The Infiltrators (40 page)

“Sinister?” His head came up angrily. “There’s nothing sinister about us! All we want…” He checked himself.

“All you want is to purify the country, according to my last informant,” I said. “Well, fine. Go ahead and purify all to hell. At the next elections, use your money and influence and newspaper to put in your pure candidates and kick out all the impure bastards currently contaminating the political scene. Not that I’m particularly eager to be purified, but if you can get enough people to vote your way I’ll go along with purification, at least until the election after that. But when you try to circumvent the elective process by force and assassination and subversion, backed up by computerized trickery, whatever it is that’s going on up in those
CADRE
installations of yours, to hell with you. And when you frame an innocent woman into prison for your convenience, and try to kill her after she gets out, having already murdered her husband to protect yourselves, to hell with you. Do anything you like with your money, even to buying votes; at least that shows a certain respect for the vote, being willing to pay for it. But play it within the system, mister. The people will decide when they want a new system, and I don’t think it will be one run by you and your kind. And don’t ever try the guns; you’re not good enough. Guns are my business. You can buy me and sell me a hundred times over, but when it comes to the real crunch it’s the bullet that counts; and I’m the bullet specialist around here. So it would be well if you kept your hand away from that desk drawer, sir. What have you got in there, the old service .45? A great old firearm, but you’ll never make it.”

There was a long silence; then Admiral Lowery slowly relaxed in his chair and smiled. “I was told you were a wild man, Mr. Helm.”

“I can guess who told you. How’s my friend Burdette these days?”

He didn’t answer that. He said, “I can’t give you Mrs. Ellershaw, on my word of honor. I can’t even tell you where she is. I don’t rank highly enough in this organization, yet, to have such knowledge of… of current operations. Here I’m just an ordinary seaman, following orders.”

“That makes two of us,” I said. I studied him for a moment. “So, to change the simile, you’re just the screaming baby they tossed out of the sleigh to keep the wolves—me—busy long enough so they could whip up the horses and get away. And you agreed to this?”

“I… swore to do my part when asked, without question,” Lowery said.

“God, it sounds like a college fraternity. Did you slice your thumbs and mingle your blood when you made this fancy oath? And was Vangie asked if she wanted to join this crusade of yours? And give her young life for this pure cause of yours if it came to that, as it may? Or your wife? I assure you, Admiral, that if Mrs. Ellershaw dies, she won’t die alone.”

He licked his lips. “You mean that, don’t you? If it happens, you’d even retaliate against a young girl who’s never done anything against you?”

“I don’t call that hatchet job she did on a woman I’ve asked to marry me exactly nothing. If she’s mean to people, she can hardly complain if they’re mean to her. She uses her daddy’s newspaper, I use my Smith and Wesson .38. There’s a difference?”

Actually, I had no idea what I’d do if Madeleine were murdered; but since it would accomplish nothing, I doubted very much that I’d take it out on the kid. Or the mother, for that matter. But Lowery didn’t have to know that.

He cleared his throat. “Maybe we can work out a compromise. I can’t help you with the woman, but I think I know how I can arrange for you to… have somebody else. That self-important stuffed shirt Bennett. He may know where she is. Making him talk is your problem.”

I kept my face straight. Apparently there were useful strains and jealousies inside the great purification crusade. A military man accustomed to command might, be willing to humble himself for a cause in which he believed, but he’d still find Bennett’s arrogant pomposity hard to take, maybe even hard enough that he’d be willing to indulge in a spot of betrayal.

“Where?” I asked.

“I’ll have to make it look as if I’d seized the opportunity to set a trap for
you
,” he said. “I… we have a cabin well up the road to the ski run. It’s lonely enough that you should be able to operate without attracting attention, particularly since it’s too late for the skiers and too early for the summer climbing-and-fishing crowd. I’ll call and say I lied to you when you came storming in here with your threats, and told you that the woman is being held captive up there. I’ll tell them that they’d better ambush you, and dispose of you permanently, when you stage your dramatic rescue of a prisoner who isn’t there, since you obviously have no intention of yielding to their demands, whatever they are. Our demands. I think Bennett will grab the opportunity to deal with you himself. I’ve been given to understand that you’ve made a fool of him on a couple of occasions. Is that good enough?”

