The Threateners Page 2

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll check here in Washington and try to find out if some other agency is operating in your area. Or if there’s a possible foreign interest. That close to Los Alamos it’s not inconceivable; they still do strange work up on that mountainside, don’t they?”

  “We call it the Hill, sir, and they like people to think they’re harmless nowadays.” I laughed. “Last summer around the Fourth of July I drove up that way to visit some friends; it’s only forty miles. Coming into town I passed a big sign at the city limits: FIREWORKS PROHIBITED.The home of the atom bomb, for Christ’s sake, and they won’t let the kids shoot off a few whiz-bangs on Independence Day!” Apparently he didn’t find it amusing; I heard no laughter on the line. Well, his sense of humor isn’t very highly developed. Or maybe it wasn’t really funny. I went on: “So what do I do about this flea circus, sir?”

  “Nothing, until I’ve made an investigation here. You’d better give me the descriptions; but unless they take positive action against you, continue to ignore them.”

  Well, as I said earlier, those had been his original instructions.

  Chapter 2

  They gave me a little blue ribbon for my farewell performance in Class B. I’d beaten three other novices who’d made scores of ten, eleven, and thirteen; there was also a first-timer who’d managed a seven, better than I’d done on my initial venture into silhouette competition. Mark had cleaned up in AAA and was top gun for the day with a fairly spectacular score of 32x40.

  At his suggestion, before taking off for our respective homes, we relaxed with a couple of beers from the cooler in his van. It’s not my favorite tipple, but beer lovers are almost as bad as teetotalers for condemning you as a hopeless alcoholic if you indicate your preference for something harder. Anyway, after standing in the bright New Mexico sun for a couple of hours, I didn’t find the idea of beer completely revolting.

  “Hey, you got that new Anschutz hitting pretty good,” Mark said.

  I grinned. “Your antique wasn’t doing too damn badly.”

  What he was using was a home-built rig based on an old Winchester Model 52, no longer in production, but one of the best small bore target rifles ever made. (In target-shooting jargon, “small bore” stands for a .22; all other common calibers are “big bore.”) He’d cut down the barrel—within wide limits, a short gun barrel is just as accurate as a long one; and it isn’t knocked about so badly by the wind on a gusty day, important when you’re shooting offhand. He’d improved the trigger pull, mounted an enormous Leupold target scope, and set the whole thing into a sad-looking lam-mated stock on which he kept whittling and sanding to make it fit him better when he wasn’t adding to it elsewhere with tape and moleskin. When he got it just right, he said, he’d use it as a pattern for a really good-looking stock. As far as I could make out, he’d been getting it just right for at least two years now, the length of time he’d lived here in Santa Fe. Right or wrong, the old patchwork rifle consistently out-shot a lot of new and expensive equipment, including my Anschutz.

  “Well, that is enough of this childish play,” Mark said, draining his Budweiser. "Now I must go home and take care of serious matters, like raking the dead leaves from the yard, or my wife will divorce me. Too much shooting, she says, and not enough work around the house.”

  “I know how it is,” I said, thinking of Jo Beckman, who’d been very nice to have around, and wasn’t around any longer. “Well, thanks for the beer.”

  I whistled for the dog and had a moment of uneasiness when he didn’t appear at once, although instant obedience is not his thing; we run a partnership of sorts, not a master-slave operation. But with Spooky constantly on the horizon I couldn’t help figuring my vulnerabilities. Jo was no longer around to be threatened; that left only Happy. And me, but I’ve lived in a state of threat most of my adult life and so far I’ve managed to cope with it, one way or another.

  Then the pup came bounding over the hill and plunked himself at my feet to catch the junior-grade Milkbone biscuit I tossed him to console him for having to leave his business in deference to mine. Mark’s van was just pulling away. I frowned, watching it go. He seemed a nice enough guy, easy to get along with and comfortable to shoot with—you never had to worry that he’d let his gun muzzle wander carelessly in your direction—and he was certainly a fine marksman, but there was something lacking. Then I realized what it was: triumph. Hell, the man had won the damn match, hadn’t he? He’d beat out a dozen good local shots, and several more not-so-good ones like me, with a score that would have been nothing to be ashamed of in national competition; you’d have thought he’d be walking on air. Of course a little modesty is expected; but so is a certain happy glow, which had been conspicuously missing.

