Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (10 page)

           
"I can't tell yet."

           
The first car stopped at the gate. A
man opened the front door and hurried forward to deal with the padlock. Then
the rear door of the big old sedan opened. Herbert Leonard stepped out.

           
The headlights of the car behind him
illuminated him clearly. He'd gained a little weight in the years since I'd
seen him last, but he'd never been exactly slender: a chunky, solid man with a
rather handsome red face and that dramatic, carefully combed white hair.

           
He turned to speak to someone
remaining in the car, who leaned forward to answer. The interior lights showed
me the face of a woman in her sixties, round and a little wrinkled like an
autumn apple, framed by carefully waved blue-gray hair. I got an impression of
sharp bright eyes behind the round, metal-rimmed glasses, but my binoculars weren't
powerful enough to tell me the color. The body seemed plump and matronly,
wrapped in a dark coat against the chill of the air.

           
"Do you see her, Eric? Do you
recognize her?"

           
I said, "I recognize her."

           
"Then let's get the hell out of
here. I need a bath and ten hours' sleep."

           
"Wait till they're gone."

           
Herbert Leonard bowed over the
distant woman's outstretched hand. He turned away and walked to the next car, a
newer Cadillac, and got in. The car began to turn around. Obviously, he was
returning to the ranch, having done his duty as host by escorting his eminent
female guest off the premises. The older sedan started up and drove through the
gate and on down the valley out of sight. A lone man, after locking the gate,
ran to the waiting jeep and was taken aboard. The two remaining vehicles headed
back into the hills, and the valley was empty once more...

           
Some three hours later, towards
dawn, we pulled into a motel with an all-night office, on the outskirts of
Phoenix
, a hundred and twenty-odd miles to the
north. I registered as Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Helm and daughter, took the key,
and drove to the unit that had been assigned to us.

           
"Go on in," I said,
passing the key to Lorna. "I'll bring the luggage after I've parked the
boat."

           
There was no space large enough for
both car and trailer, so I backed the boat into a stall, disconnected it, and
put the station wagon into the space beside it. Then I got my suitcase and
Martha's rucksack and locked up. The door of the room had been left ajar for me.
I nudged it open with my foot, since my hands were full, and stepped inside and
stopped, looking at the tableau presented by the two women: the younger backed
against one of the big beds, the older holding a short-barreled revolver.

           
"Take it easy, Lorna," I
said.

           
"I had to make sure she wasn't
armed. Anyway, I don't work with people I can't trust."

           
"You must lead a hell of a
lonely life," I said. "Anyway, nobody's asking you to work with her.
That's my chore. Now put that damn gun away before it goes off and lands us all
in trouble."

           
"My gun doesn't go off until I
want it to go off. And nobody, particularly no man, tells me-"

           
"Oh, shut up and have a
drink," I said, bending over my suitcase to open it. "Leave the kid
alone. If you'd just use your eyes instead of waving that pistol around, all
your questions would be answered." I straightened up with a bottle in my
hand, and winked encouragingly at Martha, who'd sunk down onto the bed, sitting
very still, watching the revolver. I set the bottle on the dresser, started
stripping some glasses of their paper
nighties
, and
said, "For Christ's sake, Lorna, take a look at the girl before you blow
your stack. Obviously she's no trained agent, ours or anybody else's. I had to
let you know that out there, in my oblique fashion, so you wouldn't be counting
on her if we got into a bind."

           
"Then who is she and what's she
doing here?"

           
I said, "She's playing with
code names and passwords, but she can't control her high-principled indignation
when reality doesn't match the pretty dream she's conned herself into
believing: of a world in which everything lives and nothing dies. Yet, naïve
though she is, the old gray fox in
Washington
trusts her enough to send her to me with
vital information. Why? Can't you figure it out, Lorna? Where have you seen
those bushy dark eyebrows before? Of course, they show up better against gray
hair." I drew a long breath. "In case you need another clue, she says
her real name is Martha Borden. Does that mean anything to you, or aren't you
as nosy as I am?"

           
Lorna stared at me for a long
moment, and threw a sharp glance towards the girl. Then the snub-nosed weapon
disappeared inside the khaki shirt.

           
"Borden! You mean he sent his
daughter?”

           
At this hour of the morning, there
wasn't much traffic to be heard outside, and no one inside the room broke the
silence for several seconds. It was the first opportunity I'd had to examine in
good light the female agent I'd just rescued. I was a little disappointed.
Martha had described her as handsome, but while striking in an intense,
hawk-like way, she didn't attract me much: a lean and leathery lady with a
rather thin and bony face turned reddish brown by recent sunburn.

