The Terrorizers (17 page)

I said, “That’s a nice little strong-arm squad if somebody wants to use it. Ross said they’d been practicing guerilla tactics on the back lot. He also said he’d found some firearms, but he didn’t say how many they’d got away with, or what kind.” I grimaced. “Talking about firearms, what weapons does Ovid have such regular and reliable ways with? Does he pop them over the horizon or does he blast them face to face?”

Mac spoke evenly, “For a man about to go into civilian life, you ask a lot of questions, Eric.”

He was perfectly right, of course. I was finding myself oddly reluctant to bring the conversation to an end. After all, if my understanding was correct, I had worked for this man and his agency for a good many years, maybe most of my adult life.

Before I could speak, Mac went on: “Glock is said to be fairly versatile. He had sniper training in the armed forces. For close range he prefers a twelve-gauge shotgun. Number One buckshot when he can get it; and apparently it is available up there or he brought his own. That chauffeur, Lewis, had his head blown off by such a load.”

I said, “With a buckshot specialist who can also handle a sniper’s rifle prowling the local mists with a tough gang of armed mercenaries, I’d say it’s a hell of a good time for me to pull out, wouldn’t you, sir? He might run out of limousine drivers and come after me.”

Mac disregarded this. He said, “Let me titillate your active curiosity with another piece of information. We recently received a very interesting report concerning the explosive devices employed by the PPP or, rather, the means used to detonate them.”

I frowned at a pretty girl with an armload of packages heading for the department store doors.

“Interesting?” I said. Mac waited, obviously testing me a little, which gave me the cue. I said, “I don’t think I’m very interested in whether they used an hour glass, or an alarm clock, or some fancy gizmo involving the speed with which a certain acid eats through a certain metal. Should I be, sir? What I mean is, the only thing that would really interest me, in connection with detonators, would be learning that they didn’t use a timer at all. Now
that
I’d find fascinating.”

Mac said softly, “Very good, Eric.”

I frowned. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. A remote-control device?”

“So we’re told. You see the implications, of course.”

I said, “I see that these threepee characters must be even nuttier than I thought. Instead of using a tick-tock detonator that lets them get well clear after planting the boom-stuff, they’ve got a radio contraption that necessitates their remaining within firing distance, whatever it may be, waiting to push a little red button. Screwy!” I started to ask another question, but stopped and said suspiciously, “For a man about to accept my resignation, you’re handing out a lot of very confidential dope, sir. At least I don’t suppose this has been announced in the press.”

There was a little pause. At last Mac said, “Nobody resigns from this agency, Eric, in the strict sense of the word. Apparently that is among the things you have forgotten.”

I said, “I see.” It seemed like a safe thing to say, even though it wasn’t exactly true.

He let me wait another few seconds, then he said: “However, you may request inactive status if you like. I’d rather you didn’t; that is why I’ve answered all your questions and added a few additional facts I thought you might find professionally intriguing.”

“Why?” I asked.

“What?”

“Why would you rather I didn’t request inactive status, sir? I goofed, didn’t I? Walters almost got me. For all we know, he may even have managed to get away. And now I’ve managed to get myself declared
persona non grata
by a friendly neighboring country. Seems like you’d be happy to retire a guy with a record like that.” He didn’t say anything. I watched the wet people coming in out of the rain, shaking themselves off; and the dry people heading out into the rain, buttoning themselves up. Mac was still waiting. I said, “Okay, it’s a girl, sir.”

“I see. Ross didn’t mention that. Miss Davidson?”

“Yes. She doesn’t make it a condition, but she’d prefer it. Her preferences are… fairly important to me, sir. Particularly since I’m not a bit sure I wouldn’t prefer it, too.”

“Without memory, you can’t be certain what you prefer, can you, Eric?” When I didn’t answer, he went on, “It doesn’t have to be field duty. Not that I have any doubts on that score; we may not know how you managed with Walters, if you did, but we do know that your performance at Inanook was quite satisfactory regardless of what Mr. Ross may say. However, if the lady would rather have you spending more time at home, and if she has no objection to residing in Washington…” He hesitated, and went on: “This is no longer an easy agency for one man to supervise. I have been looking for someone to share the responsibility. Preferably a man who has been with us a very long time. Like you.”

