by Larry Kent
I looked at my shoulder. The bleeding wasn’t too bad. The bullet must have glanced off the shoulder bone. There was no longer any feeling in my right hand. I had transferred the gun to my left hand while in the clump of birches.
I waited; listening, watching. Then I stepped out from behind a maple with the casual air of a man taking his evening constitutional. It was unexpected. It made the man behind the elderberry bush stand up to get a better look at me. I went down just before he fired, stuck out the gun, pressed the trigger three times. The slugs clipped elderberry leaves. At least one found its mark. The guy stood on his toes, started to fall, reached out and grabbed at the bush. The bush held him up long enough for me to get a killing bullet into his chest. I didn’t bother to watch him fall.
“Lonnie,” someone called from about a hundred feet away.
“I got him,” I grunted. Then I re-loaded the gun and waited. Soon I heard someone moving through the bushes. The sounds stopped not too far away, but I couldn’t see the man. “Over here,” I grated.
It was too easy. The second man walked into the open. I sent a bullet into his middle. The slug slammed him against a tree and then he went down on his hands and knees. He still held onto the gun; he even tried to lift it; so I shot him in the head.
I had a look at both bodies, just to be sure. This made four. According to Grady, four men had arrived by car. Maybe there wouldn’t be any more. Well, I’d soon know. I walked boldly through the bushes, making a lot of noise. No one fired at me.
I looked across the lake. Somewhere in the woods on the other side were Grady and Pete. The odds were, they knew nothing about the gunfight, as all shots had been from silencer-fitted guns, and there hadn’t been any ricochets. Well, I didn’t want them to know. Not yet. This was my party.
The bubbles out on the lake moved a little closer to shore. Clouds of mud came up. The pattern of bubbles showed that the scuba diver had been searching for something in narrow circles. This was no deduction on my part; the typing on the blood-spattered piece of paper told me all I needed to know about the scuba diver. But it was a deduction, albeit an obvious one, that he intended to come ashore on this side of the lake. I was going over the reasons for this in my mind when the bubbles came up in a straight line. The underwater swimmer was heading directly for me.
I waited until the bubbles were only thirty feet or so from shore, then I stepped into a patch of reeds. The reeds were high and thick enough to hide me, but they wouldn’t deflect a bullet. I felt the blood coming out of the wound again; it ran down my arm; oddly, it felt cold against my skin. My right arm hung useless at my side.
The diver was in shallow water now. Suddenly his head emerged, the rubber hood making it look like the top of a child’s ball. He didn’t get to his feet and walk from the water; he slid himself along the weed-covered mud, then he crawled into the reeds, his black rubber suit glistening. The cold water suit was necessary because the lake was spring-fed. Even near shore the water was cold; it would be much colder at depth; and he hadn’t known how long he would have to remain in the water, searching.
He lay flat in the reeds for what seemed like a long time but may not have been more than ten seconds. Then he worked himself out of the oxygen tank harness, removed the face glass and unzipped the rubber suit. He sat up to get the flippers off. After that he removed the rubber suit, moving slowly and carefully. He had his back to me. I knew his eyes were searching the opposite shore. When he got the suit off, he knelt on one knee and looked in the direction of the cabin. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, dungarees, sneakers. There was a knife in his belt scabbard. The knife.
My finger tightened on the trigger of the Walther. It would be so simple to put a bullet through his head. But that would make things too easy for him. I wanted him to know what was coming, feel the pain of it, chew on the helplessness. And I wanted him to talk.
Suddenly he picked up something that had been out of sight beside him, a squarish package wrapped in plastic or oilskin, and then he crawled through the reeds—right at me. He wasn’t aware of my presence until he was no more than ten feet away. He stopped crawling. His eyes came up, surprise and fear not registering until he was looking directly into my face.
I said, “Hello, Lee.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Finally he smiled. “You scared me there, pal. I thought you were one of—Hey, your shoulder!”
