The Infiltrators (8 page)

I took the hand and bowed over it. “Sir Matthew at your service, Lady Madeleine. Matt for short.”

“I know. We went through all that twelve years ago, so I was being pretty silly yesterday, wasn’t I, getting on my high horse like that?” She drew a long breath. “Now that we’ve got
that
out of the way, you can take it out and feed it, Matt.”

In the motel coffee shop, waiting for our breakfasts, we studied each other warily across the table, almost as if we were getting acquainted for the first time.

“Well, let’s get this operation organized,” I said after a moment, and I took an envelope from my inside jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. “Some credit cards; any reasonable charge will be covered. Five hundred dollars in fifties; better break a couple of them as soon as you can and be sure you always have telephone change on you. You’ll find you can make a credit-card or collect call from most pay phones these days without a coin—I don’t think it was that way at the time of your involuntary withdrawal from society—but there are still a few that have to be fed.”

She laughed softly. “‘Involuntary withdrawal from society.’ I’ll have to remember that. It sounds much better than being thrown into the can.”

“Spare key for the Mazda,” I said. “A note stating that you have the owner’s permission to drive it, just in case you meet a busybody cop who decides that, with your record, you must have stolen it. And a current New Mexico driver’s license.”

She reached for the envelope and hesitated. “Matt, I don’t understand.”

I said, “We still don’t know how it will break. We could get separated, as I said before, or I could be disabled or killed. I want you to be able to jump into the little heap and blast out of there and take care of yourself alone until you’ve made that phone call and somebody comes to look after you. You can manage a stick shift; you had a sporty little Fiat or something, didn’t you? Watch out for that rotary mill, it’ll rev up to its seven-thousand red line before you know it. You can’t double-clutch it, there doesn’t seem to be enough flywheel to keep it spinning; they recommend the heel-and-toe technique if you want to get fancy.”

She shook her head ruefully. “You’re way beyond me. I don’t know those racing tricks. I don’t even know if I remember how to shift gears normally.”

“You’ll remember,” I said. “And if you do get in a bind, keep in mind that it’s a real sports car in spite of the air conditioning and the plushy seats. It’ll out-corner practically anything that comes after you. Slam it into a curve wide open and watch them go off into the bushes trying to stay with you. But we hope you won’t have to.”

She drew a long breath and nodded. She picked up the envelope and tucked it into her purse, saying, “You could have given me this yesterday.” I said carefully, “I didn’t know you yesterday.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “I see,” she said a bit coldly. “You had all the bases covered. Or to put it differently, this is Program A. If… if after studying my reactions so carefully—I wondered why you kept prodding me to talk so much about myself—if you’d come to another conclusion about me, you’d have had another approach.”

I said, “Actually, this is Program B. You went and loused up our favorite Program A by… well, well get to that in a moment. Here comes the food; to hell with idle chatter.”

We tackled our breakfasts in silence. At last she sat back with a little sigh. “God, I keep making a pig of myself; but it just tastes so damn
good
after what they fed me in… in there.” She glanced at me almost shyly. “Matt, do you mind if I do a little theorizing aloud, just so you’ll know what I’m thinking?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “well, there’s an obvious point that comes to mind. You must have been working on something important involving… well, involving
CADRE
, before you ever got that. mysterious phone call saying I was to be killed.”

I frowned, “
CADRE
? Oh, the Center for Advanced Defense Research, where your husband was working. Okay, go on.”

She said, “It doesn’t seem likely that a specialized government agency like yours would have concerned itself with a contract being put out on just any stray female being released from just any old federal penitentiary, or that your informant would have thought he was doing you a great big favor by telling you about it. My… my proposed murder had to be connected with something in which you were already interested, already involved. Otherwise you’d have dismissed it as mere nuisance information and passed it along to the proper authorities, wherever they might be.”

