Matt Helm - The Terminators E-Book

Donald Hamilton

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

When the big man in Washington assigned Matt Helm to ride shotgun on a top secret mission in Norway, Helm wanted to know why. But this was a need-to-know deal, at least until his partner—a woman posing as his mistress-was killed. Now Helm was mad, mad enough to blow the operation sky high.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Donald Hamilton

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Also by 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

Print edition ISBN: 9781783293025

E-book edition ISBN: 9781783293032

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: June 2015

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 © 1975, 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 weather in Bergen was just about what you’d expect at that time of year. Nobody visits Norway in the autumn for fun.

In summer, you go to see the fjords and the midnight sun. In winter, I guess you can go for snow and skiing if you’re bored with more fashionable locations like, say, Switzerland. But in the fall, Scandinavia is usually a gray and miserable place; and when I reached Bergen it was raining hard and the streets were full of citizens in boots and slickers, indistinguishable as to sex. Apparently no Norwegian female under the age of fifty would be caught dead, nowadays, in a neat swingy skirt and sheer, sexy stockings. The current Nordic vogue seemed to involve enormous drab, baggy slacks kind of bunched up over yellow rubber boots, cowboy-fashion.

In Bergen, it didn’t really matter. The place itself was pretty enough, or would be when they finished building it, or rebuilding it—at the moment, its most conspicuous feature was the giant construction cranes that stuck up all over the city like towering mechanical weeds in an otherwise pleasant garden. Nevertheless, it was a picturesque seaport surrounded by spectacular mountains; but the women didn’t live up to the scenery. Even when I did manage to identify a member of the opposite sex of suitable age, she wasn’t worth the trouble. I’d never seen such a bunch of plain Scandinavian females in my life.

I felt kind of cheated. Generally, if you’re a man, you can count on a little interesting, blond, visual entertainment in that part of the world. Well, I hadn’t come there for entertainment, visual or otherwise.

* * *

“Sorry, Eric,” Mac had said over the phone, using my code name as always. “The climate probably won’t appeal to you after Florida, but we owe these people a favor.”

“And I’m it, sir?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “They need an agent with a fairly lethal reputation, for some reason; and apparently they have none of their own. Unfortunately, you have made yourself rather well known, in some circles, as an expert in violence. Such publicity—any kind of publicity, for that matter—is generally a handicap in our kind of work, but it should operate in your favor here, since that kind of an image is just what these people seem to require.”

“Not to criticize, sir,” I said, “but it looks to me as if your friends are just shopping around for a human lightning rod. What do you want to bet I’ll be left out in the open with my lethal reputation, as you so flatteringly put it, while the electricity fizzes all around me and they hide in the storm cellar watching the show?” I sighed. “Oh, well, I guess that’s how we earn our government pay, taking the heat off characters with more scruples and less survival potential.”

Waiting for his response, I looked towards the lovely, tanned, bikini-clad lady—named Loretta, if it matters—waiting under a palm tree near the phone booth. I shook my head ruefully to let her know that the news was just as bad as we’d expected it to be when I got the signal, never mind how, to call Washington at once. Nothing lasts forever, and we’d both known it wasn’t a permanent arrangement, but saying goodbye wasn’t going to be much fun. Heading towards the bleak and frozen north under orders, I was even, as Mac had suggested, going to regret saying goodbye to sunny Florida, although it’s got too many people in it these days to qualify as my favorite state.

“As you say, Eric, that is the purpose of this organization,” his voice said in my ear.

“Who are these refined operators who can’t dredge up anybody scary enough from their own ranks?”

“That, I am told, is something you do not really need to know.”

I made a face at the beautiful lady I’d be leaving soon. “The old need-to-know gag,” I said grimly into the phone. “Jolly good, as our British colleagues would say. I’m supposed to die for these gentle jerks without even knowing who they are?”

“We hope it won’t come to that, Eric. To make reasonably sure it doesn’t, I’m arranging for you to have a little reliable support available along the way. This is strictly between the two of us, you understand. There are certain things the people with whom you’ll be working do not need to know, either. In a minute, the girl downstairs will come on the line and tell you how to make contact…”

I should have guessed. After all, I’d been involved in Mac’s brand of interdepartmental cooperation before. As a matter of cold fact, I’ve never known him to do a friendly favor for another government outfit that didn’t turn out, in the end, to have served some devious purpose of his own.