  Well, I wasn’t glowing much myself, even though I’d won my stumblebum class decisively and shot my best score to date in this type of competition. I was gaining on it, which was nice; but it was, after all, just a game. When you’ve been shot at for real and have shot back and survived, you may find target games enjoyable but you’re not going to be too depressed when you lose or too elated when you win. The stakes aren’t that high; your life isn’t on the line.

  It was a disturbing thought: maybe Mark Steiner wasn’t conspicuously, deliriously happy about his win today because he had, in the past, competed with firearms in other ways and in other places where the stakes had been higher. I stood there for a moment reviewing the past summer in my mind: Could the guy be something other than the simple citizen he seemed? Could he have been planted on me? The feet that we’d been assigned to shoot together today was probably of no significance, the luck of the draw, but we’d met with some frequency on the range on weekdays, apparently by accident; but was it? Well, I could think of other club members I’d encountered out here, sighting in their guns and practicing their shooting, almost as often. But he’d been very friendly and helpful and had invited me to his house and introduced me to his family. It made me feel disloyal to the guy, although we weren’t by any means bosom pals, but I found myself wondering uneasily if he could be another Spooky, Number Five, gradually moving in on me, fixing my rifle, plying me with beer, while his four associates kept watch on me from a distance. . . . Or maybe he was just a stolid gent who didn’t ever show much emotion and I was getting paranoid after weeks of being watched.

  It was still a clear, sunny, fell day, but up the Rio Grande valley white clouds were starting to form; eventually they’d pile up high and turn black, probably, and give us our usual afternoon thunderstorm. Spooky Three picked me up on the way home. Now that I’d finished shooting and the pressure was off, I felt kind of benevolent toward her; after all, I’d more or less saved her life, at least for the moment. Well, hers or one of her friends’.

  “I’ve still found no government organization that will admit to employing anybody fitting the descriptions you gave me,” Mac had told me when I checked back yesterday for the third or fourth time. “Or to conducting any operations in the Santa Fe-Los Alamos area. Of course, they do not have to be telling the truth; they seldom are.”

  “Some years ago we had another situation like this down in Mexico, if you’ll recall, sir,” I said. “I did my damnedest to find out if a certain dame I kept bumping into belonged to us, but nobody’d claim her, so I figured she had to be on the other side and wound up shooting her when she started waving a gun around. It turned out that she was working for a certain Washington would-be big shot who was concealing her identity for some dumb security reason; as punishment for her death, he wanted me skinned alive and roasted over a slow fire.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Mac said. “I have been careful to point out during my inquiries that if nobody admits responsibility for these people, we’ll feel free to deal with them as we please; and we will entertain no complaints afterward. . . . Oh, Eric.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does ‘Lapis’ mean anything to you?”

  He pronounced it as a Latin word: “La
hpis.” I’d more often heard it pronounced “Laypis,” and it took me a moment to make the connection. Well, Lahpis or Laypis, at least he seemed to have a lead after all; he just had to be coy about it.

  I said, “Well, lapis lazuli is a semiprecious stone, kind of blue, if I remember right. I believe they used to find some in Colorado. I have a vague memory that the ancients used to grind it up to make ultramarine pigment. ”

  "Very good, Eric." He sounded like a teacher commending a backward student. “Actually, the main sources of lapis lazuli are Afghanistan and Chile. However, I doubt that the man who used the word was referring to gemstones.”

