Helm - The Menacers Part 13

"I'm VERY Sorry to have annoyed you by saving your life, Seor Helm," Ramon said in his stiff Mexican way. They insult very easily down there. "I will endeavor not to make the same mistake again."

I said, "Privately, I am very grateful, Seor Solana. Publicly, all I can say is, it's a h.e.l.l of a sentimental way to run a secret service or whatever you're running." I walked over to Tony Hartford's body and retrieved the trick automatic. "Here's your gun back. I went to a lot of trouble to plant it on that guy, so it would lead you to the right place. I hope you have an alternative solution to our problem."

He took the pistol and glanced from it to me. "So that is what the fireworks were about."

"That's what."

"You are a brave man."

I said irritably, "Jesus Christ, what is this anyway, a mutual-admiration society? So I'm brave or stupid or something, who cares? And you're a great guy, too, and in spite of how wonderful we both are, we still don't know where the h.e.l.l these people are going to pull off their big show, whatever it may be."

"We have this man, here, and the pilot of the boat. A little questioning-"

I said, with a glance at the lagoon, "You won't have the pilot long. He's making for the open sea at flank speed."

Ramon laughed. "Give me a little credit, friend. There's a patrol boat hidden behind the next island that can outrun him by ten knots. As for the rest, I could not have an American agent killed before my eyes. The reports I would have had to fill out would say 'Interfered with my work for months. Besides, I had promised Mrs. Lujan that if she cooperated, she would be safe, and I was not sure how many people the man was going to shoot down, once he started. Those automatic weapons intoxicate some people." He glanced out to sea. "Here comes the patrol boat now. You see, the other boat is stopping to surrender. The pilot knows he cannot escape."

We watched the minor naval drama from the sand-. hill. Presently the two boats headed our way, bucking the sea that was still running. Below us, in the calm lagoon, even the underwater parts of the wrecked plane were dimly visible, from this height, through the,, clear water.

Carol said, "But how did you know where to come, Ramon?"

He shrugged. "It was a matter for the experts with the charts. With the help of the electronic device concealed in the pistol, we could trace the course of your plane and extrapolate-I believe that is the right word. We knew the approximate cruising range. Unless you. changed course drastically at the last moment, you had to come down in the gulf within a certain area.. Presumably there would be somebody to pick you up. A discreet radar search gave us the location of all vessels in the lower gulf. There is not much water traffic. It was not hard to pick out a fis.h.i.+ng 'boat that was heading in roughly the right direction at top speed, and determine its course. Somewhere near the spot where the two courses intersected, there had to be a place suitable for either landing the plane or putting it down in the water. Our experts decided that this island was the most likely choice for an experienced pilot under the prevailing weather conditions. I made arrangements to conceal myself here with a couple of men before daybreak, sent the patrol boat off to hide, and here I am."

"We're really very grateful," Carol said. "No matter what Mr. Helm says."

"Of course he is perfectly right, seora. I did allow sentiment to interfere with duty. Now we must hope that these men will give the right answers under questioning."

"a.s.suming that they know them in the first place," I said grimly. "Maybe I can shortcut this inquisition a bit. It's a long gamble, but it may pay off."

Carol said quickly, "That's right, you said Priscilla had given you a hint-"

"The little girl with the big bosoms and the ready revolver?" Solana said. "I will be interested to learn what happened to her and the pilot of the plane. Later. What did she tell you, Helm?"

"Not much," I said. "Just that while their girl Vadya was showing me around Mazatlan, she apparently took me into an area she shouldn't have. Priscilla thought this was proof of Vadya's intention to betray everything to me. Of course it wasn't. Vadya wasn't the turncoat type. She just knew she was being watched-maybe she knew she'd be condemned no matter what she did-and it suited her sense of humor to tease the bloodhounds a bit. She certainly didn't say anything to make me think the place had any special significance, except that it wasn't the kind of place a woman would normally take a man on a romantic evening on the town. Viewing the sunset from Icebox Hill, okay; but watching a rusty freighter being loaded with seeds or grain or something wasn't likely to do much for the male libido."

"The docks?" Solana said. "In Mazatlan?"

I nodded. "I can't remember the name of the s.h.i.+p, if I ever saw it. But you'd better get on the air as fast as you can and check if it's still there... ."

It was; and after all our efforts, the main part of the job got accomplished by the authorities in Mazatlan before we arrived, even though we made it across Cortez's Sea by boat and plane at speeds that would have curled old Hernando's hair.

