The Vanishers (33 page)

“You appear very well,” I said.

However, looking at her, I knew a pang of regret for the careless boyish companion in the creased Levi’s—or whatever the Swedish equivalent may be—and well-worn sweater to whom I’d become accustomed. But that girl, and that relationship, was gone anyway, consumed by the intense heat of the
handgranat
(E) that had taken the life of Astrid Watrous.

Karin’s transformation was actually quite startling. Now she was a fashionable young lady wearing a tailored pantsuit that, fitting nicely in all the right places, emphasized the rounded femininity of her small body. It was a spring outfit, constructed of some pale-blue stuff that resembled linen, except that real linen would have been a mass of wrinkles after being crammed into that ryggsäck; this looked as crisp as if it had just been pressed. For us hero-agents, and particularly our heroine-associates, the synthetics have certain advantages. Her low little boots had soft uppers and moderately high heels. There was a white silk blouse with a round collar and a small white bow at the throat. Working behind that rock, without a mirror, she hadn’t got the bow quite right. I retied it for her.

I said, “There. Now you’re beautiful.”

But I couldn’t get the right playful note into my voice, and she was as aware of it as I was.

She said quietly, “I am sorry. I did not realize that you loved her, or I would not have asked you to help. That is why I did not trust Olaf to deal with her; he loved her also, in his way.”

I said, “Love, schmove. This isn’t
True Romances
, small-fry.”

She said, “I had to do it. She killed my husband. That… that is not permitted! They were all responsible. So when they became interested in the incendiary grenades, I had this idea of how to deal with them. His company. His grenades. He would be striking back at them from the grave, the ones who had caused his death.” She smiled faintly. “I suppose that is what you would call a corny idea. Corny?”

“I wouldn’t call it exactly corny,” I said. I hesitated. “One thing I don’t get. If you were working with Olaf, why did you need me?”

“I told you. He had known her too well. I did not trust him to deal with her properly. I did not want her arrested, I wanted her dead. But he would not even let me be present; it was no place for me, he said. So I came anyway, with your help; and he did not dare to attempt to remove us because he knew we were armed. A misunderstanding in the dark, a shot, and his whole trap would have been ruined.”

I said, “So you teased her into going for a grenade with that popgun of yours. You took a chance. I told you she’d probably had firearms training. If she’d come up with a gun instead, at that range, you’d have been dead while you were still trying to squeeze the second round out of your idiot derringer.”

She laughed shortly. “It is a rather impossible weapon, is it not? I thought I would never get it to shoot, even using both hands.”

“Well, you’ll have a chance to get in a little practice with it shortly. If you’re still of a mind to help.”

“Of course. I owe—”

“Never mind owe,” I said.

She licked her lips. “I want to help. Perhaps you will think better of me then… No, no, do not say polite things. I know that when you look at me now, you will always see her dying like that, horribly. But at least I can show you that I pay my debts. Shall we go?”

“Just one more question, Karin.”

“Yes?”

“In Haparanda. You didn’t really lose your head in that hotel room, did you?”

“No. I hated them, all of them. I wanted to kill them all. There I had a gun and a chance at two of them; and I took it quite deliberately. I told you, I am not really the sweet little girl I sometimes pretend to be.” She laughed shortly. “But be not concerned, I do not intend to spend my life at this vendetta. It was over when she died. Those remaining are now safe from me. Get into the car and I will cover you up.”

I squeezed my six-four frame into the space between the front and rear seats of the Audi, adequate for a starving midget. She covered me, more or less, with the blue military-style raincoat we’d picked up in Oulu with the rest of her fashionable spring costume. I had a
ruggsäck
of my own for a pillow, containing the contents of my inexpensive suitcase and an intriguing assortment of my own and other people’s firearms and ammunition. I’d been afraid Olaf might get stuffy about them, but he hadn’t. The suitcase itself was being left behind here so that, when I bailed out, later, there would be nothing in the car to indicate, if anyone should look, that Karin wasn’t traveling alone. Crammed into my crack, I found the ride painfully bouncy as far as the paved highway. Even after that, as we picked up speed, it could hardly be called restful.

