The Menacers (9 page)

The walls were white and covered with carefully arranged groups of photographs, some straight grownup fashion shots, but mostly pictures of child models looking happy and clean and starched and lovable in their pretty clothes. Some framed magazine covers gave color to the arrangements. The pix were technically pretty good, but just a little too sweet for my taste. After all, I’d had some kids once—they’re growing up elsewhere with a substitute papa—and they’d never looked like that, even to my prejudiced eyes, except perhaps for a moment or two before church on Sunday morning.

“Well, it’s about time you woke up,” Carol Lujan said, appearing in the doorway with a tray. “I hope you still take your coffee black and your eggs over lightly, after all your mysterious travels.” She came forward. “Just one word of warning: if we should ever get married, don’t expect breakfast in bed for the rest of your life. The service is only for hungover gentleman friends who drop in to sleep it off. What’s the matter, doesn’t your fancy government relations job pay hotel expenses?”

So apparently I’d told her I’d been on a binge, perhaps in the line of duty, say an official reception or cocktail party. Government public relations was the cover story I’d been using since we met earlier in the summer. I mean, it’s not considered proper to go around telling people, even nice girls you sleep with, that you’re a secret agent.

“Who said anything about matrimony?” I asked, grinning.

“Not you, that’s for sure,” she said dryly. “Careful now, don’t spill it.”

She put the tray on my lap and straightened up, a moderately tall, blonde girl with the healthy, well-scrubbed look that’s always in style in my fashion book, no matter what kind of bloodless human skeletons may be cavorting on the cover of Vogue this season. She was wearing a brown-checked pleated skirt and a brown pullover sweater with the sleeves shoved casually above the elbows. There were yellow developer stains on her fingers, and there was a wedding ring on her left hand, but the marriage it represented had terminated, I knew, even before my own.

Her maiden name had been Carol Fairweather, and she’d once been married to a pretty good magazine photographer named Ted Lujan—pronounced Ted Loohahn—at a time when I’d had a wife and darkroom of my own. We’d seen as much of each other, back in those days, as two congenial married couples will, living in the same town with the husbands in more or less the same line of work.

Now Ted was dead—a jeep had rolled on him in some backward corner of the world—and my wife, having learned a little too much about my official activities with gun and knife before I settled down to be a private citizen with camera and typewriter, had decided I wasn’t the kind of guy she wanted to be married to after all.

This had all taken place several years ago, and I’d managed to avoid Santa Fe ever since, until this summer. Meeting Carol again, in the local bank, had been an odd and not entirely comfortable experience. When you bury the past, you don’t really want it to come crawling back up out of the grave.

However, she’d seemed glad to see me, which was flattering, and she was a good-looking girl, and I was alone in town. The least I could do was take her to dinner for old times’ sake—and we were unattached adults of opposite sex, and you know how it goes after a pleasant evening of drinks and reminiscences. Now, in a few short weeks, we’d come to know each other well enough that I could even sleep on her studio couch when tired, without feeling obliged to pretend that I really yearned to break down the bedroom door, which wasn’t locked anyway.

“What’s the matter, Matt? Have I got a smudge on my nose, or something?”

I guess I was looking up at her a little too intently. She was a very attractive girl. They had been pleasant weeks, but they were over. They’d been over a couple of days ago, when I’d got the summons to head south. I wouldn’t have come back here at all if it hadn’t been for Mac’s instructions.

“Your nose is fine,” I said. “Did anybody call while I was asleep?”

“No, there have been no phone calls this morning. I guess I’ll have another cup of that coffee myself. Just a minute; I’ll be right back.”

Watching her go out of the room, I had the guilty feeling you get about a girl to whom you’ve been disloyal, although technically speaking I hadn’t managed any real disloyalty, since the lady I’d had in mind for it had got shot before anything could happen between us. Still, I hadn’t been thinking very hard about Carol Lujan down in Mexico. The only time I’d used her name, it had been to make another woman jealous. And the lies I had to keep telling her about my occupation were getting a little threadbare and unconvincing. It was really time to go before somebody got hurt.