Later that day, after conferring with his local counterparts in Mazatlan, Solana gave me the guided tour of the captured s.h.i.+p. The most spectacular part of the exhibit was a concealed hold up forward that had been fitted out as a kind of a.s.sembly line for the manufacture of intriguingly scorched and crumpled sc.r.a.ps of flying saucer-the kind of debris that might have got blown around after such an unconventional aircraft had exploded violently. As might have been predicted, a surprising number of the sc.r.a.ps could be identified as being of U.S. origin, one way or another.

I looked around the gloomy hold and grimaced. "You'd think," I said, "that if they were going to all this trouble and expense, they'd cook up a couple of real UFOs-I mean actual flying models. I can see that the easiest and cheapest way of spreading the rumors was to get a lot of people to lie their heads off about what they'd seen; but one or two honest-to-G.o.d saucers flying around would have helped make the hoax more convincing."

Solana laughed. "Yes, that occurred to our friends, too. The big trouble was-according to one of the prisoners who has talked-that although they tried, they could not make them fly. The saucer configuration is apparently inherently unstable at any reasonably high speed, at least as far as our technology is concerned. The Martians or Venusians may be able to design such a craft to fly fast in our atmosphere; we can't. At least, these people couldn't. They had to be satisfied with the big lie."

I glanced towards the other side of the cavernous hold. "What's over there?"

"Those are the fire bombs. And here are the maps that show where in Mazatlan each bomb was to be planted, and where each sc.r.a.p of flying saucer debris was to be found. The day after tomorrow, after the city had gone up in flames, these remnants would have been, clear evidence of American... . Yes, what is it?" A man had come up. He spoke to Solana, who said impatiently: "Yes, yes, of course she is to be admitted. Yes, with her cameras. I gave the orders, did I not? She is to be given every a.s.sistance."

We waited, and in a moment Carol came in. She'd changed into a crisp, light, slacks-and-s.h.i.+rt outfit, and she was hung about with photographic equipment until she looked like a joke, but then, most pros do when they're working. It's only the occasional sensitive lone-wolf camera artist who can get by with interpreting the world about him, to his own satisfaction, with one camera and one lens. The guy who works for an editor's satisfaction generally needs all the gear he can drag around.

She said to Solana: "I certainly appreciate your having my stuff flown down, Rainon. Is it really all right if I take pictures in here?"

"In here, out there, everywhere," He said. "We want full coverage and as much publicity as we can get. When you are through here, you will be transported back to the island, if you wish, to get pictures there. But please be certain you first get some fine, sharp pictures of this UFO factory. For the sake of both our countries, the world must be convinced that this was all an elaborate fraud."

"Yes, of course." She made a little face. "That island isn't my favorite vacation spot, by any means, but you're right, we should have some shots of it. Can I get some of the people, too?"

"All you want, dead and alive, dear lady."

"Thank you." She was silent for a moment, and we all stood awkwardly in the middle of the iron room. Carol glanced at me and said, "Matt, I'm sorry if I said anything... . I'm just not used to being involved in anything like that."

"Sure"

"I ... I'll see you around."

I looked at her. She was telling me that it had been nice, this summer, but that was before she'd known what kind of man she was a.s.sociating with: a cold-blooded, ruthless,. callous murderous type of guy dealing in guns and blood. Somehow, I found, it didn't quite break my heart. I'd got a bit disenchanted with her, too, during the course of our adventures. She was a nice girl-well, woman-and I hoped she'd find a nice boy-well, man-and in the meantime she had her cameras and her ideals and her notion of what the world ought to be like, even if it wasn't.

"Sure," I said. "Somewhere around."

Solana cleared his throat. "And me, seora? Will you see me around, too? I still owe you a promised dinner, if you recall."

Something odd and frightened showed in Carol's blue eyes for a moment. I realized she was trying very hard to act as if she were talking to two ordinary men, while the truth was that to her we weren't really men at all, now that she'd seen us in action. We were a different breed of animal, savage and vicious beasts of the dark jungle of espionage and intrigue that she didn't want to admit existed.

She licked her lips. "I... I'm sorry, Ramon."

"May one ask why?"

She hesitated. "I ... I don't really know if I should... . Well, all right. You remember the motel room in Puerto Pefiasco, the one we watched from out on the beach that night? You let that poor man stay in that room, even though you knew he was going to be killed. All you cared about was learning which one of two people was going to shoot him. The fact that he was to die didn't concern you at all!"

After the silence had gone on for a while, I said, "I remember that poor man. That was the poor man who fed his wife a Mickey and burned her like a torch, wasn't it?"

Carol turned on me angrily and started to speak, but checked herself. There was still another awkward silence. Solana tapped me on the arm and jerked his head towards the door or hatch. I followed him out.

"Tell me one thing, friend," he said, outside. "You knew the little girl with the tight trousers was the one. How did you know?"

