Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14

by The Intriguers (v1. 1)

  Chapter V

  In the morning, I got over to the marina about nine to find that I'd missed all the excitement-which was exactly what I'd hoped for and why I'd taken my time packing and eating. I'd figured that with daylight and a calm sea something might be found, and I preferred not to be around when it was.

  Now I learned that an early-rising fisherman, leaving the harbor at dawn, had spotted an object washed up on one of the guano-covered rocks off the entrance, and had swung over to investigate. He'd come racing back to report a dead man. The police had brought in the body, sent it into Guaymas, and interrogated its discoverer at considerable length. A khaki-clad officer was waiting to talk with me, although I wasn't considered particularly important. All I'd found was a boat.

  Once again, I told where I'd found it, and how I'd done my best to search for the owner in spite of the lousy weather conditions. I was thanked for my trouble and instructed to go on about my business, so I drove over to the trailer parked in the nearby lot, hitched it onto the station wagon, and backed it down the launching ramp into the water. Then I got my boat and ran it over there. With the help of a couple of dockside characters, who earned a US buck apiece for their labors, I eventually got it onto the trailer. The main trouble, I guess, was that I wasn't used to cranking boats onto trailers; but there was also the problem caused by the complicated design of the little craft's bottom: a puzzle of grooves, ridges, and sponsons. You had to get her placed exactly right or the various rollers and supports just wouldn't fit.

  After lashing things down, I drove over to the nearby freshwater hose. I was rinsing the salt off the motor when Martha Borden appeared from the direction of the trailer court, dressed as she had been the night before, except that she was barefooted. Apparently the ragged sneakers had been a concession to the formality of the Posada San Carlos. She was carrying a bulging rucksack and a pair of big Japanese binoculars-at least I figured they were Japanese from the beat-up, cardboard-looking case. They've licked the problem of optical glass over there, but they still have a lot to learn about leather.

  I said, "Well, they found him, just about where you guessed he'd wind up. He must have drifted a little more slowly than you figured, that's all."

  She looked at me for a moment and licked her unpainted lips. "Dead?"

  "Very."

  "And it doesn't bother you a bit?"

  I said, "Sure, it bothers me. I get the shakes every time I think about how it could have been me."

  "Damn you," she said. "Where do you want me to put this junk?"

  "You're coming with me?"

  "You know I am."

  I guess I had known it, at that. "Toss your gear in the back of the station wagon," I said.

  "Then, if you want to be helpful, you can climb up into the boat-use the trailer fender for a step-amid grab this hose and rinse things oil a bit, particularly the aluminum trim, so it won't corrode. I was going to have a professional job done, but it's getting late and we'd better not waste the time. You'll find a sponge up forward. I've got to go up to the office and take care of the bill."

  Twenty minutes later we were on our way, with the official blessings of the marina lady and the police. The paved two-lane road followed the coast for a few miles to an intersection, where a right turn would have taken us to Guaymas and points south. I turned left instead, towards Hermosillo, Nogales, and the US border.

  There's not much between Guaymas and Hermosillo, and for that matter there's only a little more between Hermosillo and Nogales. As we gathered speed across the empty, semi-desert landscape, the girl beside me squirmed a bit, tugged at her pants, and adjusted her jersey over her unconfined breasts in a gingerly sort of way: she'd managed to get herself pretty wet, hosing down the boat. Not that it mattered.' In that climate she'd be dry shortly, and it wasn't as if she had a pair of sharply creased slacks to worry about, or a crisply ironed blouse, or an expensive, nicely waved hairdo. I suppose in a way it was a relief to get away from such conventional concerns.

  "Too much air-conditioning?" I asked politely.

  "No, it feels good." She hesitated. "I've got a list for you, you know."

  "I figured you had something. Where is it?"

  "It's memorized. He didn't want me carrying anything on paper. That's why I had to come along."

  "Sure," I said. "When do I get a reading?"

