Authors: Donald Hamilton
The Terrorizers
Also Available from Titan Books
Donald Hamilton
and available from Titan Books
Death of a Citizen
The Wrecking Crew
The Removers
The Silencers
Murderers’ Row
The Ambushers
The Shadowers
The Ravagers
The Devastators
The Betrayers
The Menacers
The Interlopers
The Poisoners
The Intriguers
The Intimidators
The Terminators
The Retaliators
The Revengers
(December 2015)
The Annihilators
(February 2016)
The Infiltrators
(April 2016)
The Detonators
(June 2016)
The Vanishers
(August 2016)
The Demolishers
(October 2016)
The Terrorizers
Print edition ISBN: 9781783299812
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299829
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2015
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1977, 2015 by Donald Hamilton. All rights reserved.
Matt Helm® is the registered trademark of Integute AB.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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They fished me out of Hecate Strait, off the coast of British Columbia, early on a fall morning in a heavy fog. Fortunately the ship was proceeding dead slow with a lookout at the bow who heard the plane come down. Even so, a lone man in a lifejacket is a small target at sea, and they could easily have missed me, in which case I’d have died of exposure in short order. I hadn’t had far to go.
The ship was the
Island Prince
, a small, elderly freighter of Scandinavian origin which nowadays makes a weekly circuit from Vancouver, B.C., up the coast to the port of Prince Rupert, out to the Charlotte Islands, and back down to Vancouver—in case your geography is shaky, that’s not too far north of Seattle, Wash. I acquired all this information afterwards, of course. At the time, I wasn’t really switched on and recording, if you know what I mean. The
Prince
conveyed me to her next stop in the islands. There, a helicopter, alerted by radio was waiting to fly me across the Strait to the Prince Rupert Regional Hospital which, serving a wide wilderness area, has a chopper pad next to the front door for just such emergencies as mine.
Well, maybe not quite like mine. Not that chartered bush planes don’t crash occasionally, and I’m sure it’s happened before that only the passenger survived. For the survivor to have taken a bad crack on the head during the proceedings is, I suspect, not unheard of. I have no doubt there have also been instances, maybe even in the hospital to which I’d been brought, in which the half-frozen, headachy survivor couldn’t at first remember a hell of a lot about what had happened to him; but in most of those cases, I’m reasonably sure, the guy soon remembered who he was…
“Paul, darling!” That was Kitty, bursting into my hospital room without knocking, as usual, carrying a newspaper and an armful of flowers. Well, she said she was Kitty. You couldn’t prove it by me. Actually, her real name was Catherine Davidson, or so she’d told me after learning of my memory problem. She’d said I might as well use the nickname since I always had. Now she dropped the paper on the bed, got a fresh grip on the flowers, and looked around the room in a baffled way. “Where the devil should I put this stuff?”
She had the special, intriguing Canuck accent that manages to sound British without putting you in mind of either an ’arf-and-’arf London Cockney or an I-say-old-chap Limey aristocrat, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try to explain how I acquired the background for this linguistic comparison. In some respects, the mental computer seemed to be quite cooperative. It simply balked at handing out data on one subject. Me.
“You might try the bedpan,” I said.
“Gratitude!” she said. “That’s what a girl gets for trying to brighten the patient’s day.”
I eyed the enormous bouquet warily. “How do you know I don’t have hay fever?”
“Well, if you do you never told me about it. Do you?”
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “If I don’t know who I be, ma’am, how can I know what chronic diseases I is or ain’t got?”
There was a little silence. Kitty got rid of her burden by cramming it into the water pitcher on the dresser. She slipped off the long, dramatic coat she was wearing and dropped it on a chair. She came back to the bed.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “I keep forgetting… It’s no better?”
“No, ma’am. All I know, besides what you tell me, is what I read in those Vancouver papers you bring me; and I still can’t make heads or tails of your lousy Canadian politics. What the hell is a Socred?”
“Social Credit. One of our political parties.” She spoke absently, looking down at me; then she smiled. “Well, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it? I mean, what you don’t remember. It will come back to you. In the meantime I know perfectly well who you are. You’re Paul Horace Madden, of Seattle, a very good free-lance photographer, and a very nice person I’m going to marry as soon as he gets on his feet again, and he’d better not be too slow about it, or I’ll just crawl right into that hospital bed with him.”
