The Terminators (12 page)

"Or she?" I said, watching him.

"Precisely," Priest said. "Just because a young girl's beautiful idealism has got temporarily reversed, like the polarity of a circuit, doesn't make her any less of an idealist, does it?"

"I think you're underestimating the kid, if we're talking about the same thing," I said. "Of course, there was Evelyn Benson, too. And a guy called Robbie nobody's bothered to tell me much about. The mortality seems to be high among reversed idealists, if that's what they were." Priest said nothing. I went on: "And then there's a guy called Helm. No idealist he, backwards or forwards. Does he get to hear the truth, sir?"

Priest laughed shortly. "If I'm not confiding in men like old Lars, who just brought you here, who once fought beside me and saved my life, what makes you think I'll confide in you, son? This is a fairly important project, and security is absolutely imperative."

"Yes, sir," I said. "Excuse me while I puke, sir. That word always does something funny to my insides."

He stared at me bleakly. "You're going to have to take me on faith, Mr. Helm. When you come across contradictory bits of information you don't like, just remind yourself that this mission was not initiated to make you happy. What you don't like may confuse somebody else, somebody we've got to keep confused in order to succeed. When your faith wavers, son, remind yourself that this operation has been cleared in Washington; it has even been cleared with your own superior. Tell yourself firmly that Captain Henry Famham Priest, USN, is a man who's served his country all his life and is pretty much in the habit; he's not likely to go Benedict Arnold all of a sudden in his old age." The pale eyes watched me unblinkingly. "Either that, son, or you're going to have to haul your ass the hell out of here. I can use you but I can do without you. Make up your goddamned mind."

I let a little time go by in silence; then I said, "That's quite a speech, but may I make a suggestion, sir?"

"What?"

"Don't use the word 'faith.' People get suspicious when you ask them to take you on faith. It's been overdone. Skipper."

It was a calculated risk. I was going to have to work with the guy; I couldn't have him thinking I was a sucker for inspiring, patriotic speeches, even if I had been a little slow-witted earlier. There was a moment of silence; then he threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

At last he drew a long breath and wiped his eyes. "My apologies, son," he said. "I forgot I was dealing with a pro. I've got in the habit of schmaltzing it up a bit for the impressionable civilians. No hard feelings, I hope."

He held out his hand. I shook it and retrieved my fingers, more or less intact. There was no reason to change a winning game, so I went on: "Even if you want to, you can't get rid of me, sir. I've got orders to stick around and look after you like a baby. I just got instructions from Washington, and the word is you're kind of a helpless old character who could get into serious trouble, forgetting that World War II was a long time ago. So if you need your nose wiped, sir, or your diapers changed, or the nurse doesn't bring your two a.m. feeding on schedule, just let me know right away, please."

Again, it was nip and duck. We sat there for several seconds while he fought back an attack of angry seniority. Then he grinned slowly.

"Very good, Mr. Helm. Very good indeed. Now we know where we stand, don't we?"

I wasn't so sure about that, but at least we'd redistributed the local balance of power slightly. I said, "That was the general idea."

"Well, finish your goddamned 
p0lse
 so I can spread out the chart and show you the general layout. . . ."

He'd obviously had a lot of practice at explaining geography to stupid subordinates. By the time he was through I knew the North Sea like my favorite fishing lake near Sante Fe, New Mexico—it had damned well better be my favorite since, in that dry country, it's just about the only water around, besides the Rio Grande, big enough to swim a trout. But here there was more water, a hell of a lot . more, and we weren't concerned with fish.

He showed me the locations of the submerged oil and gas fields: the British operations over to the west—one named Indefatigable, in true British fashion—the Belgian, Dutch, German, and Danish areas to the south; and the Norwegian fields, Ekofisk, Frigg, and particularly Torbotten, the latest discovery way up north where nobody'd really expected to hit anything, he said. We also discussed a bit of strategy dealing, mainly, with the Elfenbein problem. I offered a solution he didn't think much of.

"You're not going to bluff Ivory like you bluffed that little boy of his," he warned me.

