Matt Helm--The Interlopers (16 page)

“Okay, Stupid,” I said. “That’ll teach you to go taking handouts from strangers.”

He grinned at me woozily, unimpressed. I closed the door, got into the cab, and drove over to the bus station and general transportation center that also, I’d been informed, sold ferry tickets. When I came out, I was in lawful possession of a one-way fare to Haines, Alaska. The sun was still shining, the weather still seemed too warm for that far north, and the town was still, at first glance, totally uninterested in me and my vehicle, but there was a difference.

On hazardous duty—and this job seemed well qualified for the title—I generally set a few telltales when I leave my transportation, to make sure there has been no tampering in my absence. Now I saw that those on the hood were undisturbed; the cab remained securely locked; but somebody had entered, or at least looked into, the camper. I drew a long breath. It had been quite a night and I wasn’t really in the mood for monkey business.

I was tempted to simply yank open the door and see what, if anything, I had acquired back there. Whatever it was, it had to get along with a black dog, which made it either a man who was very good with dogs or one who’d made friends with this particular dog earlier. The only gents who qualified in the latter respect, who’d be likely to be up here in British Columbia, belonged to Mr. Smith—and why Mr. Smith’s people would be jeopardizing my cover by hiding in my camper this morning, when I had a contact scheduled with them this afternoon, I couldn’t guess. Well, the way to find out was obvious, but the middle of Prince Rupert wasn’t the place to do it.

I got behind the wheel. Nothing showed in the rearview mirror, although the back window of the cab corresponded with a forward window in the camper that gave me a partial view of the interior. Whoever was back there, if anybody was, was keeping low. I started the truck and drove out of town the way I’d come, found a dirt road leading back into the woods, and took this to a clearing out of sight of the highway where I could get the long-wheelbase job turned around facing out.

I cut the switch, set the brake, walked back, and opened the camper door. A young man sitting in the dinette pointed a sawed-off revolver at me.

“Come in, Mr. Helm,” he said. “I was sent to get the dog’s collar, but he isn’t wearing it. Where is it?”

I looked at him for a moment. The face and the voice were both familiar. The voice I’d heard most recently over the telephone in Pasco, complaining about grasshoppers. The face I’d seen the previous week down in San Francisco, one among many eager young faces I’d met there, all owning allegiance to Mr. Smith. I looked at the gun.

“Hank,” I said. The pup was lying docilely on the floor, obviously feeling himself among friends. He looked at me questioningly. I snapped my fingers. “Hank, get out of here.”

“Mr. Helm—”

I said, “On the double, pup! Easy now, watch that step, you stumblebum. Okay, go do your stuff, but stick around.” Still watching the gun, I spoke to the man holding it. “We have a date this afternoon,” I said. “Why not wait and get your collar then?”

“We want it now, Mr. Helm,” he said.

I said, “That firearm. Put it away.”

“The collar, Mr. Helm.”

“Put it away,” I said.

He shook his head, and gestured with the revolver. “Come inside. I have my instructions…”

I’d had enough of amateurs. I was sick of amateurs. I said, “To hell with your instructions. You have about five seconds to put that thing away. After that, you eat it.”

“Mr. Helm, I am only carrying out my orders…”

“Not around here, you’re not.” I drew a long breath. “Pee or get off the pot, Sonny, because here I come.”

“But…”

He was still saying something by way of protest as I stepped up into the camper, bending to clear the low doorway. I saw his eyes waver as I approached, and I knew I’d judged him correctly. No matter what kind of fancy training he’d had, he was still an amateur at heart and would always remain one. Training means nothing when applied to a certain kind of mentality. He was one of the new ones, brought up on togetherness and TV. He was one of the innocents who’d never learned, and probably would never learn, that the only thing you can do with a gun is shoot it.

He didn’t shoot his, of course. He never really considered it. He probably wasn’t even authorized to shoot me, when you came right down to it. He’d just been told to wave his magic .38 caliber wand at me, if necessary, and I would be his helpless slave. He was still talking, breathlessly and indignantly, when I took the weapon away from him.

