Matt Helm--The Interlopers (22 page)

Well, I didn’t really think the Woodman would go the sabotage or explosives route. There are guys who like to see guys blow up or fall off cliffs by remote control, and then there are guys who prefer to have them die, if they must die, with neat little personalized holes in them. Having studied his dossier carefully, I’d come to the conclusion that Holz, like me, belonged in the latter category.

Still, I was glad when the engine started without extraneous fireworks. Presently I was driving away from the ferry slip in the misty morning twilight, in a slow-moving line of cars winding along the shore, headlight to taillight. At the first suitable spot, I pulled out and turned the pup loose.

Libby’s car passed without slowing up. Pete’s station wagon was somewhere up ahead in the parade. The converted Ford delivery van rolled by with two up front, but the visibility was too poor for me to make out whether young Smith or his bearded partner was driving. Where the rest of the boyscouts were—the ones who were supposed to be keeping tabs on me and anyone who approached me—I didn’t know or care, as long as they stayed out of my way. I had to admit they’d done a pretty fair job of it so far. Their moral attitudes might be childish, but their tailing techniques seemed to be adequate.

I let the pup sniff and explore happily along the stony beach, wet with the night’s rain. He’d been locked up on shipboard a long time and deserved a run. It was chilly standing there on the shore—after all, these were Arctic waters. Ahead were the lights of the town of Haines; behind was the ferry dock. As I looked that way, the
Matanuska
pulled out and headed up the bay for Skagway and the end of her northward voyage. I was on my own once more, doing my own navigating. When Hank had fired both barrels and become thoroughly reacquainted with terra firma, I loaded him back into the camper and cruised through the sleeping town in the vague, slowly growing light.

Watching the rearview mirrors, I saw Pete’s station wagon pull out from behind a darkened filling station and fall into place close behind me. Apparently he was going to stick to his open-surveillance routine, hoping it would make me mad or scared or guilty. It was too bad. I mean I admire loyalty as much as anybody, but the guy was overdoing his devotion to his defunct comrade. He was crowding me.

The delay had let the cavalcade of cars from the ship pull ahead of us. We had Alaska pretty much to ourselves as we pulled out of town on a paved two-lane highway that followed the bank of a sizeable river upstream. I could see the water gleaming through the trees, an odd, murky, milky, light blue-green color, rippled with current eddies. I jacked up the speed as civilization, such as it was up here, dropped behind us, and looked for a suitable spot to teach friend Pete that tailgating is bad driving.

What I needed was a reasonably sharp curve, and a reasonably steep drop-off on the left, or river, side of the road. I found just the right spot after a few miles. I took the curve fast, hit the brakes just beyond, switched on the right-turn signal, and veered over as if to park.

Pete, rounding the curve right behind me, had no real choice. He was too close to stop; he had to swing around me, or try. Maybe he even thought I was actually parking. As he came up, I threw the long shift lever from fourth to third, the real acceleration gear. I put my foot down hard, and all four barrels of the big carburetor opened wide, and all two hundred and forty horsepower—truck horsepower, remember—came in with a roar. The pickup leaped forward just as Pete drew abreast.

He tried to make it clear, but he didn’t have a chance. The old station wagon had neither the power nor the gears. He-couldn’t get past me and he was going too fast to drop behind. I put my cab door even with his front wheels and, slightly ahead of him like that, holding it there, moved deliberately left across the highway. He didn’t even try to ram. I guess the big truck-and-camper rig towering over his flimsy passenger job looked just too massive and invulnerable, and maybe it was. Anyway, trick driving was apparently not his specialty. He just let himself be herded across the road and over the bank. It was finished in an instant.

I looked into the left-hand mirror… He could have ridden it out alive, but I saw no reason to go back and look.

Some sixty miles farther on, I came upon the little white Canadian customs-and-immigration building that marked the international border. The geography up there is pretty scrambled, with a strip of U.S. territory—the Alaska panhandle, so-called—running down the coast for hundreds of miles and Canadian real estate inland. Since there are no roads along that rugged shoreline, we now had to leave the U.S. and head across the Canadian interior, through British Columbia and Yukon Territory, to pick up the northern end of the Alaska Highway, which would then lead us back across another international boundary into Alaska proper.

