Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  “They might have my prints on file somewhere.”

  “So? They’ll establish that your real name isn’t Lynch and that you have a good service record. So what? They’d get the same line if you really were an Agency man. Once the job’s pulled off you might be hot under your own name, but that’s a name and identity you got rid of long before you found your little island and went native. You hadn’t counted on being Paul Kavanagh again, I hope?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “There isn’t any,” I agreed. “Have a good flight.”

  That was the 30th of January, a Thursday. Saturday morning I was at my desk when the phone rang. It was the general’s secretary. Would I please report to the valiant leader at once?

  There were two men in his office. They were both majors, unless their ranks were as spurious as my own. Gen. Winden was standing stiffly alongside his desk. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Mr. Richard John Lynch, may I present Maj. Philip Bourke and Maj. Lawrence O’Gara. Mr. Lynch is a civilian intelligence officer,” he told them, “and I’m sure the three of you gentlemen will have a great deal to talk about. Since the powers that be do not seem to feel that Fort Joshua Tree is capable of handling its own affairs, I’m reassured to know that three fine men will keep matters under control. Indeed, gentlemen. Indeed, reassured!”

  I looked at Bourke and O’Gara and they looked at me, and the general looked at all three of us. Bourke, the older of the two, started to say something, then changed his mind. They seemed rather dismayed at the whole affair. I could understand this, and suggested they might want to come to my office for a moment. They threw salutes at the general and followed me out of there.

  When we were all three in my cubicle, with the door shut, Bourke heaved himself into a chair and sighed. “I heard about that overstuffed son of a bitch,” he said, “but it’s nothing to seeing him in the flesh. Words do not begin. He wasn’t supposed to tell us about you, was he?”

  “It wasn’t what the office had in mind,” I admitted.

  “A shame you had to tell him who you were in the first place. He never would have worked it out on his own.”

  “You might be right.”

  O’Gara said, “You should see his record. You wouldn’t believe it.” His voice was Boston Irish. “But if he were any good they wouldn’t have sent us here. He gave us a story to explain your interest in this one, Lynch, but I couldn’t make sense of it.”

  I told him it didn’t make much sense to me, either. “The eventual destination of the shipment comes under Agency auspices, that’s all I know. So we’re showing some unofficial interest down the line. That’s about all.”

  “Expecting trouble?”

  “Not that I know of.” I looked at him, then turned to study Bourke. “Why? Something in the air?”

  “We wouldn’t know. If they had to send us here, why couldn’t they wait until maybe August? A week in this town, I don’t know. What do you do for kicks?”

  We did fifteen minutes on various ways of amusing oneself in Sprayhorn. I was waiting for the pitch, and I wasn’t surprised when they made it casual. Bourke said something about the general having simplified things, and that it was just as well our identities were out in the open. We might help each other, we could give each other company, and otherwise we’d have spent all our time running checks on each other.

  “Amen to that,” O’Gara said. “And just for the record, Comrade Richard, here’s my Red Party Card.”

  He gave me a leatherette case about the size of a passport. It had his picture—I think it was his picture, but it didn’t come all that close—and a thumbprint and description. I made a show of giving it a careful look-see while pretending to pass it with a glance. Then Bourke produced his ID and I had to glance examine it, too.

  “And now, friends, we make the party complete.” The first thing I handed them was the Maj. John Walker paraphernalia. Bourke said it wasn’t bad work, but O’Gara didn’t think it would fool anyone who looked hard at it. Then I gave them the Agency ticket in the Lynch name. O’Gara hardly looked at it before passing it on to Bourke, who took a quick glance and flipped it back to me. There was just the quietest click when O’Gara photographed it. They were pretty smooth.

  “Major Walker himself,” O’Gara said. “John Walker.”

  “None other.”

  “I used to know a bottle by that name. Do they call you Red Label, by any chance?”

  “Sounds subversive. Now Black Label, that’s something else again. If you old soldiers would care to pursue the matter, there’s a research center just this side of town that I could recommend—”

  We went to a roadhouse together and did some fairly serious drinking. When I came back from the John one time my glass was a little sticky in spots with what I guessed was scotch tape residue; now they would have some prints to compare with their photograph of my ID. According to George, it wouldn’t matter if they sent the prints to Washington. I hoped they wouldn’t bother.

  With that out of the way, we all three relaxed and made a day out of it. We went to another place for a late lunch and then returned to the first roadhouse and sat drinking until the crowd from the base arrived around the dinner hour. I got the impression that they didn’t have anything resembling final orders yet, so I didn’t bother pumping them very hard. They seemed interested in learning the final destination of the weapons, but I was vague on that score, so they gathered either that I didn’t know or that I wouldn’t tell, whereupon they let go of it. They were pretty decent types, especially O’Gara, who had an unusually dry sense of humor for a career officer. Bourke ran a little closer to type, but was still good company.

  I had to drink a little heavier than I wanted to, but I stayed on top of the liquor. I left them around six-thirty, stopped in town to send George a prearranged telegram, then went back to the motel.

