The Threateners (2 page)

“Clearly they haven’t determined your true occupation.”

“How do you figure that, sir?”

“If they knew you were a professional, they’d know it would take more than four watchers to keep you covered around the clock without alerting you. Apparently they’re under the impression that you’re just an innocent, free-lance photojournalist who has enough of a private income that he doesn’t have to work very hard; that’s the cover you’ve always used around Santa Fe, isn’t it?”

I said, “It wasn’t a cover when I started, you’ll recall, back in the good old days when I’d escaped from your clutches, before my wife left me and you lured me back into the Washington fold—well, sheepfold is hardly the right descriptive phrase, is it? Call it a wolf den.” I grimaced at the phone, although my expression would hardly reach him two thousand miles to the east of where I stood. “You may be right, sir. I still keep a couple of cameras around and snap them occasionally for show. Anyway, these people don’t seem to know I’ve spotted them, and they certainly aren’t taking any serious precautions; I could have had each of them half a dozen times. I’d say you’re right, and they don’t know what I really do for a living, or what a truly nasty person I am.”

“Well, we do try to keep it a secret,” Mac said dryly. “Now tell me what you’ve done to deserve all this attention.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, sir.”

"You have a lady living with you at the moment, I believe; a divorced lady. Ex-husbands have been known to do some strange things—”

“Unlikely in this case. The guy is a young doctor and I shouldn’t think he’d have enough money yet, judging by what Jo told me about him, to mount this kind of an operation even if he’s mad with jealousy, which seems unlikely since he remarried a few months ago. Besides, Jo has gone back to Tucson.”

“Permanently?”

I said, “If you practice with a golf ball on the office rug, or whack a tennis ball against the backyard fence by the hour, you’re merely an enthusiastic sportsman. The gal may think you’re kind of childish; but boys, even grown-up boys, must be allowed to play their silly games, right? But if you buy a new gun, even just a lousy little .22, and spend a few afternoons a week at the rifle range learning how to put a bullet in the right place . . . After the way we met down in Mexico under fairly violent circumstances, Jo was already uncertain about me. Seeing me spending considerable amounts of time and money on my shooting made up her mind the wrong way; I guess to her it seemed like watching Jack the Ripper sharpening his knife. Maybe I should have taken up golf.”

“My condolences,” Mac said. He’s not the most sympathetic man in the world; and he’s always uneasy about our amorous entanglements, although as far as I know he’s still got his own lady, a high-powered businesswoman he sees at odd intervals. “Tell me about this recreational shooting you’ve been doing. Whatever it is, I find it commendable, since I’m told that your latest scores at the Ranch, while acceptable, weren’t up to your usual standards. And we have found that just about any shooting practice carries over to all shooting.”

“Yes, sir.” I explained the basics of the small-bore silhouette game. He seemed to find it amusing that one of his sinister senior operatives was spending his convalescent leave knocking over little metal animals and birds with a .22, like a kid in a shooting gallery. I finished with: “Hell, I can’t figure out what these weirdos are up to, following me around.”

“Of course, over the years you have made a few enemies in the line of duty, but as a prelude to revenge this does seem a little overelaborate.” Mac was silent briefly. Standing by the filling-station pay phone while the attendant pumped gas into the Subaru—since I was being watched, it was highly possible that my home phone was tapped—I visualized him in his office in front of the bright window he likes to make us face, a lean, gray-haired man with black eyebrows, wearing a gray business suit, always. He went on: “In the absence of clear private motives, wed better investigate the possibility that you’ve become involved in a government operation of some kind. The questions are, what kind, and what government? Can you think of anything you’ve been doing that would bring you to official attention?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I’ll check here in Washington and try to find out if some other agency is operating in your area. Or if there’s a possible foreign interest. That close to Los Alamos it’s not inconceivable; they still do strange work up on that mountainside, don’t they?”

“We call it the Hill, sir, and they like people to think they’re harmless nowadays.” I laughed. “Last summer around the Fourth of July I drove up that way to visit some friends; it’s only forty miles. Coming into town I passed a big sign at the city limits: FIREWORKS PROHIBITED.The home of the atom bomb, for Christ’s sake, and they won’t let the kids shoot off a few whiz-bangs on Independence Day!” Apparently he didn’t find it amusing; I heard no laughter on the line. Well, his sense of humor isn’t very highly developed. Or maybe it wasn’t really funny. I went on: “So what do I do about this flea circus, sir?”