  "I can tell you the first name now. There's a woman called Lorna staying at the ranch temporarily. Ostensibly she's resting up between assignments; actually she's there for protection, waiting for word from you."

  "And just what am I supposed to do with the lady once I've got her?"

  "I don't know," Martha said. "That will be up to you, after you've talked with Washington."

  I made a face. "God, aren't we mysterious! Lorna. She's a tough one, I've heard. Won't take orders from any man. Except Mac."

  "Why should she? Why should a woman have to work under a man if she's as good as a man?"

  I said, "Well, it's the customary reproductive position, but I understand there are others."

  Martha gave me a withering glance. "Funny!"

  I grinned. "There you sit, wearing a man's zip-up-the-front pants and a man's hairdo, giving me that poor-downtrodden-women line. Just what do you think would happen to me if I started wandering around the countryside in a woman's skirt with my hair clear down my back? What would happen to any man who tried it? You know damn well we'd be locked up as transvestite perverts so fast it would make your head swim. Hell, we poor men can't let our hair grow even a little without half the cops in the country trying to bash in our heads, but you ladies can cut it all off any time you feel like it and nobody bats an eye. Which sex was it you said was being discriminated against?" She gave me another scorching look, obviously unimpressed by my argument. Well, maybe it wasn't much of an argument. I asked, "What's Lorna's real name?"

  "I don't know if it's her real name or not, but she's calling herself Helen Holt."

  "And judging by her reputation, I don't guess we'll get to call her Nellie for short," I said wryly. "What does she look like?"

  "About my height, five-eight, but thinner, say one-twenty. About thirty. She's supposed to be kind of handsome, if you like the lean and bony type. Brown hair, greenish eyes." Martha glanced at me sideways. "You really don't know? You're not just testing me again?"

  "That's right," I said. "We're normally kept apart as much as possible, and told as little as possible about each other. That way nobody betrays anybody."

  I kept the heavy rig rolling northwards as fast as the narrow highway permitted. It got a little tricky meeting or passing the big Mexican trucks, mostly christened in the local fashion.

  One trucker with a literary turn of mind had named his big diesel tractor Moby Dick; another had painted Adios Amor across his massive front bumper, presumably after a traumatic affair of the heart. We stopped for lunch in Hermosillo and reached the border early in the afternoon.

  Here, everything came to a stop while our friendly customs people welcomed us back to our native land with an interminable search of both the station wagon and the boat. At last, they even got a dog and boosted him into the boat-all eighty pounds of him-to sniff out whatever they might have overlooked, which turned out to be nothing at all. The dog looked as if he didn't appreciate the vital importance of his task and would rather have been sleeping in the sun or chasing rabbits. Well, dogs have a lot of sense.

  As we drove away from there, I glanced at my watch. It read a few minutes after three-thirty. I passed up three public telephones and settled for the fourth, at a filling station where I also took the opportunity to tank up with US gas.

  "Here I go," I said to the girl.

  "Remember, call the office, not the special number."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said. "I may be senior as hell, but my memory isn't failing me quite yet."

  At that, it took me a second or two, once I was in the booth, to remember the office number.

  Agents of my strat
ospheric seniority don't use it very often. We generally call Mac direct when we need instructions. I finally dredged the figures out of the sludge at the bottom of my mind, gave them to the operator, and fed enough coins into the machine to play the right music for her. Normally, I'd have reversed the charges, but in this case I had a hunch it was better not to announce who was calling. Mac had wanted to demonstrate something, and I figured I had better find out what it was before I started tossing around names and identifications.

  I stood there waiting for the circuits to operate, and watching the girl get out of the car and head for the restroom. Suddenly a voice was speaking in my ear, a female voice with a professional telephone-girl lilt.

  "Federal Information Center," the voice said. I said nothing for a moment, and the girl spoke a little less liltingly, almost sharply: "Federal Information Center!"

  I hung up slowly. I needed a moment to digest what I'd just heard.

