Such Men Are Dangerous (17 page)

“Funny.”

He looked at me. “Something wrong? I don’t expect big laughs, but you don’t have to get surly.”

“I’m half asleep, that’s all. Give me a minute.”

“Sure.”

I rubbed my eyes, straightened up in the seat beside him. I checked my watch and announced the time. “They must be in Omaha by now,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Or close to it. Where are we?”

He pointed to a map. I picked it up. “The next town we hit is Canby,” he said. “Can you find it?”

I found it, a dot on the map just east of the South Dakota state line and almost due west of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“Where do we stop?”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“The closest town is Good Thunder. I don’t know if it’s on that map. Middle of the state, southern tier. Look for Mankato and then—”

“Got it.”

“It’s south of Mankato and—”

“I found Good Thunder. Where do they get these names?”

“It’s an Indian word, it means Lakanookee. You know, it’s just about impossible to get a laugh out of you, Paul. The barn’s on a county road southwest of Good Thunder. One of our agents grew up on the farm, inherited it a couple of years ago when his mother died. Ever since I met him he talked about retiring there some day.”

“I hope he waits a few days.”

“I think he’s dead, matter of fact. He was in Barcelona and he disappeared. When they disappear in friendly countries we don’t usually see them again.”

“Maybe he’s on his farm, waiting for us.”

“Maybe the whole farm disappeared in a flash flood.”

That’s one thing we never prepared for.”

“Flash floods?”

“Mmmm.”

“May that be our greatest worry.”

I sat back and watched the road. I asked him if he wanted me to drive. He said he was doing fine, and I didn’t press it. The road was narrow and curvy, the snow was heavy, and the rig would have been a pain to drive on a turnpike in July as far as I was concerned.

A few miles down the line I said, “George?” He grunted. “What were those pills?”

“What pills?”

“The pep tonic for Paul Revere and the Raiders.”

“Who?”

“Sprague.”

“Oh,” he said. He chuckled, and he didn’t say anything, so neither did I. Then he asked me what I thought they were.

“I didn’t think about it at the time. If they were really bennies I suppose you would have had me tell them they were Spanish Fly. What do they do, induce amnesia?”

“In a sense.”

“Oh.”

He had that smile on his face. He said, “Time-delay capsules. The coating dissolves in two to three hours, depending upon the acidity of the stomach and the amount of change in your pocket. Then instant bliss.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Little black pills.” He glanced at me. “I told you I had a few surprises. You must have guessed.”

“I suppose so.”

“The usual diagnosis is heart failure. A good autopsy within forty-eight hours will show more, but in this case it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“No.”

“I get the feeling it bothers you.”

I shook my head. “No. Why should it?”

“Good point.”

A few miles later he said, “They would have talked, Paul.”

“No question about it. Not much they could have said, though. And if they got away in Omaha, then I’m not so sure they would have talked. Especially once they found out they’d been conned. They’d have kept their mouths shut forever.”

“What are the odds on all five of them getting clear in Omaha?”

“Long odds. Not much they could tell anybody.”

“They can describe you.”

“General Windy can do it better.”

“They can describe me, too. And pick out my photo, if it comes to that. Once they’re identified the truck becomes hot. That’s the only problem, right? We’ll have it cured before anybody identifies them or figures out that Sprague had a truck. From then on the identification works in our favor. What’ll you bet that at least two of the five are in the Klan? Or some other right-wing thing? That fits the Texas story, drags one more red herring across the road.”

“True.”

“You don’t sound convinced, Paul.”

“No, you’re right,” I assured him. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over four hours now, they’re all dead. Unless—”

He looked at me. “Unless what? You saw them take the pills, didn’t you?

“Oh, sure. But say one of them threw up before the pill worked. Or had diarrhea and somehow flushed the pill before zero hour. And then he’d see the other men dropping like flies and he might want to tell somebody about it. Or say one pill just took a lot longer to dissolve, and the one left alive figured things out. You remember that movie with Edmund O’Brien?
D.O.A.
or something, he’s been fatally poisoned at the opening but he manages to get to the cops before he goes? I saw it years ago, I—”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Probably nothing to worry about, George.”

