by Troy Conway
My wristwatch informed me it was time to go. I strapped on the shoulder holster and thrust the Luger into it. I told myself glumly that even if my scheme did work, how was HECATE going to react to my failure? HECATE might even send out a radio command for me to kill myself.
I was gambling that they would not know.
HECATE would wonder why I had failed. HECATE would want to learn the answer to that, and so they would keep me alive, if only to tell them.
I hoped.
I dismantled the spiral disc and erased the message on the tape. I stored both these objects in my valise, which I locked. It was past eleven thirty. I would have to act fast if I was goiing to reach the Chateau Frontenac by noon, when Henri Planget was due to emerge from a conference.
I hailed a taxi at the corner and gave the driver instructions to let me off at the Rue Pierre Charron, two blocks away from the Chateau Frontenac. I was counting on the fact that the driver would never connect me with the assassination at that hotel, should it go so far, if he tied me in with a different destination.
I got out of the taxi, paid my fare with a good if not too liberal tip, and walked away. I went in the direction opposite that of the Chateau Frontenac, in case the driver should later be questioned by the flics.
Then I doubled back.
At five minutes to high noon, I was in a room overlooking the sidewalk just outside the hotel. The Luger was loose in my shoulder holster and my heart was hammering madly in my rib cage. I had signed the hotel register under an assumed name, I had paid my bill, since I had no luggage, telling the clerk I was so tired after an all night train ride that I must have sleep immediately.
My first act upon entering my room was to throw up the window and study the sidewalk. I had a good ten feet in which to put a bullet in Henri Planget’s head. If I were a dedicated HECATE agent, I could have acted in no better way.
I drew back behind a drape. The Luger was in my hand. My wristwatch read twelve noon.
Where was my victim?
I held my breath. Maybe something had detained him, maybe the news of what was to happen had leaked out. I was a sitting duck here for the police if they should come to question me.
Then I saw him. Henri Planget had been a military man before he became an NATO official. His back was very straight, his head was held high. He made a perfect target, walking slowly, savoring the crisp Parisian air.
The Luger lifted, steadied.
I had him framed in my sight. I could no more have missed him than I could have fallen down. I was sweating, seeing his head just beyond my gunsight. My trigger finger curled.
Was I going to shoot?
CHAPTER FIVE
Yes!
The electrode in my skull was sending out its orders. Kill Planget! Kill Planget! It was a voice within me, powering my muscles, making me unable to refuse. My lips writhed back, I forced my mind to cancel out that call—and could not.
Inexorably my finger tightened. The Luger trigger was cold to my flesh. Cold! In an instant the gun would be spitting lead.
Below me, Henri Planget walked on.
I could not move my trigger finger! It would go only so far, and then it became a bar of rigid steel. My mind reeled with relief; at the same time my entire body shuddered at the command that other part of my brain was sending out, that could not be obeyed.
Henri Planget got into the car. The car pulled away.
The command in my brain died out. I slumped against the window frame, shaking all over, attacked by an ague of agony. I had not committed murder! My autohypnotic act had taken over my subconscious mind; it had refused to let my conscious brain obey that call to kill.
I was limp with relief. I just leaned into the wood and closed my eyes, my arm falling to my side, weighted down by the automatic.
I drew several deep breaths. It had been a near thing, a damn near thing. Now all I had to do was face HECATE and deny that I had interfered with their radio transmitter. What kind of cock-and-bull story could I concoct that they would believe? I had no idea.
It was enough for me at this moment to know I was innocent of a man’s blood, that I was free—for a little while—to do what I wanted to do as a person, not as a flesh-and-blood automaton.
I lay down on the bed and tried to relax. There was really only one possibility open to me. I had to go to the Coxe Foundation office here in Paris and get them to put a new counter-transmitter into my body.
I waited four hours, then I got off the bed, left the hotel, caught a taxi at the corner and gave the driver a street address on the Rue Majory; 45 Rue Majory was where the Foundation had its Parisian headquarters behind the guise of a real estate office.