I grinned. “Pretty sharp thinking, Admiral,” I said. “You win either way. If Bennett traps me, and kills me, your family is safe. If I trap Bennett and he talks, as he will, your family is safe. I bet you fought some tricky naval actions in your time, sir. Okay, it’s a deal, but I’ll want to see some pictures of the cabin, and a topo map of the area if you have one…”

In addition to being picturesque in its own right, in spite of what progress has done to it, Santa Fe has a number of tourist attractions, including a well-known opera for the entertainment of musical summer visitors. And then there’s the ski area in the mountains above the town, for the athletic types who arrive in winter. The Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to get the fifteen-mile access road to the run widened and straightened, but the steep Sangre de Cristo Mountains don’t take kindly to being straightened; and a few flatlanders fall off every year, mostly Texans—I suppose because there are more of them. To those of us who grew up driving in that kind of country it seems like a perfectly safe and comfortable thoroughfare, just a little more stimulating to drive than most, although it was even more fun before it was paved, back when you could slide the corners dirt-track fashion.

I’d left the conspicuous Mazda at the motel and hitched a ride in a flossy four-wheel-drive station wagon called Eagle, distantly related to the old utilitarian jeep. It was well after dark when we got the word. Bob Wills drove. He’d turned out to be more difficult to work with than his boyish appearance suggested, rather impatient and critical, and he was getting on my nerves a bit; but then I always prefer to work alone, given a choice. I guess I’m not really a leader of men at heart.

Here, of necessity, we had a small military operation going; and I didn’t know any of the friendly forces Bob had recruited, numbering five. Two rode in the rear seat of the Eagle. A third drove the battered old International pickup, vintage uncertain, that followed behind us at a discreet distance. The remaining two were already on station. They’d just let us know by radio that the fish were in the net and we could man the winches and crank them in anytime. Bob wanted to do it now.

“All we have to do is sneak in and pick them off one by one, damn it,” he said. “Wally’s got most of them spotted already, the way they’ve set up their so-called trap for you around that cabin. These are good boys, Helm, they know the mountains, and they can work in the dark. Those creeps will never know what hit them.”

I said, “Maybe, but I don’t want to wind up in a firefight. It’s a still night, and any shooting up here on the mountain will be heard clear down in town. We’ve already presented the city police with four dead bodies—well, two weren’t ours but some people would like to give us credit for them, anyway. Five if you include Marty. I’ve managed to smooth all that over after a fashion with the Chief, but I don’t want to have to deal with the county sheriff arid the state cops as well. And the bottom line, as they say, is that if there’s a lot of wild firing in the dark the man who knows what I want to know may wind up among the dead and the whole operation will be wasted; and so will a lady I’d kind of like to keep alive. Where’s this ambush spot your man picked out for us?”

“Well, if we’re going to do it this way, at least we should block the Aspen Ranch road above, in case they decide to go out that way.”

I said, “The word is that Bennett rode up comfortably in a Mercedes; and he’ll never get it out that way. That little dirt road is rough enough any time of year; now in the spring it’s strictly four-wheel-drive country. And it’s a considerable detour, so if he did pull a fast one and slip out that way in the heavier vehicle he’s got up there, it would mean he was onto us and ready for us and we’d have a battle we can’t afford before we could take him. Anyway, we can’t spare the men; we’ve got barely enough to do the job here. No, either it works as planned, and they come back down this way and stumble into our hands all unsuspecting, or we go back to the goddamn drawing board and try to figure out something else.”

“If we wait them out, it’ll be a long night for the lady,” Bob said.

“It’ll be a long night for everybody,” I said, wincing as a bounce of the car hurt my side. “How far did you say it was to the place where we can set up our deadfall instead of walking into theirs?”

When we got there, it looked good; and I had them back the Eagle up into the little dead-end stub of a road up a side canyon that other people had used for parking and picnicking. Then I had the heavy old pickup parked in front of it ready to go. I limped around a bit and checked that the vehicle wouldn’t be hit by the lights of a car approaching down the steep main road; in the dark there was a good chance it would pass unnoticed until the time came for it to do its stuff. Good enough. Now if everybody behaved exactly as I hoped, we had it made. The sides of the canyon rose black against the sky around me, and a few stars twinkled up there in a cold and remote fashion.

