The Vanishers (11 page)

“Well, after that SAS breakfast, I guess we don’t have to worry about lunch, so you’ve got until tonight sometime. I won’t make any predictions beyond that. I could use some rest myself; I’ll take a little snooze on the other bed. I’ll try not to disturb you when I go out, unless you want to be waked for dinner.”

“No, please just let me sleep if I’m still asleep.”

She was.

Even well after dark, the traffic on the big boulevard didn’t seem to have diminished much. The cars zipping by were smaller on the average than you’d find in the U.S., even these economical days. The trucks were smaller, too, but the steady rumble was just about the same as you’d hear along a busy route leading into any large American city. It was hard to remember that I was in a foreign land where I didn’t even speak the language.

I’d had a leisurely, lonely dinner in the flossier of the motel’s two restaurants. It had plushy chairs and linen tablecloths. It even served cocktails if you hit them between four and ten pee em. Afterwards, I’d read for a while, sitting in the lobby so as not to disturb my roommate. Although we were in the Land of the Midnight Sun, that’s a summer phenomenon and this was only spring, so I didn’t have to wait much past eight for darkness. Now, having slipped out of one of the rear doors of the motel, I stood for a moment listening to the murmur of traffic from the highway in front of the building. It was still loud enough, back here, that it would have made a good cover for sneaking up on somebody, since even if you were careless and snapped all the twigs and kicked all the pebbles, nobody would have heard. However, I didn’t have anybody to sneak up on. Yet.

I moved cautiously around the corner into the shelter of some decorative planting at the side of the motel, and studied the situation further. The parking lot was L-shaped. Most of it, including the space occupied by the Mercedes, was at the front, where I couldn’t see it from my present position, but an arm of it extended down the side of the building towards me. It was there that I’d parked the little Volksie-Ford. Although I’d picked the spot simply because it was open, I could hardly have done better. There were only a couple of places from which the car could be kept under observation inconspicuously.

Not that I’d sneaked out of my room to watch my own car. I’d come out to see if I could spot somebody else watching it. I was operating on the theory that there were only two of them, so they couldn’t cover all the exits of the sprawling motel. I’d taken the precaution of paying for the night in advance, not knowing how things would break, so there was no point in their watching the lobby to see if I checked out, since I could leave quite legitimately without doing so. For one of them to spend the night lurking in the corridor outside our room, keeping an eye on the door, would have been fairly conspicuous. They were pretty well forced to gamble that we had no alternative transportation available; that if we decided to slip away we’d do it in the rental Golf.

The evening was misty, and there were no stars. Dressed in stiff new jeans, a navy-blue turtleneck, and fancy-looking blue-and-white jogging shoes, courtesy of the same cut-rate emporium that had supplied Astrid’s sexy lingerie, I made a study of the terrain and decided that, since he wasn’t hiding in the ornamental shrubbery with me, the watcher had to be located in the bushes at the foot of one of the steeply sloping yards of one of the small houses on the hillside behind and above the parked cars. The angle was considerable, but the Norwegians have had plenty of practice at making their dwellings stick to precipitous mountainsides. Considering their geography, they should be almost as good at it as the Swiss.

I was tempted to go hunting; but that was the restlessness of inactivity working in me. Well, relative inactivity. I’d spent too many days recently sitting in cars and planes, clear from Mexico to Norway by way of a large part of the U.S.A. and the Atlantic Ocean. I’d had it with sitting. I cringed at the thought of spending further hours in these prickly damn’ bushes making like an evergreen. Action, action. Track the young bastards to their lairs, smoke them out… But that was not the way to go here.

I had to remember who I was and who I was up against. I was an experienced older agent dealing with, if my guess was correct, a couple of possibly well trained but probably inexperienced young men sent after me by my own agency. Always assuming that Astrid had been telling the truth when she’d disowned them; and that I hadn’t overlooked somebody else with a motive for keeping track of our movements. But whoever they were working for, they hadn’t been around as long as I had. They hadn’t been in the business as long as I had. Impatience might be their problem; I couldn’t let it be mine.

