The Terminators (3 page)

Standing there, I drew a long breath. It was no time to get mad. It was no time to stand around telling myself self-righteously that nobody'd informed me I was supposed to be guarding anybody besides my own. It was time to think very clearly and work very fast. I made a hasty survey of the cabin. Her two white suitcases lay on one berth, unopened. Her large brown leather purse, her little binoculars, and her tan raincoat, lay on the other. There were no signs of violence, except that what should have been there wasn't: the lady herself. It was hardly likely that she'd departed voluntarily, leaving passport, money, ticket, optical equipment, everything, lying in an unlocked cabin for anybody to grab.

Well, there was one possibility. I stepped back out into the passageway, closing the door behind me. I told myself firmly that I was a courageous and patriotic undercover agent accustomed to facing danger and death for my country. I made certain there was nobody in sight in either direction, and yanked open the door of the ladies' room across the hall, prepared to flee in confusion, muttering that, as an ignorant Yankee, I hadn't known that DAMER meant dames. The place was empty, with no feminine feet showing in either of the stalls.

I withdrew hastily, reached into my own stateroom for my hat and coat, and headed for the deck above, knowing, of course, that I was too late, I had to be. I knew what I'd have done, if I'd been in the place of the red-faced blond sailor; and the biggest mistake you can make in the business is to figure that other people are any less decisive and ruthless than you are.

The proof was that he was right there, lounging near the gangway, with a smaller, younger man beside him. They were watching the boarding and loading process idly, as if they had nothing better to do, and maybe they hadn't, now. My man no longer looked like any kind of a sailor. A quick shaking up had made the light hair look longer, under the battered, old, felt hat he was now wearing. The jeans and sweater were the same but now there was a necklace of big beads around his neck. A pair of well-stuffed packs, the gaudy nylon kind with aluminum frames, were parked on the deck beside the two men. They were, at a glance, just a couple of the semi-hippie types you encounter everywhere these days, seeing the world with their belongings on their backs.

There was only the one gangway. Forward, a crane was hoisting some big crates aboard; but unless the whole ship was in on the gag, he could hardly have got her ashore that way. Anyway, if they'd gone to the trouble of smuggling her ashore, they'd probably keep her alive, at least for a little while. I could work on that later, if necessary. Right now I had to act on the worst assumption I could dream up, remembering that when a ship is at a dock, everybody seems to congregate on the shoreward side watching the action. A man can practically count on having the seaward decks to himself for any nefarious purpose he may have in mind.

I drew a long breath and, without looking at the pair by the rail, walked forward to the officer who'd taken my ticket earlier, and indicated that I'd like to step ashore for a moment.

"Yes, you have an hour and ten minutes, sir," he said in good English. "But please do not forget, we sail promptly at eleven."

"I won't forget, thanks."

I walked down the sloping, cleated gangway to the dock, marched straight ahead until I was out of sight in a narrow space between two large, windowless buildings on the shore—warehouses, perhaps—and began to run. Coming out on the street beyond the buildings, I turned left, pounding along at a good clip. Reaching the far end of the structures, I turned left again, back towards the water, and hit the edge of the dock far enough ahead of the ship that I couldn't be seen by anyone on the passenger decks aft. A seaman on the towering bow might spot me, but if he was just an honest seaman he wouldn't care.

I stood for a moment catching my breath as I studied the black water of the harbor, speckled with steady rain. There were swirls and miniature whirlpools of current out there, glistening in the docklights and the lights of the far shore, moving sluggishly seaward with the ebbing tide. I glanced at my watch: eleven minutes had passed since she'd left my cabin. Say it had taken him five to get the job done, that left six: one tenth of an hour. At two knots, a current would carry a floating object two tenths of a nautical mile in that length of time, or four hundred yards. I started running again, loping to the end of the long wharf. . . .

Not quite to the end. I was just taking a last look out there before turning inland, wondering if it would be worthwhile to go on along the street, or road, that followed the rocky shoreline ahead, when I saw something out in the dark water thirty yards from shore. Staring, I saw it make a kind of crippled movement, and another, as if trying weakly to kick its way towards land. Okay. With time short, aware that I'd start checking soon, our husky blond friend had been hasty and careless. He'd counted on the cold water and the current to finish the job. He hadn't made sure before he put her over the ship's rail; not quite sure.

