The Threateners (3 page)

“I’ll keep my ears open,” I said.

“Eric.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It occurs to me that there is one way of determining who is responsible for these people who have you under surveillance. I have been thinking of that incident in Mexico you mentioned. It suggests a possible approach, doesn’t it?”

I’d hate to say how many years I’ve worked for him, but sometimes he still manages to startle me a little.

I said, “You mean, I knock off one of them here and you see who in Washington gets mad at the loss of a precious agent and comes roaring at you to demand my head?”

“Precisely. You don’t approve?”

He was getting bloodthirsty in his old age. Well, his humanitarian impulses had never been overwhelming. What disturbed me wasn’t the fact that he was suggesting a touch, as we call it—use “hit” if you prefer—on someone who might be a colleague of sorts in the murky world of U.S. undercover operations. We are no longer a little band of brothers and sisters, if we ever were. Today’s government is full of wild men and women ruthlessly saving the nation their own way, rabid spy catchers and fanatic drug hunters and hungry empire builders, who’ll kill you as soon as look at you, even if your office is right down the hall, if they get the notion you’re an obstacle to their ambitious campaigns. I owed the new groove in my skull and the fresh bullet and operation scars on my left midsection to just such a U.S. zealot with a shining cause. So I don’t pay much attention nowadays to birth certificates, passports, or even badges or IDs. It’s a jungle out there, man, if you’ll excuse the phrase; and you’re just as dead if you’re shot by a true-blue Yankee as by a dirty red commie. What counts is the gun. If it’s pointing my way, I’ll do my damnedest to blow away the guy behind it at the earliest opportunity, and if he happens to be a great American patriot named George Washington, it’s just too damn bad; he should have aimed his lousy musket in some other direction.

However, the survival instinct can be followed too far. While I’m no great humanitarian, either, the idea of casually eliminating people who’d merely annoyed me a bit by walking in my footsteps, didn’t appeal to me, if only because it would create more problems than it solved. I reflected that it was an odd reversal of our customary roles, for me to be the advocate of restraint and caution. I had to tread cautiously or Mac might think my recent wounds had left me in a state of mushy sentimentality, and order me back to the Ranch for toughening.

I said mildly, “It just seems a little premature, sir. Let’s wait a little longer; maybe they’ll reveal what they’re up to. Anyway, we don’t know that they’re taking orders from Washington rather than Moscow. Or Peking, whatever they call it nowadays. Or Havana, or Baghdad, or Qaddafiville, whatever the name of
that
dump is, and however the paranoid bastard spells his name.”

Mac said, “That is just the point. If the surveillance orders originate here in Washington, with one of his operatives dead, the person responsible will be forced to identify himself and open communications with me quickly, before I order you to wipe out the rest and send you whatever help you need to accomplish the task. I think it is fairly well known that I do not take kindly to having my people harassed, on or off duty. If we get no official complaints here, we’ve more or less eliminated Washington as a source of your problem, a considerable step forward. I’m sure you can arrange it so the local authorities will accept it as self-defense, with a small hint from me. Unless, of course, you prefer to make it an accident.”

I had it now. His professional feelings were hurt. He’d learned that somebody in Washington had a big operation going out here. Operation Lapis, for God’s sake! He knew that one of his people was under heavy surveillance, very possibly in this connection, yet nobody’d had the courtesy to tell him what it was all about even when he’d gone out of his way to ask. Okay. They’d had their warning. He’d stated clearly and repeatedly that if the operatives haunting one of his men remained unidentified and unexplained he’d take steps to have them dealt with. Having got no answers with polite questions, he intended to see what he could blast loose with a gun. My gun.

I said, “I have a hunch we’re barking up the wrong tree, sir.” Well, he was doing the barking, but it wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say so.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something amateurish about this surveillance that makes me wonder if it isn’t an independent project with no connection to Washington or any other national capital. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a little more time, sir. I’ve just been riding along pretending to be blind and deaf; now let me see if I can’t figure out a way of prying loose some information without cluttering up the place with dead bodies.”