It was startling; it was flattering; but it was also a bit embarrassing. Here was a man whom I wouldn’t recognize on the street, who’d apparently thought enough of me before my plane crash to plan on making me his second in command whenever I decided to retire from field work—it seemed unlikely that the idea had come to him on the spur of the moment. In spite of my current medical problems, he was ready to go through with the plan. There was even a hint that he’d be grooming me as his successor…

“You put me on kind of a spot, sir,” I said.

“I hope so.” After a little, he said, “You may want to consult the lady.”

“No. I know what she’d say. She’s had enough of the exciting life of the undercover operative. She wants out. For both of us.”

“And you, Eric?”

I was grateful for my loss of memory. Under other circumstances, I might have felt that I was betraying a friendship, or at least a working association, of long standing. Even without remembrance, it wasn’t a comfortable moment—but I concentrated on a mental picture of a slim girl in jeans and a gingham shirt singing to herself as she set the breakfast table.

“I want out, too.”

“Very well, Eric.” His voice was expressionless. “Let me just remind you that the decision is not, at this end, irreversible. Meanwhile, your request for inactive status will be approved if you choose to make it.”

I made it.

Outside, it was night. Mist made dandelion-haloes around the parking-lot lights and a steady drizzle was falling. As I drove away, I was aware of Ross’s man trailing along behind in an undernourished-looking Japanese station wagon. It occurred to me that it would be pleasant to live in a manner that didn’t necessitate forever watching the mirrors to see what was coming up astern, except in a peaceful, traffic-conscious way. Well, I was committed now. I was going to give it a try.

I didn’t think Mac really expected me to succeed.
The decision is not, at this end, irreversible.
He’d done his best to stop me, he’d made it quite clear that I was welcome back, all of which was comforting to the ego; but I had a distinct feeling that he was used to agents dropping out to try the peaceful life, and I didn’t have him too worried. Maybe they even ran office pools there in Washington on how long it would be before good old X-14 or Q-36 returned to the fold, bored stiff.

I didn’t think I’d be bored stiff. So far, of the brief life I could remember—omitting a few pleasant youthful recollections—about half of it had been spent in a hospital, and the other half in the violent ward of a booby hatch partly converted to other uses. It was time for a change. I wanted a world where a gun was something you picked up only when you wanted to match wits with a duck; a steady ordered world in which you delivered your photographic efforts to the client on time and then drove home to find martinis in the pitcher and dinner in the oven…

Dinner was in the oven, all right. I could smell roast beef as I stepped through the kitchen door. The martinis weren’t mixed yet, but gin, vermouth, and Scotch had been set out on the counter, plus a little jar of olives, a pitcher, and the appropriate glasses. There were two other glasses as well, with hollow stems. I grinned, remembering my thought that she was basically a chiffon-and-champagne girl. I peeked into the refrigerator, or fridge as Kitty liked to call it in her Canadian-British way, and there was the bubble-stuff, cooling. Moving into the other room, I found candles on the table set for two by the window. Her intention was obvious. After our undignified wrestling match on the living room floor, she wanted to show me that there were more gracious and pleasant ways of achieving the same object.

“Kitty,” I called, expecting an answer from the bedroom where she’d gone, presumably, to change into something nice and glamorous after making the dinner preparations in her jeans. There was no answer.

I stood inside the living room doorway for a moment, frowning. I took a step forward, and an odd glint of light from one of the windowpanes caught my eye. Instinct made me step back quickly; instinct made me reach for a weapon I didn’t have. Cautiously, I sidled around the room towards the dining nook, feeling naked and vulnerable and suddenly very scared, but not for myself. I kept out of range of the window until, from a safe angle, I could see it clearly: the single, small, starred bullet-hole a little off-center in the dark, rain-spotted glass.