“There is the Porkkala signpost,” Karin reported at last from her position behind the wheel. “Five kilometers more… Now we enter Porkkala. There is the village store we saw yesterday, when we were driving the other direction, that also sells petrol.” After a little pause, her voice came again: “I hope you can hear me. I do not wish to move my lips too much if somebody watches. But there are not many automobiles among the houses, and I see no sharp-eyed gentleman in American clothes observing the highway conscientiously.”

“I’m betting there is one, though, even if he’s keeping out of sight,” I said. “With a special little two-way radio tuned to a special frequency; we’ve got one that can’t be picked up by anybody who doesn’t know just what he’s tuning for and has special equipment to do it. Wherever he’s actually laying for me up there, Bennett’s bound to have the approaches to Lysaniemi covered. There are only two, this one from the south, and one from the north that involves a hell of a lot of roundabout driving on little forest roads, all unpaved. He’ll have men posted well out on both of them, to give him advance warning of my approach.”

Karin said, “Now I make the turn, just beyond the store. The signpost says Lysaniemi one hundred and twenty-three kilometers. I still see nobody watching. It is not so bad a road as the little one to the place where I changed my costume, but it is not paved…”

“I can tell,” I said dryly.

“I am sorry; are you much uncomfortable? Should I slow down more?”

“No, just do what comes naturally.”

“Nobody follows. I see no one in the mirror.”

“They wouldn’t follow closely enough to be seen, even if they knew I was in the car. They’d just report me on my way; then they might get instructions to come on up towards Lysaniemi well behind us, cautiously, kind of herding us along. But let’s hope you fooled them. Now you’d better find a place for me to ditch, fast, before we get clear out of earshot of the town. Then pick a spot for your picnic as soon as possible. Do your stuff and don’t look over your shoulder. I’ll be somewhere around.”

There was a brief pause before Karin said, “Prepare yourself. I think over this little hill you will not be seen… Yes,
now
!”

I went out of the car fast and low with my
ryggsäck
, hit the gravel shoulder of the road, and rolled into the bushes, almost continuing down into a roadside creek or ditch; but I managed to catch myself. I heard the Audi’s rear door slam as Karin closed it after me; I heard the car rumble over what sounded like a wooden bridge, picking up speed again. The noise of its progress faded as it topped the next low ridge.

I waited there for several minutes, well hidden in the brush, to make sure that I’d been right and nobody was tailing us. Satisfied, I stood up and checked the road, but it was well graveled, and old buckskin-clad Hawkeye himself wouldn’t have noticed the spot where I’d unloaded. Or did he wear homespun or linsey-woolsey? It had been a long time since I’d read my Fenimore Cooper. I shouldered my pack and slid on down to the roadside stream and waded it, thankful, as I’d been last night, that I’d operated in this part of Sweden once before.

A good many years had passed since that mission, which had been concluded farther north and west, up near the great iron mine at Kiruna, but I hadn’t forgotten one lesson it had taught me: except when it’s frozen solid, which it wasn’t now or then, the Scandinavian northland is one of the wettest, soggiest places on earth, and knee-high rubber boots are an essential part of the uniform of the day. Minutes later I had a larger stream to cross, the one that rushed cheerfully under the road bridge; but by jumping from rock to rock I managed to keep my socks dry there, too.

I took a course paralleling the road. When I heard a vehicle approaching from the north, I crouched behind a tree to study it as it went rattling by; but it was an ancient and very muddy Volvo truck and the face of the driver was elderly and Nordic. I marched on and almost immediately spotted the Audi in a clearing that had once been a lonely farm. The weathered remains of the house still stood in the middle of the open area, silvery gray, with the roof falling in. There was a collapsed gray ruin of a barn nearby. The Swedish hinterland is full of these derelict homesteads, empty since the kids took off for the cities and the old folks passed on.

Karin had turned out onto the dim old driveway leading across the field to the house. It was apparently quite soft, and she’d made only some forty yards, plowing twin tracks through the mud. At first glance, the maroon sedan seemed to be badly stuck; but she’d been careful to come off the main road uphill, smart girl. With four-wheel drive, and the Audi’s tricky differentials locked, and gravity to help, there should be no trouble backing out when leaving time came.

