The Vanishers (37 page)

“And you’re Beilstein, and that takes care of the formalities.” I hesitated. “How is it in there?”

“It is very good in there.”

I looked at her sharply. “I thought…”

She shook her head quickly. “It just hit me, the reaction to all that waiting. No, they say he will make it now, with luck.” She shook her head almost angrily. “Dammit, Helm, who the hell did he think he was, Sir Galahad or somebody? No woman wants a man to die for her. At least this woman doesn’t!”

I grinned. “But even though you feel obliged to go on record saying you disapprove, you’ll always cherish the fact that he was willing, won’t you?”

She drew a long breath. “Yes, damn you, and it makes me ashamed of myself. Go on in. He wants to hear all about your European adventures.”

“How bad is it?”

“He was shot in the chest; but now that he has… has turned the corner, they think he will be all right.”

There were more questions to be asked. How Mac had managed to tease the kidnappers into taking him in the first place. How he’d set up the communications that had enabled his team of veterans, crippled and whole, to trace him. How the liberation had been accomplished. How he’d got himself shot at the last minute, apparently making some kind of a sacrifice play to save his lady from harm. And in addition, there were things to be done, like making a promised telephone call to Spud Meiklejohn of the
Miami Tribune
, and sending a wedding present to Amy Barnett—Doug had mentioned in passing that his daughter and the new boyfriend were making it official. But all that could wait.

I went in and made my mission report to the chief of my agency.

It was a small ship carrying fewer than two hundred passengers. I boarded it in Helsinki, which my parents had called Helsingfors; but that was back in the days when Swedish was in and Finnish was out, in Finland. I found my cabin, a small two-berth cubicle that reminded me painfully of the one on the larger cross-Baltic ferry that I’d shared with Karin Segerby. That had been a couple of weeks ago now, and since then I’d flown the Atlantic twice, so taking a boat from Helsinki to Leningrad, which had been called St. Petersburg when my folks were kids, was really no big deal, except that I always get nervous near Russia, let alone in Russia. But this trip was cleared at both ends, and I was supposed to encounter no difficulties whatever.

When I entered the cabin, there was somebody lying on the bunk to my right; but it wasn’t Karin Segerby… You could say it was a tragic fluke, a wild pistol bullet finding a target at that range; but there are no flukes when you’re dealing with firearms. You’re supposed to know that they can kill at crazy distances. You’re supposed to have more sense than to play idiot gunfight games where uninvolved folks can get hurt—and the fact that I’d told her to stay behind the car and keep her head down didn’t do much for my sense of guilt.

I let the cabin door close behind me. “Good afternoon,” I said to the man with whom I was to share the cabin for the night’s run.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said, sitting up. He was fully clothed except for his jacket. He was a thin, pale, little man in his forties with thinning brown hair, wearing a vest and a necktie, the knot of which he had pulled down a little. He said, “I hope you don’t mind that I picked this bed. I can move if you wish, sir.”

He was being very polite because he had just been released from a U.S. prison and wanted to stay that way. It had taken considerable work to get him out. Mac had disapproved.

“You are being sentimental, Eric,” he had said, but he hadn’t said it very loudly, for the simple reason that he wasn’t strong enough yet, although he’d been declared out of danger.

I said, “Look who’s talking about sentimental. At least I don’t have a bullet in my ribs.” He smiled faintly. He’d done a job he should have left to younger men, but he’d survived it. Now he was feeling pretty good about it; good enough that he could be kidded about it. I went on: “Sentiment or not, I want some trading material. It shouldn’t take much. What they’ve got can’t be worth much to them now that the phony Astrid Land—Astrid Watrous—is dead.” I wondered what her real name had been; but I’d never know.

“I will see what arrangements can be made,” Mac said. He changed the subject. “Your activities have brought us some mild remonstrances from Stockholm, but we can deal with them. Fortunately your distant relative, Baron Stjernhjelm, seems to be a man of some influence.” He hesitated. “I gather the installation at Laxfors is not really concerned with communications. Do we know its true function?”

I said, “I know what Olaf told me. He said that it was actually a development of the system we use to detect foreign submarines along our own shores. Naturally, the Russians wanted it out of commission so they could continue their underwater activities unhampered. But the true nature of the facility had not been made public for security reasons, and also because anything built with American assistance is met with suspicion over there, these days. We have a reputation as saber-rattlers and warmongers, I’m afraid.”

“Totally unjustified, of course,” Mac said without expression.