A tall man with wide shoulders and the look of a prizefighter asked me what properties I might be interested in. I told him I was a visitor to Paris, and that my name was T.X. Coxe. Since this is the name of him who began the Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation, the man blinked, smiled faintly, and bowed me to the rear of the agency.
His hand touched a section of the wall. An opening appeared as a large panel slid back. I stepped through into what seemed to be another office. A girl with long red hair smiled at me.
I murmured, “I need an operation. I’m working against HECATE.”
She got up and walked with a pronounced back and forth movement of her rump toward a closed door. She spoke into a concealed microphone. The door slid back and the girl turned to motion me forward.
“Mademoiselle Etampes will see you now.” She smiled.
To my surprise, there was a young woman behind the big oak desk toward which I advanced. In France, I suddenly remembered, there were such things as Coxewomen, so I tried to be as Continental as possible; I made a little bow and kissed the hand she extended.
“My, my. A regular cavalier,” she enthused. “You must be happy about something. Care to tell me?”
I told her the entire story.
When I was done, Yvette Etampes nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “Of course, they discovered the counter-stimulator in your body and removed it. We can put another one in quite easily, but will it escape their detection?”
“How about my tooth? I have a cavity that’s fairly large. All we really require is a pulsometer, anything that will emit enough of a signal to disturb the radio signals to the Hecate electrode. Something simple.”
She dimpled, “You make it sound so easy. Wait. Let me make a phone call to one of dental staff.”
I listened as she explained what she needed and waited as she listened in turn to the voice on the other end of the line. She covered the speaker section of the phone and looked at me.
“Can do, with ease,” she told me. “All that remains is to set the time and place.”
“As fast as possible. I’m on my getaway route, but I do have to report back to HECATE within a reasonable time limit.”
“Right now? I’ll drive you there.”
I nodded. She spoke a few more words, got to her feet and reached for her gloves and handbag. I was discovering that my sex restrictions were gone, because as she leaned ovsr, her blouse dipped away from her pert chest, giving me an excellent view of her white breasts and pert red nipples. My manhood became interested.
Well, that was a relief!
I thought about Margot Metayer and promised myself I would try to make amends to her if ever I got the chance again. I really did owe her a reward. Through her, I had found out I wasn’t in control of my bodily reactions. This meant that if she hadn’t tried to get me to lay her, I’d never have known I had to go through with the shooting of Henri Planget, and I’d have become an assassin.
Trailing my fellow Foundation agent down the hall, studying the jiggle of her buttocks in her tight linen dress, it was a distinct pleasure to find I was a man again, believe me. Yvette Etampes was a Coxewoman with whom I would love to become better acquainted.
Unfortunately, this was not in the stars.
She was all business as she gestured me to enter the little red Citroen
parked behind the real estate agency. The fact that she showed off her shapely nyloned legs getting behind the wheel and that she drove with her skirt bunched about her full upper thighs, apparently went unnoticed by her. Not until she braked into a curbstone and her red mouth twitched into a smile, did I realize she was teasing me.
“Come see me when your tooth is better,” she invited.
“I most certainly will,” I promised.
It was a promise I was not to keep. They had been expecting me in the dental office. A nurse whisked me past a couple of waiting patients into a small room fitted out with dental chair and drill. A man in a white uniform was waiting quietly.
He stuck his mirror in my mouth, nodding as I informed him that I had a cavity fully capable of containing a pulsometer, if it was small enough.
“We have just the thing. I’ll have to prepare it, however, in case HECATE takes X-rays of your mouth. We can’t have them discovering another one on you, now can we?”
I shivered at the thought. The dentist told me to stay where I was, that it would take time to embed the pulsometer in a lead casing.
I dozed for about an hour.
His touch on my arm woke me. He was quite happy, he had been able to fit a microscopic pulsometer into a tiny bit of lead. He would cover it with silver so that it seemed only a normal filling.