Years ago, I might have kidded myself that the fact that my superior was arranging for me to have expert help available on a mere loan job showed how much he treasured my services—maybe even my friendship—and how much he’d hate to lose them. Knowing him somewhat better now, I didn’t figure it was very likely that he’d set up an elaborate support organization in distant Scandinavia just to protect the life of a single agent, no matter how valued and experienced. Obviously, we were sharpening two axes on a single grindstone, me; and as usual when I got involved in one of Mac’s trickier operations, I was going to have lots and lots of fun keeping the two edged tools apart.

The transatlantic crossing had been the standard airborne ratrace, Pan Am division. It used to be that a first-class plane ticket entitled you to a special waiting room, a special plane entrance, and special consideration. Now all you get for your—or the government’s—several hundred extra bucks is a few inches more seat and a couple of free martinis. I also got the privilege of viewing a movie I didn’t want to see. There were only five of us elite passengers up forward. Four wanted to sleep and the other wanted the movie, so we all saw the movie. That’s called democracy.

After a brief stop in Glasgow, in the rain, we landed in Bergen, in the rain. The airport bus transported me to the Hotel Norge in the rain. I checked in and read a letter that had been awaiting me; and now, after a day’s rest that had let me get slightly hardened to the change in climate and time zones, I was out in the cold northern rain again, looking for a restaurant called Tracteurstedet, a name I won’t try to translate because I don’t know how. I used to speak a little Swedish, enough to make Norwegian, a closely related language, mildly comprehensible; but I hadn’t been in Scandinavia for a good many years and my Nordic vocabulary seemed to have gathered considerable rust in the interval. On an important mission, I’d probably have been run through a refresher language-course as part of the routine preparation, but on an impromptu friendship deal like this it seemed that I’d just have to struggle along on what little I could remember.

The restaurant was down near the docks, in the area that, the guide book informed me, had housed the Hanseatic—that is, German—merchants who, in the old days, had played an important role in Bergen’s commerce with the warmer, softer world to the south. They had specialized, I gathered, in dried fish. I found the colorful blocks of ancient wooden houses facing the harbor, all right; but the eating place eluded me. Apparently it wasn’t visible from the street.

At last, spotting a cruising Bergen police car—a Volkswagen bus marked POLITI—I flagged it down and got some directions in halting English, enjoying every minute of it. I mean, when your profession is on the edge of the law, and sometimes even on the wrong side of it, you can generally get a childish charge out of boldly approaching the cops for help, like an ordinary, innocent citizen.

Following police instructions, I entered a narrow walkway between the old buildings and found myself in a maze of courts and lanes paved with elderly, splintery, wooden planks. There didn’t seem to be anybody around. At last, far back in this dim rabbit-warren, I found a two-story building with illuminated windows and the right sign by the door. Inside, a few people were sitting on benches at heavy, rustic, wooden tables. I managed to convey to the gent behind the Bergen version of a snack bar that I desired a full dinner, and he directed me to a larger room upstairs where a disapproving waitress with no English whatever gradually made it clear to me that hard liquor wasn’t legal here and it was naughty of me even to ask.

Well, I should have remembered that European martinis are not only unreliable, but difficult to come by. I should also have remembered that Scandinavia rivals Britain in the mad complexity of its liquor laws. I should have grabbed a couple of the duty-free bottles available at the Glasgow airport and, if I really required stimulation, I should have had a reviving snort at the hotel before embarking on this expedition. Now I was stuck with beer or wine. Choosing the former, I reread the communication I’d been handed when I arrived.

It was addressed to Mr. Matthew Helm, c/o Norge Hotel, Ole Bull’s Plass, Bergen, Norway, please hold. Well, that figured. You wouldn’t employ a character for his dangerous reputation and hide him under an alias. Writing to him, you’d put his real name conspicuously on the envelope so that, if the people you wanted to impress were on the ball, they’d read it and be suitably terrified. The fact that, after being informed of his fearsome identity, they might then take a few shots at him just for luck, wouldn’t concern you greatly. After all, that’s what dangerous characters are for, to be shot at, isn’t it?