  Something woke me before sunrise Sunday, a backfiring track or a bad dream. I got dressed and went out. The snow that had held off for a few days was coming down again, and according to the car radio it would do so for a long while. I ate breakfast and drank a lot of coffee, then went back to the motel. I didn’t stay there long, though, because I had the feeling that Bourke and O’Gara might pay a call, and I didn’t want to see them now. I got back in the car and went out to look things over.

  I drove to the base, then went on past it, tracing the route the four tracks would take from Fort Tree south. It was only a fifteen-mile stretch, but with the snow coming down hard it took me the better part of two hours to ran the length of it and back. In all that time, I only saw two other cars, both of them civilian. The day and hour may have had something to do with it, of course. We couldn’t count on the traffic being that light during the week.

  The countryside itself was flat and barren in all directions, large farms and open fields. The view would probably have been monotonous enough under any circumstances, but with snow everywhere there was really nothing at all to look at. Now and then a farmhouse or barn broke the barren whiteness of the view.

  I drove to the end and back, stopping periodically to check my mileage and make notes of likely spots. If we were going to take the tracks, we had to pick our spot carefully. We needed a stretch of several hundred yards away from houses and side roads, a spot where we could make the touch without being seen, a spot we could seal to traffic easily and effectively. I found three possibilities on the way out and eliminated one of them on the way back.

  That left two, and either one was better than I’d expected and a little less than I’d hoped for. They were 4.3 and 11.2 miles from the base, which meant that one was too close to the beginning of the run and the other too close to the end. My third choice had been ideal in that respect, right smack in the middle, but on the way back I had noticed a secondary road that fed right into it at its midpoint, and that seemed enough to rule it out.

  In the motel room, I used my notes and my memory to rough out a map of the fiftee
n-mile route. I drew it to scale and noted all the landmarks I could remember in the areas of the two ambush sites. I played with the map for an hour or so. When it stopped snowing I went out in the car again and had another look at the route. This time I stopped at every access road and filled it in on the map. I also added as many of the houses and barns as possible, redrafted to show bends and curves in the road, and made other notations for contour. This last was hardly worth the trouble. The ground was so flat that dips in the road hardly entered into things at all. To the west, on the other side of the Missouri, were the Black Hills and the Badlands and all of that. But here everything was flat.

  I went to a bar that night but couldn’t relax at all. My mind was on the two ambush sites and I couldn’t turn it off. I went back to the motel and dragged out the map again, bouncing a variety of plan elements off it, seeing what would work and what wouldn’t, trying to guess in advance the elements we hadn’t allowed for.

  It was a waste of time, but there was time to waste and my mind wouldn’t stay focused on anything else. When I managed to turn it aside I found myself thinking about other things, more troublesome things. George was arriving the following night, and from that time on it would be pressure all the way; in the meanwhile it wouldn’t do to get hung up on uncomfortable thoughts. I put the map in my money belt before I went to sleep, and slept with it fastened tightly about my middle.

  TEN

  ON MONDAY MORNING they started loading the trucks.

  There was no memo to that effect on my desk. The only thing on my desk when I got there was a coded wire from George, and all it said once I unscrambled it was UNDERDOG, which meant he’d be in Aberdeen that night. For all that, it hardly had to be in code. You can take the man out of the Agency but you can’t take the Agency out of the man. George was incurable.

  The decoding process, as it happened, almost kept me from discovering about the loading operation. I finished destroying the wire and my work sheets and went outside just in time to see one of the four armored cars disappearing into a building, the very building in which the shipment was presently stored. I waited, but no other trucks showed up, and I wondered if they were going to load and ship them one by one. If that was the case, we were in all kinds of trouble.

  I headed for the warehouse and was halfway there when Larry O’Gara emerged from it and waved at me. He trotted over to me. “Nothing to see,” he told me. “Phil’s inside watching them load. They’re on truck number three, and when you’ve seen one, etc. Christ, it’s cold. Is it like this all winter long?”

  “I’m a stranger here myself.”

  “A few more days and we can all add this to our list of happy memories. Let’s get inside.”

  We went to my office. It was still smoky from the telegram I had incinerated, but if O’Gara noticed he kept it to himself. “They’ll keep the loaded trucks inside until they take off,” he said. “We’ll go over later and have a look.”

  “Fine with me.”

  He lit a cigarette, then leaned back and put his feet on my desk. “We got some messages from home this morning,” he said.

  “Word from on high?”

  “Uh-huh. Phil will brief you when he gets here. Right now he’s making himself dispensable. The right crates have to go on the right trucks, and the labels with “This Side Up’ have to face up, and he seems to think none of this will come about unless he hangs in there. Funny guy—”

  “With Baldy in command, I can understand his logic.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The apes who haul things around seem competent, no matter who’s in command.” He flicked ashes on my floor. “The Texas truck was loaded first, and that was the important one, so I don’t see why he’s still there. He’ll be along any minute. Looked for you yesterday, incidentally.”

  “Oh?”

  “At your motel. We found a fellow named Carr, a light colonel who talks a fair game of bridge. Thought you might make a fourth. I think you said the other day that you play?”

