Matt Helm - The Vanishers E-Book

Donald Hamilton

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Matt Helm
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 485

Beschreibung

People are vanishing without a trace. And the disappearances are getting closer to home—the next likely target is Mac, Matt Helm's old boss. To get to the bottom of the mystery, Helm follows two beautiful and treacherous women who lead him all the way to his ancestral home—Sweden. With a coup from within the agency, and a terrorist threat from without, it's clear that nobody can be trusted...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Donald Hamilton

Title Page

Copyright

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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

The Retaliators

The Terrorizers

The Revengers

The Annihilators

The Infiltrators

The Detonators

The Demolishers (October 2016)

The VanishersPrint edition ISBN: 9781783299911E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299928

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 20161 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 © 1986, 2016 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

I was driving from Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, to Washington, D.C., U.S.A., because, I’d been told, a car such as I’d been given to use in the Southwest was now needed in the Northeast and our current budget forced us to make the most of our limited rolling stock.

Furthermore, I’d been told, a few days of relaxed freeway driving would give me time to recuperate from the terrible strain of trying to habla español with my limited Spanish grammar and vocabulary. Never mind what the assignment down there had been. It was finished and wouldn’t worry me, or anybody else, again.

What did worry me was that I was being used as a delivery boy. Please understand, it wasn’t a question of status. I’ve been with the outfit longer than most, but if somebody needs a vehicle driven somewhere and I’m going there, hell, I enjoy driving; and I’m not too proud to play ferryman. The Matthew Helm Auto-Transport Service, at your service. However, I couldn’t help realizing that any kid with a license could have done the job. I could have flown back directly from Ciudad Chihuahua, or driven north only as far as El Paso, Texas, just over the border, turned the fancy little turbocharged Ford compact over to somebody else, and taken the plane from there. I could have been back in Washington by now, ready to do battle once more for the nation I serve and the small federal agency by which I’m employed—which I won’t name since it doesn’t exist, officially.

I didn’t buy all that nonsense about the badly needed car; we’re not so hard up we can’t pick up a baby Ford, even a loaded one, when and where we need one. It wasn’t as if the heap in question were a priceless Rolls or Mercedes, or a unique all-terrain vehicle constructed to our specifications at great expense. As for the relaxing trip, the last time Mac worried about my mental health was when an airplane crash left me with a touch of amnesia; and that was quite a while ago. I came to the conclusion that he’d ordered me to drive north and east by easy stages, instead of flying, because he simply didn’t want me in Washington, at least not yet. He wanted me out on the highway for a few days, an elusive target, reporting to a recording device at a special number to say where I was spending the night so he’d know where to make contact when he needed me.

The callback came when I was only a day away from my destination. It caught me after breakfast. I’d already thrown my bag into the car in preparation for leaving the Holiday Inn—well, one of the Holiday Inns—in Knoxville, Tennessee. If I hadn’t stepped back into the room to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, and to kill the last couple of minutes before the specified departure time, I’d have missed it. You always wonder, in a situation like that, if you might not be better off pretending you didn’t hear anything and slipping away quietly, letting the damn thing ring; but of course you never do.

“Eric?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

There was supposed to be some textbook ID stuff in here, in spite of the fact that he’d used my code name and that we were pretty well acquainted with each other’s voices. However, he bypassed the normal procedure, which was significant in itself.

He said, “I’m glad I caught you. We have a slight problem.”

I winced. It was a trigger phrase and I didn’t like it. I mean, if he’d mentioned a serious emergency, or even a total disaster, okay. It would have indicated merely that things were normally screwed up in Washington, no sweat; but after a previous occasion when home base had been threatened by somebody who’d considered us, rightly, as an obstacle to the attainment of certain undemocratic political ambitions, a new emergency-alert signal had been arranged between Mac and his more senior operatives, active and retired; an elite group of fairly nasty characters of which I was the ranking member. “A slight problem” meant that the ship was sinking and it was time to order the lifeboat crews to their assigned stations.

“A slight problem,” I repeated, to let him know the message had been received. “Yes, sir. How would you like me to go about solving this slight problem.”

Solving our slight problem involved for a start, I was told, carrying out the standing orders applicable to such a situation. Afterwards, as I’d been planning to do anyway, I should drive up Interstate 81 through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley between the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains; but I should refrain from turning off on I-66, the main route to Washington some seventy miles to the east, as I’d intended.

Instead I should continue on to Hagerstown, Maryland, up near the Pennsylvania border. There I should stop at a certain motel—coincidentally another Holiday Inn—and check up on a certain female person in whom we were interested, who’d wound up in the local hospital a couple of days ago for reasons that were not entirely clear. I was supposed to make them clear to myself first and then report my findings to the same contact number, the one we were using now.

Mac said, “You will, of course, keep in mind that you’ll probably be under observation from the moment you appear at the hospital and ask for the lady. You will behave in a normal manner and make your normal telephone reports to me at the office number you normally employ. We’ll both be full of concern for the patient, of course. We’ll discuss her symptoms and treatment at length. You may use the word ‘tachycardia’ to describe her condition if you wish, and any other medical jargon you happen to pick up at her bedside; but please reserve the word ‘arrhythmia,’ meaning irregularity, to indicate that you’ve actually discovered something irregular and I should check the recorder here for details. I don’t want to draw attention to this number by using it unnecessarily. Understood?”

“Arrhythmia equals irregularity, of a noncardiac and nondigestive variety. Yes, sir, I think I’ve got that.”