I buttered my toast while waiting for her to return, and idly read the title of a book on the table:
The UFO Conundrum.
Frowning, I looked at the magazine lying nearby. The cover featured an article entitled:
Flying Saucers: Hoax or Hallucination?
Beneath the magazine was another displaying the catchy line:
I Met the UFOnauts Face to Face!
I tossed the stuff back on the table as Carol came into the room and sat down in a chair facing me.

“Are you expecting a call, Matt?” she asked, stirring her coffee.

“There’s a meeting I’ve got to attend,” I said. “They’re supposed to phone and tell me where.” I glanced at the photographic equipment piled in the corner, and went on casually: “Looks like you’re about to take off on a job.”

‘Yes,” she said. “It’s a good thing you came when you did. I have to head for Mexico tomorrow, as soon as I can locate a 500mm lens I need.”

“Mexico?” I kept my voice even. “What’s in Mexico these days in the way of kids or fashions? And what’s the camera gag that requires an outsize telephoto lens?”

“I don’t
always
shoot just kids or fashions, darling. I get general assignments every once in a while.” She hesitated. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about it. It’s kind of confidential…”

I glanced again at the photographic gear, and at the literature on the cocktail table. I sighed and said grimly, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Some crackpot magazine editor is sending you to Mexico with a great big long lens to get a close-up portrait of a flying saucer.”

“Why, yes,” she said, surprised. “Yes, how did you know?”

Across the room, the telephone began to ring.

There were four men in the outer sitting room of the hotel suite when I entered, and there were four chairs arranged more or less in a semicircle around a low table. I had a pretty good idea who’d been elected to occupy the sofa upon which the chairs kind of focused.

Mac himself had opened the door for me. He closed it behind me. “This is the man we call Eric,” he said. “Sit down over there on the sofa, Eric. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

I could have used another one, but there are circumstances under which it is not diplomatically correct to eat, smoke, chew gum, or take a drink, even coffee.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said.

I went over to the indicated piece of furniture, but I did not sit down. I mean, respect is cheap and looks good, why not utilize it? I waited respectfully, therefore, while Mac seated himself. Then he made a gracious little gesture, and I sat down. I thought his left eyelid half-closed in a kind of wink, as he played up to my phony show of deference, but I could have been mistaken. He wasn’t really a winking man.

He looked about the same as the last time I’d seen him, which was about the same as the first time I’d seen him, more years ago than I cared to think about. A lean, gray-haired man with black eyebrows, he was wearing a neat dark-gray suit that might have been designed for a banker, but he was no banker. He was one of the half-dozen deadliest men in the world, and to one in the know, like me, it showed plainly.

The tweedy, affable-looking man next to Mac wasn’t deadly. He was only dangerous if you were vulnerable to conniving and intrigue, and if you were stupid enough to turn your back on him. He had a handsome red face, a shock of picturesque white hair, and piercing blue eyes, and he was the coming boy in undercover politics, a character named Herbert Leonard who’d decided that our government’s vast civilian intelligence establishment would provide a fertile field for his organizational talents.

He’d already managed to promote himself a new, streamlined agency that would deal with all problems of security and espionage more efficiently—so he claimed—than all us old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud outfits could possibly do. Obviously he hoped to swallow up or supersede us all in the long run. It was said of him that he envisioned himself as the J. Edgar Hoover of the international cloak-and-dagger set; there were even those who felt that he wasn’t totally blind to the fact that Hoover himself couldn’t live forever.

I’d never met him before, but I’d been shown the pictures and told the rumors. I had an uneasy hunch, finding him here, that the U.S. people I’d encountered in Mazatlán would turn out to be his. And if I’d tangled with some of Leonard’s protégés, I was in even more trouble than I’d thought.

Next was a man I didn’t know, but I bet myself I could place him with reasonable accuracy. He was crowding fifty, but when they get involved with airplanes young—particularly military airplanes—they seem to develop a characteristic Rover-boy look that lasts them the rest of their lives. Some day I’m going to find out what it is about the upper atmosphere that imparts that durable boyish appearance to those who love it. Personally, I age fast whenever I’m off the ground.