I shook my head slowly. “It won’t work. I was in the cabin.”
He looked puzzled. “So?”
“You didn’t finish them off, Lee. You should have. Rita did some typing.”
“I don’t get you, Larry. You’re not making any sense at all. Has something happened to the girls? They were all right when I left the cabin.”
“What’s in the package, Lee?”
“Huh?”
“The package you hauled out of the lake.”
“Oh! This? I dropped it out of the boat last time I was up here. I figured I’d search for it.”
“What’s in it?”
“Fishing lures.”
“Quick thinking.”
“Have a look if you don’t believe me. I’II open it and show you.” He started to get to his feet.
“Be careful,” I said.
“I don’t know what’s eating you, Larry, but whatever it is, it’s wrong. Maybe, if you tell me about it ...”
“Sure, Lee. We’ll talk about it.” I felt myself swaying.
“That shoulder is bleeding pretty badly,” Lee said. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, Larry. Why, you can hardly stand up.”
“You can stop worrying about me, pal. I’II make it.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Not across the lake, Lee. That guy you sent after me wasn’t good enough. I got past him.”
A pained, hurt look came onto Lee’s face. “I wish you’d tell me what it is you suspect me of.” His eyes darted to the right of me, came back, moved to the left.
“They can’t help you,” I smiled.
His mouth hung open. He wet his lips. But he recovered quickly. He even laughed, like it was a crazy joke.
“They’re dead,” I said.
“They? Dead?” He laughed some more. “What the hell are you talking about? Larry, take a good look at me. I’m Lee Howard. We roomed together at college. You asked me to help you investigate Rita. Remember?”
“I’ll always remember Rita. And Vicki. And the way you used that knife on them.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t enough to just kill them, was it? You cut and slashed and—”
“No, Larry! I swear I had nothing to do with it. When I left the girls, they were all right. You’ve got to believe me. I’m a CIA agent.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
“It’s the truth!”
“You’d never pass the screening, Lee. If you were a CIA man, you’d have told me.”
“I couldn’t. I was undercover all the way. Only the director and assistant director know my identity. I’m not even a code name in the files. But I’ve got free access to the files. I know, for instance, that you’re down as a bad security risk. Drinking.”
To say I was surprised would be putting it mildly. But the opposition probably had an infiltrator in the CIA. The information about me could have been passed on to Lee. I told him so.
He shook his head. “Ask me anything else.”
“How do CIA men make themselves known to each other?”
“They use a code word and countersign that changes every day.”
“Where do they get this information?”
“In the big cities, they find it in a newspaper. In New York, the information is contained in a phone ad in the classified section, New York Times.”
“And in the small towns, in planes, in ships at sea?”
“When a CIA man is sent into the field, he—” Lee picked the moment well. He waited until I closed my eyes momentarily as pain shot through my shoulder, then he threw himself at
me.
But I was ready. I pressed the trigger. The Walther jumped in my hand. The slug hit Lee where I wanted it to, in the right shoulder. He fell at my feet. I moved back a little.
“That,” I said, “was a very good try.”
Lee held his shattered shoulder. Blood came up between his fingers, flowed over the back of his hand in streams that joined together before dripping to the ground. He said, “I just wanted to disarm you. You’re not thinking straight. In your condition, you’re liable to do anything.”
“Now we’re even, Lee. Your wound is bleeding worse than mine. If we’re going to pass out from loss of blood, you’ll go first.”
“You’ve got to listen to me, Larry. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Don’t you ever give up?”
“I’m a CIA man. I can tell you a lot of things about the organization.”