I hesitated. The question uppermost in my mind was why he’d saved this nursemaiding job for me. I mean, it’s only some sixty miles from Washington to Hagerstown; and he undoubtedly had agents within easy reach of his office who could have been at the Hagerstown hospital within an hour or two of the time the lady in question stumbled into the emergency room. But he’d let her wait two days on her bed of pain while I made it up from Mexico—hell, I still had five hundred miles to go. Obviously there was some reason he considered me more suitable for holding the invalid’s hand than whatever talent he had available in Washington.

I didn’t ask the question because if he’d wanted me to know what made me so special, he’d have told me. All I’d get for asking would be a slap on the wrist.

However, I was entitled to request information about the subject: “Who is this sick dame who requires a male nurse, anyway?”

“The patient’s name is Watrous, Astrid M. Watrous. Mrs. Watrous.”

I didn’t bother to try to visualize the lady. Astrid was a good Scandinavian girl-name, but it didn’t necessarily mean that the lady was a blonde and blue-eyed Norse beauty. If you’re dumb enough to bet your life, these days, on all Kathleens being Irish, or all Juanitas Spanish, or all Rachels Jewish, or all Astrids Swedish, you’re not likely to live very long.

“Never heard of her,” I said. “Under what name do I approach her?”

“Since Mrs. Watrous is using her own name, you might as well give an innocent impression, for the benefit of probable observers, by using yours. You can discard the cover we constructed for your Mexican assignment. I presume that, after returning to this country, you retrieved your own documentation in El Paso as instructed. We’ll play it in the open, at least up to a point. It’s no secret that, after the disappearance of her fairly prominent husband, Mrs. Watrous, unable to get satisfaction elsewhere, came to us for help. Under the circumstances, we’ll be expected to send somebody to the hospital to check on her condition.”

“Exactly what are the circumstances, sir?”

Mac said, “For various reasons we, like his wife, are unconvinced by the evidence indicating that Dr. Watrous vanished voluntarily.”

“I never heard of the guy,” I said. “Wait a minute. Doctor Watrous, Dr. Alan Watrous? Oceanography, or something, right? Head of a well-known scientific institute, I forget the name. Took off with a dame who wasn’t his wife—that was before I went to Mexico. And a wad of the institute’s dough. Big scandal.”

“Yes, the newspapers made quite a thing of it. But it was never proved that any money was missing; that was just a rumor.”

“But his wife’s convinced you that the newspapers, and presumably the cops, are all wet? You both think Watrous was vanished?”

“An unfortunate use of the word, Eric; but we consider it a strong possibility. And suspecting foul play in the case of the husband, we would naturally look very hard at any accident or illness affecting the wife who’s been making so much trouble about his disappearance.”

It was beginning to make a little more sense. It was a real problem, not just a question of keeping a sick woman happy. But while I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m the best little problem-solver he’s got, I still wasn’t convinced I was good enough to justify the delay involved in getting me on the job. I sensed that there was another reason why my presence was required; a reason I wasn’t being given.

“And I’m the man elected to do the hard looking?” I said. I grimaced at the phone. “Would I be looking for anything beyond the cause of her medical troubles, sir? Would I perhaps be looking for her husband, also?”

“Yes, as soon as Mrs. Watrous is released from the hospital, you will give her all the help you can in finding Dr. Watrous. And you will endeavor to keep her alive, and preferably healthy, in the process. If there should be other odd diseases going around.”

I said, “You’re obviously assuming that she’ll survive her present illness. What if she doesn’t recover from her attack of tachycardia, whatever that may be?”

“It’s very unlikely, barring complications. The condition is seldom life-threatening if treated in time; and Mrs. Watrous is making a good recovery. However, in the event that she should be lost to us for any reason, you will still make every effort to locate and liberate Dr. Alan August Watrous.”

I frowned at the inoffensive phone. There were more questions that needed answers. The one I asked was, “Can you give me a quick rundown on Mrs. Watrous’ mysterious disease?”

“The only mystery is how she managed to contract it,” Mac said. “There’s no mystery about the condition itself. You could call it the opposite of a heart attack. Instead of faltering or stopping, the heart begins to beat much too rapidly. Mrs. Watrous’ pulse was over two hundred when she reached the emergency room. The ailment is not uncommon. There are several drugs that will control it. One of them, curiously enough, is quinine, which is what she’s being given at present, quinidine to be exact. It seems to be doing the job. Her heartbeat is completely under control. There have been no more episodes; and she’s merely being retained in the hospital for observation, to make certain her condition is stable.”

I said, “As you say, sir, it’s quite a coincidence. The husband disappears. The wife acquires a sudden heart ailment which, I gather, she’s never shown any signs of previously. I presume that if she were to have another attack under conditions where help wasn’t available, she could die from it. That could be convenient for somebody. Particularly since, after this incident, it would undoubtedly go down as a natural death.”

“The thought had occurred to me, Eric.” His voice was dry; I was pointing out the obvious.

“Well, you’d better give me the priorities,” I said. “In case I have to make a choice, do I save the wife and let the husband go, or vice versa?”

Mac said calmly, “While we would, of course, prefer to have Mrs. Watrous preserved, she’s merely a means to an end.”

“I see,” I said. “And Dr. Watrous is the end?”

“No,” he said. “I am.”

I sat there for a moment listening to the traffic on the nearby freeway. “You’d better spell it out for me, sir,” I said carefully at last.