  Chapter VI

  Maybe you're accustomed to calling a government office and being greeted with a fancy organizational name. I'm not. Ours isn't that kind of an office and we have no name. At least we hadn't the last time I called Washington, less than a month ago.

  Obviously, I'd just learned what Mac had wanted me to learn, or part of it. There had been some kind of a shakeup, the gobbledygook boys and girls had taken over, and we were now something called the Federal Information Center, or a branch thereof. Well, such things happen in Washington. To learn the full extent of the disaster, I drew a long breath and called the same number again. I got a different girl, but she'd learned her lilt at the same school.

  "Federal Information Center."

  I decided to try the head-on approach and see what happened. "Give me Mac," I said.

  "Mac? I'm sorry, sir, without the full name I don't think I can. . . . Oh, yes, of course! You want the Bureau of Public Safety. I'll connect you." I waited. Presently another woman's voice came on the line. This was a severe, businesslike, liltless voice. "Bureau of Public Safety, Miss Dodds. With whom did you wish to speak, please?"

  I didn't know any Miss Dodds. "Gimme Mac," I said crudely, since that seemed to be the password.

  "Who's calling, please?"

  "Somebody who wants Mac," I said.

  "Really, sir-" She broke off. There was a brief pause; and her voice came again. "I'm sorry, sir. You did say Mac, didn't you?"

  "I did."

  "Yes, of course. I'll see if I can reach him on the temporary line,. His office is still in the old building for the time being, and we haven't been able to make very satisfactory arrangements. You know what telephone service is these days. Please hold."

  Normally, calling the office in the old building on a side street where nobody'd expect a government office to be, I'd have got a girl who simply said hello, unless there was a special message for a particular agent who was expected to have to call from a bugged phone or a roomful of people. In that case the girl might tell me I'd reached the residence of Mrs. Amos Aardvark, say, or the home of Mr. Zachariah Xerxes. If the coded message was for me, I'd apologize for dialing the wrong number and hang up. If it wasn't for me, I'd ignore it, say an identifying word or two, and ask to be put through to Godalmighty, the Big Cheese, the Mother Superior, or whatever other facetious name I chose to employ. The whole transaction would generally take considerably less than ten seconds. Obviously, things had changed.

  There was a clacking in the phone, and Miss Dodds' prim voice came again. "Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. I'm trying to reach him for you. We've been having some trouble with that connection. It's temporary, you know."

  "So you said," I said. "Keep plugging. That's a joke."

  "Yes, sir. Ha-ha.. . here we are now. Go ahead, sir."

  The line she'd got me was fairly noisy, but the voice speaking from the other end, while slightly weak, was familiar and reassuring after all the abnormal yak-yak. It spoke three words, mandatory secret-agent-type stuff. I spoke two words in return.

  "Eric?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. "What the hell's going on in that madhouse city in the Potomac swamps, anyway? The Bureau of Public Safety, for Christ's sake! Wasn't that who chopped off all those heads in the French Revolution?"

  "I believe you're thinking of the Committee of Public Safety, Eric."

  "Bureau, committee, what's the difference?"

  Mac's distant voice said deliberately, "What's going on is, quote, a streamlined reorganization of all governmental intelligence functions, unquote."

  I said, "Again? If I remember rightly, a guy tried to pull the same thing a few years back, only he knew so little about intelligence operations that he couldn't even run his own outfit without getting a bunch of communist agents planted on him, so the big deal fell through. . . .Leonard. That was his name. Herbert Leonard."

  "You have the right man, Eric. Mr. Leonard is apparently a persistent individual and a skillful politician; and this time he seems to have powerful backing."

  "So it's serious, sir?"

  "Quite serious. We are going to have to be very circumspect for a while. Mr. Leonard has already given clear indications that he doesn't like us very much. Just a minute. I have another call." I waited until his voice spoke again in my ear. "Eric? What were we talking about?"

  "About the way Mr. Leonard doesn't like us, presumably because of the way we helped to lower the boom on him last time. Maybe he's afraid we'll do it again."

  "Maybe. What kind of a vacation did you have, Eric?"