  Clearly, he wanted me to kick it around a bit. “A man, a woman, or perhaps a town?" I suggested. "I’ve never heard of a Lapis, Colorado—I don’t think that, unlike turquoise, the rock in question was ever found in New Mexico in significant quantities—but a lot of old southwestern mining camps with odd names have vanished from the map. I’ll check it out with one of the local historical geniuses if you like, sir.”

  "I’m afraid it would be a waste of time. I doubt that we’re dealing with a treasure hunt involving a lost mine. The word may be a coded reference to a man or a woman, as you suggest, maybe even one of the men, or the woman, currently watching you, but more likely it refers to an undercover organization, or a secret project, probably the latter.”

  “Operation Lapis?”

  “Perhaps.” He hesitated and went on: “I recently encountered an immaculate young fashion plate of an executive assistant who was apparently quite a partygoer in his free time. At least he was suffering from a bad hangover that day. It made him less circumspect than he might normally have been. I chatted with him as he guided me to the sanctum of his superior—some of those Washington office buildings are as confusing as the Pentagon—and he had an interesting reaction when I mentioned casually that I’d been checking on current government activity in the southwest, so far without result. First he said he wasn’t aware of any, then he apologized for yawning by saying that it had been a long night and the liquor had flowed a bit too freely but the lady had been pleasantly cooperative, and finally he yawned again and said, ‘Well, there’s Lapis, of course,’ as if it were something known to everybody. Then, realizing that it hadn’t been known to me, he seemed aghast at his breach of security and delivered me to the proper office without speaking again.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open,” I said.

  “Eric.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It occurs to me that there is one way of determining who is responsible for these people who have you under surveillance. I have been thinking of that incident in Mexico you mentioned. It suggests a possible approach, doesn’t it?”

  I’d hate to say how many years I’ve worked for him, but sometimes he still manages to startle me a little.

  I said, “You mean, I knock off one of them here and you see who in Washington gets mad at the loss of a precious agent and comes roaring at you to demand my head?”

  “Precisely. You don’t approve?”

  He was getting bloodthirsty in his old age. Well, his humanitarian impulses had never been overwhelming. What disturbed me wasn’t the fact that he was suggesting a touch, as we call it—use “hit” if you prefer—on someone who might be a colleague of sorts in the murky world of U.S. undercover operations. We are no longer a little band of brothers and sisters, if we ever were. Today’s government is full of wild men and women ruthlessly saving the nation their own way, rabid spy catchers and fanatic drug hunters and hungry empire builders, who’ll kill you as soon as look at you, even if your office is right down the hall, if they get the notion you’re an obstacle to their ambitious campaigns. I owed the new groove in my skull and the fresh bullet and operation scars on my left midsection to just such a U.S. zealot with a shining cause. So I don’t pay much attention nowadays to birth certificates, passports, or even badges or IDs. It’s a jungle out there, man, if you’ll excuse the phrase; and you’re just as dead if you’re shot by a true-blue Yankee as by a dirty red commie. What counts is the gun. If it’s pointing my way, I’ll do my damnedest to blow away the guy behind it at the earliest opportunity, and if he happens to be a great American patriot named George Washington, it’s just too damn bad; he should have aimed his lousy musket in some other direction.

  However, the survival instinct can be followed too far. While I’m no great humanitarian, either, the idea of casually eliminating people who’d merely annoyed me a bit by walking in my footsteps, didn’t appeal to me, if only because it would create more problems than it solved. I reflected that it was an odd reversal of our customary roles, for me to be the advocate of restraint and caution. I had to tread cautiously or Mac might think my recent wounds had left me in a state of mushy sentimentality, and order me back to the Ranch for toughening.

  I said mildly, “It just seems a little premature, sir. Let’s wait a little longer; maybe they’ll reveal what they’re up to. Anyway, we don’t know that they’re taking orders from Washington rather than Moscow. Or Peking, whatever they call it nowadays. Or Havana, or Baghdad, or Qaddafiville, whatever the name of that dump is, and however the paranoid bastard spells his name.”