  “I’m rusty. I’ve been away from it five years.”

  “You didn’t get a bridge game in Brazil?”

  “The only bridge I ever saw was one we kept building and somebody kept blowing up. I wore out a deck of cards playing solitaire, but that was about the extent of it.”

  “It would all come back to you.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you weren’t at your room, so the point never came up. What did you do, have yourself a sightseeing tour of beautiful South Dakota?”

  “Something like that.” I wondered if this was maybe a little too casual to be true. “Practiced my snow driving,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  Far too casual. “And did a little homework in the process,” I admitted. “I thought it might not be a bad idea to check the roads south of here. I still don’t know how I fit into the picture on this operation, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get some idea of the terrain. Just in case the office decides to put me on active duty.”

  His face changed ever so slightly, just enough to tell me I’d made the right answer. Then he started to tell me something about Carr and his crazy wife, and told me just enough so that I had the feeling it was Col. Carr’s wife who had helped me break Rule #4. That was fine, it would give me an excuse to avoid future bridge games.

  “A really strange gal,” he was saying. “I got the impression …” But I didn’t find out what impression he had gotten, because then the door opened and Bourke came in. He looked at O’Gara, and O’Gara nodded, and Bourke closed the door and found his way into a chair. The three of us talked about how cold it was, and they did a routine on the practice of locating army posts in uninhabitable areas. Their timing was good enough for me to suspect this was a bit they had refined over the years.

  “All loaded,” Bourke said eventually. “Larry tell you about it, Dick?”

  “Just that the bucks will stay there until they’re ready to roll them.”

  “Uh-huh. Your truck is number two, incidentally.”

  “I already told him,” Larry said.

  “Told me what?”

  “That the Texas truck is second. Come off it. Don’t be cute, or haven’t they told you? My spies say you got a telegram today.”

  “I did, but this is the first I’ve heard of Texas.”

  He looked at me appraisingly. “What are your orders, exactly?”

  “Hardly anything specific so far. Just stay on the scene and keep an eye on the departure of the shipment.”

  “You weren’t told to take an interest in any particular truck?”

  “No. Not yet, at least. Why?”

  They looked at each other. Then Larry said, “I don’t see why you’d be cagy, so all I can guess is that our team’s a day ahead of you on this one. It’s about time. I think I’ll declare a military victory.”

  “I don’t—”

  “On the other hand, maybe they don’t want to tell you until the last minute, or you’ll be mad at getting sent here.”

  “I’m that already. They say you get used to the cold, but they say that about hanging, too. What the hell are you talking about, Larry?”

  He lit another cigarette. “There’s supposed to be a play made for one of the trucks,” he said finally. “The usual sort of scuttlebutt. According to what we’ve got, a group of super-patriots want to take possession of the armaments so that they’ll be able to prevent the Russians from sending a gunboat up the Rio Grande. You know the drift. Some of those Texas left-wingers—”

  “Right-wingers,” Bourke said.

  “Did I say left? I meant right. The Sons of ’76 or ’69 or some such number. A paramilitary group. Listen, you can save me a lot of excess words if you already know all this.”

  “I’ve heard of the group but I don’t know anything about them fitting into this operation.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Good enough. The word is that they’re based in Texas, and they plan to make an ambush a
ttempt on the truck heading for Amarillo. You know one of the trucks is going to Amarillo?”

  “To be honest, all I knew was Texas.”

  “Well, the precise destination is Amarillo. These jokers are supposed to have an intercept scheduled somewhere between the moment we ship the goods and the moment they arrive there. Which means, of course, that they’ll hit it somewhere in Texas. Amarillo’s less than a hundred miles from the Oklahoma line, so they won’t have much room to work in.”

  “Unless they hit it in Oklahoma,” Bourke said.

  “Which wouldn’t make sense. They don’t want to cross a state line.”

  “If they’re crazy enough to do it, what difference does a state line make?” O’Gara laughed. “Either way it sounds like a load of shit, but nowadays any load of shit with Texas in it seems to inspire belief. Anyway, Dick, that’s where you come into the picture.”

  “In Texas?” I didn’t honestly have to pretend to be confused. I was confused.

  “Texas is where the rest of your buddies are. You, lucky man, got sent here to guard the North Pole.”

  “What Larry’s getting at,” Phil said, “is that evidently the Sons of ’69—”

  “I think it’s ’76, actually—”

  “Whatever they are, these Sons of Something must be one of the groups of clowns on your list. Though usually the Bureau gets them, don’t they?”

  It seemed time for me to say something. “We keep an eye on certain crackpot groups,” I said. “Insofar as they have foreign contacts or impinge on foreign policy—”

  “Uh-huh. Well, that’s the drift, then. Getting the goods to Amarillo is a military job, and we’re handling it. But making sure that the Sons don’t get their hands on them is evidently an Agency job as well, and a team of your gang is supposed to be on the spot in Texas already. We’re arranging the route to minimize the danger of an ambush once the Texas border is crossed. And you’re here to keep your eyes open and freeze your balls off, and if we weren’t stuck here too, Dick, I might go so far as to feel sorry for you.”