Matt Helm--The Interlopers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Sorry, Prince Hannibal,” I said. “You’re going to have to sleep up forward tonight and leave the camper for us humans.”

  I arranged his pad on the floor of the cab and made sure he was curled up on it comfortably before I closed the door. Sixty-odd pounds of Labrador with insomnia, I’d learned, can make a half-ton truck sway on its heavy-duty springs like a small boat on a high sea. I got back into the camper and sat down to wait. It didn’t take long. Thirteen and a half minutes from the time I’d left her stateroom, Libby was knocking on the camper door, asking to be let in. I took the .357 Magnum out of my belt and opened the door.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, acting shocked by the sight of the weapon.

  “Just a precaution. Come inside and close the door behind you,” I said, keeping her covered. I looked at her closely when she’d obeyed. She was wearing a belted trench coat, the kind without which no TV spy, male or female, could stay in business. Her feet were stuck into the same low yellow-brown suede shoes she’d been wearing all day. “Take it off,” I said, gesturing toward the coat.

  She hesitated, and shrugged. “Why not?”

  “And pass it over carefully.”

  “Yes, Mr. Nystrom, sir.”

  Underneath the coat, she was dressed—if you want to take liberties with the word—as I’d seen her last, in a brief cascade of black lace ruffles suspended from two black satin ribbons over the shoulders. I checked the coat and found nothing.

  “Lift it,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” She grasped the lacy hem of her garment daintily and raised it a few inches.

  “All the way.”

  After a moment, she shrugged and obeyed, revealing nothing—that is, no weapons, in the strictest sense of the term. Letting the black stuff fall once more, she said, “Now what’s this all about, darling?”

  I said. “You have a short memory. Your last words upstairs concerned killing me.”

  She laughed again. “You weren’t supposed to take me seriously!”

  “Killing is something I always take seriously,” I said. “If you didn’t come to murder me, why are you here?”

  “Silly,” she said. “I came to apologize. I acted like a snotty bitch, Matt. I’m sorry. Can we… can we start over and try it again?”

  I grinned and drew a long breath and put the gun away. “All right, sweetheart,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Now sit down and drink your coffee before it gets cold and tell me who you really are.”

  20

  We faced each other across the little formica-covered dinette table. Libby started to raise her paper cup to her lips, checked herself, and looked down at it, frowning. She turned her gaze on me.

  “You knew I’d come?”

  “Two chances out of three; enough to gamble a cup of coffee on.” I grinned. “Strictly a grandstand play, of course.”

  She didn’t smile, but watched me steadily. “How did you figure it, Matt?”

  “Say you were exactly what you’d been claiming to be: Miss Elizabeth Richbitch Meredith, a spoiled, willful society lady who got involved with some nasty commies for kicks, but later saw the light for one reason or another and changed sides to join us good guys. In that case, what would you do if an unappreciative jerk refused to accept your priceless favors as sufficient reward for his services and asked for cold cash instead? Well, there was a chance that you’d just scratch the cad off your social list; but there was also a chance, considering your parting words, that you’d come after him with a gun.”

  “That’s one chance out of two that I’d come,” she said. “What’s the third possibility?”

  “That you weren’t the thrill-seeking Miss Richbitch at all; that you were a simple working girl with instructions to keep the guy under close—not to say intimate—surveillance for purposes still to be determined. In that case, of course, no personal considerations like wounded pride would apply. You’d realize at once that you’d made a strategic error in letting the bastard walk out on you, regardless of insults, and that the only way you could repair your mistake was to grit your teeth, go straight to the crummy slob, and apologize as humbly and seductively as possible. Which was exactly what you did.”

  There was a little silence, broken only by the steady rumble of the ship’s powerplant—louder down here on the car deck—echoed by minor rattles and vibrations in the camper. At last Libby laughed shortly.

  “All right,” she said. “All right. It’s nice to deal with a bright man, I guess, even if it’s a little hard on the ego. But if I’m not Miss Richbitch Meredith, darling, who am I?”

  I said, “That’s my question; I asked it first.”

  She hesitated and looked down at her coffee cup, frowning again. She spoke without looking up. “Does King’s Mountain mean anything to you, darling?”

  I let my breath go out in kind of a sigh. I said, “Well, it’s a place where people got killed, like Bull Run.”

  She looked up and smiled. “So now you know.”

  But of course I didn’t. What had just passed between us was the current identification signal—a Revolutionary War battlefield answered by a Civil War battlefield—applicable to all undercover agencies of the U.S. government. To an old cloak-and-dagger type like me, it didn’t mean very much. I’ve been around too long to trust a password known to that many people, some of whom are bound to let it slip, intentionally or accidentally.

  Still, it was an indication of something I’d already considered as a possibility. I said, “Assuming that you came by that I.D. routine legitimately, how does it happen that a bright girl like you is working for a stupid gent like Smith?”

  “What makes you think I’m working for Mr. Smith?”

  I shrugged. “Well, you’re not one of ours or you’d have used a different call sign; besides, my chief has assured me we have nobody else on this job. And I hope to God there are no other U.S. spook shops mixed up in this operation. Two are enough, or one too many.”