  Mac said, “That is just the point. If the surveillance orders originate here in Washington, with one of his operatives dead, the person responsible will be forced to identify himself and open communications with me quickly, before I order you to wipe out the rest and send you whatever help you need to accomplish the task. I think it is fairly well known that I do not take kindly to having my people harassed, on or off duty. If we get no official complaints here, we’ve more or less eliminated Washington as a source of your problem, a considerable step forward. I’m sure you can arrange it so the local authorities will accept it as self-defense, with a small hint from me. Unless, of course, you prefer to make it an accident.”

  I had it now. His professional feelings were hurt. He’d learned that somebody in Washington had a big operation going out here. Operation Lapis, for God’s sake! He knew that one of his people was under heavy surveillance, very possibly in this connection, yet nobody’d had the courtesy to tell him what it was all about even when he’d gone out of his way to ask. Okay. They’d had their warning. He’d stated clearly and repeatedly that if the operatives haunting one of his men remained unidentified and unexplained he’d take steps to have them dealt with. Having got no answers with polite questions, he intended to see what he could blast loose with a gun. My gun.

  I said, “I have a hunch we’re barking up the wrong tree, sir.” Well, he was doing the barking, but it wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say so.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something amateurish about this surveillance that makes me wonder if it isn’t an independent project with no connection to Washington or any other national capital. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a little more time, sir. I’ve just been riding along pretending to be blind and deaf; now let me see if I can’t figure out a way of prying loose some information without cluttering up the place with dead bodies.”

  There was a pause; then his voice came through the phone, with a hint of impatience: “Oh, very well. But be careful. According to the reports I’ve received, you’re not in good enough condition yet, physically or mentally, to cope with any truly demanding situations. That was quite a blow you took on the head, not to mention the other injuries.”

  Which was his way of telling me that he was only yielding to my request as a concession to my temporary disabilities.

  For a long time after my marriage broke up for pretty much the same reasons that had caused Jo to leave me, I’d told myself firmly that my home was now Washington, D.C., handy to our base of operations, where I had a nice little bachelor apartment; and that Santa Fe was an okay town to visit occasionally for old time’s sake but I wouldn’t want to live there. The trouble was that the crowded east gave me claustrophobia and I found myself coming back out to New Mexico more and more often fo
r a breath of more or less unpolluted air. Finally, after years of imposing on friends or camping out in hotel and motel rooms, and each time kidding myself that this was positively my last nostalgic visit to my old hometown, I broke down and bought a small house on the east side of Santa Fe, up toward the mountains.

  For a man in my line of work to support two establishments when he spent much of his time in the field, or at the Ranch being patched up between missions, wasn’t very economical, but the danger pay does tend to pile up in the bank, and I needed a place for the dog. My new domicile is an old adobe on a tight little lot surrounded by a six-foot board fence. Esthetically, I’d have preferred a traditional mud-brick wall—Santa Fe is a city of walls—but nobody asked me, and the high fence still makes it a safe haven for Happy. Fortunately he’s not a chewer. A big rolling gate lets me bring my car into the diminutive yard, necessary because the narrow street outside is a fairly busy one and drivers, particularly late at night when they’ve had a few beers, have been known to take the bend below the house too fast and clobber a car parked out front. As a matter of fact, I’d been told that they even take out the fence every few years, and that this was the reason I’d got the place at a fairly reasonable price—the previous owner had found the midnight crashes traumatic—but folks in my line of work had better be hardened to midnight crashes and so far there haven’t been any.

  As I came around the last curve and saw my place up ahead on the right, I swore to myself; you can plaster a fence with no-parking signs until no wood shows and still people will put their lousy cars right in front of it and go off and leave them. This was a fancy Mercedes, and it wasn’t just taking up part of my very limited parking space, it was right in front of the gate in spite of my pitiful signs begging folks please, please not to block the driveway. Pulling up behind the chocolate-brown sedan, I saw that there was, after all, someone in the driver’s seat. I got out and started forward to request that they haul ass pronto. Then a woman got out and turned to face me.