Mac said, “It’s quite simple. Dr. Watrous is not the only prominent citizen to vanish in the past year. Other important people—businessmen and politicians as well as scientists—have also disappeared, always with plausible reasons. To take just one example, a certain highly placed lady in the computer industry named Janet Beilstein, is supposed to have run off with a handsome young man and company funds, although the embezzlement angle seems to have been merely a vicious rumor. That’s pretty much the same story, you’ll note, that was circulated about Dr. Watrous. It’s been used, with variations, in other instances as well; but there have also been supposed nervous breakdowns and other explanations. I can’t give you the total number of cases, but it’s impressive, even if allowance is made for the fact that, in spite of the bureaucratic paperwork that rules our lives, surprisingly many people do manage to pull down the curtain each year and are never heard from again.” He hesitated, and went on: “In the time we’ve been on the case, we’ve come up with only two promising leads. Mrs. Watrous is one. I am the other.”

I frowned at the phone in my hand. “It’s one of my dull days. I’m still not following you.”

He spoke carefully: “Let us say, hypothetically, that there is an organization devoted to abducting selected citizens for purposes still unknown, always with a suitable cover story to minimize the resulting publicity.”

“Kidnapping doesn’t seem to be exactly what’s planned for Mrs. Watrous, if we’re right about her having been drugged with the idea of eventually making it permanent.”

“But Mrs. Watrous is not a principal in this affair, Eric. To these people, whoever they are, she is merely a peripheral nuisance. Unlike her husband, she’s not well known, and she carries in her brain no valuable scientific information. She is merely a threat, not a possible asset.”

“Then where do you come in, sir? I’d think you’d fall right into the same menace classification as Astrid Watrous.”

I heard him sigh sadly at the other end of the line. “A bitter thing it is to be unappreciated by one’s own associates! I’ve served as head of this agency for a good many years. I hope I have some value to my government; and I know I have accumulated knowledge that could be useful to somebody. To be sure, I was probably not considered a primary target; but when Mrs. Watrous involved me in the case, I came under observation. It was realized that, taking the lady seriously, I had to be eliminated before I learned enough to be a real threat. However, it would be wasteful to have me killed. Because of my position I could be quite valuable.”

“You seem to have a real pipeline into this abduction outfit, sir. An informant?”

“No, just a commonsense interpretation of certain things that have been happening around me.” Mac laughed shortly. “If you were going to cause me to vanish, what explanation would you leave behind to make it seem as if I’d disappeared voluntarily? At my age I’m not, I hope, a plausible candidate for amorous entanglements. Our operational funds are, unfortunately, quite limited, so I don’t have access to large sums of money. My doctor informs me that for a man in my position, I show few signs of stress; a sudden breakdown would hardly be convincing. So why would I choose to go missing?”

He waited for my answer. I hesitated, but it was no time to be tactful. I said, “Well, I can make a guess. Patriotism and loyalty are corny words these days. Patriots are out of fashion. Faith and trust are out, lie detectors are in. It’s the time of the fink and the snitch and the traitor, sir. If I were planning to vanish you, I’d first send some known Commies to see you, on one pretext or another. I’d plant a few bits of evidence here and there to establish your subversive associations. It doesn’t take much, these suspicious days. After that, when you went AWOL, nobody’d believe you hadn’t defected, even after a lifetime of patriotic service.” After a moment, when he didn’t speak at once, I said, “Well, nobody’d believe it except a few naive and trusting characters in this outfit, who’re also suckers for Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. It’s amazing how gullible some folks can be.”

“Thank you, Eric.” After a moment, he went on: “Your guess is quite correct. After certain rumors had come to my attention, I investigated discreetly and learned that I’m currently supposed to be very depressed and angry at the scanty recognition my work has received over the years and the way our organization is forever being slighted, financially and otherwise. Furthermore, some peculiar characters have presented themselves here for interviews in recent months, supposed journalists, informants, and job applicants. I’ve made a point of taking on a couple of the last-named in spite of their questionable records. Very incriminating, for me. I’ve sent them out to the Ranch for screening and indoctrination with, of course, the special cautionary code in their induction papers.”

The Ranch is our agent training, maintenance, and rehabilitation center in Arizona. It’s a fairly tough place, and I wouldn’t want to arrive there with that little watch-this-guy mark on my record.

Mac went on: “I’m afraid they won’t be made very happy, and there will have to be a couple of training accidents after this is over, very bad for our safety record. However, at the moment their presence reflects unfavorably on my judgment or, if you want to be suspicious, my loyalty—the fact that I’ve admitted such dubious individuals to a highly classified government training area under my control.” He paused, and went on: “Not to mention letting an obvious tap on my office telephone go unreported and unremoved.”

“That’s why we’re using this elaborate communications system?”

“Yes.”

“You’re planning to let yourself be defected, then?”

“Your grammar is still deplorable, but the answer to your question is yes. I have sent a good many agents down similar rabbit holes in the past. This time I am the logical ferret. You’ll point out that it’s a long time since I’ve operated in the field. Well, that leaves it up to Joel and you to look after your helpless superior, doesn’t it? You remember Joel; you worked with him once out West.”

“Yes, sir. I remember Joel.”

“I thought you would. A good man. I know you won’t mind working with him again.”

“No, sir.”

He was throwing it at me fast. The fact was that Joel wasn’t a very good man, in my opinion. While technically competent enough, he was one of those scheming characters, ambitious for preferment, who’d hog the credit for success any time he could manage and try to slip out from under the blame for failure. I can work with anybody I have to, and there had been no blowup to jeopardize the mission; but I’d let Mac know how I felt afterwards. For him to now tell me calmly that I wouldn’t mind working with Joel again was another clear signal: this line, too, was bugged, and we had an audience somewhere that we were trying to impress with the brotherly spirit pervading our undercover organization.