“Nothing, until I’ve made an investigation here. You’d better give me the descriptions; but unless they take positive action against you, continue to ignore them.”

Well, as I said earlier, those had been his original instructions.

They gave me a little blue ribbon for my farewell performance in Class B. I’d beaten three other novices who’d made scores of ten, eleven, and thirteen; there was also a first-timer who’d managed a seven, better than I’d done on my initial venture into silhouette competition. Mark had cleaned up in AAA and was top gun for the day with a fairly spectacular score of 32x40.

At his suggestion, before taking off for our respective homes, we relaxed with a couple of beers from the cooler in his van. It’s not my favorite tipple, but beer lovers are almost as bad as teetotalers for condemning you as a hopeless alcoholic if you indicate your preference for something harder. Anyway, after standing in the bright New Mexico sun for a couple of hours, I didn’t find the idea of beer completely revolting.

“Hey, you got that new Anschutz hitting pretty good,” Mark said.

I grinned. “Your antique wasn’t doing too damn badly.”

What he was using was a home-built rig based on an old Winchester Model 52, no longer in production, but one of the best small bore target rifles ever made. (In target-shooting jargon, “small bore” stands for a .22; all other common calibers are “big bore.”) He’d cut down the barrel—within wide limits, a short gun barrel is just as accurate as a long one; and it isn’t knocked about so badly by the wind on a gusty day, important when you’re shooting offhand. He’d improved the trigger pull, mounted an enormous Leupold target scope, and set the whole thing into a sad-looking lam-mated stock on which he kept whittling and sanding to make it fit him better when he wasn’t adding to it elsewhere with tape and moleskin. When he got it just right, he said, he’d use it as a pattern for a really good-looking stock. As far as I could make out, he’d been getting it just right for at least two years now, the length of time he’d lived here in Santa Fe. Right or wrong, the old patchwork rifle consistently out-shot a lot of new and expensive equipment, including my Anschutz.

“Well, that is enough of this childish play,” Mark said, draining his Budweiser. "Now I must go home and take care of serious matters, like raking the dead leaves from the yard, or my wife will divorce me. Too much shooting, she says, and not enough work around the house.”

“I know how it is,” I said, thinking of Jo Beckman, who’d been very nice to have around, and wasn’t around any longer. “Well, thanks for the beer.”

I whistled for the dog and had a moment of uneasiness when he didn’t appear at once, although instant obedience is not his thing; we run a partnership of sorts, not a master-slave operation. But with Spooky constantly on the horizon I couldn’t help figuring my vulnerabilities. Jo was no longer around to be threatened; that left only Happy. And me, but I’ve lived in a state of threat most of my adult life and so far I’ve managed to cope with it, one way or another.

Then the pup came bounding over the hill and plunked himself at my feet to catch the junior-grade Milkbone biscuit I tossed him to console him for having to leave his business in deference to mine. Mark’s van was just pulling away. I frowned, watching it go. He seemed a nice enough guy, easy to get along with and comfortable to shoot with—you never had to worry that he’d let his gun muzzle wander carelessly in your direction—and he was certainly a fine marksman, but there was something lacking. Then I realized what it was: triumph. Hell, the man had won the damn match, hadn’t he? He’d beat out a dozen good local shots, and several more not-so-good ones like me, with a score that would have been nothing to be ashamed of in national competition; you’d have thought he’d be walking on air. Of course a little modesty is expected; but so is a certain happy glow, which had been conspicuously missing.

Well, I wasn’t glowing much myself, even though I’d won my stumblebum class decisively and shot my best score to date in this type of competition. I was gaining on it, which was nice; but it was, after all, just a game. When you’ve been shot at for real and have shot back and survived, you may find target games enjoyable but you’re not going to be too depressed when you lose or too elated when you win. The stakes aren’t that high; your life isn’t on the line.

