Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (29 page)

           
"We don't know that all the
people listed-"

           
She sniffed impatiently. "Don't
quibble. You've checked on five of your key men, and all five are dead, if we
figure that Mr. Dunn in
Los Angeles
isn't very likely to be returning from his yacht trip." She
sighed. "It's really too bad. I had faith in you, Herbert. I counted on
you. I was warned that your track record in this field wasn't impressive, but
you talked a very good fight. You convinced me. Obviously, I was
mistaken."

           
"Mrs. Love-"

           
She ignored him, turning back to me.
"If you had to guess, Mr. Helm, how many other groups like yours would you
say your chief had operating around the country?"

           
I hesitated, then I shrugged,
winced, and said, "Hell, it doesn't matter now. It's all over except
sweeping up the pieces and dumping them into the trash can. If I had to guess,
ma'am, I'd say none."

           
She frowned dubiously. "Then
you think the total body count is only ten, assuming that all your agents
performed successfully."

           
Getting smart, I refrained from
shaking my head. "No, I didn't say that. You asked how many groups there
were like mine. I think there was only one group like mine, operating independently.
The list I was given pretty well covered the country, with the exception of a
limited but important area on the East Coast. I noticed the gap when I received
my instructions; and Leonard's man who died of botulism in
Washington
,
DC
was not on my list. I think that man and quite a few others-I have no
way of estimating how many-were taken care of by agents working directly under
my chief. I think Mac handled the critical East Coast area himself, leaving the
hinterlands to me and my group. I figure that's why he had Leonard decoyed out
of
Washington
, so he could have time to clean house
without interference."

           
"I see." Mrs. Love was
still frowning thoughtfully. "That would make, perhaps, twenty or thirty
human beings violently dead in one night. Do you feel no remorse, Mr.
Helm?"

           
"Do you, Mrs. Love?" I
asked boldly. "You're the one who set the machinery of violence in motion.
What did you expect when you started using men with guns, that nobody would
ever shoot back?"

           
She sighed. "Well, I must say,
I find it a little shocking. If I'd thought there was any chance our little
scheme would meet such direct and brutal resistance, I probably wouldn't. . . .
Well, the question is academic now, isn't it?" She was silent for a
moment, looking down at me; then she said, "Give my regards to the man you
call Mac, if you ever see him again. You realize, of course, that I can't do
anything for you here. The situation is out of my control."

           
As she said it, she let her eyes
touch, for an instant, the girl in the corner who had been bound and was now
unbound.

           
"Yes, ma'am," I said.

           
She turned on her heel. "I'll
want your pilot to take me back to civilization right away, Herbert. Oh, and
under the circumstances, I think I would like another man along, armed. How
about the young man beside him? I don't altogether trust Mr. Helm's assurances;
they were just a little too glib."

           
As she started down the stairs, or
ladder, with
Jernegan
and
Bostrom
in tow, she glanced back casually, and I saw one eye close in what could have
been construed as a wink. She was making certain that I was aware that, having
first untied my accomplice, she was now reducing the odds against me by as many
men as she could plausibly take with her. She wanted to be sure this was
credited to her account. A tough, smart, old biddy.

           
"Don't bother to see me to the
boat, Herbert," she said. "Just get on with your fun and games."

           
There were still too many men in the
room, but two of them-Martha's guard and the radio operator-were basically
non-combatant types, I hoped. At least they weren't, I hoped, the kind to die
loyally for lost causes. I also h9ped that Martha was ready and not hampered by
too many peaceful inhibitions after watching the terrible, brutal beating I'd
received. I also hoped the gadget I'd given her would work after being soaked
in swamp water. That was, 1 realized, a lot of hoping.

           
Leonard waited until the runabout
had pulled away and the sound of its motor had faded in the distance. I got up
as he came for me. He stared at me hard for a moment, his hands closing into
fists, and I thought we were going to have the sock-and-slap routine some more.
Then he wheeled abruptly.

           
"Give me that!" he
snapped, snatching the revolver from the hand of Martha's nameless guard.

           
"But, sir-"

           
Leonard ignored the protest, if
that's what it was. He came back towards me, deliberately, his knuckles white
with the tension of gripping the pistol. it was no way to hold a gun for
accuracy, but at that range he could hardly miss. There was a convincing look
of ferocity on his handsome face. Even pussycats get mad.

           
I circled warily past the houseboat's
big steering wheel towards the electronics section, aware of movement behind me
as the spectators scrambled instinctively out of the line of fire.

           
Leonard raised the pistol and took
aim. I stopped, facing him.