He went on: “Actually, the two of you will be operating independently. He will be covering me, rather carelessly of course. After he’s lost me, however, he’ll pull up his socks and do his best to find me. Maybe he’ll succeed. But in case he doesn’t, you’ll be working at it quietly from the Watrous angle. Let us hope that at least one of you picks up a reasonable trail leading to a place being used as a detention center for all these kidnapped people, soon to include me.”

I said dubiously, “You’re making some rather optimistic assumptions, aren’t you, sir? What makes you think all the kidnappees wind up in the same place and, if so, that it isn’t just a large grave with room for one more? You.”

He had an answer to that, of course. Once he’s got a plan made, he’s got answers to everything. He’d never admit that he was betting his life on a hunch. Well, he often plays his hunches, and often they’re very good; but I was glad it was his life he was gambling with, for a change, instead of mine.

A little later, picking up gas just off the freeway farther north, I called him openly from a pay phone, using the normal office number. I let him give me my Hagerstown directive officially, for the benefit of whoever had made arrangements to listen in on that phone, maybe the same snoopy character who’d bugged the other, maybe not. Life was getting very complicated. It happens any time you get near Washington, D.C.

2

Living at seven thousand feet, as I did for many years out in Santa Fe, New Mexico, you tend to get snobbish about your mountains. I mean, snowcapped two-mile-high peaks are a dime a dozen out there; and they kind of spoil you for appreciating the puny geological formations people like to call mountains east of the Big Miss. Still, I’ve always considered the Shenandoah Valley to be a pretty fair scenic experience, even if it’s on a somewhat smaller scale than what you get out West.

The weather was sunny and springlike. The Interstate was in pretty good shape, which was more than could be said for some I’d driven on during the past week. The traffic was moderate except for a bit of congestion near the Washington turnoff, which didn’t delay me greatly. I had plenty of time to let the little car drive itself on cruise control while I considered what I’d been told over the phone; and particularly what I hadn’t been told.

First there was the case of the two tapped telephones. Clearly Mac was playing one of his clever games, letting somebody know he’d discovered the bug on the office phone and set up an alternative contact number; but carefully giving them the impression that he thought the second number was still secure so the snoopers would believe what they overheard on that line. Just what information he wanted to feed them convincingly, and for what purpose, remained to be seen.

Then there was the interesting case of the lady named Janet Beilstein, which Mac had thrown at me, ostensibly, as just one instance of what we were up against—but why had he selected that particular disappearance as an example? After a good many years of interpreting his instructions, I knew that he didn’t often talk at random. What had he been trying to tell me here without tipping off whoever was listening in? Well, there was a clue of sorts: when a healthy gent of any age makes a point of informing you that he’s too elderly and decrepit to be a plausible candidate for amorous entanglements, that, as far as I’m concerned, is when you check to make certain the local maidens are all locked into well-fitting chastity belts…

I’d already, at a morning coffee stop, made the emergency call to Doug Barnett in St. Petersburg, Florida, to set the disaster routine into motion. Doug was supposedly retired and building a new boat in his palmy back yard to replace one he’d recently lost in the line of duty. The agency was paying for the replacement. In return Doug was supposed to hold himself available in times of real crisis. The fact is that nobody really retires from our outfit. There are quite a few old, scarred agency warhorses grazing in quiet pastures in various parts of the country, waiting, maybe even hoping, for the battle bugle to blow once more. Well, I was blowing it.

“Barnett here.”

Using his code name, and mine, to make it official, I said, “Abraham, this is Eric. A slight problem in Washington. Contact: 325-3376. Code: arrhythmia. Pass the word. Do you want a repeat?”

“A slight problem in Washington. Contact 325-3376. Code arrhythmia.”

“You’ve got it. Good luck, amigo.”

“Shit, I was just going to varnish the brightwork around the cockpit.”

“Why varnish? Use teak and let it weather, nice and salty.” There was something I had to ask, and I went on: “How’s Amy doing?”

Doug Barnett’s daughter and I had spent some time together, having become acquainted on the mission on which he’d lost his boat. However, she was basically a nonviolent girl, and in the end, like others I’d met of that persuasion, she hadn’t been able to resist trying to reform me; a sure way to kill a pleasant man-woman relationship.

“Amy’s doing fine,” Doug said. “Got herself a new boyfriend much younger and better looking than that ugly tall bastard she was seeing for a while; I forget his name. Schelm or something like that.”

“Good for her,” I said. “Well, keep your whistle wet and your powder dry. Eric out.”

That had been in the morning. After hanging up, I’d returned to the car and concentrated on making miles without catching cops or, more correctly, being caught by them. One would think grown men would have better things to do than hiding in the bushes and jumping out to say “boo” at honest citizens. In the afternoon, an hour from my destination, I stopped to fill up again, and to make another call before entering the Hagerstown danger zone.

This call also went to Florida, but to the other side of the state. I wanted to talk with a reporter on the Miami Tribune who’d helped me out before, when I was operating down in that part of the country. I’d tried for him at my earlier phone stop, but he’d been out. It took them a while to track him down this time; then his voice came on the line.

“Meiklejohn.” When I’d identified myself, he said, “Oh, it’s the Jack Daniels man.” I’d given him a bottle by way of thanks the last time I’d consulted him. He went on: “What do you want now?”

“Beilstein comma Janet. An executive-type lady in the computer business, missing. Can you look her up for me?”

“What’s the matter with your Washington sources?”

“They’re in Washington,” I said. “It’s a very nosy city, or hadn’t you heard?”

