Matt Helm--The Interlopers (11 page)

With Hank romping outside, happy to be free after the long ride, I carried the essential luggage, and groceries enough for breakfast, into my room. Then I whistled in the pup, closed the door, drew the blinds, and took off his collar. It was time for me to make like a real secret agent once more; I’d stalled long enough. I got the bottle of dog-vitamins Stottman had given up so reluctantly. With the point of my knife, designed for more lethal purposes, I pried the waxed cardboard liner out of the metal cap. Underneath was a small round wafer of tinfoil about the size of a dime—to be exact, two thicknesses of foil with something sealed between them, perhaps a little disk of film, perhaps not.

I was tempted to separate the layers of foil and do some snooping. What stopped me wasn’t my orders from Mr. Smith to leave everything in this line to his boys, but the possibility that the communication I held might be rigged to destroy itself somehow—perhaps by exposure to light or air—if not handled in a specified way. Besides, I’d never be able to reseal the wafer properly, and I probably couldn’t make much sense of what was inside, anyway. Weapons are our specialty; microdots and ciphers and such are out of our line.

I followed instructions, therefore, and used the knifepoint to pry one of the big metal studs from Hank’s collar the way I’d been shown. I fitted the wafer inside, and refastened the shiny stud to the black leather collar. There were five flat studs in all, alternating with five smaller and more pointed metal decorations, perhaps designed to keep hostile dogs from chewing on Hank’s neck. If everything went according to plan—which would be a welcome change—I’d fill another receptacle tomorrow evening, leaving three to go. By this manner of reckoning, the job was barely started. It was a discouraging thought.

In the morning, I rose early, cooked myself some breakfast—I’m no great chef, but I can manage bacon and eggs—and hit the road well before daylight. No headlights followed me away from Lac La Hache, as the place was called, but by the time the sun had come up and burned the mists out of the hollows where it lay like cotton, the beat-up red car had taken up its station behind me once more. You had to say this for the boys: they might not be expert but they were persistent.

Later, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a doughnut in the good-sized town of Prince George. The road forked here, the right-hand branch leading inland to Dawson Creek and the Alaska Highway proper, while the left-hand branch led to the coast and the town of Prince Rupert, the southern terminal of the Alaska Ferry system. By taking the ferry, the less rugged traveler could bypass all but a few hundred miles of that he-man highway in smooth comfort.

I didn’t think comfort was the reason Grant Nystrom’s Communist superiors had chosen to send him by the latter route. The Alaska Highway, built in wartime, had been routed through the remote interior where it would be reasonably safe from hostile action by sea. The ferry, on the other hand, went up the coast; and the coast presumably was where most information on the Northwest Coastal System was to be found.

I reached Francois Lake in the afternoon with plenty of time to spare, and found the lodge at which I was supposed to stay without any difficulty. It was some miles off the main highway on a small dirt road, but there were plenty of signs to point the way. The place, when I got there, consisted of a good-sized main building, half a dozen log cabins overlooking the outlet of the lake, and a dock with some boats. I checked in, rented one of the boats, and went fishing.

There was just one hitch, when Hank refused to enter the boat. Apparently, he’d never ridden in one, and none of Mr. Smith’s canine experts had taken the trouble to check this aspect of his education. But he was a good dog, and I managed to coax him aboard, hoping that nobody was watching the performance, at least nobody who counted, like Stottman or the local contact I was to meet. Grant Nystrom’s rig sported a trailer hitch, and I’d been told that he’d used it for towing some kind of fishing boat, but that we didn’t have to worry about it since he hadn’t brought it along on this jaunt. But if Nystrom had owned a boat, his dog had probably been a seasoned sailor. My dog was making it quite clear that he wasn’t.

He stood on the middle seat, very tense, ready to unload in a hurry if this crazy, unstable, waterborne vehicle should sink or explode. I talked to him reassuringly while I shoved off and got the motor started. He almost went over the side when the outboard fired; but gradually, as we swung out of the river and into the lake, he relaxed a bit and sat down to enjoy—or at least endure—the ride. I snapped some kind of a flashy lure to the end of my line, tossed it overboard, and settled down to tow it around the lake in a slow and purposeful manner, as if I really expected it to catch a fish.