The letter was written in a feminine handwriting, in blue ink. Okay, so far. At least I wasn’t going to have to cope with one of the green-ink girls—it’s been my experience that when they feel compelled to dip their pens in outlandish colors, they tend to be kind of impossible in other ways as well. The letter read:

Darling:

I’m so happy you can get away from Washington at last. After all the delays, it’s got a little late in the year for our cruise up the Norwegian coast, but that’s all right. Now we’ll probably have the ship to ourselves; and what’s a little weather between friends? (We are friends, aren’t we, whatever else we may be?)

I’ve made all the arrangements, as you asked, and your ticket is enclosed. We have separate cabins, but right next door. I hope you don’t mind. They’re very small cabins, I understand; and anyway, while I really don’t care what people think, I don’t see much point in either offending them or going through the motions of pretending to be man and wife. Do you?

Before the boat leaves, you might have dinner at a quaint little Bergen restaurant called Tracteurstedet near the docks. A friend tells me they have a beef dish that’s out of this world. I thought the Norwegians couldn’t cook anything but fish. If you get a chance, check and let me know.

As you can see by the enclosed schedule, we shove off at eleven p.m., but you can board any time after nine. It will be simpler if I just take a taxi direct from the airport and meet you on board, as I’m catching a late plane from Paris.

Please, please, don’t let anything stop you this time.

Madeleine

I frowned at the thin, elegant sheets of paper, and the thin, elegant handwriting. Sometimes this kind of careful doubletalk is concocted, after endless conferences, by committees of experts: but I had a feeling this letter had been composed as well as written by a real, flesh-and-blood woman; a woman I was soon to meet, who wasn’t really looking forward to meeting me.

It was right there in front of me. She’d put in all the essential, official stuff: the warning that something or somebody might try to stop me, the order to pay a visit to this restaurant before sailing time, and the necessary travel information. She’d also, however, managed to include a little unofficial message of her own. No Washington committee dealing with undercover operations would give much of a damn, as long as it wasn’t conspicuously out of character, whether a couple of agents working together on a job traveled in two cabins or one. If anything, one cabin would be preferred, since it would provide better protection for both agents, and would cost the government less.

But our girl Madeleine—whatever her real name might be—did give a damn. She cared very much, in fact; so much that even before meeting me she was telling me to keep my cotton-picking hands to myself. She’d obviously been told enough about me to get a strong negative reaction. Maybe she disapproved of dangerous characters with lethal reputations; or maybe they simply scared hell out of her. In any case, the message from my future lady colleague was clear: two cabins and no funny-business. The man-and-wife routine was definitely out. But definitely. We were going to be friends, just friends, and I’d damn well better not forget it.

I grinned, and stopped grinning. Professionals, whether male or female, don’t generally worry all that much about who sleeps where. Her concern for her virtue labeled the lady as a stuffy and probably rather stupid amateur. This was no surprise, of course. Any outfit that had to borrow a nasty man from another department to frighten people with couldn’t be very professional. Nevertheless, the prissy attitude of my associate-to-be was another warning, if I needed one, that whatever happened I’d better not count on much useful assistance from her.

I sighed, folding the letter and putting it away, remembering another female operative with whom I’d once worked; a real little trouper who, the minute we hit a hotel, had unblushingly invited me to pick out the nightie in her suitcase that did most for my virility. She’d calmly put it on and climbed into bed, saying that we had a long way to travel together as married folks, and we might as well start getting acquainted. Yet she’d been no nympho, just a practical girl solving a practical problem the simplest and most direct way; a brave kid who’d died a few months later in southern France…

I looked up to see the waitress standing over me expectantly. I made an apologetic noise, put the letter away, picked up the menu, frowned at it, and shook my head.

“Sorry, I don’t dig that Norska stuff,” I said. “Haven’t you got one in English? Engelska? No? Well, just bring me something with meat in it, okay? Meat. Beef. Boeuf? No, that’s French, dammit…

“Can I be of help, sir?”