An hour later, I got out of the chair. It had not hurt, despite the drilling required. The dentist told me I would not notice the pulsations given off by the tiny gadget. Until I wanted to disobey the commands HECATE fed me, that is. Then I would be damn glad it was in my mouth.
He shook my hand. “Good Luck!”
I walked out onto the street. It was my duty to report to HECATE. I had to have a story to tell them. Maybe I could make it up on the drive back. I hailed a taxi, told the driver to take me to the Plaza-Athenee, where I had parked the scarlet Lamborghini Miura.
I fortified myself for the drive back to Dampierre with two martinis, a thick slice of entrecote, served medium rare, a Caesar salad, and three Pernods, in the hotel dining room. I took my time. I was in no hurry to face my employers. They would not be in a nice mood.
Nor would I, I reflected. I must appear to be bitterly distressed at not having carried out the task set me. My indignation must be far superior to their distrust. How could one be a good and competent secret agent, a killer, if one had not the proper tools?
Yes, this must be my approach.
I thought about it as I paid the bill, I ruminated over it as I slid into the Lamborghini Miura. I tossed it back and forth in my mind all the way along the road to Dampierre As I drove, my anger mounted.
I entered the hospital lobby like a hurricane, tossing my attache case (that held my Luger and its shoulder strap) onto a chair and shouting, “Fools! Fools! Has the world nothing but fools?”
A nurse hurried toward me, making shushing motions.
“Please, m’sieu. S’il vous plais! be quiet! We have sick people all about us.”
“I, too, am sick, nurse! I demand to see Doctor Roger-Viollet immediately!”
She nodded, giving me an odd look, then turned her back and marched ahead of me like a sergeant-major. She took me up a flight of stairs and to a dark wooden door. She knocked.
The door opened almost immediately. Doctor Cyrano Matelot stood glowering at me. “Please to come in,” he said stiffly.
I brushed past him, almost stiff-arming him out of the way. His look of surprise was grotesque. So, too, was that of Yves Roger-Viollet, sitting at his ease behind his doctorial desk.
“Fools! Imbeciles! Is this who serves HECATE?” I roared.
“We’re asking ourselves that very question,” snapped Matelot to one side of me. “You failed, Professor Damon. Hecate does not take kindly to failures.”
I pushed my face within an inch of his own. “Is this a trick? Arc you testing me, as you did in that maze? If you did—if that trip to Paris was just another of your researches as to my character—I consider myself insulted.”
They were stupefied. I had no way of knowing what they expected of me, perhaps they thought to see me cringe and fawn on them, begging forgiveness. If so, my attack was not only unexpected, it was a masterstroke of Machiavellian duplicity.
Roger-Viollet muttered, “What are you talking about?”
“The Luger, man—the silly, useless automatic you gave me.”
“Silly? Useless?” Matelot repeated.
I whirled on him. “Is a car any good without gasoline? Is a woman any good without a con? What good is a gun without bullets?”
Roger-Viollct rose to his feet, his face white. “Are you trying to excuse your failure by the falsehood that there were no bullets in the gun we gave you?”
I actually sneered, curling my lip like a villain in East Lynne. “Would I have failed to kill Planget if there had been bullets in the magazine?”
This was a facer. They stared at each other, then back at me. Roger-Viollet sat down slowly. He looked troubled, no longer angry.
Matelot muttered, “It could not be!”
Yves Roger-Viollet echoed, “It could not, indeed.”
“Farceurs,” I said angrily. “You pose and posture like wicked magicians, but your whole outfit is about as efficient as a worn-out shoe! It’s a disgrace to belong to it.” I added the insult supreme. “At least, when I belonged to the Coxemen, and when I was given a gun that was said to have been loaded—it was loaded. Pah!”
I turned my back on them and went to stand before an etching by Picasso. It was a good etching, it held my interest despite the fact that my spine crawled with worry-worms. Had I overacted? I hunched my shoulders as if to shrug off any thoughts of HECATE.