I trolled down the shore away from the lodge for half an hour, then cut across to the south side of the lake and came back, passing opposite the outlet and the lodge. I continued in that direction for another half hour, and turned back again, having seen no fish and very few fishermen. Reaching the spot opposite the lodge once more, I glanced at my watch and found that the time was a few minutes before six. I’d hit it about right, just a little early.

I reeled in my well-traveled lure, exchanged it for a gaudy red-and-white spoon, and made a show of casting for a while. No fish were intrigued by this performance, either, which was just as well, since I wouldn’t have had time, now, to mess with one if I had managed to hook him. At a quarter past six, I cranked in my line once more, started up the motor, and headed straight across the lake toward the lodge I could see on the distant shore.

It was a big lake. East and west it ran, according to my road map, for better than fifty miles; but even its narrow north-and-south dimension was impressive to a landlubber brought up in the relatively waterless areas of southwestern U.S.A. I was glad that the day was clear and calm, and that the rented motor was running strongly. I wouldn’t have wanted to have weather trouble on a body of water that size, or engine trouble either.

“You and me both, pup,” I said, as Hank shifted position nervously. “Take it easy. We’ll be back on terra firma pretty soon.”

I saw my contact coming. Another boat was approaching from the left—excuse me, from port—running down the lake on a course that would intersect mine about a quarter of a mile ahead. It was another open fishing boat, pretty much like my rental job, but slightly larger and with a somewhat bigger kicker hung on the stem. When we were within about thirty yards of each other, the other man cut his motor and I did the same. The boats ran on silently, losing speed until they lay still in the water, almost side by side.

I saw that my contact was a big, red-faced, city-fisherman type with sunglasses. He was wearing a straw hat that had a number of glittering lures hooked to the band. A fancy tackle box was open on the seat beside him. I was aware of his eyes studying me and my dog appraisingly from behind the dark lenses. The way the luck had been running on this job, I reflected grimly, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to discover that this man had gone to high school with the real Nystrom, or raised the real Prince Hannibal from a pup.

But if he had any doubts about our authenticity, he didn’t show it. He just went smoothly into the act that had been prepared for us.

“Any luck?” he called.

“Not even a strike,” I said, reading off the lines I had memorized in San Francisco. “How about you?”

He shook his head. “I guess they’re just not biting.” He plunged into the identification routine: “Isn’t that a Labrador retriever? He’s a beauty. What’s his name?”

“Yes, he’s a Lab,” I said. “His name is Hank.”

“No, I mean his full name. He’s pedigreed, isn’t he?”

These were the exact words Stottman should have used to me in the pet clinic in Pasco, only he hadn’t got a chance to. They were almost the words Pat Bellman had used to me earlier the same day. I wondered if, knowing the required gibberish, she had perhaps paraphrased it deliberately to confuse me. But anyway, it was nice to have a contact proceed strictly according to plan, for a change.

I said, “His registered name is Avon’s Prince Hannibal of Holgate.” That took care of the identification part of the dialogue, and I went on casually, “Say, you don’t happen to have a jug of water or something. I forgot to bring anything to drink and I’m parched.”

“I’ve got some beer,” he said. “Here, have one… No, no, it’s all right, I’ve got plenty more in the cooler. Well, I’m going to try that cove over there. Good luck.”

“Same to you,” I said. “Thanks for the beer.”

The red-faced man yanked his motor into life once more. I pulled the cap off the beer bottle, and raised the bottle in a salute, which he answered with a wave of his hand. I drank deeply, watching him draw away, riding out of my life, I hoped, as rapidly as he’d come into it. What happened to him next was none of my concern. Mr. Smith’s boys would presumably put a tail on him, hoping he’d lead them to other members of the local cell. Or maybe the Canadian authorities would take over. In any case, like Stottman and his partner, this man would be rounded up later, after we’d spotted the rest of Nystrom’s contacts.

