in case there should be shooting? We don’t want to hurt the poor little fellow. At least not with a bullet.”

“Everybody’s got the word. They’ll be careful.”

I said, “You’d better ride out the crash in the cab. If you try to get out, and they’re coming fast, they could hit the truck and shove it over on top of you before you’re clear.”

“I know, sir. I’ll be all right. This old wreck is built like a tank; that’s why I picked it off the second hand lot.”

I eased myself to the ground and looked at him for a moment. I decided that I’d leave the encouraging handshakes and noble before-the-battle speeches to General Eisenhower, wherever he might be. I just gave him a kind of salute and he grinned at me, and mounted to the seat of the pickup in an agile and painless way that made me jealous. I started back towards the Eagle, but saw Bob Wills getting out of it carrying a walkie-talkie of his own, and a submachine gun of some kind that gleamed menacing in the dark. It didn’t seem like exactly the right weapon for capturing a man alive and talking; but if I criticized him now he’d probably get mad and start tossing around hand grenades and vest-pocket nuclear devices. For the same reason, seeing that the other two men had already gone to their stations, I didn’t check what instructions he’d given them, lest he think I was being critical. I’d just have to hope he’d got things organized right in his prima-donna way.

He passed me without speaking. We’d worked all this out earlier; and I followed him past the parked truck and up the road to a point from which we could shoot out the tires of Bennett’s car, we hoped, in the unlikely event that it came around the last curve so slowly that it managed to avoid collision with the International, which would be blocking the road by that time, and tried to back uphill out of danger. Scrambling up the steep slope in the dark, to the patch of brush we’d picked for cover, was no fun at all. As I eased myself onto a suitable rock up there, I heard the motor of the truck start up, roar a bit, and settle down to steady idling.

“Jack, come in,” Bob Wills said into his set. To me, he said, “Jack’s around the curve, a couple of hundred yards above us.”

“I hear you,” said a tinny voice. “Nothing in sight yet. Saw a shooting star, though. Is that supposed to be good luck or bad?”

“Never mind the heavens, concentrate on matters terrestrial.”

“Matters terrestrial. Wow! Aye, aye, sir!” After several minutes, the tinny little loudspeaker addressed us again: “We’re in business. Headlights up the canyon. Two sets so far… Still just two pairs of lights. Getting closer, okay here they come. I’ll give you mark as the second one passes so you’ll get an idea how long… Mark! I repeat, that’s the
second
vehicle, the three-quarter-tonner. No sign of the sedan yet.”

In the silence that followed, I heard the growling sound as the driver of the waiting International jazzed his idling motor a bit to make sure of it. Then a set of headlights swept by below our hillside perch, and another. I could hardly make out the dark bodies of the vehicles, let alone the faces at the windows.

“Twenty-four seconds,” Bob Wills said.

“Get ready, here comes the Merc,” said the radio. “Coming, coming, coming… Mark! Nothing else on the road. Leaving post, heading down to lend a hand. Out!”

Wills was staring at the parked pickup truck below us, still motionless. “Get
out
there, you dumb jerk!” he said angrily, but he didn’t say it into his set.

But the pickup driver, with a clear knowledge of how much time he had to work in, was in no hurry. He waited a few seconds longer, then he eased his clumsy old vehicle forward and halted it where it would block the highway completely. I heard the parking brake go on and the engine stop. His timing was good. We caught the loom of headlights around the curve above us, sweeping out over the canyon as the Mercedes made the turn and headed down towards us at a fair rate of speed for that road, perhaps trying to catch up with the rest of the convoy that had pulled a little ahead of it.

The pickup seemed to materialize magically across the road as the headlights hit it. The sedan was already below us. Tires screeched and the car went into a skid to the right, heading for the hundred-foot drop-off on that side of the road. I beseeched the driver silently:
Get off your brakes, you dumb prick!
One of these days I’m going to invent a car without any brakes. It’ll kill fewer people than the ones we’ve got, at least in high-speed situations with stupid auto-jockeys who lock up everything tight and lose control whenever things get a bit hairy. Either the driver heard my soundless plea, or a measure of sanity returned; his wheels started rotating again, his steering recommenced functioning, and he got himself aimed left towards the rear end of the pickup, the light end, the hillside end.