I held it for a moment, almost angry enough to ram it down his throat as I’d promised—as if I hadn’t had enough firearms pointed my way during the last few days, without having my own people, such as they were on this lousy job, getting into the act! I seriously considered pistol-whipping him a bit, just as an object lesson, or maybe breaking an arm or two so he couldn’t wave any more guns around, at least for a little. Then I sighed, backed off, pressed the latch, swung out the cylinder of the revolver, and shook out the loads. I tossed the empty gun out the open door, and heaved the cartridges after it. It’s only in the movies that you toss loaded guns around like beanbags.

The embryo secret-agent type was glaring at me, full of resentment and injured pride. I could see what was going through his mind: I had humiliated him and he ought to redeem himself somehow. It was typical of his training. They’d taught him how to use judo and invisible ink, but they hadn’t bothered to teach him to think like a pro. Nobody’d hammered into the space between his ears the primary fact of undercover life, to wit, that his damn little personal feelings were, or should be, of no concern to anyone, not even to him.

I said, “If you jump me, Sonny, I’ll stomp you. I swear I will. I’ll mash you right into the ground. There won’t be anything left but a bloody spot the dog will be glad to lick up for me.”

He didn’t speak. I reached into a cabinet for an oil can and put it on the dinette table. I took from my pocket the Buck knife I’d just acquired, sat down on the empty seat, put a drop of oil on the hinge of the knife, and began working the blade back and forth to free it. The white hope of the undercover services watched me warily. I guess he thought I was threatening him, or something. Maybe I was.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

I said, “What’s your name, Sonny? I won’t ask you again.” He was silent. I said warily, “Look, I’m pretty tired. I’ve been up all night with a sick canine friend. All I was planning to do today was sleep until our afternoon rendezvous, and then sleep some more until ferry time tomorrow morning. But if you think I can’t find reserves of strength somewhere, enough to get a few answers out of you, you are sadly mistaken. Now answer the question.”

“My name… my name is Smith.”

“Fine,” I said. “I don’t insist on the truth. Use your imagination if you like. Just so I get some answer.” I looked at him hard. “Smith, eh? Would you be any relation to Mr. Washington Smith, whom I met very briefly a week or so back?” He was silent. I said, “Never mind. You don’t have to answer that. But there is kind of a family resemblance. The same long, pointed, snoopy nose, the same humorless, fanatic eyes…”

“Damn you, you can’t talk that way about my—!”

He stopped abruptly. I grinned at him. “Okay, Junior Smith. Now tell me what this is all about. You boys hauled me off my other duties to do some work for you. You spent a lot of time and effort briefing me about a character I was supposed to resemble slightly, whom you wanted me to impersonate. It was a vitally important mission, you told me. The exact details were shrouded in security, but the fate of the nation, if not the world, depended on my playing this part for you. And now, suddenly, now that I’m on my way and doing fine, you march in with a gun, taking a big risk of blowing my cover and wrecking the whole operation—if only by making me so mad I’ll throw your lousy job in your faces. Just what the hell are you people pulling on me, Junior Smith? Or trying to pull, to be more precise.”

Young Smith locked his lips. “You can’t throw the lousy job, as you call it, in our faces, Helm. You haven’t got a job. You’re through!”

“Says who?”

“Says my… I mean, the orders were issued in Washington right after the gist of your last phone call was received there, the one you made early this morning, reporting another dead body. You’re finished, Helm. You’re out. You’re to turn over to me what’s in the dog collar, and then you’re to have nothing further to do with this mission, nothing whatever.”

Still working the knifeblade back and forth, I frowned at him thoughtfully across the table. “And just what was there about these orders that made it necessary for them to be delivered over a .38 Special?”

“Well,” said Junior Smith, a little embarrassed, “well, the way you’ve been acting, we didn’t know… I mean, we weren’t quite sure how you’d take… anyway, I was supposed to take no chances with you.”

I nodded. “I see. Pointing a loaded firearm at a guy in my line of work comes under the heading of taking no chances. It would be interesting to know just what you folks consider really risky.” I reached for the oil can once more. The knife was loosening a bit, but it still had a long way to go before I could count on getting it into action in a hurry. “And just how have I been acting, Junior?”

“Well… well, you know,” he said. “You know what you’ve done!”