Resignedly I made myself comfortable—well, more or less—where I could watch the steep, dark hillside. There was some illumination from the streetlights and the lights of the motel, but I wished I had one of those fancy image-intensifying gadgets they’ve been passing around lately; or just a pair of good 7 x 50 binoculars. However, when they did relieve the watch, I had no trouble seeing them. By that time I was very damp and cold, and wishing for a heavy coat; but the hint of movement against the vague patches of snow below the small yellow clapboard house on the hillside made me forget my discomfort instantly.

It was the right-hand of the three houses up there. The other two were barn-red with white trim; but the colors were almost indistinguishable in the night. I saw a dim figure disappear into the brush at the foot of the lot to my right. Presently another dim figure appeared, heading back in the direction the first one had come from; it moved in a less-agile fashion. I felt a certain sympathy: he’d be as cold and stiff as I was after his long stakeout. Well, maybe not quite as stiff, since he was younger. Anyway, my hunch had paid off.

Moving cautiously, keeping low, I slipped out of my evergreen nest and through the decorative shrubbery to the fence that bounded the motel property on this side. It was wooden and solidly built in good Scandinavian fashion, painted white, and about five feet high. Still crouching, I followed the fence to the right behind the rear parking lot that seemed to be earmarked for utility and delivery vehicles, along with some cars that probably belonged to the motel and restaurant staff. It was well lighted, a little too well for my liking. The fence ended at a small road that passed along that side of the motel and continued up the slope behind it, serving the houses up there. Some junk was piled inside the end of the fence, empty crates and discarded cartons too big for the trash bins, awaiting pickup. I found shelter among them and waited.

He’d done a good job up on the hill, sitting commendably motionless so I’d been unable to spot his location in four hours of watching. But now he made the mistake the inexperienced ones often make: he relaxed before he was actually home free. Well, he was safely out of the danger zone, wasn’t he? His partner had taken over, and he was off-duty without a care in the world, heading back to his room to catch up on his sleep. When they’re hunting you, particularly if there are more of them than there are of you, it so seldom occurs to them that you might have the temerity to turn around and come hunting them.

Through a crack in the fence I watched him march openly down the small paved road towards me, swinging his arms vigorously to warm himself after his long vigil. Suspecting nothing, he was taken completely by surprise when, as he passed the end of the fence, I rose up and threw the lock on him from behind. He was too big for me to mess with. The other, smaller one I might have tried to take alive; not this husky character. I gave it maximum effort instantly, therefore, and felt certain important items break in certain important places. I held him like that until there were no more kicks or quivers or spasmodic tremors left in him; and even a little longer. Too many good men have died—well, they thought they were good—because they were too sensitive, spelled queasy, to make absolutely certain.

Even now, after midnight, the boulevard made a satisfactory background rumble. There had been a little noise: the scuffle of feet, some heavy breathing—mostly mine, since my grip hadn’t let him have much air—and a small, scraping, splintering sound as our straining bodies lurched against a wooden crate and rammed it back into the trash pile. However, with the covering noise of the traffic, nobody seemed to have noticed.

Releasing him at last, I stood over him for a moment catching my breath. Then I dragged him out of sight behind the sheltering junk and checked his pockets quickly. Wallet. Passport. Room key. And what I had hoped to find, confirmation: the familiar agency assassination piece with its built-in silencer—excuse me; I forgot, we’re supposed to call them sound suppressors these double-talk days. I’ll admit I drew a breath of relief at learning that I hadn’t killed an innocent stranger.

To be sure, he was a stranger to me, but I never know all the new, young ones, and the weapon in my hand made it certain that I’d estimated the situation correctly. Bennett had sent this character after me with takeout orders; and an official takeout weapon with which to execute them. Execute being the operative word. That gun is not issued for defensive purposes.