The girl was waiting behind the wheel. She was supposed to give me long enough to find a good position before she went into her act—we’d decided on half an hour from the moment we separated. I glanced at my watch: seventeen minutes to go. Checking the terrain, I picked up a clump of brush at the edge of the clearing fifty yards from the car, made my way down there cautiously, and settled down to my vigil. Presently, Karin got out holding a paper bag, and set it on the hood of the Audi. She extracted from it a bottle of beer, which she opened—they use the screw-type bottle cap over there; you don’t have to pry it off with an opener. She took several deep gulps, set the bottle aside, and brought out a plastic-wrapped sandwich and started to unwrap it, but changed her mind after a glance at her wrist.

The half hour was up. Karin found a small paper bag in the car and set it on the hood. From it she took the little derringer and the box of cartridges. She looked around for something to use as a target. Aha, the beer bottle. She polished off the contents and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, very unladylike. She was getting into the spirit of it; she was a gun-girl now, full of determination to learn her new trade. She was doing her very best for me, in return for my help this morning. She marched up to the wrecked old house carrying the pistol and ammo; and the empty bottle, which she put on the front step, after peering in one of the windows to make certain the building was empty. She backed off a short distance, loaded up, dropped the cartridge box into her jacket pocket, took careful two-handed aim, and fired. And missed, as she had this morning.

The .22 Magnum cartridge made an impressive noise under that low gray sky; somehow they always sound louder on a damp day. Karin stepped a little closer and tried again, and missed again. She reloaded both barrels and tried once more, standing even closer. The beer bottle exploded. I heard her laugh triumphantly. She stepped forward and found the bottom of the bottle still intact, and set it up for a final target. She reloaded the discharged chamber and fired twice, as fast as she could manage the heavy trigger pull. On the second shot the thick disc of glass disintegrated in a very satisfactory manner.

Returning to the car, Karin dumped the last two empties out of the gun, wiped off the weapon with a Kleenex, and put it back into its paper bag, along with the ammunition. She was, I reflected, doing extremely well for an amateur: acting it all out meticulously as we’d agreed, even though there was no reason to think she had any audience besides me at the moment. I wondered if she planned to keep on working for Olaf and his undercover outfit, whatever it was; with a little training, she’d be an asset to any agency. She found another bottle of beer and leaned against the car drinking it. After a while she unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite of it, eating and drinking very slowly…

At last we heard a car approaching from the south, the direction of Porkkala. You can use a sexy call to bring in an elk or turkey. Where man is the quarry, under circumstances like this, a few mysterious gunshots will do as well.

Crouching in the brush watching over my decoy car and my decoy girl, I had the fine breathless feeling you get out in the marsh at dawn when that first flock of mallards turns towards the blind, setting their wings and slanting down through the morning mist towards the phony ducks on the water… Well, it had been inevitable that the sound of shooting would bring us somebody. The Porkkala man, hearing it, would be bound to report it to the Lysaniemi man by radio. Bennett would be consulted. He’d figure that one of his people must have run into me even if none of them was supposed to be wandering around in this particular neighborhood. He’d try to check them all out to identify the agent involved, but when you set up an intricate ambush such as he’d undoubtedly organized here—the fewer the brains, the greater the complexity of the field operation—there’s always some agent who loses contact; it’s one of the laws of nature.

So unless the approaching vehicle was local, say a game warden or forester who’d heard the shots and was checking for poachers, or the elderly Viking in the Volvo truck returning from a quick trip to his Arctic corner grocery, it meant that Bennett’s man down on Highway E4, patiently watching the Lysaniemi turnoff, had been ordered to investigate the gunfire he’d reported. The question now was whether he’d use the direct approach, just driving up the road looking innocent and rubbernecking all the way, or whether he’d park at a distance and make a thorough scout on foot.

Soon the vehicle was close enough to establish that the driver had no intention of stopping to play Hiawatha in this soggy Arctic terrain. I heard it top the low rise behind me, but I couldn’t see it yet for the brush in which I hid. Suddenly it came into view. It was slowing down. The driver had spotted the Audi apparently stuck out on the muddy little side road; and the chic feminine figure, very much out of place here, beside it. Chivalry had lifted his foot from the accelerator; then self-preservation took over, and the car picked up speed once more and continued out of sight. It was a Golf sedan like the rental job I’d left in the parking lot of Stadshotellet in Haparanda; but instead of being red and sick it was blue and sounded quite healthy…