  She laughed. “Assuming I am working for the man you call Smith, and have been right along, what makes you think he’s stupid, Matt? Don’t tell me a smart agent like you was fooled by his pompous act and the boyscouts he employs as a cover!”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “You ought to know that in this business the cleverest thing you can do is act very dumb and make it stick. Mr. Smith, as you call him, puts on a deliberate show of running something closely related to the YMCA, full of bright, earnest, high-minded young people. However, the real work is done by nasty, immoral characters like me, reporting through totally different channels. That way, nobody worries much about Mr. Smith and his apparently ineffectual activities, which is just the way he likes it. Okay?”

  “It seems complicated, but okay. Do the boyscouts know about you?”

  “As far as they’re concerned, I’m a genuine double agent, discovered, recruited, and briefed by them. They’re very proud of me; I’m their prize exhibit. The fact that I was planted on the Communists in the first place by the very man who gives them their orders would disillusion them terribly if they found it out.”

  “Sure.”

  She went on: “Of course, if you ask Mr. Smith, he’ll say that he never heard of me except as an ex-commie agent who was persuaded to change her mind, and that what I’ve just told you about his setup is a figment of my imagination.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  She laughed. “But that really makes no difference to our relationship, does it, Matt? Because you have no intention of trusting me, anyway, no matter how many signs or countersigns I produce, or how many important people vouch for me—or don’t vouch for me.”

  “No intention whatever,” I said. “I’m a suspicious bastard, particularly when it comes to lovely ladies who invade my quarters in black lace lingerie.”

  She glanced down at her brief garment. “It is pretty tarty, isn’t it?” she murmured. “I ought to be ashamed of myself, oughtn’t I?”

  “You most certainly ought
,” I said. “But I find it all very sad. I don’t suppose you really have nine grand to give me. And now that it’s been more or less established that we’re professional colleagues, our relationship will have to be strictly business, won’t it? I mean, except when people are looking, of course.”

  She hesitated, then spoke without expression. “As a matter of professional technique, Mr. Helm, I have always felt that when I’m assigned to play a role—like pretending to be madly in love with a man—I can do a much more convincing job if I play it all the way, whether people are looking or not.”

  I regarded her across the table. She had, I noticed, very nice shoulders, pleasantly white against the black ribbons and ruffles of her scanty, sex-doll garment. Her face was very nice, too. In fact, she was damn near beautiful, or perhaps it was the intimate circumstances that made her seem so.

  I said, also poker-faced: “We certainly wouldn’t want to handicap you in carrying out your assignment, Miss Meredith.” I looked at her for a moment longer, and decided we’d been subtle and clever enough for one night. I said, “Look, doll, you don’t have to, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we had a good time in Seattle and I’d be happy to repeat it, but if you’re just under orders to sleep with me for reasons of strategy or something, hell, I’ll move up front with the pup. In the morning, I’ll give you a notarized certificate of copulation you can show your boss if he asks. Say the word.”

  Something changed in her eyes. She said, “You’re really a pretty good guy, aren’t you?”

  I grimaced. “Go to hell. I just like my victims tender and willing, that’s all.”

  “I know I don’t have to,” she said quietly. “And I don’t have any such orders, Matt.” She hesitated and looked down and, so help me, actually blushed a little. Her voice was almost inaudible when she spoke again: “I’m acting strictly… strictly on my own initiative.”

  “Well, in that case…” For some reason, I found it necessary to stop and clear my throat. “In that case, suppose you go stand over by the door for a moment, while I transform this eating-booth into a more useful and comfortable piece of furniture…”

  21

  I awoke suddenly with the uneasy knowledge that there was something I was supposed to be doing instead of lying in a warm bed with an attractive woman in my arms. After a moment, I remembered what it was. I glanced at my watch, holding it up into the shaft of illumination cast by one of the lights of the ship’s hold shining through a crack between the window curtains of the camper. I saw with relief that the time was barely midnight. Love or no love, sex or no sex, the mental alarm clock was still on the job.

  “Where are you going?” Libby asked sleepily as I got out of bed.

  “Sorry, I just remembered that I’ve got a date with a blonde,” I said.

  “Well, this is a hell of a time to—!” She stopped, and laughed at her own quick, jealous indignation. She said, “Oh, that blonde. But you told me your meeting in the cocktail lounge went off according to plan.”

  “I said I thought I got what I went for. I didn’t. The girl slipped me a real, honest-to-God Canadian quarter instead of the trick coin she was supposed to pass. Probably because you spooked her by snooping around.” Libby sighed in the darkness behind me. “I knew it was all going to turn out to be my fault, somehow.”

  I grinned, pulling on my pants. “Well, she was apparently spooked by something, since she didn’t complete the transfer. So now I’ve got to try the alternate drop. And this time, stay out of it. Stay put. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

  The steady vibration of the ship’s machinery seemed more noticeable outside the camper. The poorly illuminated deck was a jungle of tightly packed vehicles. I saw people stirring around the cars up forward near one of the big landing doors. They were presumably getting ready to disembark at our next port of call, a small town called Petersburg. We should have docked there around nine, but we’d started late from Prince Rupert and been slowed down still further by the fog: the official ETA was now one A.M.