After a final conference with Bob Wills, I made my cautious way back to the ambush site and asked the driver of the International to please join his friends in the Eagle. I told him I wanted his vehicle for snoozing; he could have it back when action-time came. He grinned, a nice enough guy, and went back to the station wagon. I struggled up to the pickup’s high seat and tried to make myself comfortable on the cracked pseudo-leather upholstery. The space was too short for my legs, and my ribs hurt, but I reminded myself that somewhere else somebody else was even less comfortable.
It’ll be a long night for the lady.
You have to work with all kinds, but why did I have to be saddled with a mouthy sonofabitch tonight?

Once it’s set and running, there’s never any point in wearing out the brain cells thinking about the operation. If you haven’t got it figured out right by that time, it’s too damned late. And there was no point whatever in worrying about Madeleine Ellershaw, what kind of shape she was in by now, what kind of conditions she was enduring, and how she was enduring them. If she was still alive—and what if she wasn’t? So I thought about her anyway…

“Helm!”

I realized that, thinking about her, I’d fallen asleep. I sat up groggily. The door of the pickup opened and I could see a dark silhouette, a bit chubby, recognizable as Bob Wills.

“What’s the word?” I asked.

“No word, but—”

I said, “For Christ’s sake! Did you wake me up just because you were lonely?”

“Look, damn it, it’s well after midnight. We’re just wasting time sitting here doing nothing!”

I said, “Amigo, if you can’t learn to do nothing for reasonable periods of time, you’d better take up tennis or some other sport where you get to hop around like a flea in a frying pan. Either they come or they don’t. Either we’ll get them or we won’t. Now go play cards or masturbate or something and let me sleep. Close the fucking door as you go out, please.”

The truck door slammed. I heard his angry footsteps recede. It occurred to me that I wasn’t having much luck of late with my subordinates, if you could call them that: Jackson under interrogation, Marty dead, McCullough off on a private mission I probably shouldn’t have authorized, and myself saddled with this nervous character who obviously considered me a superannuated incompetent, and could be right.

It was getting to be kind of a rat race anyway, with all these people milling around; who the hell did I think I was, anyway, Eisenhower supervising Operation Overlord? The fine old lone-wolf feeling, me against the world, was all too often missing these days of committee operations. Maybe it was time to pull out while I was still in one piece—well, more or less—and marry the girl if I could get her out of this alive and talk her into it, and settle down to… well, hell, it didn’t matter what, really. Danger pay had been piling up in banks and investment accounts for years. I could live a long, long time, even married, on what I had put away.

Suddenly I was awake again, realizing that I’d been asleep again. I was sitting up, yawning, when the head of the driver of the truck I was using for a bedroom appeared at the window.

“Mr. Helm?”

“Time to go?” I asked, opening the door and checking my watch. Three forty-five.

He nodded. “We just had Wally on the two-way. They’re giving up on you up there, and pulling out. Three cars. Well, the Mercedes, and the big old crew-cab Ford pickup with a camper shell that we knew about. And a four-wheel-drive GMC Carryall stuffed full: Wally counted nine piling into that one. Nine that we didn’t know about. Must have come up that back road and parked well above the cabin and filtered in without Wally’s seeing them.”

What he left unsaid was that if we’d made the attack Wills had recommended to me, we’d have been outnumbered well over two to one, with nine unexpected marksmen popping at us from behind the trees. Disaster Alley. “What’s the order of withdrawal?”

“Ford first, GMC second, Mercedes bringing up the rear. Friend Bennett is letting the troops break trail for him, I guess, just in case there should be somebody waiting along the road with a nasty gun.”

I said, “Good, then we won’t need the roadblock above. Just the one below, to isolate the Merc and keep the two lead vehicles from coming back to help after they’ve passed. They’d have a hell of a time turning those big heaps around on this narrow road, anyway. Tell Bob… no, I’ll tell him. You get ready here. You’ve got your part all straight?”