The Terrorizers (5 page)

There was only one conclusion possible. I hadn’t been a lone man covering my own tracks. Somebody in Washington with a lot of clout must have had the official electronic brains carefully reprogrammed to say Madden when somebody pushed the Helm button.

Okay. It was clearing up a little. That would be the same somebody, presumably, who’d set me up in Seattle with appropriate business cards, and cameras and darkroom to match, utilizing my genuine photographic experience to bolster a phony identity. Well, nobody’d go to all that trouble to create a dedicated nature photographer called Madden if there wasn’t some kind of an important undercover job for him to do, but what job? I grimaced. There was no way of getting at that, for the moment. Or was there?

I frowned. It was a very odd thing when you came to think of it. I’d been comfortably settled in my quiet hospital room resigned to spending at least another week under medical observation—and suddenly the phone had started ringing with mysterious calls, mysterious visitors had come sneaking through the door, and the doctors who’d been coyly parrying my questions about when they planned to let me go had suddenly fallen all over themselves to get rid of me.

What else had happened? Nothing much. Somebody had just gone and blown up a ferry, that was all…

Kitty put her hand on my knee. “You’re not supposed to make faces like that,” she said. “You know the doctors told you not to try too hard to remember… What were you trying to remember?”

I said, “Something you’ve been keeping from me. Sally Wong. She came to see me yesterday.”

Kitty took her hand away. “Oh, the little Chinese girl.”

“Yeah,” I said, “the little Chinese girl I seem to have ditched to get engaged to you. You might have told me. I had to ask her who she was. She wasn’t at all sure I wasn’t playing some kind of a nasty joke on her. You can hardly blame her.”

Kitty laughed, unembarrassed. “Well, what was I supposed to say, that you’d been doing your best for interracial relations when we met, but then you couldn’t resist my enchanting personality and magnetic physical attraction… I can’t tell you everything, darling. Some things you’re just going to have to discover for yourself.” She leaned forward a bit so she could see past me, out the plane window. “Look, we’re almost there.”

Vancouver was a spectacular city surrounding a big harbor and backed by tall white mountains. Actually, the metropolis below seemed to be half water; long fingers ran inland from the open straits over which we flew. The names Burrard Inlet, False Creek, and Fraser River came to me without my being able to recall how or when I’d learned them. The airport was located out on the flat delta of the Fraser, quite a distance south of town. Since we had no luggage to retrieve from the baggage-handling area—I had only the clothes Kitty had brought me plus a small flight bag with my toothbrush and pajamas; and she carried a single case small enough to fit under the airplane seat—we were soon riding away in a taxi.

“The Vancouver Hotel, please,” Kitty said to the driver as she settled herself beside me with her big leather purse in her lap. She glanced at me and explained: “We have to pick up my car. I just hated to leave the poor little thing standing at the airport all that time, so I parked it in the hotel garage and took the regular limousine out.”

The streets were wet with recent rain, but the sun was shining for a change. It was a fairly long drive involving some big bridges. The clear, bright day made all my elaborate logic seem very shaky, for some reason. After all I was just a guy with a sore head who’d lost a sizeable hunk of his past. Why try to kid myself I could figure it out? The idea that my situation could be in some way related to that bomb on the ferry I’d only read about, well, how farfetched could you get? And that powerful mystery-man I’d dreamed up who’d carefully covered my tracks in Washington…

Kitty reached out and covered my hand with hers. “You’re doing it again,” she scolded me. “Stop it! Just forget about remembering, dear, and tell me about dinner. I can thaw some nice salmon for you, and I’ve still got a bottle of that funny Australian wine you liked, but if you’re too tired for a real meal just tell me and I’ll think of something simple and easy.”

“No, that sounds great.” I was looking out the cab window as we drove. “You know, it all looks familiar, somehow. The Vancouver Hotel? That’s the big, old-fashioned one in the middle of town—Burrard and Georgia Streets, right? The funny thing is, I can see it but I can’t see myself seeing it, if you know what I mean. It’s just as if I’d read about it in a guidebook.”

“Down, Rover, down!” she said, laughing. “Now, for dessert there’s French vanilla ice cream with my special homemade sauce to get the last taste of that hospital food out of your mouth. Also, I think, just a touch of that Mexican liqueur you brought me last summer. Kahlua?”

