Authors: Donald Hamilton
The Infiltrators
Also Available from Titan Books
Donald Hamilton
and available from Titan Books
Death of a Citizen
The Wrecking Crew
The Removers
The Silencers
Murderers’ Row
The Ambushers
The Shadowers
The Ravagers
The Devastators
The Betrayers
The Menacers
The Interlopers
The Poisoners
The Intriguers
The Intimidators
The Terminators
The Retaliators
The Terrorizers
The Revengers
The Annihilators
The Detonators
(June 2016)
The Vanishers
(August 2016)
The Demolishers
(October 2016)
The Infiltrators
Print edition ISBN: 9781783299874
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299881
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: April 2016
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1984, 2015 by Donald Hamilton. All rights reserved.
Matt Helm® is the registered trademark of Integute AB.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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1
The released female prisoner who emerged through the steel doors into the penitentiary waiting room was of medium height, a rather plain and shapeless woman apparently well into her forties. I found that quite shocking. She’d been neither plain nor shapeless nor middle-aged when I’d last seen her; and it hadn’t been all that many years ago.
Not that she’d been abused in any obvious way, in this grim, secret, maximum-security institution. The prison pallor was there, of course, replacing the smooth outdoors-girl tan I recalled; and her posture had become very bad. I remembered her as a straight, slim, proud young woman; but now she looked slack and dumpy and defeated even on this day of her release. However, she seemed to be healthy enough. There were no visible scars or blemishes aside from the left arm that hung a little awkwardly, the wrist bent inward in a slightly unnatural fashion, a handicap she hadn’t had at our previous meeting twelve years earlier. But I’d gotten a full report of her prison history and I knew the answer to that. It couldn’t really be blamed, at least not directly, on the prison authorities.
She had a painfully well-scrubbed look and wore no makeup at all. Her hair—still thick and brown, I noted—was arbitrarily chopped off well clear of her shoulders; it had been shampooed to a state of lifeless dryness. Her clothes were so new I couldn’t help looking to see if she’d got all the price tags off: an inexpensive brown flannel suit worn with an inexpensive pink sweater. There were rather heavy, dull, businesslike nylons and sensible brown shoes with very moderate heels, also brand new. She carried a brown cloth coat, a brown purse that was supposed to look like leather, and a small, cheap suitcase.
She stopped dead just inside the room, seeing me. I saw her make her face totally without expression, the way they all learn inside, even the ones like this one who’d been brought up in secure and comfortable circumstances, loving and loved, expressing their emotions freely, never dreaming as they grew up in happy luxury that the poker-faced attitudes of the penitentiary could ever concern them. She watched me approach and licked her pale lips before speaking.
“They told me somebody was waiting for me,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine… But I think I remember you.”
“I hoped you would,” I said. “It would save me from having to identify myself all over again.”
“Helm,” she said. “Matthew Helm. You work for the federal government in some mysterious capacity you never really explained. You asked me out…” She stopped, obviously remembering a shining, lost world in which she’d once lived. “You came to the office when I was a… when I was with Baron and Walsh. You took me out to dinner that night. A very good dinner at”—she frowned, then stopped frowning—“at the Cortez Restaurant. You let me pick the wine.” When I nodded, she asked, “Why are you here?”
“We’d like your help on a matter that concerns us, Mrs. Ellershaw. In return we may be in a position to do something for you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Something?”
I grinned, I hoped disarmingly. “Well, for a start, I have a car outside. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go; save you from having to take the prison bus to town and find transportation from there. But let’s talk as we ride, if you don’t mind.”
She hesitated; then she said bleakly, “I stopped minding anything eight years ago when they put me in here.”
“You’d better put your coat on,” I said. “It’s a bit wintery outside.”
She looked rather startled when I took the garment from her and held it for her, and picked up the suitcase she’d put down. That was a painful thing, as painful as seeing the brutal physical changes prison had wrought in her. The lovely and self-confident girl I’d known very briefly all those years ago had taken for granted that doors would be opened for her, and cigarettes lighted for her, and bags carried for her, and coats held.