“Of course, sir,” I said. “But with eight people dead in a protest demonstration, the whole thing had to become public. Actually, Laxfors came out of it pretty well. The Swedes’ ancient dislike of the Russians is considerably stronger than their more recent fear of America; and the whole country has been very much upset by the Soviet submarine penetrations of their waters. Anything and anybody helping to combat this kind of trespassing will meet with reluctant approval even if it involves Yankee expertise. The fact that Soviet agents were using the peace demonstration for purposes of sabotage, and had in fact helped to incite it, didn’t raise the Muscovite stock any. So Laxfors and everybody concerned with it came out smelling of roses, which is why they’re not very mad at me over there. Just a little mad.”

Mrs. Beilstein rose from her chair in the corner, in the decisive way I’d come to recognize. “That is enough. Now you’d better let him rest.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She hesitated uncharacteristically. “Oh, Matt. Could I ask you a question before you go?” When I nodded, she said, “That Bennett man, who’d made such a point of fair play. If he won your… your shootout, or whatever you called it, how could he expect to keep his body armor a secret afterwards? I mean, if you hit him, as you probably would. There’d be a hole in his clothes but no wound. They’d all know he’d cheated.”

I grinned. “You must be thinking of the Boy Scouts of America, Mrs. Beilstein. What makes you think Bennett would keep his Kevlar vest a secret from those cynical young characters? He’d boast about it; it would be a great big joke, and they’d all have a good laugh at the tough old pro, me, who let himself be conned into a romantic pistol-to-pistol showdown with a guy wearing bulletproof BVDs.”

She shook her head. “I see that I still have things to learn.”

As I reached for the doorknob, Mac spoke behind me: “Eric.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You were on the ground. You saw the installation. Do you really believe that submarine-detection story?”

“Of course, sir,” I said. “I always believe everything I’m told. When it’s diplomatic to do so.”

“To be sure,” Mac said. “When you come tomorrow I will let you know what I’ve been able to arrange for you.”

He’d got me my trading material, the pale little man now sharing my cabin on the Leningrad ferry. We had dinner served in the cabin, and breakfast, according to instructions. After landing, still following instructions, I left him on board and took the standard guided tour of Leningrad. The Russians just love showing you monuments and memorials. I returned to the ship shortly before sailing time that evening.

There was a certain amount of suspense as I knocked on the door of the same cabin, wondering if our elaborate diplomatic arrangements had worked. A feminine voice said something in Finnish that I didn’t catch, and wouldn’t have understood anyway. I assumed I’d been given permission to enter, and did. The door sighed shut behind me; they use strong closing devices on those ships so there won’t be a lot of slamming in a seaway.

The middle-aged man was gone. His place had been taken by a young woman. The first thing I noticed was the mass of very fair, very fine hair, loosely wound about her head. Then she turned to face me directly, and I saw the striking brown eyes.

“I am sorry, I thought it was the Finnish steward.”

“Miss Land?” I said.

The shocking thing was how close they’d come. Well, I suppose with a population close to three hundred million, you should be able to find a pretty good match for just about anybody; and if the double you chose was bright enough and a good enough actress, and had some opportunity to study the person she was supposed to become and practice the impersonation, you could wind up with a resemblance that was quite breathtaking. Even the voice, with its accent, was very nearly the way I remembered it.

“Yes, I am Astrid Land,” said the real Astrid Land. “And you must be Matthew Helm, the man to whom I owe…”

“Never mind owe,” I said.

She laughed softly. “He rescues me from an endless gray hell, years and years of it, and says never mind. Listen, we are getting under way. It’s really happening. I’ve been trying not to let myself believe it was going to happen, so I would not be too shattered when it turned out to be just another of their cruel tricks.” She looked up at me, and licked her lips. “Nobody else seemed to care; my parents could get no help at all. Why did you do it, go to all that trouble, for a girl you’d never met?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“We have time,” she said.

Donald Hamilton was the creator of secret agent Matt Helm, star of 27 novels that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

Born in Sweden, he emigrated to the United States and studied at the University of Chicago. During the Second World War he served in the United States Naval Reserve, and in 1941 he married Kathleen Stick, with whom he had four children.

The first Matt Helm book,
Death of a Citizen
, was published in 1960 to great acclaim, and four of the subsequent novels were made into motion pictures. Hamilton was also the author of several outstanding standalone thrillers and westerns, including two novels adapted for the big screen as
The Big Country
and
The Violent Men
.

Donald Hamilton died in 2006.

The long-awaited return of the United States’ toughest special agent.

Death of a Citizen

The Wrecking Crew

The Removers

The Silencers

Murderers’ Row

The Ambushers

The Shadowers

The Ravagers

The Devastators

The Betrayers

The Menacers

The Interlopers

The Poisoners

The Intriguers

The Intimidators

The Terminators

The Retaliators

The Terrorizers

The Revengers

The Annihilators

The Infiltrators

The Detonators

The Demolishers
(October 2016)

PRAISE FOR DONALD HAMILTON

“Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.”
Anthony Boucher,
The New York Times

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