I knew that Kahlua was kind of brownish and tasted like sticky-sweet alcoholic coffee; but of course I couldn’t recall bringing it to her. Obviously, however, I’d made quite a production of playing the ardent swain. Yet if I was a man on a secret mission operating under a carefully constructed alias, as everything indicated, it seemed unlikely that my amours, oriental or occidental, would be totally unrelated to my assignment, whatever it was. Nobody’d go to all that trouble to establish an agent in the rainy Northwest just so he could exercise his virility on a pair of irrelevant females…

Kitty said, “Darling, when we get to the hotel, please do exactly as I tell you. Please?”

There was something odd and strained about her voice. I glanced at her quickly. She’d taken a small, nickel-plated, automatic pistol from her purse and she was pointing it straight at me.

It was terrible treachery, no doubt, and I suppose I should have been shocked and grieved by the dastardly betrayal, but it wasn’t as if I’d been taking the girl at face value, and there were too many other things to think about. I remembered that we’d been subjected to no anti-hijack precautions at the little Prince Rupert Airport, so she’d have had no problems there. I stared at the gun. Rather to my surprise, the mental computer kicked out the data: Astra Constable, self-cocking, external hammer, caliber .380 ACP. The letters stood for Automatic Colt Pistol, the now-discontinued weapon for which the cartridge had originally been designed. And the plating wasn’t nickel, I corrected myself, it was chrome.

The disturbing thing was that, in addition to knowing exactly what the firearm was, I also knew exactly what to do about it, although it wasn’t the kind of knowledge you’d expect from a respectable photographic character named Madden. Presumably the information came from the sinister and shadowy Helm—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde move over, please. I could see that the girl didn’t really want to shoot. I was aware, somehow, that that was all the edge I needed. It would give me an essential fraction of a second. All the moves were clear in my mind. I knew they could work. I knew I could take her, deal with the cab driver as necessary, and get the hell away…

But get the hell away where? And do what when I got there? Well, I did have one other contact with the unremembered part of my past aside from a voice on the phone I had as yet no way of tracing. Sally Wong could still, presumably, be found behind the ticket counter at that waterfront airline, North-Air, and the address was presumably in the phone book—but reason warned me that the neighborhood of Herbert Walters’ pretty Chinese playmate might not be a very safe refuge for me in my hour of need. I had no safe refuge, or if I did, I didn’t know about it. And safe refuges weren’t exactly what I was after, I realized, when I stopped to analyze my own feelings.

I was aware of a funny, nagging, little sense of professional pride, even though I didn’t know exactly what my profession was. After all, somebody’d gone to a lot of trouble to send me here, and keep me here for six months. Then something had gone wrong. I must have goofed in some way, since it was unlikely I’d been supposed to wind up in the ocean with amnesia. Now I could either compound the goof by running like a rabbit the first time somebody waved a gun at me, or I could play along with this lovely, amateurish, double-crossing chick and her silly firearm, and learn a few things like where she was planning to take me and who’d be there to greet me.

She was, after all, the best contact I had with my lost past. Everything indicated that I’d gone to a lot of trouble to make her acquaintance; furthermore, it didn’t seem likely that she was going to all this trouble just to have me killed. Away from her, not knowing what it was all about, I’d be a blind man trying to find a book in a library he didn’t know in order to read the print he couldn’t see…

I saw sudden apprehension in Kitty’s eyes. “No, Paul! Don’t do anything… anything rash. Please!”

She was way behind the times. The decision had been made.

“It’s your party, Kitty, darling,” I said, relaxing beside her. “Your party, complete with my funny Australian wine and your special ice cream sauce.”

She looked hurt. “Don’t!” she pleaded. “Please don’t be angry. You… you don’t understand. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just going to… to detain you a little while for your own protection, your own good. Please try to understand!”

I noticed that she kept her voice low, as well as her gun. Apparently the taxi driver was not an accomplice. He jockeyed the cab through the dense downtown traffic, unaware of the drama—or melodrama—behind him. Presently he turned into a narrow driveway between two tall buildings and pulled up at the hotel’s rear door, complete with a uniformed doorman, who stepped forward to let us out, and to lift our scanty luggage out of the trunk of the taxi. Kitty maneuvered to stay behind me. The little Astra was out of sight, but her hand was hidden in her purse.