I wondered what the Canadians had worth spying on in this remote part of the north woods, but it wasn’t really any of my business. I drank some beer and it was flat. Well, that figured. You can’t keep capping and recapping a bottle without losing some of the fizz. I set the bottle on the seat, pried the cork liner out of the cap, took out a little tinfoil wafer similar to the one I’d obtained from Stottman, and hid it in the second stud of Hank’s collar. Then I carefully stuck the cork back into the cap, dropped the cap overboard, and watched it sink out of sight to where nobody would ever see that it had been tampered with. The beer I drank, flat or not, and the empty bottle I left in the bilge for the benefit of anybody who might have been watching through binoculars, from the shore.

When I reached the dock, it was just about dark. The proprietor and his wife were climbing into a big outboard runabout. They said they were heading up the lake to have dinner with some friends, and asked if I minded holding the fort alone. I said I didn’t, and watched them disappear around the point. I whistled for Hank, and started for the cabin, and told him to shut up when he growled softly as we approached the door.

It was nice of him to warn me, but I’d set a few indicators about the door before I left, and I already knew somebody had been inside and very likely still was.

I took a chance and let them catch me by surprise. I mean, having no inkling of their presence—well, admitting none—I walked right into the trap, just like any of those handsome, brave, bone-headed movie operatives who are forever strolling casually into dark rooms and getting clobbered by sinister gents hiding behind doors.

This was another of the housekeeping cabins popular up here, and the room into which I sauntered innocently, dog at heel, was actually the kitchen. To my relief, the guy who stepped out behind me didn’t actually clobber me. Maybe he was afraid of what the dog would do if he used open violence, or maybe he just didn’t like hitting people over the head unnecessarily. Anyway, he merely told me to set down the fishing tackle I was carrying, very carefully, and put my hands up, which I did.

Then he hit a switch and the lights came on, dispelling the twilight gloom of the place. Nystrom Three appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding a familiar-looking .357 revolver—a mate to the one I was carrying—in a gingerly sort of way.

“Close the door quick!” he snapped at the man behind me. “Don’t let the dog out!”

I heard the door being shut, but I didn’t move or turn my head. There are advantages to dealing with amateurs, but there are disadvantages, too: they’re much more likely than pros to blow your head off accidentally. You don’t want to do anything to startle them as long as they’re pointing firearms in your direction, since as a rule they’ve never bothered to learn how much trigger pressure—or how little—it takes to make their guns go boom.

I stood very still, therefore, while the man behind me reached around to get my .357 from its trick holster. Hank was sitting beside me, looking up and whining softly. He knew something was wrong, but he was a hunting dog. Just as the technical aspects of espionage were out of my line, so the K-9 routines were out of his. Pheasants he could handle, ducks were his meat, but these oddly behaving human beings baffled him. Instinct told him he should be doing something about them, but he’d had no training to tell him what.

Nystrom Three had stepped into the little kitchen. As his former role required—the role he seemed to have abandoned now—he was a tall, skinny character with whitish hair, probably bleached for the part just like mine. For two men who were supposed to look like the same man, we didn’t look much like each other. At least I hoped I didn’t have that nervous, shifty-eyed, slack-lipped look.

“Careful!” he snapped, as the other man moved behind me, doing something I couldn’t see. “Don’t take your eye off this guy! Don’t forget, he’s the bastard who stalked Mike Bird and killed him in cold blood: one shot from that hand-cannon at a hundred and fifty yards.”

That eighty-yard shot was getting longer every day, I reflected wryly; but the attitude of the two men, particularly the one I could see, bothered me. I mean, I had been operating on the assumption that they couldn’t intend anything very drastic here, since I had collected only two of the five little tinfoil wafers Pat Bellman presumably had her eye on. Figuring that they needed me to get the other three, and knew it, I’d let myself be captured to see what kind of deal or arrangement they had in mind. Besides, I had plans for them, too, and this was the kind of discreet, off-the-road place I thought Mac would approve of. But there was a tenseness in the room that didn’t bear out my reassuring theories.

The man behind me said, “Hell, if you’re scared of the guy, let’s finish him off now and get out of here with what we came for, before somebody comes.”

I drew a long, cautious breath. Scratch another bright idea. Obviously there was something very wrong with my elaborate reasoning. The boys were playing for keeps.