           
"Twice!" he breathed.
"Twice I had it all in my hands, all I ever wanted, and you, always you,
took it away from me, Helm! Well, you're not going to live to gloat about
it-"

           
"Martha, now!" I shouted,
throwing myself to the floor. He was an amateur to the last. He looked quickly
towards the girl instead of doing his shooting first and his sightseeing afterwards.
There was a sharp crack behind me, like the report of a firearm. An intense
white light filled the pilothouse, brighter than the sunshine through the big
windows. The light seemed to envelop Herbert Leonard's face, and his hands as
well, as he tried to claw away the fiery, incandescent thing that had struck
him. He screamed and fell to the floor, rolling back and forth in agony.

           
Nobody moved except the thrashing
man on the pilothouse floor and I. I hitched myself over to pick up, with my
bound hands, the gun he'd dropped. I struggled to my feet, moved to stand over
him and, by twisting and craning, managed to aim accurately enough to put a
bullet into the back of his head and stop the noise. After a little while the
flare burned itself out.

           
I looked at the two men. Martha's
guard raised his hands in a gesture of submission. The black radio operator
spread his wide, with a little shrug, indicating that his field was electronics,
not violence. Martha looked at me blindly for a moment. Then she threw the
little flare gun away from her, turned, snatched the door open, and stumbled to
the houseboat's rail, very sick.

           
It took me a while, unassisted, to
cut my hands free with Herbert Leonard's pocket knife, find the signaling
device again, reload it, and go out on deck to fire another flare straight up
into the blue
Florida
sky.

           
Mac hadn't changed much. He still
looked, if you didn't look too closely, like a banker strayed from the
financial fold, in a neat gray suit that, in deference to the local climate,
was a little lighter than his customary working uniform. His black eyebrows
still made a striking contrast with his gray hair. His cold gray eyes hadn't changed
much, either; but his voice was a little different, here in the admiral's
living room, from the crisp, businesslike tones I was used to hearing over the
phone or in his
Washington
office. It occurred to me that this was the first time in our long relationship
that we'd met socially, so to speak, in a private house.

           
"I haven't had an opportunity
to speak with you, Eric," he said.

           
"No, sir," I said.

           
He'd been waiting on the Priests'
dock when the Frances II brought us in. I'd given him the mission-accomplished
sign as I stepped ashore, and with that off his mind, he'd turned his attention
to his daughter. What the two of them had found to say to each other under the circumstances,
I didn't know; but they'd apparently worked out some basis for coexistence, and
it was none of my damned business anyway.

           
"I want to thank you," Mac
said.

           
I looked out the window of the
bright room at the dark screened porch from which I'd once eavesdropped on a
political meeting. That had happened only twenty-four hours ago, but it seemed
like the distant past. Through the wire netting of the porch, I could see the
big
sportfisherman
lying at the flood-lighted dock as
if she'd never left it, the shovel-nosed Whaler that had brought me armed help
that I'd no longer really needed; and my own little craft, well, I still
thought of her as mine, although actually she belonged to Uncle Sam and always
had. The chewed-up prop had been replaced, and she was ready to go again, but
the assignment was completed, and there was nothing more for her to do here or
myself either.

           
I turned to look at Mac. It was the
first time I could recall that he'd ever thanked me for anything. Well, I guess
it was the first time he'd had anything to thank me for. You can commend or reprimand
a subordinate for the way he does his job, but you don't generally thank him
for it.

           
"
Por
nada," I said.

           
He said, "I couldn't in good
conscience put a sniper in a situation like that hampered by orders not to
harm, particularly when a member of my own family was involved."

           
"No, sir."

           
"The other solution would have
been acceptable. You understand that."

           
"Yes, sir."

           
He smiled faintly. "Of course,
as the head of a government agency, I'm obliged to point out that your behavior
was sentimental and reprehensible, but. . . . Thank you."

           
"Yes, sir," I said.
"The fact is that we've worked together for a hell of a long time. I
couldn't shoot a kid of yours, job or no job. I hope you couldn't shoot one of
mine. Where the hell does the admiral hide his liquor, anyway?"

           
It was an
undigestible
mixture of personal and business relationships, and I walked away from it. If
he didn't like it, he could go for tarpon in the morning and take it out on a
fish. I found the liquor cabinet by tracking down the sound of glass clinking
against glass. Martha was pouring herself a stiff concoction involving, mostly,
vodka. She'd washed off the mud of the morning's adventures, but as some kind
of protest, I suppose, she was back in her grubby pirate costume: the striped
jersey, the white pants, and the frayed sneakers. She was talking with the
admiral. When I came up, I reminded her of something.

           
"Uncle Hank," she said,
"when you port your helm, does the boat go right or left?"

           
"Right, of course," he
said, "but who ports any helms around here? What are you trying to do,
impress somebody with how salty you are? The Navy command to the wheel is
'right rudder,' and that's what I taught you, young lady. . . . Excuse me.
Laura seems to want me in the kitchen."

