The Vanishers (23 page)

When I started to pick up the suitcase at her feet, Joel beat me to it. “I’ll carry it; you look kind of rocky. Problems?”

“Only third-degree burns over ninety-five percent of the body,” I said as we headed towards the elevators. “A slight exaggeration; but you took your sweet time moving in.”

“Hell, you said to hold off long enough for them to commit themselves.” After the elevator door had closed on us, he turned to the girl. “I’m Paul Haraldsen.”

“I am Karin Segerby. Mrs. Karin Segerby. But my husband is dead.” She seemed to be a little dazed by the events of the evening, although she hadn’t played a very large part in them. But she wanted everything to be perfectly clear, including her exact marital status. Her wide blue eyes studied Joel’s face. “Did you
have
to do that to Greta, Mr. Haraldsen?”

“Greta? Oh, the dark kid.” Joel shrugged. “It’s too bad, Mrs. Segerby. I don’t know why people never seem to believe I mean what I say. I told the blonde one, the older one, Watrous, that I’d cut her young friend if she didn’t cooperate. The choice was hers. If she doesn’t want scar-faced friends, she can answer what she’s asked and do what she’s told.”

The elevator doors opened, releasing us into the lobby. Outside, we walked briskly across the driveway into the parking lot. Joel steered me past the red Golf to a black vintage Volvo. He tossed my suitcase in front and climbed in after it. I opened the rear door for the Karin and followed her in. Joel took us away.

“What’s the name of your peace outfit?” I asked the girl beside me after we’d driven for a while.

“I don’t think I want to tell you that,” Karin said. “Or will you cut my face if I don’t answer?”

“UFO,” Joel said without turning his head.

“What?” I asked.

“That’s what I was asking the Watrous woman,” he said. “One of the things. They call themselves UFO, but they pronounce it differently. Not You-Foe, but something like Ooh-Foo. It stands for Ungdomen’s Fredsorganization. You know how they run their words together.
Fred
means ‘peace.’
Ungdom
means youth. Youth’s Peace Organization.”

I sighed. Now Joel was getting into the act and teaching me Swedish—a lousy Polack named Valdemar Konowski, for God’s sake!

“Olaf Stjernhjelm hardly qualifies as a kid,” I said. “Even Astrid Watrous can’t be considered a dewy juvenile.”

“A youth organization needs a little adult guidance,” Joel said. “At least this one does; it was apparently set up with considerable assistance, financial and otherwise, from a well-heeled parent organization in America. Naturally, they wanted to protect their investment, so they arranged to have a grown-up adviser riding herd on the wild-eyed kids.”

“Olaf?”

“Correct. They had him over in the States for a while for indoctrination; that’s how he met Mrs. Watrous, visiting his relative, Alan Watrous, in Gloucester. Only she was still Astrid Land back then.”

“And the name of the American peace group?”

“You know them. The People for Nuclear Peace, or PNP. You had some problems with them in the Bahamas recently, I understand.”

I said irritably, “It’s a screwy world when you’ve got to fight a bunch of folks whose basic motives you respect, just because their methods are so haywire. But I thought we’d pretty well put that outfit out of business.”

Joel’s voice was cold: “You thought you’d put Bennett out of business, too, but he’s right in there plugging; he’s even sitting in the boss chair now, for God’s sake! Maybe you’re getting soft in your old age. Next time you’ve got a trigger to pull, maybe you should think about pulling it. Hell, even when you did pull one, you missed the shot, just pinking the Watrous woman in the arm!”

There was something in what he said, but it wasn’t his place to say it. On the other hand, it wasn’t my place to get involved in a disciplinary hassle. Looking out the car windows, I realized that I didn’t know where in Stockholm we’d got to.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked.

“Mrs. Watrous said something else; something I think we’d better check out. She gave me an address. I’m pretty sure that having been forced to betray it to me, she’ll be heading there herself to pass a warning. Let’s hope she won’t want to use the doctor’s phone in front of everybody there, not to mention talking through the clinic switchboard; and that she’ll take time to get her arm fixed so we can beat her to it.”

“Mystery?” I said.

“Bear with me, pal. Better for you to come to it cold. I want to see your reaction.”

