The Vanishers (26 page)

“The Darkroom? That mysterious concrete blockhouse, or whatever you want to call it?”

“Yes. It has no windows, but it does have ventilators leading underground to where the equipment is located. The ventilators are, of course, protected by grills; but a device that will penetrate armor will make short work of those flimsy grills as well as any other obstacles it may encounter as it drops down a ventilation shaft.” She shrugged. “I have watched a demonstration. In addition to melting, practically vaporizing, anything with which it is in contact, even durable metal, the Type 7 also creates a fireball that consumes any organic material it envelops. Outdoors, it is not a very big fireball for obvious tactical reasons; you do not want to burn up the soldier who threw the grenade. However, it will turn an enclosed space into a raging furnace.”

“What’s supposed to be down there worth burning up? Do they think we sinister Yankees have smuggled a nuclear device into your country and persuaded you to build a camouflaged silo for it?” I made a face. “If that’s the case, setting fire to it doesn’t seem like a very bright idea; and I’m not sure I want to help you find a spot from which to watch the radioactive pyrotechnics.”

She laughed shortly. “You have a point, but the idea that our government would permit the secret installation of a foreign missile with a nuclear warhead anywhere within our borders is not very plausible. However, the constant probing of our coastal defenses by the Soviets over the past few years, and the repeated invasion of our waters by their submarines, could have caused our military people to take a few unpublicized steps towards cooperation with America. There have been many rumors to the effect that American assistance, or at least American advice, was involved in the construction of the Laxfors facility. And with those fields of antennas… The thought that LSA may be a forward control station of some kind for missile guidance, American missile guidance, nuclear missile guidance, chills the blood of the ordinary Swedish citizen, who likes to feel secure in his country’s neutrality. And of course our anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, like the UFO, are capitalizing, loudly and energetically, on this feeling.”

“What is there besides rumor to indicate that Laxfors serves our evil American interests?”

“The best evidence in the world. The Russians are trying to discredit and destroy it. Or have it destroyed by others.”

I said, “The Soviets are famous for their paranoia. Remember that Korean airliner. Any time a housewife in Cincinnati picks up a paring knife to peel a potato, it’s actually a secret dagger aimed directly at the heart of Mother Russia. And how do we know how the Russians feel about it, anyway? Even if they talk indignant, that’s just their normal way of conducting a conversation on practically any subject.”

Karin hesitated. “They have done more than talk, with respect to Laxfors. They have sent people to make certain the place is put out of action. You do not think all this unfavorable publicity is accidental, do you? They are the world’s greatest rumor-mongers. They are using UFO and other groups as unwitting tools with which to achieve their purpose.”

I studied her face for a moment. “What people have they sent?”

“At least one person.” Karin looked back at me without expression. “I do not know about Olaf Stjernhjelm. I do not know if he is betraying his country deliberately or if he is merely a dupe for an attractive woman.” Karin stared at me defiantly. “An attractive woman named Astrid Watrous. An attractive woman who is a Soviet agent!”

There was a short silence; then I grinned and said, “This is a hell of a serious discussion for two people of opposite gender sitting on a bed without any clothes on.”

“You do not believe me!”

I shrugged. “Sure I believe you. So what else is new?”

Karin frowned in a bewildered way. “I do not understand… You are not surprised?”

I laughed shortly. “After all the years I’ve spent in this business, I’m supposed to be surprised because a pretty lady isn’t what she pretends to be? Hell, you’ve been pretending, one way or another, ever since I met you waving that toy gun in that Maryland motel. Fine. Everybody tries to con dumb Helm. It’s an international sport, and I’m hardened to it. So why should I flip my lid because of Mrs. Watrous’ little deception?”

“But you knew?”

“Let’s say I guessed.” I hesitated. “What else do you know about her?”

“What else is there to know that is important? She is working for the Russians. She is a traitor to the country of her birth, your country, the United States of America.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean? You just admitted—”

“I admitted what she is. Sure. But let’s consider what she isn’t.”

“I do not understand what you mean.”

I said, “Astrid Wastrous is a Soviet agent. But she isn’t Astrid Watrous.”

