A Korean Tiger (3 page)

"You can close your mouth now," said Hawk. His laugh was harsh, mirthless. "But I know how you feel. I looked the same way when they first told me."

Nick leaned forward in his chair. He still couldn't believe it. "You mean little Bennett? The little file clerk? But didn't he retire about a month ago?"

Hawk rubbed a skinny hand through his dry, brittle hair. "He did. Just a month ago. After thirty years in Civil Service. He was only on loan to us, you know."

Nick shook his head. "I didn't know anything about Bennett. I hardly ever saw him, and didn't notice him when I did — if you know what I mean?"

Hawk's smile was grim. "I know, all right. Neither did anyone else — notice him. Bennett was the little man who was always there — only we were all so used to him that we didn't really see him. Not that it made any difference — then! It sure does now. The chickens are coming home to roost."

Killmaster rubbed his well-shaven chin. "I'm afraid I still don't quite get it, sir. You said we had a traitor in the organization. Did you mean this Raymond Lee Bennett? But how could he be? I mean, after thirty years? He must have been checked out a hundred times! Anyway, what could he know, or find out? He was only a file clerk and..."

Hawk raised a hand. "Hold it — hold it! I told you it was pretty damned complex. That was maybe an understatement, too. Let me give it to you in the proper order, just the way I got it. Then it makes more sense. You just listen, son. No interruptions until I finish, eh?"

"Right, sir."

Hawk left his desk and began to pace the tiny office. He was in his shirtsleeves. Nick noticed that his tie had a soup or gravy stain on it His chief was not the neatest man in the world.

Finally Hawk said: "Bennett is, or was — he may be dead — fifty-five years old. He left Columbia University, in New York, and came to Washington to work when he was twenty-five. I suppose some sort of security check was run on him, but I doubt that they were as tough and thorough in 1936 as they are now. Anyway he was cleared and went to work as a typist and file clerk.

"He must have been in some sort of pool at first, because he worked around, and I mean
all
around, Washington."

Hawk paused in front of Nick. "That is important. Damned important. Here are some, just some, mind you, of the agencies Bennett worked for." Hawk ticked them off on his fingers. "He started with the Post Office. Then, over the years, he worked for the Treasury, the Secret Service, the OSS, the FBI, the CIA and, finally, for us. For AXE. Just before his retirement last month."

Nick whistled softly and dared to interrupt. "He sure got around. But that doesn't make him a spy, or a traitor. And as I said before, he must have been checked and rechecked over the years. He must have been clean or..."

Hawk nodded and resumed his pacing. "Oh, he was clean. Never a breath of suspicion. Bennett was like Caesar's wife — above suspicion. Besides being damned near the invisible man! But let me go on.

"Over the years Bennett became an expert stenographer. He learned to use a stenotype machine and he sat in on a lot of important conferences. Not any top-level stuff, as far as we know, but enough. He could have picked up a lot."

Noting the expression of near pain on Nick's face, Hawk paused. "Okay. Ask the question. Before you burst."

Nick asked. "Supposing he was a plant, and I'm presuming you mean Commie plant, how could he pass on his information without getting caught? Over a period of thirty years! The FBI isn't that bad!"

Hawk clutched the back of his scrawny neck, his features contorted as if in agony. "Now you're starting, just starting, to see how screwed up this whole mess is. First thing — we don't really know, can't prove, yet, that Bennett was a spy. But if he was — and we think there's a good chance he was — we don't think he did pass on any information. That clear things up a little?"

Nick was aware that his mouth was open again. He closed it on a fresh cigarette. "No, sir. It clears up nothing. But I think you were right — I'll have to hear the whole story. Go on, sir. I won't interrupt again."

Hawk paced again. "I'll have to jump ahead a little in the story, just to give you the peg on which we're basing this investigation. So it will make a little sense. Without it the whole story is just so much smoke. Okay, to jump ahead. When Bennett and his wife disappeared a couple of weeks ago a routine investigation was started. Just routine, nothing more. It got more and more involved, and less routine, as it went along. But just one thing is important right now — they came up with some information that was missed thirty years ago. Raymond Lee Bennett did have some Commie friends! At Columbia, when he was going to college. This fact wasn't caught at the time and Bennett was cleared. He was clean. No Commie leanings, he belonged to no front organizations, he was absolutely in the clear. Then! Now, thirty years later, the picture is a little different. He could have been, all those years, a well-hidden Commie plant."

