The Vanishers (27 page)

I said, “A few years back, Mr. and Mrs. Land moved from the town in which they’d lived, all their later lives to the town where you called them. A town where they knew nobody, and nobody knew them—or their daughter. This happened shortly after Astrid Land had visited northern Europe. She’d toured Scandinavia, with particular emphasis on Finland, the land from which her parents had emigrated. She’d also made a side trip that’s pretty standard for American visitors to Helsinki who want to catch a short, safe glimpse of Communist Russia: she’d taken the package tour overnight to Leningrad. I have a hunch that if somebody checks up on that particular group of tourists, they’ll find that one particular young lady missed the return trip, perhaps hospitalized due to a sudden illness. She came back with a later group—a group that, not having seen her before, didn’t realize that the Astrid Land who’d gone into Russia wasn’t the Astrid Land who came out.”

“And the real Astrid… That is why her parents moved, because they were told to move? I see. They were needed to support her identity, so they were ordered to make a new home where no one would realize that their ‘daughter’ was now an impostor, a Soviet agent. And they obeyed because the real Astrid was a prisoner in Russia and would suffer if they did not cooperate fully.” Karin drew a long breath. “Yes, that is understandable. And when I spoke to them on the telephone and found them so upset because the false Astrid was so sick in Hagerstown—of course I did not know she was an impostor at the time—it was not because they loved her so much, they probably hated her; but if she died, what would happen to their true daughter, languishing in Soviet hands, when she was no longer needed to insure their cooperation?”

“Something like that,” I said, watching the road unrolling in the headlights. The forest was black on either side, and there was no traffic in sight for the moment. “If you’re so smart, can you figure out what her target was? Who her target was?”

“Target? Oh, you mean the person in whom she and her Russian superiors were interested?” Karin hesitated, and glanced at me sharply. She spoke in tentative way: “Astrid married Alan, did she not? She must have been sent to spy upon his work.”

“I have no doubt the Russians are interested in oceanography, but there’s no evidence that Dr. Watrous was engaged upon any project important enough for them to go to great lengths to put a beautiful lady agent in a position to spy upon his research.”

“Beautiful?” Karin made a little face. “I have never thought her terribly attractive, Matt.”

“You’re not a man, honey,” I said. “And you’re stalling. You know damn’ well who Astrid’s target was. You.”

Karin didn’t seem to find the idea outlandish. She said thoughtfully, “Yes, I have wondered. Although he spent considerable time in Washington, and was related to me, Alan Watrous never showed much interest in Frederik and me until he became married; then they gave us a big rush, if that is what you call it. Obviously, it was she who wanted very much to make friends with us. I wondered why at the time, but I dismissed it as just a general interest in her new husband’s aristocratic family.”

“I’d say her interest was focused very specifically on you.”

Karin shook her head dubiously. “If the people behind her really wanted to… to seduce me, would they not have sent a handsome man?”

“Maybe they felt that was too obvious,” I said. “Or maybe, having studied the situation, they came to the conclusion that although you fought with your husband about his work, you really loved him too much to be a good prospect for the gigolo approach.”

There was a little silence; then Karin said quietly, “Yes. But I did not realize quite how much I had loved him until he was lost to me.” Then she spoke more briskly: “But with Astrid, it is such a complicated thing! She could simply have come to Washington and arranged to meet us socially, could she not? She did not have to obtain for herself a position at the Oceanic Institute and scheme to marry the man in command because he was my relative. And do you not mean that her target was really Frederik and his company, through me? And how does Laxfors come into this conspiracy? I thought that was supposed to be the Russians’ true objective; but Laxfors was not even built when Astrid first took employment at the institute.”

The little girl was smarter than she let herself look; she asked some good questions. I said reprovingly, “You’ve been thinking. You’ve got to watch that; it can be habit-forming.” After a moment I went on: “I’m beginning to realize that we’ve been looking at this thing backwards. In the Russky master plan, Laxfors was an afterthought. I think their original objective was, and still is to a great extent, Segerby Vapenfabriks Aktiebolag. SVAB.”

Karin frowned. “But why? It is by no means the biggest…”

“That’s just the point. SVAB is a respected family concern, not a great soulless corporation. If you’re a Swede, even if you’re firmly opposed to war and munitions of war, you can’t help being just a little proud of this solid Swedish company competing successfully with the multinational giants.”