"Who's bluffing?" I asked. "Anyway, nobody'll call me. Dr. Elfenbein's been around. He knows better than to confront a man in my line of work with a direct challenge. He knows, or thinks he knows, that we homicidal types are all unbalanced, dangerously unstable, apt to go completely berserk if crossed. He won't risk it, not if he's looked up my record, as he undoubtedly has."

"You're running hard on that record of yours, son. One day you'll rely on it and it won't work."

"Maybe," I said. "But it's what you hired me for, so let's make use of it while it is working. I wouldn't be fool enough to try it on Denison; but if I can't back down a white-haired little laboratory genius, even one with a criminal bent, I'll turn in my invisible ink. Who's he working for, anyway?"

"What?"

"Ivory," I said. "Who's his client here, who's paying his freight?"

"We haven't been able to determine that. As far as we know, Elfenbein is working on speculation, hoping he can find a customer once he gets hold of something to sell." Priest shrugged, dismissing the subject. He went on: "You have two contacts to arrange. Matt, in Trondheim and in Svolvaer. Well, the arrangements have already been made, and Diana knows them, so I won't waste time on them here; but your job is to see that the people up there get met, and their material picked up, according to plan. Just remember, a lot of these folks aren't quite as brave as they were back when their country was in the hands of the Nazis. They're helping me out, but they're not very, happy. Anything out of line, and they'll crawl back into the woodwork; so be careful."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"The important delivery is the one near the end of the line," he went on. "You'll get plans for a certain piece of machinery invented by a drunken, middle-aged, oilfield bum who once was a bright, young, mechanical genius with a knack for explosives. He sank a small troopship for us and did a fine job, but he was one of the sensitive ones, you know the type, and he started seeing drowning Germans in his dreams. Do you ever see dead men in your sleep, son?"

"No, sir," I said. "I'm told I have no imagination."

"Well, this chap had too much imagination, and it more or less finished him; but once in a while he gets lucid and tosses off an invention, something so simple nobody ever thought of it before, if you know what I mean. This gadget of his is one of them. He named it after me, you know."

"So I understand."

"Don't think the gesture was flattering, Mr. Helm," Priest said, smiling thinly. "The boy—well, he's no boy now, but he was then—hates my cold-blooded, murdering guts, and told me so, in several languages, at the time. Apparently he feels this is just the kind of lousy device that ought to be named after a bastard like Sigmund, the sadistic, heartless slob everybody else in Norway considers a hero. I'm just giving you a rough idea of his attitude, using his words as well as I can. To put it differently, it's his big joke. Everybody else will consider it a tribute to a national hero; only Johann and I know what he really means by it. And now you."

I said, "The motivations are getting a little complicated, but I think I'm still with you, sir."

"Don't fall for this Sigmund crap, is what I'm trying to tell you," Priest said. "My job was to do as much damage as I could, and I did it. Some of them hated me for it and some of them loved me, and to hell with all of them. Well, that's putting it too strongly. They were good tough men. Some of them still are. But you know how these things go. A bunch of mean, ragged bastards, scared shitless, prowling through the 
fjells
 like hungry wolves, becomes, in the history books, a band of clean, noble patriots led by a saint on a white horse. You sneak into a village one night and slit the throats of five poor, stupid Nazis from behind and ten years later you're reading about the goddamned battle of Blomdal complete with cavalry, band, and bugles. But just don't expect that if you say Sigmund they're all going to knock themselves out helping you. Some of them got hurt, including some who didn't expect it, and didn't think it was fair it should happen to them. Fair, hell! Who ever heard of a fair war, for God's sake?"

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "you know the standard German method of retaliating for guerrilla attacks back in those days. What the hell made them think we'd pay any attention to their lousy hostages, son? We were getting shot; if somebody else got shot, too, we were just as sorry as we could be. It was too damned bad, and all that, but we had a war to fight and we just got the hell on with it. If those people wouldn't get out into the hills and fight with us, the least they could do was stay in town and die with us, was the way we felt at the time."

The room was very quiet after he stopped talking. Then a truck drove by outside, and he reached for his mug and finished off his beer and ran the back of his hand across his mouth.