Hawk went back to his desk and put his feet on it. He had a hole in the sole of one shoe. "To get back to the present, in the right order. Bennett retired a month ago. No breath of suspicion. He took his gold watch and his pension and retired to his little house in Laurel, Maryland. That's about twenty miles from here.

"Okay. So far so good. Nothing. But then the milk and the mail and the papers start piling up. The meter readers can't get in. The neighbors begin to wonder. Finally the local police are called in. They force their way into the house. Nothing. No sign of Bennett or his wife. He had been married for twenty-five years.

"A lot of their clothes are gone, and some suitcases that the neighbors remember seeing. So at first the Laurel police don't think too much about it. Natural, I suppose." Hawk found a fresh cigar and actually lit it. It was the ultimate act of desperation and a tip-off to his mental state. Nick repressed his faint grin.

Hawk pointed the cigar at Nick like a pistol. "Then it happens. It begins. One of the Laurel cops smells something. Literally. And it stinks."

Despite his vow, Nick could not resist. "The wife? Dead?"

Hawk's grin stretched his wizened face into a death's head for a moment. "Go to the head of the class, son. But not stuffed into a closet or buried in the basement. Nothing as mundane as that. There was a
secret room
in Bennett's basement. The FBI found it, after the Laurel people called them in. I guess they had a hell of a time finding it, and if it hadn't been for the smell they might never have found it, but they did. Back of what used to be a coal bin. The neighbors say that Bennett was quite a do-it-yourself man. He did a good job on his wife, that's for sure. He used a hatchet."

Hawk took some 8 X 10 glossy photos from his desk and scaled them at Nick. As the AXE agent caught them he murmured, "Secret room, eh? Now that's something you don't often find these days in this profession. I thought they were rather passe. Except in castles on the Rhine."

Hawk, half snarling, came up with a reprimand from his own generation. "It ain't funny, McGee! If this thing turns out the way I think it's going to turn out — we're in trouble up to our ass. Just remember that Bennett was working for us, for AXE, at the last. We're going to be left holding the baby."

Nick was studying the photo of the dead woman. She was fat and lay in a congealed web of black blood. The hatchet, which still lay beside her, had done nothing to improve her features. He doubted they had been much to begin with. But then neither had Raymond Lee Bennett, as Nick remembered him. He strove to visualize the man now and found it hard. Yet he must have seen Bennett a thousand times. Lurking in halls, working over a desk, at a water cooler, in the elevators. Under normal circumstances you just didn't notice the Bennetts of this world. Balding, skinny, a long horsey face ravaged by a terrible case of juvenile acne. Dull eyed. Shambling walk. The image of the man was coming back to Nick now. And a more unlikely candidate for spy, for Commie agent, for traitor, he could not imagine. As he remembered now, forcing his mind back, Bennett hadn't even appeared very bright. Certainly he had never advanced, never gotten anywhere in government service. Why would the Kremlin employ a man like that? Especially, why would they employ him and then never contact him? Never use him?

Nick frowned at the dead fat woman and then looked at Hawk. "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense, sir. Something, or somebody, is way out of line. The more I remember about this Bennett the more impossible it is. I..."

His boss was smiling at him. An odd smile. "There's one other thing I didn't tell you," Hawk said. "It slipped my mind."

Nick knew it was a lie. It hadn't slipped Hawk's mind at all. He had been saving it for the last, this little tidbit, whatever it was. Hawk had a rather distorted sense of the dramatic at times.

"Raymond Lee Bennett was something of a freak," Hawk said. "He wasn't very bright in school. He got lousy marks. He dropped out. And he never got anyplace here in Washington. But the FBI found an old retired professor, who used to teach Gestalt psychology at Columbia. He's almost ninety now, but he remembers Bennett from one of his classes. Bennett
was
a freak — he had total recall. A camera mind. And a recorder ear. Once he read, or heard, a thing he never forgot it! So every document he's seen, every damned word he's heard in Washington in the last thirty years is filed away in his freak brain like books. Thousands of books. All the Commies have to do is open the books and read!"