As I straightened up with my loot, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement at the lighted rear door out of which I’d sneaked several hours earlier. I stood quite still, waiting, but nothing further happened over there, if anything had. I hesitated, and said to hell with it. If somebody was calling the Oslo constabulary, I’d know soon enough. There was an ugly smell from the man at my feet. The sphincters had let go as they often do. Carting dead bodies around isn’t quite the nice clean fun they make it seem in certain jolly murder mysteries, literary and cinematic. However, I was going to have to move this one; but first I had to find out where.

I was fairly sure they hadn’t been using the same rear door that I’d employed. Hiding just around the corner, I’d have heard something. I headed for the street side of the building, therefore. The first opening I found there was locked, and there was a small sign behind the glass that I translated, roughly:
Between Hours of 1000 and 0600 Be So Good as to Employ Front Entrance.

But my homicidal young friends would have made provision for re-entering the building without passing the front desk. I made my way to the next side door. It bore the same sign; however, it hadn’t latched properly due to a Norwegian paperback novel—a Scandinavian-Gothic romance by the cover—jammed between the threshold and the bottom of the door. I slipped inside, reflecting that it was no way to treat a good book, or even a bad one. I checked the room key I’d confiscated. Number 137 was just down the corridor, left-hand side, very convenient. I entered the room, hauled the coverlet off one of the beds, and went back out to the dead man and rolled him up in it. Traffic still ran busily on the big main drag, but the side street was empty, and everything was quiet around the motel. I caught no further uneasy hints of movement anywhere.

I drew a long breath and went into my Hercules act, hoisting the long bedspread-wrapped bundle to my shoulder and staggering off with it. By the time I got him to the room, he weighed at least four hundred pounds. Panting, I dumped him onto the bed I’d stripped, and straightened up painfully, rubbing my back. I yearned for a drink, but there seemed to be no liquor on the premises. The idea of being stalked by a pair of earnest, dedicated, young teetotalers was a little frightening. You like to think that, like you, the opposition, whatever it may be at a given time, has a few human weaknesses. I consoled myself with the thought that maybe, being of the younger generation, they took their comfort from drugs instead of booze.

James Aloysius Harley was the name on the passport. Unmarried. Occupation, newspaper reporter—at least for this assignment. Credit cards. Membership cards. Press cards. American money. Norwegian money. Swedish money. So they had apparently learned from Research about my interest in a certain village up in Swedish Lapland, as I’d anticipated. Preparing to follow me there, they had supplied themselves with suitable currency, which was more than I had done.

I studied the gun. It was the short-barreled High Standard .22 automatic that looks like the Colt Woodsman, although the lines aren’t as graceful; but the old Woodsman, like many fine old things, is no longer in production. Not that the High Standard isn’t a good enough gun; and it has one big advantage. The barrel is removable, meaning that you can pull off and ditch the silenced barrel, highly illegal just about anywhere, and stick on a plain barrel, and have a gun that’s only moderately lawless in most jurisdictions and doesn’t convict you on sight of being a professional hit man. The clip held a full complement of ten rounds, but there was nothing in the chamber; he hadn’t anticipated any emergencies requiring instant artillery. Searching the room more thoroughly, I found no spare pistol barrels; but each man had a box of match grade ammunition in his suitcase, each box with ten cartridges missing out of the fifty.

It looked as if Bennett had been passing out silenced agency automatics to everybody in sight. I knew that the boys were not employing the target stuff for super precision; they were using it simply because it was slower than the .22 ammo you buy off the shelf. The speed of sound is 1,088 feet per second. It was discovered long ago that for maximum accuracy an ordinary .22 bullet must not be driven faster than that. So farm kids shoot rabbits and squirrels with .22 caliber projectiles that scream along at around 1,200 feet per second, but expert smallbore target shooters settle for something like 1,050.

This has another advantage of more importance than championship accuracy to the sinister folk in our line of work. A silencer—to hell with the latter-day jargon—can muffle the noise of the powder exploding inside the gun, but it can’t do anything about the crack of the bullet, outside the gun, passing through the sound barrier. Keeping the bullet velocity subsonic is, therefore, essential to silencing a gun effectively, which was why my pursuers had chosen the relatively slow target ammo to kill me with.