"The old man's getting garrulous," he said dryly. "Let's get back to business. In addition to the Siphon drawings, we need some information about the area that's kind of specialized and not in the oil and gas journals. Johann's done the work on Torbotten; he'll hand it over with the plans. He's in bad shape, he needs what I'm paying him, but don't discount the possibility of a doublecross anyway. In other words, make sure there's a girl at the right place at the right time, but be careful."

"Yes, sir," I said.

He didn't go on at once. The door opened, and the waitress came in with another beer. I wondered about ESP and decided there was probably a buzzer under the rug at the head of the table where he sat.

"As for the Trondheim contact tomorrow," he said, "take care of it if you can, but don't risk anything for it. It's the stuff on Frigg and Ekofisk, but we're not too interested in Frigg at the moment. It's a gas field, and we probably won't be set up to handle gas for quite a while, if ever. Anyway, it's shared between the Norwegians and the British, being right on the boundary line between their respective areas, so it offers political complications. Ekofisk also presents problems. For one thing, there's a deep ocean trench between the wells and the Norwegian coast, so the oil is going to have to be pumped the other way, west or south, which makes it tougher to get at. Also, Ekofisk is being handled by a whole mess of companies working together: Phillips, Aloco, and a bunch of others. That makes finagling kind of difficult, if you know what I mean. So if the Trondheim drop starts looking too risky, forget it. We'd certainly like to have that southern information on file, for future reference, but at the moment it's not essential. Largely, it's a diversionary tactic. We have people picking up information around the British operations, too, even though we see no way of using it right now. That way, even if some rumors get around, nobody'll know just where to look for trouble. But the place we've really got our eye on, at least for a start, is Torbotten."

I glanced at the big chart on the table. "It looks kind of chilly for well-drilling, way up there," I said. "Or for anything else."

"The Gulf Stream off shore keeps that coast from getting too damned cold," Priest said. "Not that you can't freeze your ass off, I did plenty of times, but you don't have a lot of heavy ice to contend with. Actually, Torbotten is ideal for our purposes—well, it depends kind of on what Johann has turned up, but up to now it looks very good. It's not too far out in deep water, it's all Norwegian, and best of all it's being developed by a single outfit called Petrolene, Incorporated—a name that may sound faintly familiar to you—controlled by a gentleman with the high moral principles of a wolverine. Of course, the operation is being conducted under strict government supervision and the Norwegians are being very tough—the contracts they've been insisting on lately are truly heartbreaking, I'm told. Oslo runs none of the risks and gets all the money, said my informant with tears in his eyes."

"Your informant wouldn't have the same initials as the city of Los Angeles, by any chance?"

"Don't be naive, Mr. Helm." Priest's voice was dry. "Nobody deals with Lincoln Alexander Kotko face to face. He has very efficient negotiators to talk for him, while he sits in his Swiss chalet or his French chateau admiring the view and getting a nice tan on his shaved head—I understand he has the theory that women find bald men irresistible. So far, I gather, the evidence is all in his favor. Of course, his money may have something to do with his amorous successes, but I don't suppose anybody dares suggest that to Mr. Kotko. Well, the hairless sonofabitch is going to have to come out of hiding if he wants what I've got to offer. I'm not risking men's lives for it, and women's too, just to turn it over to some errand boy like Denison." He threw back his head and finished the latest beer in a single draft like a Viking polishing off a horn of mead. "Now you'd better shove off, son. If there's anything I've left out, Diana can probably fill it in for you. I'll be keeping out of sight—north of here, somebody might recognize me who shouldn't—but I'll be in touch later, or some of my people up there will."

"How will I know them?"

He frowned. "It's been a long time since I played this secret agent game. ... If you speak some Swedish, you've got a pretty good notion of how Norwegian's supposed to sound. If they can pronounce 
p0lse
 correctly, they're mine. If they say 
pelsay
, or 
poalsee
, shoot them. Okay? Give my regards to the girl. Here are the things I brought along for her. How are you kids getting along?"