I looked down at last. I knew what I would see, and she was lying there, of course. The one-shot boys don’t miss. There wasn’t any immediate shock. My mind just went coldly to work on it. He’d apparently got her as she stepped to the window to pull the curtains. A .30-caliber rifle, I judged, fired from the freeway embankment up the street. Probably, they’d used a van and pulled out on the shoulder up there, feigning engine or tire trouble. A van because you can’t see into it much. He’d have arranged himself comfortably in front, the little round man who was reliable as a clock; and he’d have used the vehicle’s windowsill for a rest. Two hundred yards give or take twenty. Telescopic sight. At that range, not long for a trained sniper, it could have been done with iron sights, but these optical days there isn’t a rifleman in a thousand who knows how.

Ovid hadn’t gambled. He was a pro. He hadn’t fired while she was moving around the table attending to the last-minute details. He’d known she would come to the window to close things up as darkness fell, giving him a perfect target, and she had. I remembered waiting like that once in a Central American jungle; waiting for my target to step into the clear and stand perfectly still because you don’t try for moving targets at five hundred meters. I remembered… Remembered?

Crazy things were suddenly happening in my head. I stood there looking down at the slender body in a hostess garment that was long and pink and filmy—slightly disordered now as she lay half-curled up, half-concealed by the tablecloth. I saw the small pink slippers, and the small pale face, and the blood, but I wasn’t really there. I was in a hundred other places. They came and they went: the places and the people. It was all there, but it was going by too fast for me to study it, like a film spliced by an idiot and projected by a maniac. I remembered…

The projector stopped. Everything came to a sudden halt. There had been a dull, hard sound outside.
Stupid
, I told myself sharply,
they wouldn’t stop with her: if they wanted her they’d want you, too.

I knew exactly what the sound had been. My bodyguard had just left us. Maybe he’d simply been shot; maybe he’d managed to get off a hopeless shot of his own—a warning to me, perhaps—as they sneaked up on him silently, possibly while he bent over the body of his colleague, the man Ross would have left to protect the house, who’d undoubtedly been taken out earlier, before the rifleman moved into position. In any case, my shadow was gone. I knew it as surely as if another dead body had been placed at my feet.

Now they’d be coming for me. Not Ovid. He was a pro. They’d have wanted him to try for me when I returned to the apartment, and he’d have refused. Even if he’d been willing to hang around after his first shot, trusting that the freeway noise had masked the report, he wouldn’t tackle a running shot at a long-legged gent loping through the rain between car and house on a dark night. With a scope-sighted rifle under those conditions you couldn’t even see the crosshairs. And even with his shotgun, he wouldn’t participate in a clumsy frontal attack. He’d consider himself a surgeon, not a butcher; brute force was out of his line. He’d done his part, had Ovid. The rest was up to the ex-Inanook guards. Fifteen men, Mac had said, and one woman if she liked to participate in that sort of thing…

Call it instinct, call it experience—the experience that was just coming back to me in a wildly confused and disorganized way. I knew they were out there. I knew they were coming in. I didn’t try to kid myself I might have heard an auto crash on the freeway, or a neighbor trying to replace a burned-out porch light and dropping the bulb. It didn’t occur to me to try the fire-escape at the bedroom end of the house. For one thing, they’d have it covered, and for another, I wasn’t in a running mood. I looked down briefly, call it a farewell glance if you like, and went to meet them.

They were on the outside stairs when I grabbed the knives out of the rack: the two big chef’s knives I’d spotted the first time I’d walked through. People are always helping themselves to your guns in this world; it seems to make them feel moral as hell. You learn to keep your eyes open for other weapons. There was one eight-inch Sabatier and one ten-incher, a real sword. Both had wicked, heavy, sharp triangular blades that were wasted on vegetables. They were at the door; they kicked it in. They came through it movie-style, two of them, waving submachineguns, for God’s sake! They were really taking their protest movement seriously.

I recognized the nearest; I’d seen him before in uniform, at Inanook, making the outside rounds. I threw the big knife point-first, letting it slip off my fingers; there wasn’t room to put a spin on it at that close range. It flew like a spearhead without the shaft and went hilt-deep into the chest. The chopper, to use the old Al Capone term that has nothing to do with helicopters, which hadn’t been invented then, clattered on the floor. As the man sagged aside, I threw the eight-incher. It got the throat of the guy beyond, a little higher than I’d intended, but why should I admit that? It looked very good, very impressive, very calculated.