It was the male half of the couple at the next table, a husky, weathered character in his sixties with cropped gray hair, wearing tweeds and a strong British accent. His companion was younger, a slim, pale girl in gray slacks and sweater. I’d noticed them when they came in, a few minutes after me—as a matter of fact, I’d recognized the man and been surprised to see him, since he wasn’t the kind of errand-boy I’d expected to meet—but I had not, of course, paid any attention to them since.

I said, “Well, if you don’t mind… I’d kind of like a steak or something. I’ve been eating fish ever since I got here. What’s Norwegian for beef?”

The man said, “The word is ox køtt—ox meat. They don’t have steaks here, but the first meat dish on the menu is rather good, don’t you know? Would you like me to tell her?”

“I’d sure appreciate it,” I said. “Ox meat, for God’s sake! Thanks a lot.”

“It’s perfectly all right, old chap. Happy to be of service.”

His British was a little overdone, perhaps; but then, so was my American. He spoke to the waitress in reasonably fluent Norwegian. After being thanked once more, he turned back to his companion, who gave me a brief, polite, restrained little smile before picking up the conversation that had been interrupted by my gastronomic and linguistic emergency. An hour later, well fed and beered, I emerged on the street that ran along the misty harbor. There had been a man lounging in the shadows near the corner of the restaurant, but nobody’d jumped me or shot at me as I made my way out of the Hansa merchants’ ancient dark lanes, although it was an ideal place for an ambush.

I was a little disappointed. I’d kind of hoped for some kind of action to give me a hint of what I was going to be up against. Well, whoever we were dealing with, they’d missed their boat. I’d been walking around practically naked for a couple of days. All these current anti-hijacking procedures make it tough for an honest agent to earn an honest buck, or even stay alive; but now I had my gun and knife back, slipped to me under the table, after being transported across the Atlantic by a different route, by the tweedy pseudo-British chappie who was actually a very solid American citizen, an ex-congressman in fact, named Captain Henry Priest, USN, Ret. Obviously, he was having himself a lot of fun playing secret agent, phony accent and all.

His presence changed the picture rather drastically. I’d been thinking of this friendship deal in rather vague and general terms; but Hank Priest was a real friend of Mac’s, with a real claim on the organization for services rendered not long ago, when we’d needed his help badly. If, after losing his bid for reelection, and later losing his wife in a boating accident—I’d read about it in the newspapers—Captain Priest had consoled himself by becoming involved in some kind of hush-hush government project that required a little assistance of the kind that only we could give, he’d know where to go; and if his request was at all reasonable and legitimate Mac would undoubtedly grant it, maybe even straining the rules a bit, since we did owe the guy a favor. The only question was: why hadn’t Mac simply told me I’d be working with Hank Priest once more, instead of handing me the old need-to-know routine?

Well, my superior does like to be mysterious, sometimes unnecessarily so; but in our business it doesn’t pay to take anything for granted. I had to go back to the hotel anyway, to check out and pick up my suitcase—it hadn’t seemed advisable to explore the wilds of Bergen burdened with forty pounds of luggage. Back in my room, I placed a call to a number in Oslo, the national capital, a couple of hundred miles to the east across a lot of rugged mountains. After half a dozen rings, a male voice answered.

I said, “Okay Priest.”

The voice said, “Priest okay.”

I hung up, making a sour face at the phone. Hank Priest might be okay as far as security was concerned; he had been reliable the last time we met and apparently he still was. He might be a pretty good congressman, when the voters allowed him to work at it. He might even, before retirement, have been a fine seaman and naval officer. I had no reason to think otherwise. But just what the hell was the picturesque old seadog doing here with his lousy old tweeds and his pale young brunette?

Well, whatever it was, it was bound to be a high school production and I wanted no part of it—which didn’t alter the fact that I obviously had a large part of it whether I wanted it or not.

I picked up my suitcase and went downstairs to check out and take a taxi back to the harbor, past the Hansa section where I’d had dinner, to Festnungskaien, which I managed to translate loosely as the Fortress Dock, presumably named for an ancient stone structure on one of the hills nearby.