I raced around the end of the dock, ducked under a fence cable, and slid down the rocks to the water, getting rid of hat, raincoat, jacket, and shoes. I put my wallet on top of the pile, and tucked my gun underneath, wondering why the hell people couldn't ever seem to get themselves drowned—or half-drowned—in summer. She came drifting past the end of the pier as I launched myself. The water was just as cold as I'd anticipated; and I'm no great swimmer even when I'm not freezing to death. I just kind of hacked my way out there awkwardly, grabbed a fistful of wet tweed, chopped my way back, and dragged her onto a shelving rock. As I eased her down gently, so I wouldn't bruise her any more than she was already bruised, my fingers encountered an ugly, unnatural depression in the skull under the soaked hair. . ..

"Helm?"

I almost missed the faint whisper, as a car roared by on the road above. "Here," I said.

"My head. ... He had a gun. He made me go on deck, and then he hit. . . . It was the sailor, the one carrying the bags. Watch out... watch out. ..."

"Sure," I said.

"Cold," she breathed. "It's so cold and dark Helm?"

"Still right here," I said.

Suddenly her voice was quite calm and clear, although still very weak: "Ivory. . . . I'm sure that man was working for Ivory, the one who hit me. He wants the Siphon—"

"The what?"

"The Siphon, the Sigmund Siphon!" She was impatient with my stupidity. "And the information; the data to make it work. Ekofisk, Frigg, Torbotten. The drops are Trond-heim, Svolvaer. Deliver to. . . . Don't remember. Oh, damn! Denison, the man Denison works for. Deliver to him. No, I forgot, the Skipper will deliver. Contact in Narvik. Narvik? The ferry? Somewhere up in there. Can't remember. My head. They'll tell you what you need to know. Get in touch with them."

"Who'll tell me?"

"The Skipper will tell you.”

"The Skipper?"

"Hank. Captain Henry Priest," she whispered, "and his pale, doting little shadow. . . . Madly in love with a man old enough to. . . . Stupid little girl, really. Oh, never mind. I'm wandering. But ask them. The money's in my suitcase, two envelopes. The thick one's for Svolvaer, of course, to pay for the plans of the Siphon. The other's for the contact in Trondheim. Trondheim? I think that's right. The binoculars, you'll need the binoculars. . . . No, dam it, it won't work. Not for you; not for a man. They're expecting a woman. Can't change; they'll know something's gone wrong, and panic. Very timid people. . . ."

"Do they know you?" I asked.

The painful, determined whisper continued as if I hadn't spoken: "Ivory's after it, too, hired by somebody; and that smug little hypocrite his daughter pretending she doesn't really approve—"

I interrupted sharply: "The timid people in Trondheim and Svolvaer from whom we'll be buying all this stuff. Do they know you, doll?"

It brought her back from wherever she'd gone for a moment. "Don't call me that!" she snapped. "It sounds so cheap. . . . No, they don't know me. . . . And you really should do something about your habit of pawing girls in public, Mr. Helm. It's not very nice, you know. I must insist that in the future. . . ." Her voice stopped abruptly.

"Sure," I said, after waiting out a long moment of utter silence. Headlight beams swung over my head suddenly, and the sound of the car washed over me. When it had died away, I rose slowly. I said, "Sure, kid. In the future."

Then I was sorry I'd said it, because she wouldn't have liked being called "kid." Not that it mattered now.

III.

TRACTEURSTEDET, the restaurant with the untranslatable name—untranslatable by me, at least—was still open for business. The watcher I'd spotted in the shadows, earlier, was still where I'd left him, right on the job; a small, rather shabby man, from what I could make out. Then I saw another, larger, male shape back up one of the alleys. It's nice in the movies. You can tell the white hats from the black hats; and sometimes even the Union Blue from the Confederate Gray. Well, as long as they minded their business, whatever it might be, I'd mind mine.

Standing among the old wooden buildings in the steady, cold, Norwegian rain, I studied the lighted windows for a moment. I was feeling a bit shy after my evening dip in the harbor. I saw that there was an outside staircase leading directly to the upstairs dining room, bypassing the snack bar below. I took that, and looked through the glass of the door. They were still where I'd left them over an hour ago: Hank Priest and his rather colorless young lady-friend.