I looked at her with respect. “That’s pretty good theorizing. It happens to be slightly wrong, but that’s my fault. I let you think the phone call saying you were to be killed came directly to us. It didn’t. It was the kind of gratitude deal I described, all right, but I can’t tell you what agency was involved because I simply don’t know. We were merely given the information, told how it had been obtained, and ordered to do something about it without asking any nosy questions about things we didn’t need to know about. That’s how our great government works, if you want to call it working.”

“I see. But the organization that did receive the tip was presumably interested in
CADRE
, since otherwise why would they care whether I lived or died? The only thing about me that could possibly concern anybody in the U.S. government is the fact that I’d been—still am, officially, since he’s never been declared dead—married to Roy, who was employed there. And that I was supposed to have helped him carry out his nefarious espionage scheme. They must have thought I knew something important after all, that I’d kept to myself all these years. Or was in a position to learn it, now that I was being set free.”

I said, “Obviously, somebody else thought so, too—thinks so, too—or they wouldn’t be trying to kill you.” I frowned. “You haven’t any idea what it might be?”

She said rather stiffly, “I don’t expect you to believe me, but I really don’t.”

I grinned. “You may be surprised at what I’ll believe. But let’s skip it for now. Maybe it will come to you, whatever it is, or we’ll be able to figure it out as we go along.”

After a moment, she relaxed and gave me a reluctant little smile. “And in the meantime I’m a docile decoy, trying not to scream every time somebody slams a car door hard. Now get me some more coffee, please, and a little more jam for my toast, and tell me all about Program A, the favorite one I’ve managed to ruin for you somehow.”

I passed her requests along to the waitress and said, “Program A was based upon the assumption that there was an evil lady serving a well-earned prison sentence, let’s call her Mrs. Mata Hari Ellershaw. This reprehensible female had conspired with her husband and another woman to steal documents that compromised the security of the United States of America in a very dangerous way. However, the plot went sour and she found herself deserted by her accomplices and left behind to take the rap. She spent, her prison term kicking herself for being such a sucker, but fear of eventual retaliation kept her silent about certain important things she’d learned. Also the fact that, disbarred and discredited and penniless, she was going to need help when she got out. But her wicked associates considered her too dangerous to be allowed to go free at the end of her sentence, or maybe they simply didn’t want a sullen, resentful ex-convict lady around to embarrass them. They laid plans to deal with her permanently upon her release from the penitentiary. My chief decided that somebody—like me—should be there when our Mattie, as we’ll call her, realized the further double-cross to which she was being subjected. When she discovered that her husband, not satisfied with having thrown her to the wolves, so to speak, nine years ago, was now actually conspiring to have her killed, she might well get angry enough to break her self-imposed silence and supply us with valuable information, maybe even some hint, of where to find him.”

Having already creamed and sugared her coffee liberally, Madeleine was spreading large quantities of red jam over an already generously buttered slice of toast. Well, her figure was really none of my business.

She spoke without looking up: “But the evil female didn’t react properly?”

I said evenly, “It turned out that we’d made a mistake, a rather grave error, in fact a real booboo. When the guns started firing, the lady in question obviously hadn’t the slightest idea of who was shooting at her. She showed none of the anger of a woman subjected to a terrible betrayal, none of the shock and disillusionment of a woman learning that the associates she’d counted on to help her rebuild her broken life had turned against her. In fact, she just looked kind of pleasantly excited. It was very disappointing, after all the careful planning we’d done. There we were, stuck with a sadly misjudged and mistreated lady who didn’t know any more than we did about why she was scheduled to be killed. A lady who, it appeared, was probably quite innocent of everything she’d been accused of.” I drew a long breath. “Of course, being careful professionals, we’d allowed for the possibility, remote though it had seemed. There were other ways of utilizing this victimized dame. Scratch Program A. Institute Program B.”