“Pay the nice man, darling,” she said, and I got rid of some Canadian bills that, although dry now, hadn’t been improved by being thoroughly soaked in sea water not too long ago, along with the other contents of my wallet. I tipped the doorman lightly and picked up the bags. Kitty said, “Let’s go inside for a drink first, dear; it’s a long drive home,” but that was just for public consumption. Once we were inside the high, oldfashioned lobby she said, “No, just walk straight through to the front, please.”

I was very much aware of her walking beside me as we marched past the lounge and the desk. I was very glad that the Astra was a double-action-type weapon that, uncocked, took a long, strong pull on the trigger for the first shot. I didn’t feel she really knew what she was doing with it—which made her, of course, twice as dangerous as if she had known.

“Right through the front door and across the sidewalk,” she said.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see that her face was pale and shiny with strain. I’d have been happier if she hadn’t taken it quite so hard. She was tense enough to blow me to hell by mistake and have regretful hysterics afterwards. With a bag in each hand, deliberately handicapping myself to reassure her, I shouldered my way through the big doors, to see a wide, busy street outside. As if on signal, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up at the curb. The rear door opened and a beefy, dark-haired man got out. He was wearing a shabby, dark suit that didn’t go with fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of vehicle; and a black turtle-necked sweater. His hand was in the pocket of his jacket.

He said, “In the front, Miss. Quick, we’re holding up traffic. You, throw that gear on the floor and get in back!”

A moment later we were driving away. The darkhaired man, who’d got in beside me, took his hand from his pocket and displayed a snubnosed Colt revolver in a casual way as if he thought I might be mildly interested. The man behind the wheel was wearing a chauffeur’s cap. He seemed to be another beefy muscleman; his neck was broad and red. Kitty, in the other front seat, drew a deep breath, as if happy to be relieved of responsibility. She unbuttoned her long, pink coat. Throwing it wide open for air, she let herself slump down in the seat in an exhausted way, as if she’d run a hard mile on a hot day. For her, I gathered, betrayal was hard work.

“Were you followed from the airport, Miss?” the man beside me asked.

“I… I don’t know for sure. I didn’t want to keep looking around.”

He said, “It’s practically a dead cert you were, but I think you lost them at the hotel. We’ll check. Incidentally, I’m Dugan and that’s Lewis. Miss Davidson, isn’t it? And this is Mr. Madden, is it, returned from the dead? We want to hear all about that, don’t we, Miss Davidson?”

Kitty licked her lips and didn’t look at me. “I don’t… I wasn’t told why… I was promised he wouldn’t be hurt.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t dream of it, Miss,” Dugan said. “Gentle as lambs we are. Never lay a finger on him, not a finger.”

Kitty stared straight ahead through the windshield. After a little, she organized the bunched pink slacks more becomingly about her legs, and then drew her coat close about her once more as if suddenly chilled. It was another long ride, at least as long as that from the airport. The driver, Lewis, did some early twisting and turning that increased the mileage considerably; but at last, apparently satisfied that there was nobody behind us, he took us out onto a freeway and started making reasonable time. I didn’t like the fact that I’d been given the names, and that I wasn’t blindfolded. It seemed to indicate that they didn’t care what I told, later, which didn’t seem likely; or that they didn’t figure I’d be in any condition to tell, later. I wondered if I’d made a serious miscalculation when I passed up the chance to escape.

Presently we left the freeway. We were out in the British Columbia countryside now, driving past soggy fields and woodlots drained by deep ditches and creeks running with brown water. The clouds had pulled together once more; the brief moment of sunshine was only a shining memory. The driver turned the Mercedes into a lane that led back between two fenced fields—high, barbed-wire-topped, chain-link fences, I noted—to some white buildings among the trees. We passed a small, neat sign: INANOOK SANITARIUM.

I wondered idly if that was a genuine aborigine name or if somebody was being cutiepie and hinting that this sprawling place was a cozy nook. Except for the institutional white paint, it looked like one of the resort hotels where the guests inhabit expensive individual cottages and bungalows scattered widely around the main building—except that these bungalows, I saw, had bars on the windows. The headquarters structure was impressively large and two stories high. In front of the door, three people awaited us, two men and a woman, all in similar starched white coats. The legs were dressed differently, however. One of the men wore dark trousers. The woman had on practical dull nylons and sturdy brown shoes. The second man wore white, starched pants to match his jacket. He was young and blond, with a face that could have been called handsome in its dull and fleshy way. He had big shoulders and muscular hands. He stepped forward as we approached.