2

The ship looked black and enormous, lying at the dock in the misty darkness. I guess I was judging her by the pleasure boats I’d been playing around with recently in more tropical waters—a ton-and-a-half outboard is quite a husky runabout, and a ten-ton sport fisherman isn’t something you want to start dreaming about unless you can shell out half a hundred grand without hurting. This was actually a fairly small steamer; but she’d still weigh in at well over two thousand tons.

Although far from new, she was clean and freshly painted; but I quickly learned that she was no luxury cruise-ship with service to match. The uniformed gent at the gangplank just took my ticket, told me that my cabin was one deck down on the starboard side, and let me find it for myself, carrying my own damned bag.

The Norwegians call it their National Highway Number One: the regular daily ship service up the coast. It’s also known as Hurtigruten, which translates loosely as “the speedy route.” I guess it does beat walking, at that, and maybe even driving, since the roads along that rugged, mountainous, fjord-slashed shoreline mostly have to go the long way around, where they exist at all.

If you’ve got an active imagination, you can visualize the main Scandinavian peninsula as a large dog standing on its forepaws (don’t ask me why) near a fire hydrant called Denmark. The belly, washed by the Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia, is Sweden, which also includes the forelegs. The back, exposed to the North Atlantic, is Norway, which also includes the head. Oslo is tucked away well up under the chin. Bergen is out on the face, halfway between the nose and the ears. The ship route runs from there up the mutt’s back, clear around the rump—the North Cape, well above the Arctic Circle—-and down to Kirkenes on the Russian border; the ice-cold ass-hole, if you insist on completing the picture. A round trip takes some eleven days and is popular in midsummer with sun-worshippers, who get a thrill out of experiencing twenty-four continuous hours of daylight on the roof of the world. In midwinter, it works the other way, of course; but I’m told that few people seem to be interested in seeing that much darkness.

The ticket I’d received wouldn’t take me that far. It was a one-way job entitling me only to a four-day voyage as far as Svolvaer, in the Lofoten Islands just off the coast, opposite Narvik on the mainland. Having been there once, I knew that Narvik is the ice-free Norwegian port that handles the ore from the great Swedish iron mines across the mountains in Kiruna—at least the ore comes out that way in winter when the Gulf of Bothnia freezes over. It’s the sort of detail you notice when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Whether it was actually significant as far as the present operation was concerned, I had no idea. What would happen after Svolvaer, if we got that far—destinations marked on tickets mean very little in this racket—was up to the gods, or a girl called Madeleine.

I’d checked both cabins, as well as I could, for electronics; and I was examining my stateroom when she arrived. I was standing there wondering how a race of reasonably husky people like the Norwegians manage to do their sleeping in the narrowest, shortest beds on earth. My fairly expensive Bergen hotel room had boasted, if that is the correct term, a pair of diminutive cots I wouldn’t have wished off on a couple of stunted kids. This tiny cabin was equipped with sleeping-shelves—you couldn’t conscientiously call them berths—one on each side, that were not only ridiculously inadequate in the transverse direction, but weren’t significantly over six feet long, leaving me with several extra inches to dispose of somehow. It occurred to me that my prospective partner’s elaborate efforts to preserve her virtue had been quite unnecessary. We might as well have saved public money by sharing one cabin. Only a pair of oversexed midgets could have managed successful passion in the cramped space provided…

“Matt, darling!”

She was standing in the doorway. It was no time for taking inventory. After all, we were supposed to be, at least, very good friends. She was stepping forward, arms outstretched; and I took the cue and embraced her heartily and kissed her on the lips—cool and damp from the rainy night outside—without having had much of a chance to determine what I was greeting so affectionately. I only knew that it smelled nice and felt feminine in spite of being snugly wrapped in a tailored pantsuit of brownish tweed rough enough to earn the approval of Hank Priest in his British incarnation.

I felt her stiffen in my arms when I carried the exploration a little too far. Apparently I’d read her written message correctly: no funny business. I withdrew my scouts from the forbidden territory; and we clung together a moment longer and parted with reasonably convincing reluctance—all this, presumably, for the benefit of a husky, red-faced, fairhaired sailor in dungarees and a navy-blue turtle-neck, who was standing out in the passage with a white suitcase in each hand. It seemed that there were ways of getting porter service on board, after all, if you knew how and were properly constructed.