There was a pause; then his voice came through the phone, with a hint of impatience: “Oh, very well. But be careful. According to the reports I’ve received, you’re not in good enough condition yet, physically or mentally, to cope with any truly demanding situations. That was quite a blow you took on the head, not to mention the other injuries.”

Which was his way of telling me that he was only yielding to my request as a concession to my temporary disabilities.

For a long time after my marriage broke up for pretty much the same reasons that had caused Jo to leave me, I’d told myself firmly that my home was now Washington, D.C., handy to our base of operations, where I had a nice little bachelor apartment; and that Santa Fe was an okay town to visit occasionally for old time’s sake but I wouldn’t want to live there. The trouble was that the crowded east gave me claustrophobia and I found myself coming back out to New Mexico more and more often for a breath of more or less unpolluted air. Finally, after years of imposing on friends or camping out in hotel and motel rooms, and each time kidding myself that this was positively my last nostalgic visit to my old hometown, I broke down and bought a small house on the east side of Santa Fe, up toward the mountains.

For a man in my line of work to support two establishments when he spent much of his time in the field, or at the Ranch being patched up between missions, wasn’t very economical, but the danger pay does tend to pile up in the bank, and I needed a place for the dog. My new domicile is an old adobe on a tight little lot surrounded by a six-foot board fence. Esthetically, I’d have preferred a traditional mud-brick wall—Santa Fe is a city of walls—but nobody asked me, and the high fence still makes it a safe haven for Happy. Fortunately he’s not a chewer. A big rolling gate lets me bring my car into the diminutive yard, necessary because the narrow street outside is a fairly busy one and drivers, particularly late at night when they’ve had a few beers, have been known to take the bend below the house too fast and clobber a car parked out front. As a matter of fact, I’d been told that they even take out the fence every few years, and that this was the reason I’d got the place at a fairly reasonable price—the previous owner had found the midnight crashes traumatic—but folks in my line of work had better be hardened to midnight crashes and so far there haven’t been any.

As I came around the last curve and saw my place up ahead on the right, I swore to myself; you can plaster a fence with no-parking signs until no wood shows and still people will put their lousy cars right in front of it and go off and leave them. This was a fancy Mercedes, and it wasn’t just taking up part of my very limited parking space, it was right in front of the gate in spite of my pitiful signs begging folks please, please not to block the driveway. Pulling up behind the chocolate-brown sedan, I saw that there was, after all, someone in the driver’s seat. I got out and started forward to request that they haul ass pronto. Then a woman got out and turned to face me.

It took me a moment to recognize her. She hadn’t changed all that much, but it had been five years. Then I exchanged my scowl for a welcoming grin and hurried forward.

"Madeleine! Damn, it’s been a long time! It’s good to see you!”

There was no answering smile on her face. "What are you trying to do to me, Matt?” she asked as I came up. “What in God’s name are you trying to do to me?"

Looking at her, I remembered certain things, of course, the kind of things you remember about a woman to whom you’ve made love, particularly a woman to whom you’ve made love in times of peril. We’d shared some violent adventures and some tender moments; but while I’d found myself deeply involved at the time, she’d never let herself be drawn into a full commitment.

A bright and ambitious young woman from good family with a shining law career before her, not to mention a happy marriage, Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw had suffered intolerable disgrace and lengthy imprisonment for a crime involving national security of which she had not been guilty. Freed at last, and eventually exonerated, but with her career and life in ruins—her husband, a scientist employed at one of the secret government installations near Los Alamos had been murdered at the time of her troubles—she’d been determined to achieve the kind of complete social rehabilitation no gun-toting secret-agent type could give her, even if he’d been instrumental in proving her innocent.

I’d thought she’d attained her goal with her second marriage, to a very respectable young lawyer named Walter Maxon. I’d made a point of keeping away from them—no marriage needs old lovers hanging around the bride—but after a couple of years I’d read about the divorce in the newspapers and heard that she’d left town. I’d been sorry, the way you are when things don’t work out for people you like, but not sorry enough to look her up wherever she’d moved to. I mean, that hand had been played.