But he’d overcorrected in his panicky counter-reaction to his first panicky reaction. His left wheels rode up the steep bank and flipped the Mercedes onto its side a moment after it had smacked the back end of the pickup and spun it halfway around. I was already sliding down the rocky slope to the road, stoically ignoring my aching side, heroically interposing my body between Bob Wills’ automatic weapon and the wrecked car, just in case he should be irresistibly tempted to give it a burst.

I tried to remember which military greats had been shot in the back by their own men. Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, for one; but there had been others. Stonewall Jackson?

The interrogation van was a blunt, boxy, windowless vehicle with a red paint job that had faded, as had the lettering on the side:
GARCIA AND KETTENBERG—PLUMBING
. When I opened one half of the rear double door, and hauled myself inside, Bennett was sitting on the narrow cot at the side in his underwear and socks, a costume that left him little dignity. They hadn’t had to work on him very hard, and there wasn’t a mark on him except for a patch of white tape on his forehead at the hairline where he’d hit something when the Mercedes flipped; but his shoulders sagged, his body looked shrunken, and his face was that of an old man with a faint silvery stubble of beard and dull staring eyes.

“Tell me about the Orosco Grant,” I said. “Orosco with an ‘s’ or Orozco with a ‘z’?”

“With a ‘z’,” he said.

“Size?”

“Several thousand acres, but parts are still under litigation. You know these fucking Hispanos, suddenly rising up now and claiming that their innocent ancestors were screwed by the sneaky Anglos—after they stole the land from the Indians in the first place!”

There was nothing in that for me. An easterner himself, he was merely parroting what he’d been told by his landowning local associates.

“Access?” I asked.

“I already told them—”

“Tell me.”

“Turn east off the freeway on State 470. Seventeen miles. Barbed-wire fence, left side. Padlocked gate. Key—”

“I have the keys they took off you. Go on.”

He continued to speak mechanically, as if repeating a speech he’d made several times to another audience, as of course he had. They’d have made him repeat every detail endlessly until they were sure they had the truth, as far as he knew it.

“Dirt road,” he said. “You’ll need four-wheel drive crossing the arroyos. Two arroyos. Deep sand. Proceed nine and a half miles from the gate into the Gabaldon Hills. The old Higsbee Mine.”

“Landmarks?”

“Las Dos Tetas. The mine is kind of between them. Actually, the diggings are in the one to the south. Two round knobs closer together, a little higher than the surrounding hills.”

“What’s left at the mine after all these years?”

“Not much. A couple of old buildings. Falling down. Piles of dirt. Hole in the hillside, tunnel. Branches. First branch tunnel on right.”

“Alive?”

Apprehension flickered in his eyes. “We didn’t hurt her!” he said defensively. “She was alive when we left her there!”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday.”

“Is there a shaft, a deep vertical shaft, or whatever it’s called in mining parlance?”

He hesitated. “Yes. End of main tunnel. I was told that years ago, when they were working it, they thought they had a rich strike in one of the lower strata, but it petered out.”

I watched him closely. “It sounds like a convenient place to dispose of her body if she happened to die on you.”

His eyes betrayed him again. “We weren’t going to harm her!”

“Twenty-four hours tied up in the dark with the rats doesn’t count as harm?” I stared at him grimly. “What were you supposed to do with me if you caught me up at that mountain cabin, Bennett?” He started to speak, and stopped, and looked away. I said, “Then you have a good idea what I’m supposed to do with you, once we’ve wrung you dry.”

His eyes widened fearfully. “But I’ve told you everything!”

“Not yet you haven’t,” I said. “But you will. And if you do, and if the boys don’t have to work too hard for it, and if we find Mrs. Ellershaw alive and not too badly damaged, thanks to your information, well, I’m allowed a certain amount of discretion in carrying out my orders. Keep it in mind.”

Leaving, I glanced at the equipment that cluttered up the inside of the van. Apparently they did most of their work electrically. The inside of the mobile torture chamber was covered with soundproofing, not too neatly applied. Outside, there was bright sunshine, and it was warmer than it had been. A cool morning had come and gone while we cleaned up the mess on the mountain and delivered the warm body in question to the I-team and let them work on it. The afternoon was now getting balmy; summer was obviously on its way. The van stood at the curb by the green strip of park that runs along the Santa Fe River. Three men were sitting at a nearby picnic table drinking beer. Seeing me emerge, one rose and came up to me.