I’d met her at the trial of a second-rate professional killer named Willy Chavez. I’d attended hoping for a line on a first-rate professional killer with whom he’d been associated, in whom we were interested at the time. Although very young, not long out of law school, her bar examination just behind her, she’d been assisting with the defense; and I’d realized that she was the one to approach for help, not the rather remote and formidable senior partner with whom she was working, Mr. Waldemar Baron.
Before going up against her, I’d done a little research and learned that she was the kind of youthful female prodigy all firms, including law firms, were looking for in those days—maybe they still are—hungry and handsome and super-bright, the kind who could be groomed for important positions and trotted out when needed to prove that sexual discrimination had never reared its ugly head around
that
shop, no siree. At the time there had seemed to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that unless something inconceivable happened, Madeleine Rustin, as she was then, would eventually become the first woman partner in that eminent legal firm.
She’d received me in her small office and we’d discussed my problem. This had involved my identifying myself and letting her check the identification with Washington. I’d been impressed by her quick intelligence, her clear grasp of the facts and their implications, her ambition, and of course her striking good looks.
I’d asked her out, as she’d just said, and over dinner we’d argued the obvious things. She’d asked if I enjoyed tracking down human beings as if they were wild animals, and I’d asked if she enjoyed turning wild animals loose on society as if they were human beings. We never came to an agreement there, nobody ever does, but she argued well and I liked the assured and good-humored way she handled herself without being too cocky about her brains and looks. At least she didn’t try to kid herself self-righteously, or me, that the client was necessarily innocent simply because she and a senior member of her firm were working hard on his behalf. Her point was the quite valid one that even a guilty man is entitled, under law, to the best legal defense possible—not that she was admitting the client’s guilt for a minute, of course.
That was all. Afterwards I delivered her to her apartment, shook the firm young hand she offered me outside the door, thanked her for arranging a jail interview for me in the morning, and never saw her again until this moment—but of course I did see her picture in the newspapers a few years later when the inconceivable happened, and the prestigious legal partnership vanished into the rosy mists of might-have-been, and the prison gates closed behind Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw, as she’d become, for an eight-year term, which she’d now served in full. But it was hard to recognize in this colorless ex-convict the bright flame of a girl I remembered, so confident and eager and ambitious, with the world at her feet.
That was the thing I found so shocking: how completely prison had destroyed her. Some change had been inevitable, of course. It was a dozen years since I’d seen her, and personal disgrace and professional ruin would inevitably have marked her, not to mention the daily indignities and degradations of prison life; but I hadn’t anticipated that the disaster would be so total. Confinement had softened and thickened the firm slender body I remembered. The fine bright face had become coarse and dull, like the once shining brown hair. There was nothing but apathy in the stony gray eyes, which had lost the golden glow of youth and anticipation that I recalled very clearly.
Seeing her like that, I found it difficult to recall her true age, although the lack of gray in her hair was a cruel reminder. I suppose I didn’t really want to accept the fact that in the normal course of events Mrs. Madeleine Ellershaw would by now have become a slender, well-groomed, very striking and handsome society lady, as well as a very successful professional woman, probably looking considerably younger than her thirty-four years, instead of this plain, sagging, badly dressed female who looked as if she’d soon be crowding fifty. She’d paid a high price for what she had done, if she had really done it. Actually, according to the record, she’d maintained her innocence to the last, even when a confession, and a little cooperation with the authorities, might have earned her a considerably reduced sentence.
“That’s right, Mr. Helm,” her voice said, totally without expression. “Not much left of Madeleine Rustin, that smart young career girl, hey? Makes you uncomfortable, don’t it? I didn’t want to meet nobody who’d recognize me, at least not right away. That’s why I maybe looked kinda startled when I saw you. But it don’t matter all that much. You might as well all get a good look at what you done to me.”
The slovenly grammar and the flat convict tone she’d used shocked me again. The carefully reared and expensively educated young lady I remembered could never have spoken like that. Then I saw a faint gleam of malice in the slaty eyes, and I realized that she was playing a savage joke on both of us, getting some kind of masochistic satisfaction out of appearing even more coarsened and tarnished by her prison years than she really was. But the bitter amusement she’d found in my reaction was quickly replaced by apprehension.