There are two kinds of operations. There's the precision-mission in which Agent A stays at point B for C number of minutes after which he proceeds at D miles per hour to point E. This hardly ever works as planned. Somewhere along the line somebody slips by thirty seconds and the whole schedule goes to hell. Opposed to this is the seat-of-the-pants operation where you're told to hang around a likely area as long as you feel you may be needed there, and then go to some other spot of your choice, where your talents may come in handy, as fast as your instinct tells you. With luck, and the right people, this sometimes clicks. Apparently, I had some right people on my side tonight. At least, something had kept them dawdling over their coffee so I could find them when I needed them.

I opened the door and, overcoming my shyness, marched right over to the table hoping that, in this dismal weather, my coat and hat would do a reasonable job of covering the fact that underneath I was actually wetter than any normal rain would account for.

"Excuse me," I said when the two of them looked up at me. "Excuse me, I was here before, sitting right over there, remember? You were kind enough to help me with the menu."

"Yes?" It was the girl who spoke.

"I seem to have misplaced a book," I said carefully. "I was wondering if I'd left it here."

"A book? What kind of a book?"

"A guidebook," I said. "A rather special guidebook. I'll be lost without it."

"Oh. Well, I'm afraid it's not here, at least I didn't see. ... Why don't you ask the waitress. Hank?"

"Of course." Priest called the woman over and spoke to her in Norwegian. He turned back to me, shaking his head. "No, she says you left nothing behind, old chap."

"Oh, hell," I said. "Well, thanks anyway. Sorry to bother you."

"No bother at all."

I walked out. At the bottom of the stairs I retrieved a bundle I'd tucked out of sight; then I stepped around the comer of the building to wait, shivering uncontrollably from time to time, but the cold was irrelevant. We dedicated professionals, sustained by our fierce sense of duty, protected by our rigorous training and conditioning, are immune to hardship, or supposed to be.

The relevant fact was that it was conveniently dark back here in the Hansa boys' historic old compound—I hadn't come' across any references to Hansa girls in my hurried research; maybe they'd all stayed home in Germany where it was warm. Anyway, it was dark and it was raining harder than ever. Both facts were in our favor if our retired naval hero—the Skipper, for God's sake!—would just get his damned seagoing butt off the bench and out here before I froze to death.

Then they were coming down the stairs. Priest was helping the girl with her coat, gray like her sweater and slacks, one of the long, tailored, cover-up jobs reaching almost to the ankles. The two of them stopped at the foot of the wooden stairs, looking around.

"Over here," I said.

Priest was struggling into a shapeless, colorless, British-type raincoat. He had on a tweed cap that matched his suit. He must have had lots of fun getting the props together for his I-say-old-chap act but, I reminded myself, the guy had stuck around where I could find him. After all, he wasn't a total greenhorn. He'd been through some wars. He might not be much of an undercover operative, but apparently he did have a useful feel for a combat situation, if you want to call it that.

. He had something else. just before stepping off the bottom of the stairs, he made a small signal with his left hand. The man at the comer of the building nodded, and strolled across the little courtyard, and signaled to the man up the alley, who joined him. Both headed towards the street, and vanished. I wondered briefly how our tame nautical expert had managed to recruit local help—at least they had that look—but after all, he did seem to speak the language; and an ex-Norwegian named Priest wasn't any more unlikely than an ex-Swede named Helm. Maybe he had family in these parts. I watched him approach with the girl.

It was hardly a time for social amenities, with a crisis on our hands and the rain pouring down. Still, aside from our brief encounter earlier in the evening, we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years, and some kind of relationship had to be established, or reestablished.

"A long way from Florida, Captain," I said. "I was very sorry to hear about Mrs. Priest, sir."

I mean, the dead girl might have got by with calling him Skipper, and I'd known him well enough once to call him Hank for a week or two, but you've got to be careful with these gold-braid guys, particularly the retired ones. Some of them can't seem to forget the rank they once held and it breaks out on them like a rash any time they find themselves with a little authority. I was going to have to work with the man. I didn't want to antagonize him right at the start. I didn't want to make the same mistake twice in the same night. After all, if I'd taken the trouble to show the proper gentlemanly deference to the girl called Madeleine, maybe she wouldn't have felt it necessary to go off and powder her nose and get herself killed.