She was watching me steadily. “So that’s why you were so anxious to keep me talking, yesterday, to confirm—”

I nodded. “Having already studied your file pretty thoroughly, I wanted to hear your side of the story. Actually I never did really buy the case against you, persuasive though it seemed. As I said yesterday, that Kravecki woman was very unconvincing as a secret courier. And as for the money in a bank box under your name, hell, somebody set up exactly that frame for me once, so I know how easy it is. As far as the rest is concerned, well, damn it, I’ve stayed alive longer than some because I don’t often go too far wrong about people. My chief was going by the evidence, and I had to play along with him up to a point. But I’d met you and he hadn’t. There are lots of crimes you could commit, Madeleine, but spying for the nasty Red Russkies, particularly for money, isn’t among them.”

The gray eyes were very wide and a little shiny, staring at me out of the prison-pale face. I don’t know what I expected—a little pleasure perhaps, a little gratitude for my faith in her innocence. I didn’t get it. There was a lengthy silence. When she spoke at last, it was in a low, savage, shocking voice.

“Damn you!” she whispered. “Oh, damn you, damn you, damn you! The one man in the world who believes I didn’t do it, and he comes to me eight years late, after it’s all over, after it’s all been done to me, after my life’s been totally smashed and there’s nothing left to salvage!” She drew a deep shuddering breath. “Where the hell were you when I needed you, Matthew Helm? Where, where, where?”

She jumped up, snatched up her purse, and ran out of the restaurant. I sat there for a moment rather stunned by the outburst. Then I reminded myself sharply that I had a job to do, and that the big emotional crises were times of distraction when things often happened that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. I rose and moved to where I could watch through the windows and make certain she got safely across the parking lot to her room.

I saw two men close in on her as she reached the door, and accompany her inside.

I drew a long breath, walking back to the table to pick up the check the waitress had left there. The trouble was, I knew the men I’d seen—although I couldn’t remember the name of one of them—and they were not the kind of men I’d expected to have to deal with on this mission. It was a complication I hadn’t been warned about and didn’t need.

I paused briefly to drain the last of my coffee. I moved quite naturally, I hoped, in case somebody was watching, to the cashier’s desk. We’d slept late enough that the scattering of winter tourists had mostly all breakfasted and blasted off along the highway, east and west. The place was almost empty, and the money lady had retired to the kitchen. I’d already checked us out at the motel desk, so I couldn’t put the meal on the bill. I rang a little plink-plink bell, and presently the woman came out to work the credit-card machine. Having rung up the sale, she went right back out again. So far, so good.

And where was the takeout crew? They wouldn’t grab Madeleine without making provisions for neutralizing her escort. Most likely they were waiting to catch me outside, as they had her.

I located the lighted
RESTROOMS
sign, and walked quickly that way. It was a dark, blind hallway with a payphone cubicle just inside on the left, followed by the two doors. One of the discriminatory sanitation arrangements, I noted. Any kind of
MEN
, gentlemen or bums, could use the male facilities, but only superior-type
LADIES
were permitted in the female establishment. Women of lower social status were presumably sent outside to squat in the bushes. With a quick, guilty look around, I slipped into the
LADIES
’ chamber, the first beyond the phone.

Waiting, hoping that none of the female help or remaining female customers would need to go, I extracted from a hidden inside pocket of my jacket the little drug kit we usually carry on duty, a new model this year. The old-fashioned hypos they used to give us had been pretty slow to load, and the needles had tended to snap off under stress before the full dose had been transmitted to the patient, unless he was first tranquilized with a gun butt. The new gadget was cartridge-loading and spring-fired. I selected one of the green capsules—the red and orange ones kill—and charged the little squirt-machine and cocked it and waited, gun and hypo-gun ready in left and right hands respectively.

They held out for only about ten minutes, counting from the time Madeleine had run out of there. Then they got nervous about me and came in after me. Two of them. Holding the restroom door slightly ajar, I heard them enter the restaurant and make a quick check of both public rooms, the little coffee shop where we’d breakfasted, and the larger dining room, now unoccupied, where we’d had dinner the night before. I let the john door sigh shut automatically. It seemed unlikely that they’d be dumb enough to charge into the kitchen leaving the men’s room uninspected behind them. They weren’t.