He was pushing hard, but he always had been a pushy guy to work with, forever testing to see how much tolerance he could expect from the man in charge of the operation; which could be the reason he’d never been put in charge, himself. But again, this wasn’t the time or place for a showdown.

“Whatever you say,” I said.

“Afterwards, I’ll take you back to your car; I got the key off the Lagersten kid. You’ll be heading north next, I suppose. Watrous said you had something going at a wide place in the road up near the Arctic Circle.”

“North?” It was the small girl beside me. “You are traveling north, Mr. Helm? Will you drive anywhere near the government’s so-called communication center at Laxfors?”

I started to ask a foolish question, like why did she want to know, and checked myself. “My destination is about eighty-five kilometers from there,” I said. “Why, do you want to come along for the ride?”

“Yes, I would very much like to come along. If you do not mind.”

I looked at her and grinned. After a little, she looked away. Even in the erratic lighting inside the moving car, I could see the color rising under that very fair, very smooth skin. I didn’t say anything.

At last she gulped, and said, “All right. Before we left the apartment, Olaf told me that it was very good that you had asked for me, and that I am supposed to stay with you as long as I possibly can, since Astrid is no longer traveling with you as… as observer. I am to keep Olaf informed about where you are and what you are doing…”

Before I could speak, the car stopped and Joel spoke from in front: “There’s the address the Watrous woman gave me. That doorway just up the side street to the left. We’ll wait right here and see what goes in. Or comes out… Whoa, hold everything, our timing is perfect, there’s Mrs. Watrous going in now, all clean and bandaged. Somebody must have driven like hell to get her here so fast. I suppose that fancy Mercedes is waiting up the street while she runs inside with the warning.”

Astrid was a slender, dark figure hurrying down the far sidewalk—well, dark except for the neat blond hair. As Joel had said, she was in much better shape than when last seen; she’d changed to the jeans and dark jersey I’d bought her on another continent. Her left arm was supported by somebody’s blue silk scarf doing duty as a sling. At least I thought it was blue; at night, at the distance, it was hard to tell.

She vanished into the doorway Joel had pointed out. We waited. Somewhere nearby, undoubtedly, Olaf was also waiting to make the pickup, as Joel had suggested, probably with Karl as wheelman. It seemed likely that Greta had been left behind at the clinic, however. It would have taken longer than this to attend to her wound properly, under anesthesia. I wished I had a little anesthesia, and remembered that I did have the tube Olaf had given me, but it was hardly the time to be smearing goop on my chest.

“Back door?” I asked.

Joel said, “I suppose there’s got to be one, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to seem too interested. Let’s hope they’ll figure that knowing the city better and driving faster, they’ve made it far enough ahead of us so they don’t need to get tricky… There’s our girl again, checking to see if the coast is clear. Come on, baby, tell them it’s safe as houses; get them out where we can see them!”

Karin stirred beside me. “I do not understand. Whom do you expect, Mr. Haraldsen?”

Joel didn’t answer. He was watching Astrid in the distant doorway. She turned briefly to beckon to someone inside; then she came down the two steps to the sidewalk and looked back once more to make sure she was followed. Two people had appeared behind her. The man was better than medium height for a man, blond, with a sizable blond moustache; he was wearing flannel slacks and a tweed jacket. The woman was about the same height in her high heels, which made her quite tall for a woman. She was wearing dark slacks that made her look incredibly slim, and a short fur jacket. There was something odd about her face. When she turned our way to speak to the man, I realized what it was. I was looking at a quite young and very handsome black woman.

Joel stirred in the seat in front of me. “If you don’t recognize them, I do, from their file pictures. That’s our girlfriend Astrid’s supposedly missing husband, Alan Watrous, and his current passion flower, Hannah Gray. Gray! Some name for a nigger wench, hey?” He turned his head. “What the fuck is going on here, Helm? Those two were supposed to’ve been kidnapped in the U.S. and held prisoner over there with Mac and all the others who’ve vanished recently. What the hell kind of a game is Mac playing, anyway? What’s the beat-up old wolf trying to pull, getting us all chasing over here after people who aren’t missing at all, and a lousy little Arctic village called Lysaniemi nobody ever heard of…”