Karin sighed. “Yes, I have felt that myself, even when I disapproved. You mean that a scandal touching SVAB would be more disturbing to the country and the industry?”

I nodded. “I’m theorizing now, but I think I’m close. The Russians are obviously exerting deliberate pressure on Sweden. There have even been suggestions here, I’m told, that they’re studying the feasibility of an Afghanistan-style takeover. That may just be Swedish paranoia talking, caused by living in the shadow of the bear so to speak; but there’s got to be a motive behind the submarine probes and other unsettling Soviet actions. It’s a testing and softening-up process of some kind; and strikes and scandals have always been weapons in their arsenal. So they give a female agent impeccable Scandinavian credentials: a fine Finnish family, marriage to a titled Swede. Then they have her move in on the rebellious young wife of one of the directors of SVAB, establishing a friendly and understanding relationship with the younger woman. Finally they look around for some way to use the idealistic girl’s distaste for her husband’s business to decoy her to her destruction, and his.”

“Laxfors?”

“Yes, at just the right moment, the Laxfors question arises. A totally different problem for the Russians, presumably being handled by a totally different undercover team—until somebody in Moscow sees how the Laxfors Project can be combined with the SVAB Project to produce a double whammy: the LSA installation sabotaged by fanatics employing Segerby weapons; and the Segerbys discredited by the terrorist involvement of the girl who’d married one of them, who’d supplied the weapons.” I grimaced. “My family was concerned enough about the bad publicity you might give us to put me on the job; but it’s the Segerbys who should be doing the real worrying.” I glanced at the girl riding beside me. “Maybe they are. Maybe they’ve taken action to stop you, too?” I made it a question.

She shook her head. “Not that I am aware,” she said.

We rode in silence for a while. I held the car steady on the lonely forest road—they’re practically all forest roads up there. There had been some stars earlier, but they were gone; and the night seemed to have become darker. I should probably have tried to get a weather report somewhere, in a language I could understand, but it would have made no difference, really, since we had to make the drive regardless.

“You know that she killed Frederik,” Karin said at last. “Astrid. She shot him down in that parking garage, and only a few hours later came to the apartment to hug me so affectionately and express her deep sympathy for my terrible bereavement!”

I was a little startled by the revelation. Not the revelation about Astrid. I’d been fairly certain that she’d been responsible for Frederik Segerby’s death, since no other answer made sense, the people involved being who and what they were. But I hadn’t been quite prepared to learn that this small blonde girl had been aware of the identity of her husband’s murderer—well, murderess—and had still managed to play along with Astrid and her associates without revealing her knowledge.

“I think you’re probably right,” I said, “but what brought you to that conclusion?”

Karin shrugged. “How can I know? The way she looked at me that morning, perhaps. I simply knew that, she had done it the moment she walked into our Washington apartment the day after the murder. There was no doubt in my mind from the moment I saw the false look on her face: she was the one who had killed him!”

The legal geniuses would have sneered at that answer, but I don’t discount female intuition; I’ve even encountered some interesting examples of male intuition.

Karin said, “I came very close to… to attacking her. I wanted to scream accusations at her, but I had no proof. Who would believe that the respectable wife of the director of the Oceanic Institute was a Communist spy, maybe even a trained Communist assassin? And the terrible thing was that Frederik had warned me, but I had laughed at his warning. He was always seeing reds under the beds, I told him; and he could put his company sneaks to investigating the UFO and Astrid if he wanted to, but they would find nothing, absolutely nothing. But clearly he had been right.” Karin drew a long breath. “So I swallowed my anger and accepted her condolences. I made myself cling to her helplessly, weeping. I forced myself to make tearful sounds of gratitude and treat her as my very dearest friend from that moment on. Ugh.”

There was a brief silence as the roadway changed and our four lanes shrank to two, but the pavement remained reasonably wide and smooth; however, the Finns don’t let you play that stimulating passing game employing the shoulders of a two-lane road allowed by the Swedes, so it was pretty dull, straightforward driving. I could have used more power getting around a few slowpokes; but there really wasn’t enough traffic to slow us down. I could employ the high beams most of the time, and the headlights were good.

