The Terrorizers (4 page)

Helm. Matthew Helm, son of Karl and Erika Helm. Just as the man on the phone had said. It was confirmed now; I could go on from there. I was Matthew Helm, profession unknown, alias Paul H. Madden, free-lance photographer; but why the masquerade? The answer to that question, along with the more recent part of my life to which it belonged, remained unremembered, but other things were coming back…

Somebody was talking to me. I came back across the years from the dry, sunny, southwestern country of my boyhood to the sterile northwestern hospital room with rain on the window.

“What did you say, Doctor?” I asked.

“Are you all right, Mr. Madden?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

It was a time to be very careful. I now knew for certain that I was a man who’d constructed a false identity for himself and worn it for at least six months—and had then, somehow, wound up in the ocean with a cracked head. The two circumstances might have no connection, but I couldn’t count on that. It was no time to be passing out personal information to anybody, beyond what was absolutely necessary to keep them happy and unsuspicious.

“I guess I was thirteen or fourteen at the time,” I said. “Later, I recall getting kicked out of college due to some kind of fight I got into with a bunch of upperclassmen who were trying to push me around.” I grinned. “I must have been a feisty young fellow. I finished up at another school. Then my parents both died within the same year. I got a job with a camera on a newspaper in the state capital, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Later I worked for some other New Mexico newspapers. I did say all this took place in New Mexico, didn’t I? After that—”

I stopped abruptly. It had been coming with a rush, but suddenly there wasn’t any more.

“Go on.”

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all she wrote, at least for now. It ends with that last newspaper job—the last I remember, anyway. That was in Albuquerque. I don’t remember leaving, and there’s nothing after that.”

“I see,” he said. He frowned thoughtfully, watching me, for a second or two. Abruptly, he got up and walked to the window and spoke looking out at the rainy view. “Mr. Madden.”

“Yes.”

“I’m inclined to turn you loose. Physically, Dr. DeLong tells me you’re coming along very well. Mentally, I feel you can’t be helped much more here. There’s no skull fracture. The concussion seems to have produced no impairment of function. The danger of hematoma—blood clots—is past. As far as your memory is concerned, I think you can deal with the problem yourself. If it comes back, fine. If not, as I told you earlier, it’s something most patients adjust to quite easily, although their friends and families tend to take it more seriously.” After a little pause, he swung around at the window to face me once more. “However, if you think you’re up to handling it, I’d prefer to send you off with all the information we can give you.”

“What information?” I asked. “Don’t tease me, Doctor.”

He said carefully, “We’re in possession of some rather puzzling data—rather disturbing, I might add.”

I realized, from the way he was studying me, that for all his psychiatric training he wasn’t any more sure than anybody else that I wasn’t kidding him about my loss of memory. He was looking for a guilt-reaction that would tell him I already knew what he was going to say.

I grinned. “Well, if I go into shock, this is a good place for it, isn’t it?”

He smiled thinly. “Very well, Mr. Madden. You might, in your idle moments, try to recall how you acquired three submachinegun bullets in your right shoulder and arm not too terribly long ago, say within the past two years.”

I won’t say I hadn’t noticed the scars, or the faint residual stiffness in the mornings, but I hadn’t given them any thought. Perhaps I’d deliberately avoided thinking about them. I could see why Dr. Lilienthal found the human mind a fascinating subject.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Fairly sure,” Lilienthal said. “Dr. DeLong has had considerable experience in military situations. He says he would wager a tidy sum on their being projectiles from a machine pistol, although two achieved total penetration and the third has been removed. Probably 9mm. They could have come from a 9mm handgun, but something about the grouping seems to indicate a fully automatic weapon to Dr. DeLong. Not a rifle. Three bullets from a highpowered rifle in that large a caliber would pretty well have torn your arm off.”

I said, “According to my fiancee, I’m supposed to have spent some time in Vietnam with my cameras.”

“Of course, Mr. Madden.”

I looked at him sharply. “You have a very unconvincing way of agreeing with a guy, Doc.”

Lilienthal said dryly, “You’re a very unconvincing guy, Mr. Madden.”

“Spell it out, please.”

He came back to his chair, swung it around so he could straddle it, and faced me over the back of it. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Do you really
feel
that you are a gentle photographer chap currently specializing in beautiful pictures of little birds and animals?”