“Beilstein?” Spud Meiklejohn was silent for a moment, presumably searching his capacious memory. “I remember the story. I’ll have to look it up if you want her undergraduate and advanced business degrees and her complete employment record before she wound up at Electro-Synchronics, Inc., where she worked her way up to executive vice-president. But if you’re satisfied with learning that she’s fifty-two years old and ran off with her twenty-four-year-old tennis pro, and maybe a couple of million, although that’s not been confirmed, there you are.”

“The pro’s name?”

“Emil Jernegan.”

“Had he been around for a while, or did he just appear one day out of the blue, pretty much the way he disappeared? In other words, could he have been planted on her?”

“Well, he’d been on the job for only about six months before he zeroed in on the lady executive who’d started taking his lessons, very charming and attentive. But there seems to be no real mystery about him. Just another good-looking young tennis bum who couldn’t make it competitively and settled for a country-club job. But there seems to be a slight mystery about the Beilstein woman herself.”

“Give.”

“She’d take a few weeks’ vacation a couple of times a year,” Meiklejohn’s voice said in the phone. “She’d come back tanned and tough and healthy, they say, ready to lick her weight in financiers; but she’d never say where she’d been. Or with whom, if anybody. Not really normal for a single woman—well, she’d been married years earlier, but it didn’t take. But most dames back from a glamorous vacation in the sun can’t wait to tell the other girls in the office all about it. Not Mrs. Beilstein. No glowing holiday reminiscences from her.”

“She didn’t take the youthful tennis-playing Tarzan along on these mystery trips?”

“No. The times he was out of town don’t synchronize at all with the times she was.”

“Maiden name?”

“Janet Rebecca Winterholt.”

I said, “Okay, thanks. That’ll hold me for a while. One fifth of Daniels Black coming up.”

Meiklejohn hesitated; then he spoke slowly: “Funny the way people have been disappearing lately, Helm. Not really big important people who’d throw the country in an uproar if they went missing. Just kind of medium-prominent citizens good for a few stories; and always with a plausible reason for vanishing.”

“What are you trying to say?”

He said, “To hell with the thanks and the booze. Just remember me if you come up with something I can use.”

“You’re at the head of the list, amigo.”

The Hagerstown Holiday Inn was expecting me, having been alerted by its opposite number in Knoxville to the fact that one unit of business was heading its way. No mystery about that Helm character. He’d received his marching orders, and he was reluctantly making a detour on his way home to look in on a sick dame in whom his agency was interested. The motel was on the far side of the picturesque little city from the Interstate exit, and I had to buck a long string of traffic lights to reach it; but it turned out to be within a few blocks of the Washington County Hospital, as Mrs. Watrous’ temporary, we hoped, residence was called.

I could have walked over, it was that close, but I didn’t. Nobody followed my car as I drove away from the hostelry that overlooked a four-lane boulevard with a grassy median wide enough to boast some scattered shade trees that were just about to put out leaves. It had been late spring in Mexico and Texas, I remembered; but I’d come a long ways north as well as east. To make sure I was unescorted, I stopped at a shopping center and bought a handful of flowers at an exorbitant price—six tulips at four bucks apiece—and then I got myself lost, not quite accidentally, so that I had to circle around through a maze of little one-way streets to find the hospital. No surveillance yet. It made me feel quite lonely.

I passed up the parking garage across the street and found an open space along the curb a block and a half away. A little walk wouldn’t hurt me. I entered the hospital by the front door, flowers in hand, asked my question at the information desk, and was directed to the third floor. Room 357. I didn’t ask permission there. I just walked in and looked at the woman in the bed, who was a mess. Well, in a hospital they mostly are, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. But this didn’t look like a patient who was making a fine recovery.

Astrid Watrous turned her head to look at me. “Platelets!” she whispered bitterly.

“What?”

“Red blood corpuscles, yes, those I know. White corpuscles I know. But platelets?”

“What’s the matter with your platelets?”

“I do not have them. Only a few hundred per… per something, and one should have thousands. The quinine, it killed them. It happens sometimes, so they say. But why is it that everything that sometimes happens now happens to me?”

“I know,” I said without expression. “It isn’t fair, is it?”

She winced. “Now you are cruel. But it is deserved. I am sorry to be so cowardly, but I am not accustomed to illness. It frightens me terribly.”

The accent was intriguing, and she had the mannerisms of a woman accustomed to admiration; but she was under terrible handicaps here. I judged that under favorable conditions, properly dressed, she could have appeared quite youthful and handsome, but in the ugly cotton hospital gown, lying in the mechanized bed hooked up to the usual intravenous plumbing, she looked thin and plain and middle-aged.

The bones of the face were good, but they were much too prominent under the drawn gray skin. The brown eyes were dull and sunken. There was a considerable quantity of fine blonde hair spread over the pillow. It was probably spectacular hair in good times; but it was matted and uncared-for-looking now. I wondered if it was real; true brown-eyed blondes are scarce. Her lips had the dry cracked look that goes with serious illness. They looked as if they didn’t fit her mouth very well, and as if she were very conscious of having picked up the wrong size by mistake.

She licked the ill-fitting lips and moved them around in her face as if trying to get accustomed to them. She whispered, “Over six feet. Bony. Sarcastic. You must be the man called Helm. Washington said you were coming to help, but how can you help?”

“I’m the man called Helm. Is there anything you want that I can get for you?”