I steered around a beat-up Saab without slacking speed. I said, “Let’s see how they worked it from the start. You weren’t good seduction material, but you were a member of a very large family that took itself seriously as a family. Okay, find another Stjernhjelm relative in America to work through. There were actually several, they discover, but Alan Watrous looks best; he lives on the East Coast and often has business in Washington. He is single and should be vulnerable. Probably they considered a straight meet-cute pickup of some kind, but in studying the situation they learned about a nice Finnish-American girl from the distant Midwest who’d applied for a job as laboratory assistant, ideal, particularly since she was spending the summer in Europe before coming in for an interview on her way home. So they picked a very bright girl of their own and put her through a massive cram course and either gave her brown contact lenses or bleached her hair, since the chance of their having on tap a smart brown-eyed blonde of approximately the right dimensions aren’t very great.”

“I am certain that Astrid uses a strong rinse, at the very least.”

“I’m glad to get a woman’s opinion. I looked and couldn’t tell,” I said. “Anyway, one Astrid Land went to Leningrad. Another Astrid Land appeared for the interview in Gloucester, Mass., smiled prettily, and got the job. But apparently Dr. Watrous had some inconvenient principles about playing around with the female help; she couldn’t get beyond a nice platonic friendship. Along came Olaf Stjernhjelm visiting his scientific seventy-second cousin, or whatever the relationship is. Astrid made a play for him, caught him, and even, apparently, recruited him for Moscow; but mainly she used him to make Alan Watrous very jealous. Dr. Alan probably cringed every time he thought of her dainty loveliness in the clutches of his crude soldier-of-fortune relative. Then Astrid staged a break with Olaf and let Alan see that she was in terrible trouble. She knew her man; he couldn’t resist being magnanimous; he offered his help; in the end he even married the girl, who then managed a convenient miscarriage. Pretty soon Dr. Watrous had to make one of his trips to Washington; and of course the attractive new Mrs. Watrous went along and made certain they looked up those nice relations of her husband’s, the Segerbys. Contact accomplished, mission running. Only the male Segerby had a suspicious nature and did some snooping so in the end he had to be killed; but it all worked out for the best, since the stupid little female Segerby, his wife, in her shock grabbed at the nearest warm body for sympathy and support and was, as they say, mere clay in the hands of the older and more experienced woman. At least so the older woman thought.” I glanced at the still profile of the girl beside me. “Just what the hell are you trying to pull here, Karin?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you playing along with these people, even supplying them with incendiary whizbangs from your late husband’s company… Oh, Christ, here comes the snow!” I reached down to switch on the defroster. I said, “You’re not really sold on this fiery protest they’re planning with those grenades, are you?”

When Karin spoke, her voice was reluctant: “No… no, but I do not want it stopped until they have committed themselves fully.”

“I see.” I didn’t really, except that I’d certainly made a mistake in taking this girl at face value; and apparently Astrid and Olaf and their wild-eyed young associates had made the same mistake. I said, “You’ve got something up your sleeve?”

“Up my… Oh, yes, that is one of your American phrases. Yes, I have something up my sleeve, Matt.” She hesitated. “I should not tell you this, but certain arrangements have been made, by me and others. It is all taken care of. Please do not get patriotic at the last moment and spoil everything.” Before I could speak, she said quickly, “And do not ask questions, please. I have already told you more than I should. I have trusted you more than I should, much more… I would not worry about this snow if I were you. At this time of year it should not be very troublesome.”

She knew her northern climate better than I did. Throughout the night the thin snow flurries never managed to coat the pavement to amount to anything; not enough to worry about. What did worry me was the car. Feeble to start with, the little four-banger up front seemed to be losing more power as we drove, and there was an occasional miss that had me holding my breath waiting for total failure. It was a strange ride northwards through a foreign land, with the snow tires hissing and the windshield wipers clacking steadily. In that empty country, with an uncertain power plant, I stopped for gas whenever I saw an open station, but they weren’t numerous, and none had a mechanic on night duty. With the price in Finnish marks—I’d exchanged some money on the ferry—and the quantity in liters, I had no idea what I was paying for the stuff at the pumps; but I had a hunch it wasn’t cheap.