  "Lousy, sir," I said. "My girl Friday turned out to be a missionary at heart, and somebody tried to shoot me."

  "Shoot you? What happened?"

  "He missed. Then, unfortunately, he kind of drowned," I said. "They fished him out of San Carlos Bay this morning. His death was strictly accidental, of course."

  "Of course. Do you have any clue as to his motive?"

  "No, sir. We never really got on speaking terms."

  "I see. Well, there are a number of people employed by other nations who have reason not to be particularly fond of you."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I don't want to seem to dismiss an attempt on your life lightly, but there are reasons why I'm rather disinterested in would-be murderers at the moment-as long as they are safely dead, of course. We have trouble inside our own ranks. As you'll gather, it couldn't have come at a worse time."

  "No, sir. What's the problem?"

  "To put it bluntly, one of our people has gone a bit berserk."

  "It's an occupational hazard, sir."

  "Particularly among agents with families, it seems. Whenever anything happens to their spouses or offspring, their immediate reaction is to employ their training amid experience for purposes of vengeance. It's always very awkward, but particularly right now."

  "Yes, sir. Who's the current berserker? Do I know him?"

  "You did a job with him in Cuba. Agent Carl."

  "A big blond guy. Sure, I remember him. What's up with Carl?"

  "Let's just say that he received some rather bad news concerning a member of his family.

  He called immediately afterwards to say that he was resigning to take care of some private business. He said not to send anyone to try to stop him, because anybody who was sent just wouldn't come back." I couldn't help a wry laugh. Mac heard me, two-thirds of a continent away. He spoke in a severe tone of voice: "You seem to find that amusing, Erie. Why?"

  "Only because I've used the same line myself upon occasion, as you may remember, sir." I made a face at the phone. "But you are sending somebody after Carl, in spite of his warning."

  "Yes. You."

  "Thanks a whole lot, sir."

  "He is presently in Fort Adams, Oklahoma, or somewhere nearby. We don't have his exact address. You'll contact him and take whatever steps necessary to prevent him from involving us in a scandal that could destroy us. I repeat, whatever steps are necessary. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. "You always do, sir. But if Carl has resigned, offic
ially, how do his actions reflect on us?"

  "Don't be naïve, Eric. Mr. Leonard is just waiting for an excuse to crack down on us. Do you think he'll let a little thing like a resignation stand in his way?"

  "It's a point," I admitted. "Well, you'd better give me Carl's current description. These days of long hair and beards I might not recognize him. That Cuba assignment was a long time ago.

  Oh, and if it isn't too confidential, you might tell me precisely what the news was that sent him off his trolley. . .

  The girl was back in the station wagon when I returned to it. I signed the charge slip for the gasoline and got behind the wheel. We didn't speak until we were out of Nogales, heading up the four-lane freeway towards Tucson. It's a funny thing, much as I enjoy Mexico, and much as I detest that interminable border hassle, I always feel a sense of relief and relaxation when I'm back in the US with American gas in the tank.

  "Well?" Martha said at last.

  "What do you know about something called the Federal Information Center?"

  "Just what everybody knows," she said. "FINC is the brainchild of a red-faced, white-haired, smoothie political type named Leonard, who's mounted a real slick takeover operation with powerful political support."

  "What did you call it?"

  She laughed. "Officially, it's abbreviated FTC, but everybody calls it FINC. What else would you call a national collection of snoops and spooks?" After a moment, she glanced at me.

  "Did you talk to . . . him? What did he say?"

  I reported my conversation with Mac, practically verbatim, and said, "Apparently, we are now the Bureau of Public Safety, operating under said FINC."

  "Well, we've got lots of company, Mr. Helm. The CIA's latest overseas booboo and J.

  Edgar's recent death made it relatively easy for Herbert Leonard. Obviously, it was time for a change, or Congress thought it was, and he's it. The whole ball of wax. All the nation's intelligence agencies wrapped up in one glorious unified package. You must have read about it."