I grinned, trying to dismiss Carol's white face from my mind. Perhaps my heart had been broken a little, after all, just enough to make me want to hurt her slightly.

"How did you?" I asked.

Solana shrugged. "A man of experience learns to distinguish between pa.s.sion and what is only a pale imitation of pa.s.sion, amigo. That young lady was only an imitation s.e.xpot, to use your ' Yankee term. She was not really interested in men. Her true interests obviously lay elsewhere. And perversion is a subject upon which your government is very sensitive. If the security of her department was so lax as to overlook her h.o.m.os.e.xual tendencies, what else had been overlooked?" He smiled faintly. "Besides, I was not impressed by her chief, when I met him. I do not trust stupid people, or people who work for stupid people. And then you did not shoot that murderer; she did. That confirmed it for me. Now tell me how you spotted her."

I said slowly, "There was a woman named Vadya, a communist agent, who walked into a room knowing that death was waiting inside. She was not a woman to give up easily. If the trap had been set by me, she'd have done her best to elude it or fight it. But there's a funny fatalistic streak in those people. Remember all those strange confessions in court many years ago? When I'd had time to think it over, I knew there could be only one reason why Vadya had walked into that room deliberately: because she knew her own side had p.r.o.nounced the death sentence on her, and right or wrong she couldn't fight it. Which meant that the people who killed her had to be something other than the fine upstanding U.S. agents they seemed to be."

Solana nodded. "Well, it was a far-fetched plot, but it might have worked. I am not too fond of americanos, to be quite honest, but I do not want to waste my country's time and effort fighting them unnecessarily. Particularly if they are all as unpleasantly competent as you." He smiled. "But you really should learn how to fly an airplane, my friend. Watching you trying to bring that machine down was the most harrowing part of the whole a.s.signment: I could not be sure you were not going to drop it right on my head. Now, is there anything I can do for you by way of showing grat.i.tude."

I said, "Well, you could save my life, but you've already done that. Do I still have some credit on the books?"

"Anything you like. What is mine is yours, as we say here in Mexico."

I said, "There was a girl with red hair who disappeared."

"We have her. She was in hiding aboard this s.h.i.+p, with several others. Or a prisoner. Apparently she was, herself, not quite sure which. She is guilty of the murders of three U.S. tourists and two Mexican nationals-the captain and the mate-who died when a fis.h.i.+ng boat burned and sank, fired by a device planted by her. Afterwards she told a rather elaborate and convincing flying saucer story to explain the disaster. Do you want her?"

"Yes. I'll have to call Was.h.i.+ngton first, but I think we want her."

He shrugged. "I will not ask why. She is yours. As far as we are concerned, she will cease to exist. We have enough awkward cases to deal with, without hers."

I called Mac from the docks on a phone that Solana made available to me, and brought him up to date, I thought, only to find that he'd already got most of the information from other sources. He had some interesting news from the home front: the s.h.i.+ning new agency that had been going to revolutionize the nation's intelligence systems was in the throes of a security shakeup it was not expected to survive, and Herbert Leonard had been kicked upstairs to a fancy-sounding position with "coordinator" in the t.i.tle. In Was.h.i.+ngton, whenever they start coordinating, they're pretty well through.

I said, "Well, I hope they don't start investigating us, sir, because I'm afraid I've been a little lax, security-wise."

"I gave you strict orders-"

"Yes, sir," I said. "But death was staring us in the face, and I needed the lady's understanding, and I figured that under the circ.u.mstances Leonard wasn't going to be worrying about anybody's security but his own."

"That is absolutely no excuse, Eric."

"No, sir. But after a couple of days of making a d.a.m.n fool of myself playing the perfect clam, while everybody else was telling everything to everybody, my resistance just went down the drain, so to speak. Shall I send in my resignation, sir?" He didn't answer, and I went on: "If not, I have a suggestion to make... ."

24.

ANNETTE O'LEARY was waiting in my room at the hotel when I got there. She didn't look like a fugitive who'd been hiding out, or imprisoned, aboard a rusty freighter. Her long red hair was smooth and glossy, held by a black velvet band. She was wearing a short, slender, sleeveless black dress over which floated a sheer black garment known, I believe, as a cage-I sometimes wonder who dreams up these fas.h.i.+onable terms.

The filmy overdress, and her slim, high heels, gave her a fragile, ethereal look. Her suitcase lay open on the bed. There were wet towels strewn around the bathroom. Obviously she'd made good use of the facilities as soon as the police had brought her here. Well, she could have tried running away, instead. TI would have been disappointed in her if she had.

"Ah," she said lightly, "the man with the ever-ready shower. And, I suppose, the handcuffs." She held out her wrists. "Take me away, officer. I'm guilty as h.e.l.l."