“I want to be out of here, but can you get me that? I want to be out before they ruin me completely with their medicines! The runaway heart, that was frightening enough, but…” She drew a ragged breath. “I woke up spitting blood; I must have bitten the inside of my mouth somehow. Just a little, but it will not coagulate properly without the platelets. Who ever heard of those things? They invent strange new small particles all the time! From school I remember only electrons and protons; and look what they do to the atom now; nobody can understand it! And all the idiotic microscopic things they are finding in the blood! But not finding, not enough, in my blood…” She swallowed hard, clearly on the verge of tears. “Look at me! I have the tiny red spots all over me, small hemorrhages under the skin. And they do not know where I may be bleeding inside. Instant hemophilia, all on account of their quinine and their platelets!”

I gestured towards the drip apparatus connected to the needle in her arm. “What are they pumping into you?”

“It is only glucose solution now. They do not want to make a new hole in me if I need another transfusion, so they leave the apparatus in place. They wait to see if I start making my own platelets again or if they must shoot more into me… Are those flowers for me?”

I took a chance on kidding her a bit. “If I can’t find a prettier girl to give them to.”

After a moment, she drew a long breath, pulling herself together with an effort. She made a small, feminine gesture towards ordering her hair, and laughed ruefully.

“No problem,” she said. “Just reach out and take the first female person who walks down the corridor. I am a very stringy and unattractive specimen today; you should have no trouble doing better.” She watched me uncover the flowers; then she grasped the wrist of the hand with which I offered them to her, and drew me closer. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “If I do not live, look around Lysaniemi. Somewhere around there, up above the Pole Circle, the Arctic Circle. Remember Lysaniemi. Say Lysaniemi. But softly, someone may be listening.”

I formed the word clumsily. “Loosanaymie.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Lysaniemi.”

“Leesanaymie.”

She said irritably, “It is terrible, your pronunciation. I thought, from your name, that you were of Swedish descent.”

“Leesanaymie isn’t Swedish.”

“All right, it is Finnish, but most Swedes can pronounce it better than that. You have been in America too long.”

“Hell, I was born here.”

“Some of us keep the old ways, the old languages, nevertheless.” She shrugged, and dismissed my linguistic deficiencies. “Lysaniemi. I heard them talking about it, all snow and ice. They were boasting that it was a place no one would think to search for anyone. But you must find them without me if I never leave this bed. My Alan who is not mine any longer, and his new woman, his dark woman, Hannah Gray. Perhaps he was weary of blondes, and I do not blame him. Find them, help them, set them free. Please. Oh, and investigate Karin Segerby, please.”

“Karin Segerby?”

“You have heard the name. You live in Washington, I was told; and it was in all the Washington papers.”

“I don’t spend much time in that town. The apartment there is just a place I hang my hat between assignments.”

“The newspapers were very cautious, of course. It was about a year ago, when her husband was murdered. She was released on a technicality, but there’s really not much doubt… And no doubt at all, in my mind, that she is the one who gave it to me when we had lunch together in Washington before I started on this trip; gave me the poison that made my heart behave so crazily that very night. That is why I stopped driving early, here in Hagerstown because I was feeling very strange and had to get off the highway. Remember Lysaniemi. Remember Segerby.”

I nodded. There were a great many questions to be asked, and answered; but she seemed to think the room was bugged, and maybe it was. And maybe she just liked to dramatize things.

I asked in normal tones, “Where were you driving when this cardiac thing hit you?”

“To see my parents, in Indiana. To be with them for a little, while I waited to hear about Alan. If there was anything to hear. Your chief said it was all right, I needed to relax, he could reach me there.”

I nodded. “What are they giving you for the heart now?”

“Well, if it means anything to you, they gave me a steroid last night, Solu-Cortef, to build me up, I suppose, after tearing me down so badly. But for the heart they are trying something called Procaine or Procan. Yes, Procan SR.” She drew a long breath. “The flowers are very beautiful, Mr. Helm. We must give you a medal for valiant floral service beyond the call of duty. Really, it was sweet of you. I will call and have something brought to put them in…”

After the tulips had been cared for, we talked a little longer. Quite steady now, completely under control, she asked me to do something about her car. It was in the hospital parking lot that wasn’t supposed to be used by patients, just staff. However, sick and frightened in the middle of the night, with her heart going crazy, she’d just left the car in the nearest vacant spot a few steps from the emergency entrance and stumbled inside to get help. She’d been told that the physician whose space she’d taken would like it back.

She also asked me to settle up for her at the motel. She’d asked them to hold the room for her when she headed for the hospital. After giving her directions, the night man at the desk had offered to find somebody to drive her, she said, but she’d thought she could make it by herself since it was so close, and she had. But now, with this stupid reaction, it looked as if she was going to have a long siege here, so she’d like me to check her out and pack her things and bring them to her, not forgetting her coat in the closet and her toilet things in the bathroom. I said I probably wouldn’t find it too much of a strain, since, not quite by coincidence, it was the motel in which I was staying.

Then I went out to find a doctor. The general-type physician in charge of the case referred me to the heart specialist, who, fortunately, was in the building. I had to pull a little rank before, a busy man, he’d stand still for my questions; but after seeing the impressive ID we carry, designed specifically to be brandished at such moments, he became quite pleasant and cooperative.

“Yes, it’s possible,” he said in answer to my question. “Melodramatic, of course, but possible. An overdose of thyroid might do it, but I think the effect would be hard to predict. However, there are other medications… I’d rather not commit myself until I’ve checked some authorities, Mr. Helm. Do you really suspect, shall we say, foul play?”

I said, “I’ll grant that it seems a clumsy way to commit murder. But our organization does make enemies, Doctor; and we like to investigate any mysterious accidents or illnesses involving anyone associated with us, even temporarily.”

A lean dark gent in a white coat, he studied me shrewdly with cynical brown eyes. “I didn’t catch exactly what your organization is.”