           
Her khaki pants were grimy and torn
at one knee, and her khaki shirt was grimy and lacked a button-not the
strategic top button that seductive movie females always manage to misplace in
times of stress, but one lower down.

           
I reminded myself that after hiding
out two days and nights on the
Arizona
desert, she could hardly be expected to be
a flower of fashion, and in fairness I should reserve judgment.

           
However, my initial reaction wasn't
favorable. Of course, I may have been prejudiced by her domineering manner.

           
"Mr. Helm? Matt?" It was
the girl sitting on the bed. Lorna and I turned to look at her sharply. She
flushed, disconcerted by our sudden attention. "I... . I don't
understand."

           
"What don't you
understand?"

           
"Daddy said that you didn't
know . . . that nobody knew...”

           
It seemed odd to hear Mac referred
to in that casually familiar way. I said, "Your dad isn't that stupid.
What he probably told you was that nobody was supposed to know his real name.

           
But I doubt that a man smart enough
to manage a menagerie of snoops like us would ever kid himself that he could
prevent them from doing a little snooping on their own time, As a matter of
fact, I learned his name kind of by accident. One day, several years ago, I saw
a car I had reason to believe was his personal transportation, parked in
downtown
Washington
. He'd used it a few months earlier to send
me help when I needed it in a hurry. it was a Jaguar sedan with a
radiotelephone installation, a little too expensive and conspicuous a vehicle
to be kept around for the use of ordinary agents, but fast, which 1 guess was
why he'd risked lending it out in this particular emergency. Anyway, I couldn't
resist waiting around to see if I'd guessed right. After a while, Mac walked
up, got into the Jag, and drove off. I tailed him to a house in
Chevy Chase
.

           
The rest was just a matter of basic
research: Arthur M. Borden, respectable civil servant, exact field of
employment unspecified, with a wife and one child, female."

           
There was a little silence, then
Martha said, "My mother died two years ago."

           
"I'm sorry."

           
Lorna ended another awkward pause by
saying briskly, "Well, I was checking old civil service records on another
matter entirely when I came across a handwriting that looked familiar. The
signature was A.
McGillivray
Borden, and there were
papers on file-interoffice memoranda and such-signed
McGillivray
Borden, or simply Mac Borden. Apparently he disliked the name Arthur in his
younger days. That was long before he got into this particular line of
government work, before World War II."

           
Martha Borden licked her lips.
"It would seem . . . it would seem that grown men and women would have
better things to do than sneak around prying in matters that are none of their
business!"

           
I said, "Hell, we work for the
guy. We put our lives on the line when he says 'put.' Anything about him is our
business. If he wants to be anonymous around the office, fine, none of us is
going to blab what he's found out, but if a time ever comes when a little
additional information is needed, we've got it. And I think he knows we've got
it."

           
"Why would you expect to need
information like that?"

           
I said, "I already have needed
it, and so have you. if I hadn't recognized the name, and looked at you a
little harder, and realized who you really were, you'd have been in a tough
spot once I came to the conclusion that, with your attitude, you couldn't
possibly be any kind of fledgling agent working for Mac in any capacity. And
I'm willing to bet he was counting on that when he told you to use your real
name."

           
After a moment, Lorna spoke
abruptly. "That bottle does not have to be brought up to body temperature,
Mr. Helm. It's not as if it were rare old brandy."

           
I'd forgotten the whiskey bottle I'd
picked up once more but had not used. "Sorry," I said, pouring a
drink and handing it to her.

           
She said, as if there had been no
irrelevant interruption, "There is also the consideration that your father
is not supernatural, Miss Borden. We respect him, but we do not attribute
unearthly powers to him. Specifically, we do not consider him murder-proof or
kidnap-proof."

           
"What do you mean?"

           
"There are people all over the
world who have reason not to like him very much," Lorna said. "He
could be shot down in the street today or turn up missing tomorrow. In either
case, there would be decisions for us to make. If he were killed, we might want
to avenge him. If he were to disappear, we'd certainly want to find him. In
either eventuality, we'd need a better starting point than a three-letter
nickname."

           
"Well, Daddy hasn't died or
vanished yet, thank God," Martha said. "He was still answering his
phone this afternoon-I guess that's yesterday afternoon now. Matt talked with
him. But, as a matter of fact, he does seem to be expecting trouble, serious
trouble."

           
"What kind of trouble?"
Lorna asked.

           
"I don't really know. He didn't
say. But if worse comes to worst, he's planning to do just as you say:
disappear, for a while at least."

           
"That figures," I said.
"He's a sitting duck as long as he stays in
Washington
. If
Herbie
Leonard feels secure enough to take over the ranch by force and send the
extermination squads after individual agents like me, he's not going to
hesitate to try for the head man when he figures the time is right.
"Whiskey?"