It seemed too bad to land in Finland at night. You like to get your first view of a new country by daylight; but the sun was down by the time we got the word to return to our cars. Presently we felt the ferry settle into its slip at the eastern end of its voyage. Customs was as casual as it always seems to be in those Scandinavian lands, I suppose because they don’t have our obsession with drugs, or the weapons-sensitivity of the newer and more insecure nations, forever concerned about arms and insurrection. I’d found my arsenal back in my suitcase, courtesy of Olaf Stjernhjelm, and I’d done my usual half-ass job of hiding it around the car, but they didn’t even look.

Then we were driving through Turku, which even at night looked very new and clean like most cities in that part of the world, even those that were founded long before young Chris Columbus first got his feet wet; and most of them were. The odd thing was that, for the first time on this cockeyed overseas mission, I felt that I was really on foreign soil—more foreign than any I’d visited in a long time. I suppose this was due to the total incomprehensibility of the Finnish words on the lighted signs and billboards we passed. It’s an orphan language spoken nowhere else in the world. It seems to employ an awful lot of
k’s
, both singly and tandem. Even the Coca Cola signs looked weird.

“Can we talk now?” Karin asked.

She was mad at me; she’d wanted to spend the whole day on shipboard eagerly discussing Astrid Watrous and kindred subjects. A sleepless night, and a vigorous sex session, had apparently had no effect on her vitality; but I’d cut our morning conference short by telling her there would be plenty of time for further conversation after we got off the boat. Right at the moment, I’d said, with a bed handy and a five-hundred mile drive ahead of me, on foreign roads and mostly in the dark, I wanted to recharge the human batteries, good night, wake me in time for dinner.

“Think about Astrid, and you’ll see that what I said makes sense of a lot of things,” I’d said. “We’ll talk about it in the car, later. Sleep tight.”

One thing you learn in the business is to sleep anywhere, day or night, under any circumstances, even with a nude blonde flouncing around the stateroom and making a big thing of visiting the miniature bathroom and preparing her bed and thrashing around in it to make herself comfortable—and me uncomfortable, she hoped; but I was asleep before she stopped squirming over there. The next thing I knew, she was shaking me awake and saying that dinner was in half an hour; if I wanted to eat before we landed I’d better get dressed. I refused to discuss business of any kind over the meal. Now she was still pouting. For a bright girl, and one who’d proved herself to be fully adult in various important respects, she had some childish reactions.

The lights of Turku faded behind us. It was a relief to be on the road, headed in the right direction, even though I knew from the map that this fine dual highway wasn’t going to last very long. Like the Norwegians and Swedes, the Finns aren’t very generous with the four-lane stuff. Unfamiliar with local night-driving customs, I took it easy; and we rolled sedately through a country of dark evergreens, and frozen lakes that gleamed gray-white in the night. As a final precaution against being intercepted, I’d rejected the coast road as too obvious, and angled inland instead to pick up, eventually, the main thoroughfare north from Helsinki, Highway E4, the same road that I would have taken if I’d headed straight north through Sweden, although I was now catching it at the other end, the Finnish end, and running it backwards.

“Actually I gave you a slightly bum steer,” I said after we’d driven for a while. “Astrid really is Mrs. Watrous; she did marry the guy. But she is not now, and was never, Astrid Sofia Land, of the Finnish family Landhammar.”

“I do not understand. How could she deceive everybody…” Then Karin glanced at me sharply. “How did you find her out?”

I said, “She flunked two tests I tried on her.”

“Tests?”

“Yes. First there’s the artillery test. Very useful these days when most females—at least in the U.S., I don’t know about other countries—pride themselves on fearing and hating guns and not knowing anything about them. In order to determine if you have a normally gun-phobic American girl on your hands, you simply toss her one of those fearful pistols unexpectedly and see if she panics properly. Astrid Watrous didn’t.”

Karin grimaced. “That is very ingenious, if rather cruel. I am afraid that, although I am not an American girl, I would not have reacted calmly to your frightening test. I am glad you did not try it on me.”