I grinned. “You weren’t supposed to. But if you’re worried about my credentials, I’ll give you a number to call in Washington and let my chief reassure you.”

He regarded me a moment longer, and laughed shortly. “I guess that won’t be necessary. We’re not dealing with state secrets. I’ll do a little research and let you know what I find out. You’ll be around for a few days?”

“Until Mrs. Watrous is released.”

“We want to keep her long enough to make certain there aren’t any more surprises and that she’s recovering well from this one. And that the new treatment is doing its job.”

“If her attack was artificially induced, will she be able to stop taking pills eventually, or is her pulse-rate mechanism, whatever you call it, permanently screwed up?”

“If a cardiac accelerator was used, the patient should be able to come off the medication fairly soon. But frankly, Mr. Helm, I’m not taking the possibility very seriously. It seems pretty cloak-and-dagger to me.”

“That’s the name of the game, sir.” I hesitated. “There’s no way somebody could have given her a fake quinine reaction, I suppose. Or a real one?”

He looked shocked. “Here in the hospital? I think your melodrama is running away with you! But I’ll look that up for you, too, just to set your mind at rest.” He smiled sourly. “And mine, now that you’ve made the suggestion,”

I found Astrid Watrous’ car in the staff parking lot. A dignified maroon color, it was a plushy Buick sedan that, although smaller than the impressive barges that used to wear the name, felt like an aircraft carrier after what I’d been driving.

But I wasn’t too preoccupied with driving the unfamiliar car to note that a white Honda had been behind me from the moment I left the hospital. On that short run, it could have been a coincidence, but I wouldn’t have bet a lot of money on it.

Mrs. Watrous’ room had, of course, been tidied up. The beds were made and the loose clothes that weren’t on hangers were folded on a chair. Her nightie hung on a hook behind the bathroom door, presumably the work of a conscientious maid, since it seemed unlikely that she’d have taken time to dispose of it so neatly, herself, when the heart-flutters hit. It was, I noted, being that kind of a guy, quite a pretty nightie. Packing it away in her suitcase, I saw some other intimate stuff that also looked sexy and expensive. A satin-and-lace lady after my own heart, I reflected; but I wished I were as sure of her motives as I was of her lingerie.

With her smart brown spring coat over my arm and her suitcase in my hand, I left the room. I made my way to my own and managed to work the key in spite of my burdens. Entering, I turned to set the suitcase back by the door where it would be out of the way.

“Just stay like that, right there!” said a strained voice behind me. “I have a gun! Don’t straighten up! Don’t move a muscle!”

“Is it okay if I breathe?” I asked.

3

The shaky voice told me that I had an amateur behind me, and a female amateur at that. Under the circumstances, there were various actions I could have taken with some hope of success. Although we’re taught that docile submission to a firearm is seldom an acceptable option, Hollywood and the cops to the contrary notwithstanding, I could have played along a bit, hoping to get close enough to disarm her. Or I could have slung the suitcase at her legs and flung the coat at her head and dived aside, pulling my own gun to shoot her dead.

Dealing with a man, I would probably have done one or the other, gambling that, although I might incur some damage in the hassle, it wouldn’t be fatal. However, the fact that there was a woman behind me made it, I decided, unnecessary to take the risk. A man, particularly a novice, holding a gun on another man, expects to have the situation under control. If his control is challenged, his pride is hurt, and anything can happen. The Wild Bill Hickok syndrome. With a woman, you don’t have that kind of macho pride to contend with. Maybe.

All this went through my mind almost instantaneously as I crouched there. After all, the mental computer was programmed for situations like this, we’d been here before. The girl behind me—at least she sounded young as well as scared—started to speak again; but she had nothing more to say that I needed to hear. I released the handle of the suitcase and straightened up very slowly.

“I told you not to move!”

The voice was shrill; I hoped the trigger finger was less nervous. I reached out deliberately and grasped the knob of the door, which had closed automatically. I opened the door.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Moving with infinite care so as not to startle her, feeling very vulnerable in the spinal area, I stepped away from her, one deliberate step at a time, out into the Maryland spring night—it had got quite dark outside by this time. No bullets followed me. The door sighed closed behind me.

I drew a shuddering breath and told myself angrily that a stupid young bitch who’d never learned not to brandish a firearm she wasn’t going to shoot ought to be turned over somebody’s knee and spanked; and if nobody else would correct the serious flaws in her upbringing, I might even take her in hand myself, as a public service. It occurred to me that, dumb as she seemed to be, she might actually be foolish enough, now that the ambush had failed, to flee the joint heedlessly, weeping bitter tears of frustration. I moved to the side and waited by the door, holding Astrid Watrous’ nice brown spring coat in both hands like a bullfighter’s cape.

I’d judged the idiot female correctly. I didn’t even have to wait very long. Soon the door opened cautiously. Seeing the coast apparently clear, a smallish, white-clad blonde girl sidled out, or started to. I noted that her hands were empty, but the right was steadying a large white shoulder-strap bag. I didn’t waste time carrying the inventory further; I simply stepped out in front of her and wrapped the coat, and my arms, about her head. I marched her, blinded and stifled, backwards into the room, and hooked a heel behind her ankle, and slammed her to the rug, letting my two hundred pounds—well, I might have picked up a little additional weight on that Mexican food—land heavily on top of her. I heard the door close automatically, and the latch click.