“Sure—things your friends passed on to you. Too bad, Lee, it might have worked if Rita hadn’t lived long enough to do some typing. You slashed her and locked the door of her room. Then I guess Vicki must have said something in her sleep, or maybe you enjoyed slashing so much that you had to have some more of the same. After that you put on your scuba gear and went down to the water. You weren’t worried. You had two armed men to protect you, and you figured I was probably dead—because you’d assigned a man to take care of me. You never dreamed that Rita would struggle to the window and see you go down to the water in your rubber suit. Then she heard me call out your name. I guess she tried to get my attention but couldn’t talk However, there was the typewriter. She used it. You were in diving gear, the message said. You were in the lake, getting Strep 3. There was nothing about you having stabbed her. There wasn’t time for that. But she did have time to type the three letters, CIA. She was CIA, Lee.”
“That’s crazy,” Lee gasped. “If she was CIA, your people would have known.”
“No. The group I’m working for isn’t attached to the CIA. They actually thought she was trying to sell out. The truth was, she took the job with you so she could check on you. And there was something else she typed. It looked like the name of a Martian. It was: Laricle Gaik. It makes sense only if applied to you. The L is your initial. The ‘aricle’ means article. ‘Gaik’ is Galek, Professor Galek, her employer, the Strep 3 man. You wrote an article about Galek. That is, you set out to. Maybe Galek wanted the article written, I don’t know. But somehow you found out about Strep 3, so you must have got pretty close to Galek. When he killed himself, you took the Strep 3.”
“How would I know where to get it?” Lee’s voice echoed in my brain, like he was shouting to me through a long pipe, into a cave.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you got it. And Rita must have suspected that you had it. I guess she knew about your meetings with Galek.”
“Yes, she did,” Lee said in a resigned tone. “Don’t look so surprised, Larry. There’s no point in my putting on an act any longer.”
My head seemed to be expanding. Lee’s face wavered, became waxen, melting slowly in a fire ...
“I want to tell you all about it,” Lee said.
Sure. He wanted to talk until I passed out. Then he’d probably take the knife from the scabbard and go to work on my hide. Like hell.
“Be my guest,” I said.
“We always talked things out in college, Larry, remember? We were pretty close, even though you didn’t always see eye to eye with me. We were friends.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, dear buddy.”
The hand that held the wound was dark and shiny with blood. His face seemed to be melting into the blood. But I could see his eyes all right. Shrewd, calculating eyes, bright now with hope. I could feel sweat rolling down my neck, yet I was shivering. I must have looked pretty bad to him, ready to fold up.
“Professor Galek asked me to write an article,” Lee said. “He made it a big secret. I saw him five times. Each time he told me a little more, until I had it all. He wanted to let the world know, through me, about Strep 3. He even trusted me with the hiding place of the last vial of bacteria, plus his notes. It was the notes I wanted. I tossed the vial into a furnace. No plague for me. You know how I am about things like that, Larry. When someone has a cold, I don’t want to be close.”
“I remember,” I said. “The guys at school called you ‘Hypo Howard.’ Hypo for hypochondriac.”
Lee’s lips curled in a smile. “That’s right.”
“But you don’t mind giving the enemy some bugs that could depopulate this continent within a few months.”
“Why not? This country is all loused up. Better to start all over again.”
“Where would you be while the rest of us were dying?”
“An ocean away, with all the loot I’ll ever need.”
“In Russia?”
“Don’t be old-fashioned, Larry. The Russians are starting to believe in co-existence. It’s a much smaller country, one that doesn’t have the big bomb. With Strep 3 they don’t need it.”
“Keep talking, Lee. I want all of it.”
“You’ll get it, Larry. There’s no reason for secrets now. I imagine you want to know why I hired Rita? Well, I was a little worried when she answered my ad for a secretary. I hired her because I wanted to know if she saw me on one of my visits with Galek. He spoke a lot about her. Although he told me he hadn’t given her any information on Strep 3, I had my doubts. He may have slipped up. He was a nervous wreck at the end ... Besides, it occurred to me that our cloak and dagger men in Washington may have sent Rita to spy on me. Maybe they knew about the proposed article. At any rate, I didn’t want them to be suspicious; so. I hired her. Then you came to me with the big surprise. Rita was suspected. You can imagine my amusement.”