  The Communist agent who’d made up Grant Nystrom’s itinerary had apparently been aware that the ferry often ran hours behind schedule, because he’d set no fixed time for the contact. Instead, I was to present myself in the snack bar forty-five minutes before the predicted moment of arrival in Petersburg, as chalked on the purser’s blackboard, which I’d checked on my way to Libby’s stateroom earlier in the evening.

  It was exactly twelve-fifteen when I entered the snack bar, a rather long, narrow, well-lighted room with a newsstand at one end and a hamburger kitchen at the other, both closed for the night. In between was a battery of vending machines, one of which I’d already patronized for coffee, and half a dozen good-sized tables. One table was occupied by a bunch of sleepy-looking, aggressively ragged, grubby, long-haired kids, male and female; the rest were empty.

  I stopped by the beverage dispenser, fished out some change, and, deciding that I’d drunk enough coffee, punched the hot-chocolate button. The machine gave birth to a paper cup which it proceeded to fill.

  “Hit it again for me, please,” said a feminine voice behind me. “Here’s the money… Oh, it’s the man with the nice doggie!”

  She was just as cute and brown-eyed and blond as she had been earlier, and she was still in the short blue linen dress with the trickily pleated modesty-insurance between the legs, but the basic pants-structure of the garment was more obvious now that it had got a bit rumpled from some hours of being slept in, I judged, on a car seat or in one of the ship’s chairs. I took the quarter the girl held out, palmed it, and stuck one of my own into the vending machine.

  “Thanks,” said my contact when I handed her the cup. She glanced at the small watch on her wrist. “I’m supposed to get off at Petersburg, but I guess I’ve got time to drink this… No, let’s sit over here, away from the hippies.” She gave the long-haired contingent a disapproving look designed, I figured, to go with her rather prissy appearance. She went on, still in character: “I just don’t see how people can bear to show themselves in public like that, all hairy and dirty and disgusting!”

  “They’re rebelling,” I said.

  “That doesn’t really prevent them from getting a bath and a haircut occasionally, does it?”

  “Of course it does,” I said. “You just don’t understand what they’re rebelling against. Pay no attention to the guff they spout. They’re not really fighting society, or the establishment, or war, or the draft. Not primarily. Their big fight is with all the television commercials commanding them to be clean and smell sweet and have soft shiny hair and bright white teeth and no sweat under the armpits. They’re showing the world that they’ll sweat if they damn well want to, and that no damn TV announcer is going to tell them what to do.”

  She laughed. “Well, that’s a new slant. I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way.”

  “I hadn’t either, until a minute ago,” I said, grinning.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. “I can’t keep calling you The-Man-With-The-Dog.”

  “Nystrom,” I said. “Grant Nystrom.”

  “I’m Ellen Blish,” she said, and held out her hand. “It really is Blish. Honest. There is such a name, even though people don’t seem to want to believe it. Hi, Grant…”

  I didn’t pay much attention to what her mouth was saying, because her small fingers were talking a different language. For the second time that night I was having an identification routine thrown at me; this time the old fraternity grip of my own—well, Mac’s—peculiar organization. It was a sign that meant somewhat more to me than the one I’d got from Libby, because it’s known to relatively few people, all carefully selected and highly trained.

  Perversely, it made me want to burst out laughing. Signs and countersigns are corny enough at any time; this one made me wonder just how many Communists were actually involved in the nebulous Red spy ring with which I was supposed to be dealing. It had apparently b
een infiltrated by just about everybody, like some of those legendary subversive groups in which the F.B.I. men finally outnumbered the genuine Marxists.

  I made the proper response, searching the pretty little face of Ellen Blish, or whatever her true name might be, for signs of the toughness she’d have to have to be one of ours. But it doesn’t always show. I remembered another small, rather delicate-looking blonde of ours—the more common blue-eyed variety—who’d come out of the jungles of southeast Asia and died in my arms beside a back road in southern France…

  But it was no time to be thinking of blondes I’d loved and lost, or brunettes or redheads either. “Hi, Ellen,” I said, retrieving my hand.

  “You’re Eric,” she said. Her rather high-pitched, sweet-young-thing voice had changed to something lower and more business-like. “You made a telephone call two days ago to a certain number in Washington,” she went on and gave the number. “That’s in case you don’t have any more faith in fancy recognition signals than I do.”

  “If I’m Eric,” I asked, “who are you?”

  “Just Ellen,” she said.

  “And what do you have for me, Justellen?”

  “Information. A warning. It looks as if you may be met at the dock.”

  “Any particular dock?”

  “We haven’t been able to determine that. It could happen at Haines, where you get off, or at Juneau, Sitka, or maybe right here in Petersburg. Do you know a brown-faced, black-haired gent, stocky, about two hundred pounds.”

  “I know him. His name’s Pete. What about him?”

  “He was seen making contact with Holz. We don’t know what was said, but they left Anchorage by plane, heading south, this way. I was told to alert you.”