The Terrorizers (9 page)

Her head came up. Her eyes came to life with angry recognition. “Why… why you unspeakable
beast
!” she gasped, lunging out of her chair.

I caught her wrists as she came at me. Although I owed her nothing, as far as I knew, but the best part of a week of electronic horror, I was relieved. It was all right. She could get mad and everything. Dr. Elsie hadn’t hit the higher numbers on the rheostat. Miss Davidson might be slightly frayed around the edges, but she was still with us.

“Relax, relax,” I said, holding her. “I’m sorry, I just had to snap you out of it. Where are your clothes?”

She stopped fighting me and, after I’d released her, frowned at me in a bewildered way. “Did… did they let you go? Are they turning us loose?”

“Us?” I said. “What’s this
us
bit? Whose side are you on, anyway, Kitty?”

“Why, yours, of course,” she said. “I mean—”

“You have a hell of a funny way of showing it.”

She flushed. “Oh, I see. Just because I… You think I… Oh, I just can’t think clearly!” She swayed, standing there, and I reached out to steady her. “They’ve got me all mixed up, that horrible woman and her dreadful machine that turns you into a helpless puppet twitching and kicking on a string… Oh, Paul, get me out of here. Please! I can’t stand any more of that. I can’t
stand
it.”

I held her once more, as she started to cry. “It’s all right, Kitty.”

After a while, she stiffened abruptly in my arms, in a panicky way. “They
didn’t
let you go, did they? You escaped! And that awful man Dugan will be coming here any minute with my dinner, he’s late already. Quick, we’ve got to get away before he—”

“Don’t worry about Dugan. I’ve already had a little talk with Mr. Dugan and persuaded him not to bother us.” I went on quickly before she could ask questions: “And there are a few things I’ve got to know before we start running around in the rain. Like, if I’m on your side, why am I here, courtesy of an Astra .380 held by you?”

“Astra?” Her voice was muffled against me. “Oh, the gun.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The gun.”

“I didn’t want him to do it,” she said, still clinging to me. “I tried to talk him out of it—”

“Who?”

She hesitated. “You’re sure Dugan won’t… He gives me the creeps; he’s almost as bad as that female monster he works for.”

“Never mind Dugan. Who told you to turn me over to them?”

“The man in Washington… Can’t we talk later? I want to get out of here now!”

“What man in Washington?”

She sniffed loudly. “You know, the one you work for. Oh, of course you don’t remember, but you told me to get in touch with him if anything ever happened to you.” Another big sniff. “Well, it did, so I did. After your crash I called him at the number you’d given me—”

“What number?”

She told me. I made her repeat it once and said, “Okay, I’ve got it. What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his full name. You just called him Mac. Darling, can’t we please go now? At least find my clothes so I can be dressing while you—”

I said, “So this Mac I work for had you throw me to the wolves. Nice guy.”

She freed herself and stepped back. She spoke breathlessly fast: “He said it was regrettable but unavoidable, and you’d been trained to cope with situations like that. He said it was the only way we’d ever find this place, for me to do exactly as they asked. Otherwise I’d lose their confidence altogether and all our work would be wasted. If… if I didn’t turn you over to them, if I tried to protect you, they’d know I wasn’t a real convert to the great cause for which my husband gave his life!” Defiantly, she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her cotton garment. “
Now
, will you please, please find me something to wear besides this floursack? I think Dugan took my things out into the other room somewhere.
Please?
”

It was the first I’d heard of her having had a husband, that I could remember; but her marital, status, or ex-marital status, could wait. She was right, of course. With two dead men on the premises who might be discovered at any moment, we didn’t have too much time to waste.

“Sure,” I said. “Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”

Out in the little attendants’ room between the two prison suites of Goldenrod Cottage, I found a closet containing the pink slacks-shirt-and-sweater outfit she’d been wearing when I’d last seen her, including shoes and some flimsy underneath stuff I hadn’t had the privilege of viewing previously although I could recall making an effort in that direction, unsuccessful. When I returned, she wasn’t where I’d left her. I heard the shower running in the bathroom. Well, if she could worry about soap and water, I didn’t have to worry about her. I went in there to find her just stepping out of the shower. Under other circumstances I might have been intrigued by the picture she made, reaching for a towel, but this wasn’t the time or place. At the moment I didn’t give a damn whether she was entrancingly nude like September Mom or armorplated like Joan of Arc; and apparently neither did she.