The customs man had apparently just got out of bed. The office was open, but there was a line of cars still waiting to be processed through. Libby’s convertible was parked at the side of the road a little back from the mob scene. I stopped the truck behind it, and she came over and joined me in the camper, reacting in typical feminine fashion to Hank’s muddy feet and affectionate tongue.

“You really ought to teach that dog some manners,” she said, wiping a smudge off her corduroy pants.

“He’s just being friendly,” I said. “Down, Stupid. The lady doesn’t like dogs.”

“You can say that twice,” Libby said. “My God, that poodle they saddled me with in Seattle! The idiot bitch was carsick all the way to Pasco and back, and I was a total wreck by the time I got rid of her—well, you saw me.”

Her voice was a little challenging. We were proving something. Perhaps we were demonstrating that, even if last night meant something, I was going to have to take her as she was. She wasn’t going to be a hypocrite, no matter how nice it had been. She wasn’t going to pretend to be a dog-lover, or anything else, to please me.

When I didn’t rise to the challenge, or come to the defense of our four-footed friends—even my own four-footed friend—she sighed and said in a different tone: “I was beginning to worry about you, darling. What kept you so long?”

“Why, Hank had a lot of business to attend to, after two days on shipboard,” I said. “And then there was a slight accident down the road.”

“An accident?” After a moment, she glanced at me quickly. There was an odd, savage, expectant little gleam in her eye that I’d seen before. As I’ve said, she wasn’t the gentlest lady I’d ever slept with. She licked her lips. “That man you called Pete? I saw him waiting for you at that filling station as I drove by. Is he… is he dead?”

“I didn’t stop to check,” I said.

“What do you mean, you didn’t stop to check?” Suddenly her voice was harsh. “You fool, if you made a try at him and he’s still alive—”

I said, “Sweetheart, you are the damndest girl for just wishing people dead. If you feel all that homicidal, why don’t you get out and do a little murdering on your own?”

I grinned as I said it, but she didn’t smile back. Her voice remained angry as she said, “But now that you’ve confirmed his suspicions by trying to get rid of him, he can ruin everything!”

It had been a mistake, after all, not to go back, or at least to tell her about it. I’d forgotten that this girl didn’t know, as I did, that whether or not Pete’s suspicions were confirmed didn’t really matter, since he’d already communicated them to somebody else, who was acting on them or soon would be.

She didn’t know, and I was not authorized to tell her, that this was just the way my assignment had been planned a long time ago—well, it seemed a long time ago. She was thinking of a different operation with a different objective, and I couldn’t put her straight. That Mr. Smith and his people and his counterespionage mission were just a cover I was using for a totally different job wasn’t information I could entrust to anybody, certainly not to a girl who claimed to be working for Smith.

To cover up, I had no recourse but to get nasty. I said, “With all due respect, Miss Meredith, I’m just a little tired of your trying to use me as a lethal weapon—and then complaining when I fail to pile up the corpses in large enough heaps to suit your bloodthirsty taste!”

She looked at me coldly. After a moment, without speaking, she rose from the dinette seat in a dignified manner—at least it would have been dignified if the camper had had about six inches more headroom. The crack on the head didn’t improve her temper. She just glared at me and pushed past me and went out of there fast. I heard her, outside, running around the rig to her car. The forward window, giving a view ahead through the cab and windshield, showed me the Cadillac lurching away to join the diminishing line at the customs office.

I drew a long breath and turned back to the stove. After a little, I noted that she’d been checked through. Obviously still mad, she was out in the left lane, highballing it past the slower traffic before she was out of sight. Well, that might be all right on smooth U.S. pavement, but the Canadian roads up here, I’d been told, were very much unpaved and had to be treated with respect, particularly if you were driving a vehicle designed for glamour rather than durability.