The autumn sun was bright and hot and I remembered that I’d left Happy in the closed station wagon with the engine, and therefore the air conditioner, turned off.

I said, “Just a minute. Let me get the dog.”

“Matt—”

“Hold everything, this is no place to talk. Lock up your car and get out of the street, they take this comer like it was Indianapolis on Memorial Day.”

I snapped the leash on Happy, grabbed the gun case, waited for an old pickup truck to roar past, and joined her at the entrance to my miniature estate. She was looking at the yellow sign indicating that the premises were protected by the Guardian Security System, known as GSS. I dealt with the padlock. Although the hasp is on the inside, a hand-sized hole lets you work the lock from outside. I rolled back the heavy gate far enough to admit us and rolled it closed again.

“Give me time to turn off the alarm,” I said, leading the way to the front door, which is actually at the side of the house. “Once the door is open, I’ve got about sixty seconds to push the right buttons or all hell breaks loose. . . . Here, hold the dog.”

I must admit that the crazy burglar alarm has me bugged; I’m always terrified that I’m going to forget the code and run out of time trying to remember it, or punch it wrong even if I do remember it. I don’t know why I make such a big deal of it; it’s not as if the system was wired to a lethal load of plastique or TNT. If I don’t turn it off within the allotted sixty seconds, all that’ll happen is that the noisemakers will scream and disturb the neighbors a bit, and the private security outfit monitoring the system will phone to find out if I goofed or if they should really call the cops. However, I made it to the control box in time and punched the right number on the keypad, and the little red light went out.

“Okay, all clear.”

After letting Madeleine enter, I took the leash off Happy and put him out into the yard, hearing Madeleine laugh as I closed the door behind him.

“He’s kind of sweet, like a big friendly teddy bear, not at all the kind of dog I’d expect you to have,” she said as I turned back to face her.

“You think I’m more the snarling pit-bull type?”

"Or killer Doberman." Her voice was expressionless, but there was a hint of mischief in her eyes.

I grinned. “I don’t need a dog to defend me; I can defend myself. But I’m very lousy at fetching ducks out of deep water in freezing weather, which is Happy’s specialty. Well, what do you think of my cozy domicile? Living-dining room before you. Bedroom to the left. Kitchen and bath to the right. . . Did I say something interesting?”

“I’ve been waiting out there for quite a while,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Into the kitchen and hard left. Guest towels on the top shelf. In the meantime, I’d say the sun is practically over the yardarm, wouldn’t you, ma’am? As I recall, the drink is Scotch.”

“Your recollection is accurate, sir.”

I watched her move away from me, a slender woman in her thirties, looking very competent in a severely tailored business suit, black with a fine white stripe. Nylons black, very sheer. Pumps black, with high, slim heels. Height medium. Hair brown, not too long, carefully arranged about her head. A lady who, five years ago, had made a spectacular comeback from almost total disaster with, although I wouldn’t have dreamed of reminding her, some help from me.

She’d been in bad shape, defeated and hopeless, when I’d picked her up at the prison on the day of her release, with orders to keep her alive, never mind why. There had been others around who’d had instructions that conflicted with mine. Playing bodyguard, I’d wound up having to throw myself heroically between her and a distant rifle, taking a bullet in the shoulder. After getting patched up locally, I’d had her drive me to the Ranch in Arizona for more permanent repairs. The reconstruction had taken some time, and I’d arranged for her to be put through the less classified parts of our basic training course so she could help defend herself while I was semidisabled. The experience had taught her a number of things most women don’t know, and our demanding exercise program had turned her from a soft, helpless victim into a lean female predator who’d repaid me for saving her life once by saving mine twice. I was glad to see that she’d kept the taut figure she’d attained back then. I wondered how much else of the Ranch course she retained. No one unaware of her history would associate knives and guns and unarmed combat with the handsome businesswoman in the pinstripe suit and severe silk blouse who emerged from the kitchen.