“What cause?” I asked.

“What?”

“Your husband gave his life for a great cause, you said.”

Having given herself a quick rubdown, she started drying her hair. “The PPP, of course,” she said a bit irritably. “The People’s Protest Party. How corny can you get?”

It took me a moment to make the connection, even though I recalled now that I’d had some earlier suspicions that there was a connection.

I said, “Oh, you mean this terrorist outfit that goes around blowing things up? Like ferries.” Busy with her hair, she only nodded. I summarized what I’d learned so far: “What you’re saying is that your husband was a member of this outfit, he got killed, and now you’ve infiltrated it, is that the idea?”

“Yes, of course. They killed Roger, didn’t they? Oh, they tried to make me think he blew himself up accidentally while doing their horrible work with Dan Market, and of course I pretended to believe them so they’d trust me, but actually Roger was sick of the whole terrible business. He was planning to… to blow the whistle on them as you Yankees say. Obviously they planned his death to silence him. So I tried to get some evidence by… by getting involved with them myself.” She tossed aside the towel, found a comb on the glass shelf above the washbowl, and started working with it painfully. “That was back east where Roger was killed. Toronto. Then they had me move out here to the West Coast and run a few unimportant errands for them. I knew that they were just testing my loyalty, and that they didn’t really trust me and probably never would. I realized I was getting in over my head so I secretly got in touch with one of the investigators who’d questioned me after the Toronto explosion—an RCMP man named Ross; you saw him at the hospital—and asked for help and protection.”

“Me?”

“As it turned out, they sent me you. Of course we had to get acquainted very elaborately and sneakily so as not to arouse suspicion…” She threw the comb aside. “I don’t know why I’m worrying about my bloody
hair
! Where did you put my… Oh, thanks!” She giggled abruptly. “You make a wonderful ladies’ maid, Mr. Madden. Have you had a great deal of experience?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t remember,” I said. “It seems to me I could have been told some of this stuff before now.”

“In that hospital room? It was… there was a microphone in it. And on the telephone, too. Bugged, is that the word?”

“Bugged,” I said. “But the plane we took to Vancouver wasn’t bugged, was it?”

She said, a bit uncomfortably, “Well, that man in Washington, Mac, felt that since we were going to turn you over to them, the less you knew the better.”

“Sure, my pal, Mac.” I grimaced. “Where does the Chinese girl, Sally Wong, come into all this?”

“You’d been working with her on another aspect of the case that had led nowhere, I understand. They took you off that and assigned you to me.”

So the oriental menace wasn’t. Well, you can’t be right all the time. Kitty was buttoning her shirt. I passed the pants over and she stepped into them.

“All that business about your doing a story on the lumber business,” she said, zipping herself up, “and ditching the pretty airlines girl because you’d fallen for the lovely PR lady at first sight… Rather trite, but it seemed to work. I was questioned about you, of course, but Joan Market seemed to accept my answers. But if I’d refused to bring you here when she ordered me to last week, she’d have known I was lying when I now claimed to hate you violently because you’d just been revealed as a sneaky U.S. agent trying to destroy the PPP, who’d wormed his way into my affections pretending to be a harmless photographer.” In spite of her damp and tangled hair and hastily assembled costume, there was a hint of the old Kitty about her as she grinned at me maliciously. “Hi, worm.”

She was making a fast comeback, but it was hardly the ideal spot for flirtation. It wasn’t even a very good spot for interrogation; but there was no way of knowing what would happen next, and I preferred not to operate in the dark when the knowledge was available.

“What’s a Market?” I asked. “Who’s Joan? Who’s Dan?”

“Where are my shoes? Just set them down there, thanks…” She held my arm for balance, stepping into them. She said, “Joan Market is my contact, I guess you’d call her; the person through whom I infiltrated the PPP. Rather a hippie type, fuzzy hairdo, long denim skirt, and very suspicious; but it wasn’t too difficult to convince her I wanted to pick up the flaming torch of freedom where my martyred husband had dropped it—and if you think that’s corny, you should hear them talk some time—since her husband, Dan, had been killed with Roger in that Toronto blast.” Kitty was struggling into her pink sweater and pulling her long hair out from under it. “Now can we go?”