           
When he was gone, I said, "Now
you know."

           
She made a face at me. "I
wasn't trying to impress you with how salty I was! I was just . . .It happened
so fast, and I didn't know what commands you were used to."

           
I said, "Hell, I'm an old
Annapolis
man, didn't you know?" I grinned at
her unbelieving look. "I spent a couple of weeks there once, taking a
course in small-boat handling for spooks who might be put ashore on strange
coasts. I learned to do things the Navy way, on the water, at least."

           
"You're a surprising man, she
said. "And a terrible one. But I'm glad you're here."

           
"Why?"

           
"I can count on you not to be
sweet to me. Everybody else is being so goddamned sweet and understanding and
forgiving I could
urp
." I didn't say anything.
After a moment, she continued, rather bitterly: "Code double
negative!"

           
I grinned once more. "Cute,
wasn't it?"

           
"Does it always mean two days
early, like the fifteenth instead of the seventeenth?"

           
"Two days," I said,
"or two hours, or two minutes, depending on how the time is given. It's
just a little understanding between your dad and his more senior operatives.
You won't find it in the official manual of procedure, so even if you'd
mentioned it to Leonard-apparently you didn't think it important enough-it
wouldn't have meant anything to him." I gave her my nasty grin still one
more time. "It also means that the bearer of the code is untrustworthy and
should be utilized accordingly."

           
She flushed. "Like you utilized
me, you and Daddy between you!"

           
I said, "If you'd played it
straight, you wouldn't have got utilized, would you?"

           
"I had to do it!" she
said. "I had to do something. It was all so wrong." She stopped. I
said nothing. After a little, she said, "But I'd like you to know that
before I told Leonard about Cutlass Key, I made him promise-it sounds naive as
hell now--but I made him promise that

           
Daddy wouldn't be harmed." 1
made no comment on that, either. She gave me a sharp, sideways glance and went
on' defensively, "How could I know? After watching you and your
cold-blooded friends in action, 1 had to believe that somewhere there were
normal, decent people with a sane regard for human life! And Mr. Leonard seemed
so civilized. How could I know he was just as bad as the rest of you?" She
shivered. "I keep seeing his face," she said, looking at me. Her eyes
were wide and dark.

           
"It'll fade," I said.

           
Martha shook her head minutely.
"I don't know. Why aren't you telling me what a brave girl I was, saving
the day by my heroic. . . . I didn't care about saving any days. I just knew
that after he killed you, he'd shoot me, too. I did it simply because I didn't
want to die. I did it, in spite of my. . . . convictions, simply because I was
scared, that's why! That's how much my. . . .my ideals are worth, Matt! How am
I going to live with that?"

           
I said, "Cut it out.
Everybody's scared. It's a perfectly natural-"

           
"You weren't scared."

           
I said, "Hell, this is the
first time I haven't been petrified in twenty-four hours."

           
"No, don't lie to me!" she
breathed. "You don't know what fear is, that kind of fear. We were safe,
and then you.

           
You didn't really get mixed up about
port and starboard, did you, Matt? That's what you told them, so they wouldn't
know you'd deliberately let them catch you. You ran that boat aground on
purpose when you could easily have got away, because you hadn't carried out
your mission.

           
Well, I suppose that's very
admirable, in a way. But you'll excuse me if I find it just a little sick,
considering what your mission was!"

           
I looked at her for a moment longer.
We'd come a long way around, but we seemed to be back just about where we'd
started one evening in Mexico; and it was a circle we'd never break.

           
Anyway, she was Mac's daughter. He
was a good man to work for, in his field, but I had no desire to become a
member of his family, even by association.

           
I got out of there, out the front
door, and headed towards the big station wagon I'd parked on the other side of
the driveway, after cleaning up at the lodge. Then I stopped and stepped back
into the shadows instinctively as a sedan turned in from the highway and pulled
up behind the parked vehicle. A lean, feminine figure in pants got out. I moved
forward. Lorna stopped and squinted up at me in the dark.

           
"I can't make out your
features, mister, but the elevation is familiar," she said. "Agent
Lorna reporting, sir.
Mission
accomplished, sir." She drew a long breath. "Well, we pulled
it off. I hope the man is happy. What happened to Carl, going suicidal like
that and getting himself shot by a cop?"

           
I said, "It's too hard to
explain. Anyway, he got the man he was sent after, didn't he?"

           
"Don't snap at me. You look as
if you'd been taking a beating, both physically and psychologically. I think
you need a drink and a woman."

           
"I need a drink," I said.
"I've had a woman."

           
Lorna glanced at the house, as a
youthful shadow showed briefly on a drawn blind. "Hell, that's not a
woman," she said. "You can do better than that."

           
As it turned out, I could.