“Darling!” said my colleague-to-be. “Oh, darling!”

Her eyes were angry. Even play-acting, apparently, before an interested audience, I was supposed to keep my cotton-picking hands from wandering.

“It’s been a long time, Madeleine,” I said soulfully.

“Too long, dear. Much too long!”

She was properly constructed. She was, as a matter of fact, much better than I’d expected. As a rule, the ones who are afraid of it are the ones to whom it will never happen; but this one wasn’t going to wither on the vine unpicked unless she worked at it hard. She was a fairly fragile-looking girl in spite of her tweedy, trousered outfit; a slight figure with dark, carefully arranged hair, and delicate, accurate features in a small, heart-shaped face. She was carrying a purse, a raincoat, and what I at first took to be a cased camera, and then realized was a pair of small binoculars. I wondered if it was part of her tourist camouflage, or if she was actually expecting to have to spot a distant object invisible to the naked eye, and if so, what.

“Give me a moment to clean up, darling,” she said. “I just stepped off the plane and into a cab. It’s wonderful to see you, Matt, it really is!”

Our greeting dialogue wasn’t the greatest, I reflected; but then we weren’t really trying to fool anybody, just to make them think we were trying to fool them, if I had the game figured correctly. Even that, as far as I could see, wasn’t absolutely essential. After all, judging by what Mac had said, I’d been hired as a menace, not as an actor. That meant the people I was supposed to be menacing were supposed to know it, or what was the point? And if the folks who were supposed to be scared knew enough about me to know what a scary fellow I was, they’d also know, most likely, that I’d never seen this very attractive, very proper lady before in my life.

“I won’t be a minute,” she said.

I made a burlesque thing of checking the time. “I’ll hold you to that, doll,” I said. “One minute. Sixty seconds. No more.”

She laughed; but her eyes had narrowed slightly. I’d gone and done it again; the crude gent with the wandering hands and the big mouth. Calling her “doll” was, apparently, not showing proper respect, or something. I watched her turn away and I sighed, reflecting grimly that it was going to be a great four-day boat ride, relaxed and informal and friendly, just fun, fun, fun all the way. Well, hell. Maybe I should look upon it as a challenge to my machismo, as the Mexicans call it and make a real project of finding out what kind of a girl or woman was hiding behind the frigid, protective shell. But my experience has been that kissing Sleeping Beauties awake isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s more fun when they already know where the noses go.

I shook my head ruefully, and busied myself unpacking my suitcase while I waited. I’d laid out my pajamas and toilet kit; and I was tucking the bag into the wardrobe, out of the way, when it occurred to me to glance at my watch again, a bit uneasily. Six minutes.

Of course, the lady probably hadn’t taken the time limit I’d set her very seriously. She could even be putting me in my place deliberately. Nevertheless, the old hunter-hunted instinct was stirring in its primitive way. It had been a hell of a quiet evening so far. It didn’t feel right. Somebody’d had me brought a long way because I was supposed to be familiar with violence; yet no violence had occurred. Or had it?

I stepped quickly out into the passage and knocked on the door of the next stateroom. There was no answer. I checked the door cautiously. It wasn’t locked. Well, it wouldn’t be. The general passenger instructions issued with my ticket had informed me that for safety reasons—I suppose so you could get out in a hurry if the ship started to burn or sink—the staterooms were not supplied with keys. If you wanted to protect your belongings while you stepped ashore at a port along the way, you were supposed to see the purser, and he’d do the honors.

I worked the handle, gave a little push, and watched the door swing back into the cabin. There was nobody to be seen inside and there was only one place for anybody to hide. With my hand on the gun in my jacket pocket, I sidled into the stateroom, kicked the door shut, and yanked open the wardrobe. It was empty.

Standing there, I drew a long breath. It was no time to get mad. It was no time to stand around telling myself selfrighteously that nobody’d informed me I was supposed to be guarding any body 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…