I said, "That's no joke, O'Leary. They don't come any guiltier."

She sighed. "1 might have known it was just a beautiful dream. Well, at least I got a bath out of it. Okay, which way is the jail?"

"Is that why you picked that dress, to go to jail in?"

"No, dad, I picked it to stay out of jail in, if I could. But I can see that you're not a bit impressed." She drew a long breath. "That's enough kidding, Mr. Helm. I'm not really in the mood. Why don't you just break down and tell me why you had me brought here."

I said, "You're a ma.s.s murderess, O'Leary. You killed five people-count them, five-just like snapping your fingers. Justice demands that you pay the supreme penalty, or spend the rest of your days in prison, regretting your crime."

She looked at me for a moment. Her greenish eyes were hard and bright in her small, freckled face. "And what am I supposed to do now, get on my knees and make with the remorse? Sure, I blew up the d.a.m.n boat, and told a lot of far-out lies about what had happened out there. It was a stupid thing to do, and I did it for a stupid reason, but I was mad, and I don't think too clearly when I'm mad."

"What were you mad about?"

She said irritably, "You haven't done your homework, Mr. Secret Agent. My husband was killed, remember? They took him away and got him shot over in some crummy jungle or other. Was I supposed to keep loving the country that did that to him, and to me? So when some creep came up with some crazy plan for striking back I said, sure, I'll play. And I did. Like I say, I was mad."

"Are you mad now?"

"Not that mad," she said. "And now I know that I like foreign political creeps even less than the homegrown variety. There's nothing like playing footsie with a bunch of greasy conspirators to give a girl an acute attack of patriotism. But if you want me to say I'm sorry, to h.e.l.l with you."

"n.o.body wants you to say anything," I said. "And I mean that. Your remorse isn't wanted, but neither are your opinions on peace, war, or anything else. Can you keep your trap shut, O'Leary? You're no good to me if you're going to get mad and blow your stack all over again."

She was silent for a little while. Her tongue crept out and moved around her neatly lipsticked mouth, cautiously. "What do you want?" she asked at last.

"I have a new a.s.signment coming up," I said. "For this a.s.signment I need a good-looking, bloodthirsty, conscienceless little b.i.t.c.h who'll slit a man's throat and then kick him in the crotch for bleeding on her shoes."

Her eyes watched me steadily. "Well," she said, "well, I'm not very pretty, Helm."

"You'll do," I said. "You dress up pretty good. I'll pa.s.s you on the looks."

"Why ... why me?"

I said, "Technically speaking, you did a nice, clean job on that boat. We like our people to be able to handle explosives. And your lies were good. The drunk act you put on for me was pa.s.sable. For real professionalism, you need some training, but you've got the right att.i.tude already, and that's half the battle. I don't see any black hollows under your eyes. You haven't been losing much sleep over those five innocent people who died because you got mad, have you? Morally, that's terrible, but we're not going to have much truck with morality, O'Leary, where we're going. That is, unless you'd rather go to prison."

She hesitated. After ~. moment, she turned away from me and walked to The door, and opened it. The wind fluttered her fragile dress and stirred her long hair. It was getting dark outside. The surf was beating against the beach just as it had the last time I'd been in Mazatlan. The offsh.o.r.e islands were black shapes against the dark sea and the darkening sky.

"You don't scare me," Netta said without turning her head. "You know that, don't you? You don't scare me one d.a.m.n bit. If I take your crummy job, it won't be because of your crummy threats."

"Sure," I said. "What's the answer, or are you going to keep me in suspense?"

But I knew what her answer would be, because I knew what kind of a person she was, a person very much like myself. I saw her start to speak, but the words did not come. Instead she reached back quickly and grabbed my arm and held it, staring out to sea. I saw it now: something odd was happening over the dark shape of the islands. A pulsating green light was moving steadily and silently across the sky from north to south. We watched it until it disappeared over the town across the bay. The girl in front of me turned.

"Did you see it?" she breathed. "Did you see it? Why, it was a real-.-"

I said, "I didn't see anything, O'Leary, and neither did you. There's no such thing as a flying saucer. We've just proved conclusively that it's all a great big hoax, remember?" I grinned. "Besides, do you really have the nerve to tell another UFO story around Mazatalan?"

After a moment, she laughed and drew a long breath. "There's just one question, Matt," she said. "You said we'd have no truck with morality. Just how ... just how immoral am I expected to get?"

I shrugged. "Just how immoral do you want to get?" She smiled slowly and took my arm again. "That's all right, then. Just so I have a choice."

We went back inside. I closed and locked the door behind us.