“You son of a bitch. You’re sitting there and smiling, you son of a bitch.”

“Well, you know,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you getting over-confident, George. Got to keep you honed to a keen edge.”

He let it hang there for a while. Then he laughed, but it sounded as though he was pushing it.

We were on the road ourselves not long after the truck convoy pulled out. The few things that had to be done beforehand were worth the time they took. Sooner or later someone was going to know something was wrong, and sooner or later a team from Fort Tree would check the route and find out what had happened and where. The idea was to make all this occur later instead of sooner.

We brought the stolen Chrysler back into the intercept area. It was clean, so we didn’t mind abandoning it, but it was an attention-getter, and this way it would be out of sight until the team from Fort Tree came down. We left all our road signs in place to insure that. Accidental discovery by some citizen would cut our lead time to the bone, and the road signs would keep most citizens off that stretch of road and might coax any others into interpreting anything they saw as an accident the authorities already knew about.

The bodies were easy. We had the snow to thank for that. George had already tucked our two majors into a drift, and when I went back to check out their pockets it was hard to find them, the snow had erased all traces. I decided it wasn’t worth digging them up and left them there.

We gave the other twelve the same treatment. We hauled them far enough from the road so that they would have been tough enough to spot even without the snow, and then piled white stuff on them. We left tracks in the snow, of course, but the wind figured to wipe them out within half an hour.

There were a lot of extra guns around—handguns returned to us by Sprague’s men, the M-14s, the Thompson, a few stray rifles. They went in the back of the van—“A dividend for our
compañeros,
” George called them. I figured it was quicker than burying them.

The van also got all of the garbage from the army Ford, plus my own luggage. Some of it would have to be destroyed, but we could paw through it at our leisure.

We left the crippled convertible at the side of the road. It was clean, like the Chrysler. My own rental car bothered me a little. I had cleaned it out, but it would trace to John NMI Walker, who in turn would trace to Lynch. They were going to guess Lynch anyway, so it didn’t really make a hell of a difference. Still, it bothered me; I told George we should have put it on one side of the empty trucks and he told me I was building a case out of nothing.

“Slam it into the convertible,” he suggested. “Make it look good.”

“Make what look good?”

“The accident, the reason why the road is closed. Hell, I don’t care. Dig a hole and bury it. Fold it up and put it in your pocket. Take it and shove—”

I got in the Chevy and drove it a nice steady twelve miles an hour into the upset convertible. Thinking back, I suppose the main reason I did this was because it’s the sort of thing everybody secretly wants to do. I was braced for the impact, of course, and I stopped accelerating instinctively a few instants before the collision, and twelve miles an hour is not all that fast, but it was still a hell of a sensation. And it did more damage to both cars than I had expected.

When I got out of the car George told me it looked like fun.

“It was,” I admitted. “If you want to try it, the Chrysler’s just down the road. You can make it a spectacular three-car smashup.”

For a moment I thought he was going to try it. Then he said, “Oh, the hell with it, it’s a waste of time. What did we forget?”

“Sprague’s jackets.”

They went in the van. So did the wallets we had taken from the five men. If there was anything else, we didn’t have the time to stand around figuring it out. We got in the cab, and George started it up and stalled it twice figuring out where the gears were. Once he got the hang of it, though, he wasn’t bad at all.

The radio announcer said we were listening to the Twin Cities’ home of countrypolitan music. He said this right after a newscast during which he had said nothing at all concerning our operation. This didn’t mean anything one way or the other. Whatever happened, it didn’t figure to make the papers. “Three months from now there might be a paragraph in Drew Pearson’s column,” George had said, “and then someone important will tell him please to write about something else, and he’ll expose a highway construction scandal. That’s all.”

The radio played something with too many guitars. George slowed the truck, killed the radio, and said we were here. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I saw that there was a space ten yards wide between two fences and that there were no trees in the space. That was the only indication that it was a road.