It was a disturbing thought: maybe Mark Steiner wasn’t conspicuously, deliriously happy about his win today because he had, in the past, competed with firearms in other ways and in other places where the stakes had been higher. I stood there for a moment reviewing the past summer in my mind: Could the guy be something other than the simple citizen he seemed? Could he have been planted on me? The feet that we’d been assigned to shoot together today was probably of no significance, the luck of the draw, but we’d met with some frequency on the range on weekdays, apparently by accident; but was it? Well, I could think of other club members I’d encountered out here, sighting in their guns and practicing their shooting, almost as often. But he’d been very friendly and helpful and had invited me to his house and introduced me to his family. It made me feel disloyal to the guy, although we weren’t by any means bosom pals, but I found myself wondering uneasily if he could be another Spooky, Number Five, gradually moving in on me, fixing my rifle, plying me with beer, while his four associates kept watch on me from a distance. . . . Or maybe he was just a stolid gent who didn’t ever show much emotion and I was getting paranoid after weeks of being watched.

It was still a clear, sunny, fell day, but up the Rio Grande valley white clouds were starting to form; eventually they’d pile up high and turn black, probably, and give us our usual afternoon thunderstorm. Spooky Three picked me up on the way home. Now that I’d finished shooting and the pressure was off, I felt kind of benevolent toward her; after all, I’d more or less saved her life, at least for the moment. Well, hers or one of her friends’.

“I’ve still found no government organization that will admit to employing anybody fitting the descriptions you gave me,” Mac had told me when I checked back yesterday for the third or fourth time. “Or to conducting any operations in the Santa Fe-Los Alamos area. Of course, they do not have to be telling the truth; they seldom are.”

“Some years ago we had another situation like this down in Mexico, if you’ll recall, sir,” I said. “I did my damnedest to find out if a certain dame I kept bumping into belonged to us, but nobody’d claim her, so I figured she had to be on the other side and wound up shooting her when she started waving a gun around. It turned out that she was working for a certain Washington would-be big shot who was concealing her identity for some dumb security reason; as punishment for her death, he wanted me skinned alive and roasted over a slow fire.”

“Yes, I remember,” Mac said. “I have been careful to point out during my inquiries that if nobody admits responsibility for these people, we’ll feel free to deal with them as we please; and we will entertain no complaints afterward. . . . Oh, Eric.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does ‘Lapis’ mean anything to you?”

He pronounced it as a Latin word: “Lahpis.” I’d more often heard it pronounced “Laypis,” and it took me a moment to make the connection. Well, Lahpis or Laypis, at least he seemed to have a lead after all; he just had to be coy about it.

I said, “Well, lapis lazuli is a semiprecious stone, kind of blue, if I remember right. I believe they used to find some in Colorado. I have a vague memory that the ancients used to grind it up to make ultramarine pigment. ”

"Very good, Eric." He sounded like a teacher commending a backward student. “Actually, the main sources of lapis lazuli are Afghanistan and Chile. However, I doubt that the man who used the word was referring to gemstones.”

Clearly, he wanted me to kick it around a bit. “A man, a woman, or perhaps a town?" I suggested. "I’ve never heard of a Lapis, Colorado—I don’t think that, unlike turquoise, the rock in question was ever found in New Mexico in significant quantities—but a lot of old southwestern mining camps with odd names have vanished from the map. I’ll check it out with one of the local historical geniuses if you like, sir.”

"I’m afraid it would be a waste of time. I doubt that we’re dealing with a treasure hunt involving a lost mine. The word may be a coded reference to a man or a woman, as you suggest, maybe even one of the men, or the woman, currently watching you, but more likely it refers to an undercover organization, or a secret project, probably the latter.”

“Operation Lapis?”

“Perhaps.” He hesitated and went on: “I recently encountered an immaculate young fashion plate of an executive assistant who was apparently quite a partygoer in his free time. At least he was suffering from a bad hangover that day. It made him less circumspect than he might normally have been. I chatted with him as he guided me to the sanctum of his superior—some of those Washington office buildings are as confusing as the Pentagon—and he had an interesting reaction when I mentioned casually that I’d been checking on current government activity in the southwest, so far without result. First he said he wasn’t aware of any, then he apologized for yawning by saying that it had been a long night and the liquor had flowed a bit too freely but the lady had been pleasantly cooperative, and finally he yawned again and said, ‘Well, there’s Lapis, of course,’ as if it were something known to everybody. Then, realizing that it hadn’t been known to me, he seemed aghast at his breach of security and delivered me to the proper office without speaking again.”