Anyway, I was willing to wager a small sum that I was in the presence of a military flyboy with a reasonable amount of rank. He was in civilian clothes—sharp gray flannels—but the eagles or stars show on a man even when the uniform gets left behind.

Next to him was a short, dark, compact gentleman with a thin black moustache. He was obviously foreign, presumably Mexican, in a dark business suit, immaculate white shirt, and silk tie—they don’t go in for casual clothes much during business hours. His presence gave an international flavor to the gathering that I found somewhat reassuring. Apparently the purpose wasn’t only to give one U.S. agent hell, although that might be first on the agenda.

The white-haired Leonard was the first to speak. “So this is the man called Eric!” he said quickly. “If you don’t mind, General, before we start, there are a couple of questions I’d like to put—”

“But I do mind.” For all his youthful look, the flyboy could put a snap into his voice. “I have a good idea what questions you want to ask, Herb, and we’ve already been through all that. You’re out of line. I’m not a damn bit interested in your intramural squabbles, for one thing, and for another you haven’t got a leg to stand on. I’d never fault one of my pilots, in a combat situation, for returning the fire of an unidentified aircraft when there had been no warning whatever of friendly traffic in the area. As I understand it, this man did everything possible to establish identification, and it was refused. So your agent got shot because somebody got too secretive, and we’re sorry about that, but it’s got nothing to do with our business here.”

Leonard said angrily, “General, I want to point out that I had three good operatives in Mazatlán. One was killed by this man. One was critically wounded trying to rescue him. And the third is presently involved with the Mexican authorities—no offense, Señor Solana—because of her efforts in his behalf. All this for an agent who, when the chips were down, failed to go through with the job he’d been sent to do.”

Well, I now at least had a notion what had happened to the bullet from the Luger cartridge case I’d seen. Mac’s lips had tightened disapprovingly as Leonard spoke. He doesn’t mind administrative infighting—he’s been through years of that—but he can’t stand a man who uses “presently” to mean “at present,” any more than he can abide anybody who uses “contact” to mean “make contact with.” We’re all very careful to leave such gobbledeygook usages out of our report. But this was no grammar class, and what he said was:

“Eric, did you request cover from one of Mr. Leonard’s agents?”

“No, sir. I told him to get a good night’s sleep and lay off. He must have decided to follow me on his own.”

Leonard leaned forward triumphantly. “And why
didn’t
you ask Hartford to help you? To make doubly sure of carrying out your assignment?”

I said politely, “If I had the situation figured right, sir, I wouldn’t need him. And if I was wrong, I figured he couldn’t help me much, anyway.”

Leonard took the bait. “Why not?”

“Well, sir,” I said, making a show of hesitating, “well, sir, Harsek’s grade A material, if you know what I mean. He eats little boys like that alive. There was no sense in just setting the kid up for a target.” I shrugged. “Apparently he went and set himself up, and got himself shot as could have been predicted.”

Leonard’s red face was a shade or two darker than it had been. “His interference probably saved your life, Mister! Of course you wouldn’t know that, being unconscious at the time.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “And if that’s true, I’m duly grateful, but I wasn’t aware that saving my life was one of the objectives of this mission. He apparently didn’t manage to rescue the girl, which would have been more to the point.”

The flyboy leaned forward, interrupting Leonard’s retort. “Never mind all that, Herb,” he snapped. “I told you to lay off. As for you, son, you’ve mentioned the objectives of your mission. Maybe you’d better tell us what they were, as you saw them.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve been called “son” by anybody, and he’d have had to be kind of precocious to make it as my daddy, but in the armed forces they tend to figure the generations more by rank than by age.

I hesitated. “If it’s not classified information, I’d like to know to whom I am speaking, sir.”

He looked a little taken aback; then he grinned. “Why, certainly. I believe you know the two gentlemen on my right. I am Brigadier General Bill Bannister, U.S.A.F.—Bannister like in stairs. I’m kind of in charge of this whole crazy operation. And this is Señor Ramón Solana-Ruiz of the Mexican… Well, let’s just say that he represents his government here. Very unofficially, of course.”