The man in charge of the I-team looked quite ordinary. They usually do. Very few of them have werewolf fangs and pointed, tufted ears. This one was dressed in a faded, flowery sports shirt, frayed jeans, and the kind of tricky jogging shoes that have taken the country by storm. He was a somewhat older McCullough type, with the kind of boyish/girlish appearance the longish hairdos give the prettier ones these days, even into their thirties and forties. But I didn’t like his eyes. Well, hell, maybe he didn’t like mine. We all have our little specialties. Who was I to criticize?

“Satisfactory?” he asked.

“So far.” I told him what I wanted.

“No problem,” he said. “Not with this one. Very cooperative.”

“Meaning you had a problem with the last one I gave you?”

He shook his head. “He never got this far, friend. These damn suicidal types!”

I drew a long breath. “They lost him?”

“So I was told. I never saw him.”

I started to speak angrily, to say I’d warned them to be careful. Obviously Jackson, fearing pain as he did, had had an extra little dose of oblivion hidden out somewhere, and they’d missed it, searching him. Well, at least he’d had the satisfaction of outwitting us all in the end. In any case, it wasn’t this man’s fault.

“Well, try not to lose this one,” I said.

An hour later I was rolling down the four-lane highway in Bob Wills’ fancy FWD Eagle, which he’d been very reluctant to lend me, although it was in a sense a company car. Well, I’d been equally reluctant to let him, in return, use the Mazda, which wasn’t. God save us from all temperamental agents, present company excepted. I’d left Wills with careful instructions: he was to keep certain people covered, and act in certain ways if certain things happened, and he was not to come blundering after me helpfully under any circumstances. Until tomorrow. If I wasn’t back by then he could buy himself some shovels and hire a jeep and take a crew out to bury the bodies, if he could find them.

“Goddamn it, Helm,” Wills had said. “You talk as if the country out there—this Whatchamacallit Grant—is just crawling with war-painted Apaches, or Navajos, or whatever the hell kind of hostile Indians you used to grow out here! Bennett says he simply took the woman to the mine and left her tied up there unguarded, doesn’t he?”

I said, “He may even be telling the truth, as far as he knows it. But I’m not going to gamble my life, or Madeleine Ellershaw’s, on what Bennett thinks he knows. If you were in the same outfit with him, and had to use him, would you tell him any more than you had to? So remember what I told you: stay clear. If it’s easy, one man can do it. If it’s hard, maybe one man can still do it. But in either case a lot of superfluous characters raising dust all over the desert will surely get her killed, and me as well.”

Now, driving south along the freeway all by myself, I felt it all drop away. It was a lovely feeling. To hell with critical subordinates. To hell with tame torturers I’d had to use to save Madeleine’s life, because they were better at interrogation than I was, even though my conscience told me that if I had to get information by such means the least I could do was get my own hands bloody. This way I was like the kind of hypocritical creep who loves steak but wouldn’t dream of going out and murdering a poor little steer—or deer—himself. Or herself. And to hell with fantastic nationwide plots and science-fiction garbage and Advanced Human Managerial Studies.

I had a very good notion of what was waiting for me out there in the Gabaldon Hills. Who was waiting for me. The double-trap technique. He’d let me avoid the clumsy ambush arranged by Bennett—perhaps he’d even guessed that Admiral Lowery had suggested it under duress—and now he hoped I’d be feeling very self-satisfied and clever, and very safe, so I’d come marching boldly into the real trap, baited with a captive lady, that had been waiting for me right along.

I made the turn at the elaborate cloverleaf that seemed like a highway department overreaction to such a small state road. I drove the seventeen miles along the rough narrow pavement and found the gate in the barbed-wire fence—
bobwahr
, they call it over in Texas. I unlocked the padlock with one of the two keys that had been taken from Bennett’s collection. The other was supposed to unlock Madeleine’s handcuffs if she was still wearing them; but it seemed overoptimistic to think that far ahead yet.