I grinned. “At the moment, I’m gentle as a lamb, but the answer to your question is that I’m not sure how I feel. Not yet. Go on.”

“The fact is that you have altogether too many marks of violence on your body for a peaceloving cameraman, or even a news photographer with a penchant for trouble. The shoulder wounds are the most recent but there are others. And the most interesting thing about them is that some have been carefully erased, as well as could be managed with plastic surgery, as if somebody’d been interested in making sure you wouldn’t cause too much comment with your shirt off.”

“So that’s it!” I couldn’t help laughing. “I thought those investigators from your MOT eyed me very suspiciously, not to mention that closemouthed gent from the RCMP. I suppose this was called to their attention.”

Lilienthal looked slightly embarrassed. “As a matter of fact, it was. A doctor has a duty to his patient, but he also has a duty to society. There was no way for us to be certain that the identification found on you wasn’t forged or stolen.”

“So somebody decided they’d dredged up a professional syndicate hitman, or maybe a soldier of fortune, disabled while engaged in a nefarious operation of some kind, is that it?” I laughed again. “How did you get around the fact that I’d been positively identified by Kitty Davidson… Oh, of course, she was my gun moll helping to preserve my cover. Cover? That’s the word, isn’t it, Doctor?”

Lilienthal smiled. “Well, some fairly melodramatic theories were considered, I’ll admit, although the RCMP quickly determined that Miss Davidson was precisely who and what she claimed to be. Your history was a little harder to obtain, since you are not a Canadian citizen.”

“And?”

“Your fingerprints were finally identified in Washington.”

I said, “The suspense is awful. I can hardly stand it, Dr. Lilienthal.”

He said, “Your fingerprints were positively identified as belonging to Paul Horace Madden, a reputable photographer with no recorded involvement with the law.”

I drew a long breath, not all for display. “Well, if they’d found anything else, that Mountie would be parked outside the door, wouldn’t he? What about my fascinating scars?”

“You were severely wounded in Vietnam. It was some time after that—after convalescence—that you began concentrating on peaceful wildlife photography.”

There was a little silence. I frowned. “So it’s all explained very plausibly, but you’re not satisfied. What bugs you, Doctor?”

“Bugs?” It was his turn to frown; then he laughed. “Oh, yes, of course. Bugs!” He became sober and intent once more. “I’ve done my duty to society, Mr. Madden. Now my duty is to you, my patient. My professional advice is: don’t waste time and effort trying to remember something that never happened, regardless of the official records.”

I said slowly, “Something like being wounded in Vietnam while heroically snapping pictures under fire?”

“Exactly. Your various scars were caused by different weapons, and incurred at different times, not in a single traumatic wartime experience. Dr. DeLong tried to point this out to the authorities, but you know how they are when they already have a simple solution to a problem. They refuse to let it be complicated by contradictory information.” Lilienthal rose, and spoke curtly: “As far as I’m concerned, you’re well enough to be released from this hospital. Goodbye, Mr. Madden.”

“Doctor,” I said, “you’re mad about something. What is it?”

He hesitated, and said, “I think you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “You think I’m a phony but you’re not quite sure. Right?”

He didn’t speak for a moment. At last he nodded. “As you say, I’m not sure.”

I said, “For what it’s worth, you have my word that, no matter what kind of a phony I may turn out to be, my amnesia is perfectly genuine.”

He hesitated once more. “Good luck, Mr. Madden,” he said again, but his voice was friendlier than it had been.

They rolled me to the hospital’s front door in a wheelchair. After that I was on my own—well, except for Kitty, who seemed to be indulging a highly developed Florence Nightingale complex. She helped me solicitously to the waiting taxi, which took us to the airport by way of a small car ferry. Apparently there’s no real estate level enough for a landing strip on that rugged mainland; the Prince Rupert Airport is therefore located on an island across the harbor.

The plane was a goodsized jet, wide open inside and crammed full of tourist-class-sized seats from bow to stern: a giant, airborne commuter bus. We took off on schedule and headed south. There were snowy mountains off to the left of our course. There was a dense, damp-looking wilderness below. Off to the right, the west, was a misty maze of islands and waterways that reminded me of Scandinavia or pictures of Scandinavia, I wasn’t quite sure which. I only knew that I associated that kind of rocky, piny archipelago with a different part of the world; but of course you can see practically anything on color TV these days.