It took me a tense moment or two to get a grip on the purse. I yanked it free and slung it across the room. The girl was getting back some of the breath driven out of her by the fall. She’d liberated herself from the smothering coat, and she was starting to fight me, but although she was strong enough to cause me trouble, she didn’t really know how. I clamped a grip on her neck, knuckles digging into a certain pain center under the ear in a certain way. I heard her gasp in agony. Her resistance ceased. I rose to one knee and, shifting my grasp to take her by the scruff of the neck like a puppy, hauled her across the other knee, facedown. Pinning her there left-handed, I raised my right hand to warm her bottom as she deserved. Then I dropped my hand again.

I mean, it was getting through to me at last that this was a very female little body with which I, a male, was wrestling. The rump was particularly delicious in snug white slacks. Even though I don’t go for dames in pants as a rule, I’ve been known to make exceptions. And for a gent my age to convince himself that he’s walloping the shapely ass of a girl her age strictly in the interest of education and discipline, with no irrelevant biological considerations whatever, isn’t easy. I stood up abruptly, dumping her to the floor. She sprawled there for a moment, clearly afraid to make a move lest it be the wrong move. At last, finding herself unraped, unshot, unwhipped, and unkicked, she sat up, regarding me warily through a veil of white-blonde hair.

“Get your purse,” I said. “Get the gun out of it and put it over there, on the table by the window. Anything else you care to do with it, or try doing with it, be my guest. But remember, I’m just looking for an excuse to shove it up your anus, butt first.”

She remained sitting for a moment longer, waiting for her breathing to subside. Then she got to her feet, a little awkwardly. She moved across the room and picked up the shoulder-strap bag. Showing a gleam of intelligence for a change, she turned to face me so I could see what she was doing, before opening it. She took out a tiny black pistol, neither a revolver nor an automatic, but a two-shot derringer. She crossed the room and placed it on the table as directed.

“Now let’s try you on something hard,” I said. “The coat. We can’t leave a nice coat lying on the floor getting all wrinkled, can we? Hang it up neatly over there in the closet corner by the bathroom. Oh, and there’s a nice little twenty-five caliber automatic right there in my open suitcase. By all means go for it if you like. I haven’t had a good gunfight all week.”

She wanted to protest against being ordered around so rudely and sarcastically, but a little common sense seemed to have fought its way to the surface through the thick layers of stupidity. She contented herself with a resentful glare, and picked up the coat. While she was taking it across the room, I examined her weapon. Two stubby black barrels; actually a solid, gun-shaped little block of metal bored with two holes, one above the other. A small curved butt that, with a hand of any size, wouldn’t accept a full complement of fingers. If you held the gun normally, the pinky would be left waving in the breeze; but you don’t shoot a derringer normally. You lay your trigger finger along the barrels, and point it at the cheating sonofabitch across the poker table, and pull the trigger with the middle finger.

The old-time gamblers wore them up their sleeves, or maybe in special leather-lined pockets of their embroidered waistcoats. The best-known specimens came in .41 caliber, throwing a big blob of lead without much velocity or accuracy; but how much do you need across a pile of marked cards? However, this was a modern job in .22 Magnum, an oddball rimfire cartridge that has considerably more punch than the standard .22 but still not enough to loosen the fillings in your teeth when you fire it. Incidentally, the derringer was first invented or at least popularized, we’re told, by a guy named Deringer. Nobody seems to know where the extra r came from.

“May I…” On the other side of the room, having put Astrid Watrous’ coat on a hanger, the girl hesitated, embarrassed. She spoke stiffly, avoiding my eyes: “I would like to use the toilet, if I may.”

I refrained from grinning. After the suspense of waiting for me to walk in so she could wave her horrid gun at me, and the shock of being roughly manhandled, she undoubtedly did need to go. And while it was necessary for me to bully her a bit to keep her from getting independent and doing something else stupid, there was no need to humiliate her about a simple call of nature.

“Help yourself,” I said.

She disappeared into the bathroom. Waiting, I finished checking the diminutive weapon in my hand. It broke open like a double-barreled shotgun, but reluctantly, with the stiffness of a brand-new weapon. Two brass cartridge heads showed in the twin chambers. I picked out the loads, closed the gun, and tried the trigger pull. The old-time derringer had a hammer that had to be cocked before each shot. Since the hard work was done with the thumb, the trigger finger had a relatively easy job. With this modernized, hammerless version, however, you simply hauled back on the trigger, cocking and firing the piece in a single operation—a very tough operation. It was the longest, roughest, heaviest double-action pull I’d ever met on a weapon, well over twenty pounds. It made me feel a little foolish. I’d really been in no danger. Even if she’d managed to fire the little monster, using both hands, the chances of her hitting anything while struggling against that incredible mainspring were practically nonexistent.

I reloaded the gun and dropped it into my jacket pocket. I looked into the big purse she’d also left on the table. There was a box of .22 Magnum cartridges inside, full except for the two in the gun, no practice rounds missing. I pocketed that as well. There was also, among the standard feminine junk, a passport. I examined it quickly. It was Swedish, issued to a female person born twenty-four years ago next June—a female person named Karin Agneta Segerby.

I stood for a long moment looking down at the little book in my hand. I had to hand it to her, she took a good picture. Any girl who can look pretty in a passport photo ought to grab the first plane to Hollywood. She looked cute and bright. Karin Segerby. The girl I was supposed to investigate if Astrid Watrous died. The sinister female who’d probably murdered her own husband and poisoned Astrid Watrous. According to Astrid Watrous. I grimaced, and dropped the passport back where I’d found it, and checked through her wallet quickly, finding nothing that didn’t agree with her identity as a Swedish girl temporarily residing in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. She seemed to be employed by a firm called Nordic Textiles, Ltd.