“A big belly laugh,” I said.
“Very amusing. Rita was spying on me, you were spying on her, and in the wings was another outfit—they wanted you dead in the worst way, Larry. But they wanted the notes on Strep 3 even more, They offered a hundred thousand. I laughed. They went up to two hundred thousand. But I was holding out for a lot more. Finally, only this morning, they came across.”
“They’d have killed you,” I said.
“Not on your life. There are Photostats of the notes with my lawyer. He doesn’t know what they are, and they don’t know my lawyer. If something happens to me, my lawyer has instructions to send the Photostats to a certain place.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
“Jason McEvers. You remember Jason. He went to school with us. Good old Jason. He used to follow me around like a faithful dog, and he hasn’t changed much.”
I winced as my shoulder throbbed anew. The pain was close to unbearable. Large colored spots danced sluggishly before my eyes.
“I have a proposition for you,” Lee said.
“You know better,” I said.
“Half, Larry.”
“Drop dead.”
“Hear me out. We can arrange for Jason to deliver the Photostats of the notes to our side. It’ll be the same as with the bomb. If more than one country has it, the threat is neutralized. You’ll be doing the world a favor.”
“You’re just talking, Lee. You know you’re just talking. You think I’ll keel over if you talk long enough. But hear this, pal. Before that happens, I’ll kill you. But I’d rather keep you alive. I want to see them put a rope around your neck.”
I glanced around, saw a large rock. The rock expanded, contracted. I took a few backward steps. The world tilted. Soon everything would be spinning. I knew the symptoms. I couldn’t feel my legs beneath me. I wanted to close my eyes and go to sleep. The dry reeds rustled as Lee moved. I pushed the gun in his direction. He was a blob of movement, nothing more. I pressed the trigger. He cried out as the bullet hit. I turned. Where in hell was the rock? Suddenly I saw it, fired. The bullet ricocheted as it glanced off the stone. I shouted, too. Then I fired two more bullets off the rock before I fell. I didn’t know how loud my shouts were, but Grady would be sure to hear t
he ricochets. I started to close my eyes. So easy to sleep ...
But Lee was still alive. The reeds continued to rustle and crack. I forced my eyes open. The reeds were giant tree trunks seen through a red haze. Then there was something else. The shimmer of steel, and the shine of a giant eye. I pushed the end of the gun into the eye and pressed the trigger—and then the universe exploded.
I was suspended in blackness. There was no weight to my body. Lights flashed in the blackness and I asked them to go away. But one light became a face. Grady’s face.
“Kent …”
I want to float, I thought, or maybe I said it. I don’t know. “Everything’s all right,” Grady said.
I felt I wanted to smile.
“You can go back to where you were,” Grady said.
His face became a light again. The light dimmed, went out. It was very nice of him.
“Sit down,” Dumbrille said.
I sat. My left arm was in a sling. Three days in a hospital were behind me. A private hospital, where no questions were asked. It seemed that one of the requirements for seeing Dumbrille was to spend three or four days on your back recuperating from a nasty experience.
“I want to thank you for your help,” Dumbrille said. “We could not have managed it without you. Because of the rather trying time you had, not to mention that you deserve every penny of it—and more—please accept this token of my appreciation.”
Dumbrille slid an envelope across the desk. I lifted the flap, thumbed through some hundred-dollar bills. I said, “This is more than I contracted for.”
“I think our benefactor can spare it,” Dumbrille smiled. It was, of course, a brief smile. A throat-clearing cough followed, after which he arranged a ballpoint pen, a ruler and a letter opener in a neat line on the left side of his desk blotter. “Larry, I don’t think I have to emphasize the need for secrecy in this matter. During the past three days I’ve attended meetings at the very highest level. There was—and is—no small amount of concern over the fact that a private citizen—”