But that was her problem. I really had no business worrying about it. It was time for me to remember once more the maxim of the profession:
What happens in bed has absolutely no bearing on what happens elsewhere.
No matter how nice the night had been, it was daytime now.

I sat down to eat. Afterward, I went through the border formalities and, alone on the road, headed toward the Alaska Highway a hundred miles away, thinking about Holz and just how he might be figuring to take care of me, now that he had me available in open, empty country instead of on a crowded ship.

At least that was what I was supposed to be thinking about.

Inland, it was a fantastic country. The stuff along the coast was picturesque enough, but I was brought up on mountain scenery, and it takes a lot of rock to impress me. The real experience for me came when I climbed out of the coastal cliffs and canyons and topped out on the endless roof of the world, bright in fall colors. I’d seen something like it once before, in northern Europe at the same time of the year, but that kind of landscape doesn’t grow old very fast.

The road was just as lousy as I’d been promised it would be, making the total impression even more memorable. There’s something kind of insulating about asphalt and concrete. In order to appreciate a country fully, you’ve got to dodge the rocks, smash into the potholes, weave along the ruts, splash through the puddles, and taste the high-flung mud blown in through the open window…

My next—and last, thank God—pickup wasn’t scheduled until early this evening, at the final border crossing at a small town called Beaver Creek, only some three hundred miles ahead. It was still early. I had plenty of time to make it if I didn’t get in a hurry and break something, so I just cruised easily along the twisting gravel road—gravel, in that part of the world, means anything from chicken-gravel to head-sized boulders—across the gaudy tundra, if that’s the proper term for the terrain I was viewing.

There was no human habitation and no traffic for a good many miles beyond the border. Then I passed a single car, a fellow straggler from the bunch off the morning’s ferry, judging by the shiny paint and the California plates. It was a big new Lincoln carrying a middle-aged couple obviously reluctant to get their expensive sedan bent or dirty; the man was driving very cautiously, picking his way along the rugged road like a lady trying to cross a wet street late at night without ruining her party shoes.

Five miles farther on, I saw another vehicle approaching from ahead. As it drew closer, I realized that I knew it, even though it was going the wrong way and had got pretty muddy since I’d seen it last. It was the lab truck, as young Smith had called it. It was heading back toward Haines for some reason, and the boys weren’t sparing it a thing the road could dish out. They were really coming, hammering over the washboards and sliding through the curves. As they neared me, I pulled over to give them plenty of room, since they didn’t seem to have the situation altogether under control.

The man at the wheel—whichever one of them it was—flashed his headlights at me and slammed on his brakes. He skidded to a halt well beyond me as, in answer to his signal, I stopped my rig more sedately on the other side of the road. It seemed like a hell of a place for a conference, out in wide-open country where anybody within a five-mile radius could see us together; but it was their mission and their security, and if they wanted to blow it, it was their business. Actually, considering what Holz probably knew or guessed by this time, there wasn’t much left to blow, but they weren’t supposed to know that.

I got out. The driver of the panel job got out. I saw that it was Smith, Junior. He came running toward me across the muddy road. Something about his approach didn’t strike me as friendly. I moved clear of the truck to give myself maneuvering room, and checked on the bearded partner I’d seen on shipboard. He was just coming around the pseudo-delivery-van, too far away to be an immediate threat. Young Smith ran up to me, breathless.

“You killed them!” he shouted wildly. “You damn crazy murderer, you killed them!”

He swung a fist at my face. I stepped back. As he started to bring the other fist into action, I kicked him between the legs, quite gently. Castrating him might not have been a bad idea, but it’s not for me to say who should, and who should not, be permitted to perpetuate the race.

Young Smith doubled up and went to his knees. I looked at the other man, who had his hand inside his zipper jacket.

I said, “I’m not the world’s greatest quick-draw artist, friend, but when I pull it, I shoot it. Don’t wave anything at me you don’t plan to use.”

He brought his hand out empty. After a moment, he came across the road and looked down at his kneeling associate and up at me.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t have to. I was just feeling magnanimous. The routine response to that windmill attack involves a karate chop and a broken neck.” I drew a long breath. “Who are you?”