Roger-Viollet cleared his throat. “M’sieu le projesseur! Your attention, please. We at HECATE do not make mistakes.”
I stared at the etching as I said, “Correction! You would like to think that you make no mistakes. Actually you are all bunglers. Bunglers!”
Matelot said mildly, “It has never happened before.”
I turned on them. “It will not happen again—if you want me to go on serving your moon goddess! I am not used to failure. My record until now has been one of uninterrupted success. I will not have that record ruined.”
Roger-Viollet spread his hands below a pleasant smile. “We would not have it ruined either, Professor. When we heard that Henri Planget was en route to Brussels aboard a Sabena jet, we could not believe our ears. Naturally we assumed you had bungled.”
“You’d blame me? Just tell mc, how could I have bungled—if there’d been any bullets in that Luger? Just one was all there had to be. I had him in the sight like this.”
I held out my right arm stiffly, my fingers curled about an unseen gun-stock. My eye peered down an invisible barrel. It was an impressive performance.
Cyrano Matclot honored it by muttering, “There can be no other explanation! Yves, there cannot be. He must be telling the truth.”
Yves Roger-Viollet griimed wickedly. “We could ask you to take a lie detector test, but there is no need for that. You could not have disobeyed us. You could not! You did aim the way you so dramatically represent, Professor. You did not fire the gun. Why? You were being forced to fire it. Your body was compelled to obey that directive.
“The only sane explanation is—the gun was not loaded.”
“An inexcusable mistake—on somebody’s part,” I growled.
“Indeed, yes,” nodded Matelot. “I shall check back. Of course, whoever is guilty will lie, he or she will swear he or she loaded the magazine. We know better.” He turned his head to look down at Roger-Viollet. “Ought such a one be punished for negligence?”
“Not yet. But his actions will be studied. If he makes another such error, he will be removed.”
“Well? What about mc?” I demanded. “I demand my record be corrected to show no mistake on my part. I refuse to take the blame for the malpractice of some underling.”
Doctor Matelot moved to a
mahogany liquor cabinet. He poured three glasses of Napoleon brandy in big crystal snifters. He carried them to the desk, handed one to me, one to his fellow HECATE leader, and took one himself.
“To Professor Damon—on a job well done,” he smiled.
I allowed myself to be mollified. Besides, the brandy was excellent and I could not keep up my pose of injured feelings before its warmth. I sipped, I savored, I enjoyed. True Frenchmen, the doctors beamed at my obvious delight in their brandy.
“I should like another job as soon as possible,” I told them, when I set down the empty glass. “I want to prove to you that I am an accomplished agent, that I can carry out orders perfectly—when stupid mistakes do not handicap me.”
Roger-Viollet murmured, “We may have an assignment for you, Professor. One on which you can prove your boast of never having known a failure.”
“Good,” I snapped. “Let’s have it.”
“Oh, not so fast,” laughed Matelot. “Things like this take time to plan. You take it easy for a few days. Familiarize yourself with the grounds. Get to know your fellow HECATE-workers.”
It was good advice, I told myself. If I were ever to find a way to topple HECATE, I had to know its layout, its alarm systems, its secret traps and obstacles. This was as good a time as any to learn what I might expect if ever I got the chance to lead an attack on this stronghold.
I made my adieus. I found a blonde nurse down the hall and asked her to show me to my room. She giggled and stepped along beside me, chattering away, casually telling me she knew Claudette Marly, and that Claudette had mentioned me. It was a hint I could not overlook without making an enemy.
One of my duties was to get to know my fellow HECATE-workers, Doctor Matelot had said, so I made myself as charming as possible. When we stood aside to let three doctors pass, I urged my loins into the nurse’s soft buttocks. My manhood reacted as I have trained it to do. I heard her gasp and felt her sideways motion with the underside of a thigh as she took a rough kind of measurement. She gasped.
I whispered into her pink ear, “You’re almost too exciting.”