“There’s two feet of snow there,” I said.

“We’ll make it. I’ll back it in.”

We kept getting stuck and he kept rocking us loose and we were in the barn sooner than I’d have guessed possible. Partly in the barn, anyway; the cab and half of the rest remained uncovered. I was going to point this out to George, but he answered ahead of time. “No neighbors anywhere near here, and we can’t be seen from the road. C’mon.”

“What now?”

“Grab a broom. We’ve got a hundred yards of tracks to cover.”

There were brooms in the bam. We each took one and waded out to the road, walking in our own tire tracks. Then we backtracked all the way, using the brooms to fill the tracks with snow. The top ten inches of snow were loose and powdery, which made it easier. A wind would have been extra help. For the time being, though, we had to live without one.

It took a lot of time. Walking backwards, filling in tire tracks with a broom. A hundred yards, after all, was a substantial distance. It was approximately the length of my island, but it was a lot easier to walk the length of my island than to trudge backwards through snow, and—

I reminded myself not think about my island.

We quit before we’d done the whole hundred yards. It was fundamentally absurd to eliminate tracks all the way to the foot of the truck itself. Anyone close enough to see them would see the truck, too. We gave up twenty yards from it and went into the barn and set our brooms against the wall.

“Now we pray for snow,” George said.

“But not too much. Or we won’t get out.”

“We’ll get out,” he said. “Think of all the
revolucionistas
who are counting on us. Pardon me.
Counterrevolucionistas.
Pardon me again,
contrarevolucionistas.
”

There was enough food for a week, but he assured me we’d be on our way within twenty-four hours. I said, “
Veinte y cuatro horas,
’ and he winked. He asked me if anyone had thrown any Portuguese at me. No one had. He said I would have covered it anyway. I said we’d never know, and I for one would never care, and I was hungry.

There was bread, butter, four different kinds of luncheon meat some cold chicken, twelve cans of beer (and a can opener; this impressed me). There was milk, scotch whiskey, chocolate bars. Other things too that I don’t remember.

I asked what was poisoned. He threw back his head and roared. “The scotch,” he said. “Whatever you do, stay away from the scotch.”

The son of a gun even had glasses. I poured each one half full of scotch. He took his and asked what we should drink to.

I suggested brotherhood.

“The Brotherhood of Man?”

“Keep it simple,” I said. “Just brotherhood.”

“Fine. To brotherhood. How do you say that in Español?”

“You don’t. To brotherhood.”

I think he was waiting to see if I would drink mine before he drank his. I might have played the game, but by now I really did want that drink. I tossed it off, and he thought about playing games and decided it wasn’t worth it, and drained his own glass.

FIFTEEN

W
HEN
W
E
F
INISHED
eating he lit a propane stove and rolled out a pair of army surplus sleeping bags. “All the comforts of home,” he said. “I don’t think you can see the stove from outside.” I went outside, and he was right.

He thought we ought to sleep in shifts. I didn’t, and said so. If they found us we couldn’t possibly shoot our way out. He suggested that some tramp might stumble in.

“And murder us in our sleep? If you tried that on your computer it would laugh at you.”

He thought it over. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not worth the aggravation. The hell with it.”

He took a sleeping pill. I didn’t want one. I told him someday he would take a black pill by mistake. He told me, pleasantly, to go screw myself. I stripped to my underwear and got into the sleeping bag. There were a few dozen things I had to do, and I thought of about half of them before I fell asleep.

It must have been around five-thirty when we sacked out. I put in an honest eight hours. If I dreamed, I wasn’t aware of it. I woke with the sudden thought that I had to go through Bourke and O’Gara’s luggage. There was that thought, instantaneous and undeniable, and then I was awake, and my watch said 3:42.

George was snoring gently. I let him sleep. I opened the back of the van, but it was too dark inside to see anything. I remembered seeing a flashlight hanging on the wall of the barn, and I walked to where I thought it might have been, and it was there. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself if I had just walked on water.