“What went wrong? How did you wind up here?”

She said impatiently, “Well, naturally they’d been suspicious of me—even more suspicious of me—since they learned who you really were. I don’t know how your chief or whoever he is came to make that slip, using your real name over the phone so they could trace you. I’d told him from the start they were listening to everything that was said in that room and over that telephone. After… after using me to get you here, I guess they decided I wasn’t much good to them any more and they’d find out exactly where I did stand.” She hesitated. “I… I told them, Paul, I told them everything.”

I grinned. “Hell, so did I. Everything I knew, at least. Who wants to be a hero? But what they really wanted to know I couldn’t remember. Walters, Walters, Walters. What’s so damned important about Herbert Walters, anyway?”

“Isn’t that obvious? He was one of them; at least he sat in on the meetings of the council. He knows—knew—all about their next operation.”

I thought that over for a minute and whistled softly. “Now it begins to add up! They’ve got another big bang all set to go, is that it? But if the missing Walters compromised their plans they’re going to have to abort… Sure. They’ve got to know if it’s safe to go ahead. I don’t suppose you know what they’re preparing to blow up next?”

She shook her head quickly. “Heavens, no! That’s very high-echelon business. I was just a raw recruit on probation…
Please
, Paul. Can’t we leave now? This place gives me the horrors.”

I nodded. “That’s it with the questions. Ready for Operation Breakout. Firearms first. What happened to the gun you had?”

“They took it back, of course—it was theirs to start with—but I’ve no idea where it went to.”

“Well, we could spend all night looking for a gun cabinet,” I said. “To hell with it. I’ll get one off a guard. There’s not much chance of surprising the inside security man, the one on the front door, not with a lot of ambulatory patients and their attendants lounging around the lobby after dinner. However, the outside man makes his first evening round at dinner time, and if he’s on schedule he ought to be coming back towards Aster shortly. There’s a lovely bunch of dripping lilac bushes for me to hide in right at the corner of the cottage… Remember, when I tell you to stay some place and don’t move, you stay there and don’t move, no matter how deep you sink in the mud or how hard it rains on you.”

Kitty was looking a little pale. “I’ll do my best, Paul.”

Actually, it was easy. It was drizzling fairly heavily by now, and the security guard, a thickset middleaged man, was wrapped in a long black rubbery raincoat that gleamed wetly under the hazy lights. It rustled so loudly as he walked that he couldn’t have heard the roar of a charging lion, and it didn’t help his maneuverability a bit when I jumped him from behind. The first blow from Dugan’s cosh knocked off his uniform cap and sent him to hands and knees.

I picked my spot carefully, and struck a second time, harder. He was dead before he subsided on the wet bricks of the walk.

It didn’t take me long to become the possessor of a .38 Colt revolver with a six-inch barrel, a fairly husky weapon designed for holster use. A little further searching gave me a trick rubber cartridge holder, a quickload device with six extra rounds all lined up ready to be slapped in the cylinder—I wondered what kind of a firelight he’d been anticipating on these medical premises. I also acquired a wallet and some more keys. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do any swimming before the night was over. The amount of metal I was now carrying, I’d sink like a stone.

I turned my head and whistled softly. A light figure detached itself from the wet bushes and came splashing towards me across the soggy lawn. Pale pink wasn’t, I reflected, a very practical color for this type of night-escape operation. The next time we had to blast out of a booby hatch together, I hoped she’d pick a more suitable color scheme, not to mention a pair of pants she could run in without tripping over the super-stylish, super-wide cuffs—even as I watched, she got her feet tangled and fell headlong. Not that it mattered. By this time we were both about as wet and muddy as we could get. I stepped forward and helped her up.

“Grab the feet,” I hissed, leading her back to the corpus delecti. “The old goat is too heavy for me to carry and I don’t want to direct attention to him by leaving a plowed-up trail where I dragged him across the lawn… What’s the matter?”