Down the street on the far side, the three people on the sidewalk—the wife, the husband, and the husband’s paramour, a cozy group—had stopped and moved to the curb. Presumably they’d seen the Mercedes coming, although it wasn’t visible from our angle. I had a good look at the supposedly missing couple. She was certainly a striking young woman; and he was a good-looking man, but I wondered what his hangup was. Probably the Galahad complex. I mean, clearly he had a thing about rescuing ladies in distress, first a pregnant girl and then a female member of a minority race. Maybe he couldn’t face the man-woman relationship if he didn’t have the advantage of being such a generous and tolerant fellow, with the dame bound to him by gratitude. Not that Hannah Gray looked like a person who’d appreciate being patronized in this way, or rescued from her miserable black condition by a big-hearted whitey; but maybe she just hadn’t caught on to his true motivation yet. “It’s a trap, it’s a lousy trap, isn’t it, Helm?” Joel’s voice was indignant. “That’s the bait over there. That old bastard in Washington, or wherever he is at the moment, has set us up, damn him! He’s keeping Mr. Bennett and me and the boys all busy tracking you around Scandinavia, decoyed over here by a phony kidnapping and a crazy village name, while he and some of his other pet agents deal with the real business back in the States.”

I said softly, “Mr. Bennett and you, amigo?”

He threw me a defiant glance over his shoulder. “What the hell does Mac expect, playing favorites the way he does?” he demanded bitterly. “Why shouldn’t I switch over to a new top man who knows how to run an outfit like this, a
real
administrator who recognizes talent when he sees it instead of forever keeping younger men down and handing the plum missions to superannuated incompetents just because they’ve been with him since Bull Run, or was it Verdun? Or maybe Valley Forge?” He started to turn around, and I knew his gun was in his hand, although I couldn’t see it; but he’d always been a talkative slob who had to make a speech before he could shoot. “Don’t move, Matt. I’m sorry, but…”

I didn’t tell him what I thought of him: how deeply hurt and disappointed I was at his dastardly treachery, not to mention his total incompetence—he apparently took for granted that, having been Olaf s prisoner, I had to be unarmed, which is the kind of assumption no professional should ever make. Just as every gun should always be assumed to be loaded until you check it out personally, so every agent should be assumed to be armed, no matter what the circumstances.

But I didn’t make any speeches; I simply shot him, through the back of the seat. A .22 hasn’t got all the penetration in the world, particularly with soft lead bullets and target loads, so I kept on firing until the clip was empty. The silenced automatic didn’t make much noise even inside the car; but I was glad that he never managed to pull the trigger of his .38. With that short barrel, in that enclosed space, the muzzle blast would have left us deaf for a week.

After a moment of stunned silence the girl beside me moved abruptly, hitting the door release and starting to throw herself out of the car. I managed to catch her wrist and haul her back inside. I exerted some leverage that made her gasp with pain.

“Relax, or they’ll be fitting you for a sling, too,” I said. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? You’re here on Olaf’s orders to keep an eye on me, remember, not to go rushing around in the night… No, don’t slam that door; they’ll hear you. Let it hang open until they’re gone.”

We sat like that, watching as the Mercedes drove up and made the pickup. I’d wondered why Astrid had always made a point, whenever Hannah Gray’s name came up, of referring to her as dark—I suppose it had seemed like a bitter sort of secret joke to the blonde wife displaced by a beautiful black girl. A moment later the street was empty and silent except for the murmur of the city, gentle at this time of night.

I said, “Olaf trusted me, a little. I trusted him. I’ll trust you a little if you give your word that you’ll behave yourself. Otherwise I can tie you up with your belt… What’s funny?”

“I’m not wearing a belt.”

“My mistake. The way those jeans fit, I can see why you wouldn’t bother. Simple molecular attraction should do the job. You can close the car door now.”

She pulled it shut, and drew a long breath. “I am sorry. I lost my head. I… I have never seen anybody killed before, Mr. Helm. I thought that since I am a witness you must kill me next.”

“Who’re you going to tell, the Stockholm police? Why? This guy was no friend of yours, was he? I don’t really think you want to explain the whole situation to the cops any more than I do. If you did get involved with them, they’d want every last thing you know, and you wouldn’t like that, would you? So just sit still while I pry the dear departed out from behind the wheel. What’s the matter now?”