I said, “I didn’t need to. I saw the way you handled that crazy derringer of yours, as if you were holding a live tarantula; so I knew that whatever you were, you were nobody’s trained agent. Astrid, on the other hand… I didn’t give her time to think, and she reacted instinctively, catching the weapon and flipping it open expertly to see if it was empty or if I was totally insane, playing catch with a loaded revolver. The first girl I tried that stunt on dropped the gun as if it were hot and practically wet herself. Not Mrs. Watrous.”

“I see.”

“Of course there are a few people around, both male and female, who are sensible about guns, even though they have no professional dealings with them. If she’d let it alone, I’d still be wondering a little; but she didn’t. She knew she’d betrayed herself, and she quickly improvised a story about how she’d been given an instant course in gun-handling by a policewoman friend. She gambled on using the name of a real person, hoping that if I did check up, at this distance, I’d be satisfied when I learned that a certain Mary Alice Linderman did exist and had graduated in the same class. But my informant dug a little farther and learned that Linderman was never a policewoman. She’s Mrs. Vincent Marchesi now, happily married to a chemistry instructor at the university from which they graduated, she has two babies, and she wouldn’t dream of letting a filthy firearm in the house. Anyway, Astrid’s story was phony from the start. You don’t develop gun reactions like that in one outing with a friend; and a session with a police revolver wouldn’t have told her how to check out an automatic expertly, as she did later. Obviously, she’d been subjected to some pretty stiff firearms training, and she was trying to cover up because she didn’t want me asking where. Which was not the response of an innocent girl who’d simply joined her college pistol team; and the real Astrid Land hadn’t.”

“Yes, that is rather revealing,” Karin said. “And the other test?”

“Let’s call it the aristocracy test, although it wasn’t exactly a test,” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t something I sprang on her deliberately, like that revolver. But I began to notice that she had some very odd reactions to our screwy family. Here’s a girl whose own family, in America, stuck to the old Finnish ways closely enough that the American-born daughter still speaks with an accent; the daddy is hipped on Scandinavian history and the girl has the old sagas at her fingertips. Is it likely that she wouldn’t have learned to be proud of her own aristocratic ancestors? Yet she didn’t seem to know quite how to cope with us obsolete noblemen and our obsolete titles. Hell, she practically panicked at Torsäter when we were going in to meet all the barons.”

“But she was already acquainted with Olaf and me,” Karin protested. “She had been given plenty of opportunity to see that we were…”

“Just ordinary folks?” I said when she hesitated. I shrugged. “Well, maybe; but that was back in the U.S. The idea of encountering aristocracy in the mass, in its native habitat, kind of threw her. It wasn’t the gee-ain’tit-wonderful response of a naive American girl about to get to mingle with some real honest-to-Jesus sirs and Honorables. But it was a perfectly natural reaction for a young woman who’d been brought up in an altogether different way, under a totally different system.”

Karin licked her lips. “Yes, I think I see what you are driving at.”

I said, “Astrid was apprehensive and wary the way somebody’s wary who’s been taught since babyhood about the evil aristocrats drinking the blood of the slaughtered hero-workers and laughing fit to kill. It wasn’t the reaction of a girl, even one born in America, who’d been brought up to remember a family tree full of high-class Landhammar ancestors. But it was a good Communist attitude; and while they’d undoubtedly run her through that tough Americanization process they use over there on agents they’re hoping to plant on us, it hadn’t covered dealing with the nobility, since that’s not a common problem in the U.S. of A. She’d retained the proletarian instincts hammered into her as a child, when she’d learned all about the innate wickedness of the upper classes, particularly the titled upper classes.”

Karin thought for a little. I was aware of her shaking her head beside me. “But her parents… She was on her way to visit them when she got sick in Hagerstown. Well, she had planned that, up to a point; she knew she would not complete that journey; but she had visited them many times before. It is not possible that they would not know their own daughter!”

“That’s just the point. They do know their daughter. They know where she is; they knew where she was. And she was not in Washington, D.C., or Hagerstown, Maryland.”

Karin said, “You mean that the real Astrid is a… a hostage somewhere? All this time?”