Nick was still pondering that when Hawk said, "Come on. Get your hat. We're driving out to Laurel. I want you to see this secret room for yourself. What you learn may help you catch Bennett — if it's not too late."

During the drive to Laurel in the chauffeur-driven Cadillac that Hawk had requisitioned, his chief expounded on a point which, in the ordinary course of things, would not have concerned Nick Carter.

As they left D.C. behind and entered Maryland Hawk said: "I know that normally you leave politics to the politicians, son, but have you been keeping up with the current hassle about the CIA?"

Nick, thinking briefly of Peg Tyler's marvelous breasts and thighs, admitted that he had not, recently, so much as glanced at a newspaper.

"I didn't think so." Hawk's tone was sardonic. "But for your information certain Congressmen, and Senators, are raising a hell of a stink. They think CIA has too much autonomy, and they want to do something about it, bring the agency under tighter supervision."

Nick grinned as he tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail. "Any Congressman that wants to do that can't be all bad. Those meatheads can use a little supervision, I'd say. Their fumbling damned near got me killed in Mexico this last jaunt."
^[2]

Hawk rolled down a window. He decorated the serene, rolling Maryland landscape with a beat-up cigar. "The point is — that if they succeed in supervising the CIA then we're next. AXE! The CIA can function in the limelight, but we can't! I won't even try. The day Congress comes poking its nose in the affairs of AXE is the day I resign. Anything like that would ruin us overnight. We might as well take a front page ad in
The New York Times!"

Nick remained silent. It was a tempest in a teapot. He doubted that Congress would be allowed to investigate AXE and, even if it did, that Hawk would resign. The old man was too firmly wedded to his job for that. The only way Hawk would ever quit was by mandate of the retirement law — even then they would have to bind him and carry him, kicking and screaming, from his little office.

But it turned out that Hawk was not merely fuming. He was making a point. Now he said: "I know, and you know, that we always operate under cover, in the 'black' and with top secrecy. I don't have to tell you that."

"But you are telling me, sir. Why?"

His boss pulled the cellophane off a fresh cigar. "Just to remind you. And maybe help you a little. Normal secrecy and precautions, which are usually tight in any case, are being doubled and tripled in this Bennett thing. We, AXE and all the other agencies involved, have slammed a total blackout on this matter. All over the world. If the press ever gets hold of it we're dead. All of us, but especially AXE. Just because Bennett worked for us last!" Hawk bit off the end of his cigar and spat it out the window. "Damn it to hell! Why couldn't the bastard have ended up in Agriculture, or Commerce — any place but us!"

Killmaster had to admit that there was some reason for Hawk's trepidation. If the newspapers ever sniffed the scent, ever found out that a Commie agent had been able to lie doggo in Washington for thirty years, to be discovered only after he had made the mistake of murdering his wife, there was going to be a lot of undiluted hell to pay. It could blow the dome right off the Capitol!

They were in the outskirts of the little town of Laurel now. The chauffeur seemed to know where he was going. As the big limousine turned off U.S. 1 and headed for the business section Hawk said, "I've been out here once before. As soon as the FBI boys started checking and found out that Bennett worked for us they called me. But I want you to see for yourself. That's why I haven't explained more — your first impressions might be valuable. Might help you catch Bennett. He was a real kook, a concealed kook, and I've got a hunch that you're the only man who has a chance of catching him." Hawk glanced at his watch and groaned. "Unless, of course, he's having dinner in the Kremlin about now."

"Maybe he hasn't made it yet," Nick consoled. "Even if he's running in that direction. You've shot the works on this, I take it? The complete bit?"

Hawk nodded. "Yes. Of course. That's really our- only chance — that he's been forced to hide, go to ground and wait until things cool off a bit. They won't, of course, not until we get him. But he might not know that. I said he's not really very bright. But I've got the net out — our people, the CIA, the FBI, Scotland Yard, the Sureté, Interpol — you name it and I've done it. Of course there's a risk there, too, but I had to take it."