I said, “Frankly, I thought I’d done pretty well. I was told to get through, come hell or high water, and I’m through, this far, anyway. I was given a schedule to keep and I’m right on time. There were a few obstructions to overcome, but I dealt with them without letting them delay me significantly. So what’s the gripe?”

“A few obstructions!” he said sharply. “You’ve killed five people getting here, Helm! The Canadians are complaining bitterly about the one-man crime wave we’ve turned loose on them. You’ve left a trail of blood across the whole Northwest! Did you really expect us to sit by and
approve
what you’ve been doing in our name?”

I regarded him with a certain amazement. The idea that anybody would draft an experienced agent—a specialist in homicide, no less—for a dangerous mission, tell him that the fate of humanity depended on his carrying it out, and then complain about the breakage, was so childish that for a moment I couldn’t believe he was serious.

I said, “I see. You people want the lawn mowed, but you don’t want to hurt a single dear little blade of grass doing it, is that it?”

“Well,” he said defensively, “well, I suppose there are times when an agent has to kill in self-defense, but…”

“And what am I supposed to have been doing, shooting and knifing people for the pure sadistic fun of it?”

“The man in Pasco was shot in the back, Helm. In the back! And so was the one at the campground just east of here. How can you possibly call that self-defense?”

I studied him carefully. He was human, all right. At least he had a nose, a mouth, and two eyes. There was presumably a brain somewhere behind the eyes, but it had never been given a chance. It had early been washed clean of all practical and sensible and logical thought processes and supplied with a bunch of automatic TV cliché reactions to take their place.

It occurred to me that if I’d had any matchmaking ambitions, I would have made a great effort to get this specimen together with Pat Bellman. They were obviously made for each other. She, too, had been firmly convinced that, homicide-wise, there was a great moral distinction to be made between an eastbound victim and one heading west.

I said, “I will correct my statement. The man in Pasco was shot, not in defense of me, but in defense of my dog. I was told that the animal was intrinsically valuable, wasn’t I? And that the whole mission depended upon my having him constantly available for identification? Besides, he’s a pretty nice pup. Fuzzy-face was going to shoot him, so I shot Fuzzy-face. I apologize for not asking the gentleman to rise and turn around before I fired, but it didn’t seem advisable at the time. Okay? As for the other guy, he had the collar in his pocket, and I didn’t think he should be allowed to reach his car with it. Again, rotating him so the bullet hole would be in front wasn’t exactly feasible, or didn’t seem so to me. I wasn’t aware that it was a detail of earthshaking importance.”

“You don’t think killing a man is important?”

He was deliberately misinterpreting my words, but I said patiently, “I think killing a man is important. But I assumed the job was more important. Most jobs I’m given are. At least that’s the theory on which we operate, rightly or wrongly. And if I’m going to kill a man, I don’t think it matters a good goddamn, either to me or to him, which way he’s facing when it happens. This is not a sport with me, Junior. I’m not supposed to fight fair, win or lose. I’m not sent out to lose. I don’t lose. At least I haven’t yet.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken!” Junior said in the same sharp voice. “You’ve lost this time. At least you’ve lost your job. We don’t want the responsibility of sponsoring a cold-blooded killer.”

“I see,” I said. “Do I gather this job isn’t really important after all? Or is it that the welfare of the world, or the U.S.A., can go hang, just so you people keep your reputations as fair-minded ladies and gentlemen with clean, bloodless hands?”

He said, “Never mind the rationalizations, Helm. Just give me the collar.”

I nodded, surprising him. I said, “Okay, I’ll give you the collar, since you’re here. And you’ll give it back this afternoon, exactly the way we planned.” I looked at him hard. “Make any changes you care to, but don’t even think about not returning it in good shape, Junior. Because if you give me any trouble at all, I just won’t bother to give you a look at the rest of the stuff I pick up along the route. And there are three pickups left, remember?”

He licked his lips. “I told you! The orders from Washington are that you’re to have nothing more to do with the operation!”

“Did Washington tell you how to stop me? Of course, you can shoot me. I mean, if you ever find your gun again. Otherwise, there isn’t much you can do about it, is there?”