Looking at her, I wondered if that part of the world was full of beautiful women in baggy pants, or if she was a unique specimen. Instinct told me that, while her unbecoming taste in clothes might be currently commonplace in the great Northwest, and even elsewhere, this girl wouldn’t ever be commonplace anywhere. She was a tallish, very slender, brownhaired kid with a small, lovely, pink-cheeked face. There’s something about a damp, cool, coastal climate that seems to produce that kind of fresh-faced loveliness; but again, don’t ask me how I knew it. I couldn’t really remember any other damp coastal climates or any other fresh-faced lovelies. The thought just came to me.
She was wearing a pink pullover sweater over a pink open-necked shirt; and pink slacks that were, as I’ve indicated, ridiculously wide, so they had a sloppy-floppy look in spite of being immaculate and sharply creased. It was a garment that obviously hadn’t been picked for flattery, or even, practicality, just for current style. Nevertheless, she surmounted the handicap with ease, and managed to leave me with no doubt that her unseen legs were shapely and marvelous, and her invisible ankles slim and wonderful. The idea of sharing a bed with her, by invitation, wasn’t exactly revolting. From what she’d already said to me, and to the authorities who’d questioned me about the crash, this wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. It seemed ungallant of me to have forgotten it.
I said firmly, however, “Begging your pardon, ma’am, what I want right now is to get me out of this damned bed, not you in. First things first and all that. Not that I don’t appreciate the offer. I’ll be happy to accept a rain-check valid for a more suitable time and place.”
She made a face at me and laughed. “Well, all right, I won’t rape you today if you’re feeling shy, darling… What do the doctors say? Have they told you when you’ll be well enough to leave?”
I said, “I have a hunch they’d turn me loose right now if I wasn’t such a fascinating specimen. They’re waiting around expectantly, hoping to be present when it all comes back to me in a great flood of beautiful memories.” I grimaced. “Let’s go through it again, Kitty. If you don’t mind.”
She winced. “Oh, dear, we’ve been over and over… But of course I don’t mind if you think it may help.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Where do you want to start?”
I noticed, that the street-sweeping pink slacks weren’t quite immaculate after all. She’d got the cuffs a bit damp, getting here from the motel where she was staying in town. I glanced at the window and saw that outside it was raining vigorously. This came as no great surprise, since it had hardly stopped since I’d been well enough to notice the weather. It was a wet damned corner of the world.
I said, “Let’s start with the fact that I’m P. H. Madden and live in Seattle. 2707 Brightwood Way, Bellevue, you told me. What’s a Bellevue?”
“It’s a Seattle suburb. Hilly. Your house is on a fairly steep little street. The lot slants right up from the sidewalk; you have to climb a lot of steps to get to your front door, which is actually at the side of the house.” Kitty’s voice sounded mechanical, as well it might. As she’d said, we’d been over and over it. She went on: “Or you can drive into the garage at street level and let yourself into the basement, where you have quite an elaborate darkroom, all spotless and shiny like a laboratory. Then you go up a flight of stairs to the living area. Not so tidy, that, if you don’t mind my saying so. Kitchen. Living-dining room. Two bedrooms and bath. You use one of the bedrooms for an office. Lots and lots of filing cabinets full of pictures. There’s a porch or sundeck at the front of the house, over the garage.” She regarded me hopefully. “Does that bring anything back?”
It was detailed and convincing, but I didn’t recognize it as a house in which I’d ever lived. “Not a thing. I gather I haven’t been in residence too long. Six months or so, you said.”
Kitty nodded. “Yes, you’d spent a good many years moving around, you told me. Free-lance photography in odd corners of the earth. More recently you took pictures for some magazine in Vietnam and got yourself badly wounded. Afterwards you did some work for an oil company in the Middle East, I think, and also up in Alaska—something to do with the pipeline. But you finally got tired of the nomadic life and decided to find a place where you could set up a permanent headquarters and take the kind of pictures you really liked.”
I thought about it for a little, and shook my head. “Still no contact, I’m afraid. You’d think a man would remember getting shot up in Vietnam, wouldn’t you?” It was funny that I’d know about Vietnam in a general way without being able to remember a thing about me in Vietnam, but I was getting used to such mental quirks. I shrugged. “Okay, let’s try something else. I take pictures for a living. Outdoors stuff, you said.”
“Well, mostly. You’re especially good with animals and birds; you’re very good in the woods and very patient. We once had a fight, sort of, when you took me along and I kept fidgeting, you said. I thought I was sitting still as a rock. You have all kinds of elaborate equipment for taking pictures by remote control, or from a long ways off. Of course, you do other things besides wildlife. Fishing and hunting stories, articles on oil and mining and logging… I told you, that’s how we met.”