           
Martha frowned. "What?"

           
"Do you want a drink?"

           
"Oh. Oh, no, thanks.. . . Well,
all right, just a little one. Matt, what's happening? What's it all
about?"

           
I handed her a glass, lightly
loaded. "I was hoping you could tell me."

           
She shook her head. "No, Daddy
kept saying that the less I knew the better, except for the names I had to
memorize for you. He said he was giving you enough information so you could
figure it out, as long as I was sure to tell you the code was double
negative."

           
I saw Lorna check a slight start and
glance my way. I nodded minutely and spoke to the younger woman:

           
"Okay, you've told me. Let's
try to work it out from what we know. There's obviously a lot of political
power involved. Somebody wants something big and is going to great lengths to
get it. Well, we know what Senator Love wants: she wants her mail delivered to
a certain address on
Pennsylvania Avenue
. In a Latin-American country, she'd be
setting the stage for a coup
d'etat
by making sure of
the army. Here in the
US
where we don't change governments that way,
she seems to be going about it a little differently. She's apparently making
sure of the nation's intelligence services well before election time. How she
plans to use
Herbie
Leonard and his newly conquered
undercover empire remains to be seen, but obviously her first concern, and his,
is to make certain he's actually in solid control. That means eliminating any
oddball organizations that might not go along with the big takeover, like Mac's
Murderous Mavericks and their notoriously independent chief."

           
Lorna frowned, sipping her drink.
"I'm rather surprised they haven't struck at Mac already."

           
"Maybe they have," I said.

           
"That's, silly!" Martha
protested quickly. "He sounded perfectly all right when we . . . when you
talked with him, Matt. A little tired, but otherwise all right."

           
"Maybe that's what got him
tired, ducking knives and bombs and bullets," I said, and went on before
the girl could speak again: "Look, Mac's been taking care of himself for a
long time. I suppose he can be hit-anybody can-but it'll take more than a
white-haired
Washington
glamour boy to do it. Leonard is ambitious and he may even be smart in
his own way, but his genius, if any, is political, not homicidal. Hell, he's
tried for me twice, or his boys have, and I'm still here. I suspect Mr. Leonard
is discovering the hard way that good men in this particular line of endeavor
are hard to find. Where's he going to recruit the necessary talent? He can't
afford to deal with the syndicate, that would be political suicide, and there's
only one government agency that really specializes in this type of work-and
that's the one he's trying to eliminate."

           
Martha said sharply, "This type
of dirty work, you mean!"

           
I grinned. "That's our girl.
Keep after us. Maybe someday we'll straighten up and fly right."

           
"But it's . . . it's horrible!
These times, when civilization has at last turned the corner away from war and
violence, to think that a government organization run by my own father. She ran
out of breath and stopped.

           
I looked at Lorna. "What times do
you think the kid is talking about? Have you seen us turning any corners
lately, Miss Holt?" I used the cover name I'd been told about.

           
"Mrs. Holt, if you please, but
you may call me Helen," Lorna said graciously. "Well, the body count
in
Vietnam
was down just a little in the last newspaper I read at the ranch. And
those people in the
Middle
East
weren't
killing each other much on that particular day. And the police hadn't shot or
beat up any blacks or students within the previous few hours; and only one
policeman had got killed that I noticed. Maybe things did seem just a little
better, but I wouldn't say we'd actually turned a sharp and decisive corner,
no."

           
Something she'd said screamed for
attention. I frowned, realized what it was, and asked,

           
"The cop you said got shot.
Where did it happen?"

           
"He wasn't really a cop, just a
sheriff's deputy. And I didn't say he was shot. Actually, he was garroted,
strangled to death. In
Fort Adams
,
Oklahoma
. That's where they had those student riots
recently, I believe. Apparently somebody's been giving extracurricular courses
in how to use the old piano-wire noose. Why?"

           
I hesitated, and shook my head.
"Never mind."

           
Martha, who'd been trying to speak,
broke in hotly:

           
"You're so terribly, terribly
amusing, both of you! It's very easy to make fun of the little girl, isn't it?
The little girl who has the naïve and romantic notion that human life is
something valuable and . . . and kind of sacred. . .”

           
I started to say something and
checked myself. Lorna made an odd little sound in her throat and turned to the
dresser and splashed more whiskey into her glass. She stood there for a moment
regarding her sunburned features in the mirror, without affection. She spoke
without turning her head.

           
"Do they all live in a dream
world, Helm?" she asked softly. "Don't any of them ever wake
up?"

           
I didn't say anything. Martha
stirred angrily and blurted, "I don't want to wake up! Not if being awake
will make me like you!"