I reminded myself that I must have flown over just such country as this—maybe even this particular landscape—within the past few weeks with a guy named Herb Walters, but I still couldn’t bring back a thing from that illfated plane ride. As the big jet rumbled southwards, I was aware of an odd and not entirely unpleasant sense of expectation. It wasn’t, I realized, that I thought the rest of my memory would return like a sudden gift from heaven the instant I walked through the door of my own house in Bellevue, Wash. It was, instead, that I had a pretty strong hunch it wouldn’t. I’d got back all I was going to for the time being. I was going to have to figure things out for myself. To hell with the recalcitrant mental machinery; I’d spent enough time waiting for it to get into a cooperative mood. It was a challenge, let’s say. A good man ought to be able to get by in the present without a lot of help from the past. If a newborn baby could do it, dammit, I could.

“Do we have to change for Seattle?” I asked. “Or does this plane go right through?”

“Who’s going to Seattle?” Kitty asked. She reached out and squeezed my hand. Apparently I’d been forgiven for my amorous crudities of yesterday. “I’m taking you home with me,” she said, smiling.

I said, “That’s called kidnaping, ma’am. A capital offense, I do believe.”

“You don’t really mind, do you, darling? After all, it isn’t as if you hadn’t stayed in my apartment before; and you need somebody to look after you for a few days, at least.”

“Sure,” I said. “How’s your cooking? I seem to forget.”

“Don’t worry so much about your memory,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.”

I wasn’t worrying about my memory, but I was wondering a bit about the girl beside me. She still didn’t quite add up to her own billing as a bright PR girl and a complaisant mistress, even a mistress with matrimonial ambitions.

Well, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite make sense. The Chinese kid who’d visited me—I reminded myself that Kitty had never bothered to mention her name to me—hadn’t been exactly a little jewel of relaxed and logical behavior, either. My impression was that the Chinese could hold grudges as well as anybody or even a little better; yet my cruelly jilted oriental sweetheart had made a special trip five hundred miles north into the Canadian bush just to relieve my poor sick mind of worry, she’d said.

It was mean of me to doubt her, of course, but my poor sick mind couldn’t help considering the possibility that, in spite of her pretty pretense of ignorance, she’d heard that I’d lost my memory and come flying up to get some notion of what I actually remembered and what I didn’t. This brought up the question of why my recollections, or lack of them, should be of concern to her. Well, she worked for the outfit that had employed the pilot who’d taken me on that last flight. She even admitted to being emotionally involved with the guy. When you buckled down to think about it hard, you arrived at the interesting fact that there was absolutely no proof that Walters was dead. The only guy who was known to have got hurt on that airborne safari was me. Looking at it from this angle, which no one else seemed to be doing, I could see a lot of fascinating possibilities, mostly threatening to my welfare.

I told myself to go back to the start and try to unravel it from there. The start was now—it had to be—the simple and amazing fact, just handed me by Dr. Lilienthal, that my fingerprints had been sent to Washington, D.C., and had been officially identified as those of P. Madden. Yet one of the few things about myself I knew for sure was that I’d been born M. Helm.

I considered the possibility that, at some time in the part of the past that was still missing to me, the true Mr. Helm had switched identities for some reason, probably nefarious. He’d managed the changeover so well that no government files carried anything but the new information on the false Mr. Madden…

No. It wasn’t possible, I told myself. It couldn’t have been done, not by a lone man covering his own tracks. I’d been a newspaper photographer for several years; I’d driven a car; I’d paid income tax. There would be—there had to be—all kinds of records extant concerning Matthew Helm, boy cameraman. I couldn’t actually recall fingerprints being taken, but somewhere along the line I was sure that, in the line of my newspaper business, I’d have needed a government clearance or permit or pass, since New Mexico, I recalled, has always been full of federal installations. My prints would have gone into storage with the rest of my data. There was also a strong possibility of real military service of some kind, although I couldn’t remember any. It was simply not possible that my whirls and loops and ridges were not associated, in the official master memory banks, with the name Helm. Yet, when asked, the computer had belched out Madden, complete with non-combatant war wounds.