Matt Helm--The Interlopers Read online

  Crouching there, I continued to whistle and yell until the pup came slinking back, very guilty and ashamed of himself. I spoke to him severely and used the leash to tie him to a tree, letting him think that was part of the punishment. Then I drew a long breath; I’d made it out of sight, and there were no bulletholes in me, and my adversary was not alerted. At least I hoped he wasn’t. Leaving the pup tied, keeping low, I made a quick circle of the little knoll, slipping up behind the rifleman without further trouble. When I got within a couple of hundred yards of the spot, I could see that he was still there.

  I had a good view of the sole of a boot sticking out of the brush, and from this angle I could see about half a bare head above the undergrowth. It had a lot of hair on it, but sexwise that means nothing these days, and as far as I’m concerned, no double standard applies to people who hide in bushes with rifles, anyway.

  With a rifle of my own, I might have tried the shot, but all I had was Grant Nystrom’s choice of sidearms: a short-barreled Colt .357 Magnum revolver with the butt trimmed down for concealment purposes. It wasn’t a bad gun as revolvers go—it was a lot more gun than the .38 Specials we’re usually issued—but it was no long-range weapon, and I’m not much of a long-range pistol-shooter, either. The long-range capabilities were all with the opposition, which made my problem clear if not simple: I had to get close enough for one good shot before he spotted me, since I probably wouldn’t be given time for a second should the first one miss.

  I looked around. The ground rose to the left toward another bare hillside—bare of brush, but there was some scraggy grass that I thought would give me at least partial cover. I worked my way up there, using my knees and elbows, until I was above the sniper and about eighty yards away. Instinct warned me that was as close as I’d better go.

  I slipped the .357 out of its trick holster inside my waistband, and cocked it, muffling the click under my jacket. I made myself steady and comfortable, flat on my stomach. Parting the screen of grass in front of me, I tried the square, target-type sights against the prone figure below me, with both elbows firmly on the ground and both hands on the gun. One-handed pistol shooting is mandatory in target matches, but this was simple homicide and there are no rules for that.

  The man down there—if it was a man—stirred uneasily, obviously wondering where I’d disappeared to and what I was up to. Well, it was about time. He lifted his head from the rifle stock and glanced over his shoulder as if he’d sensed my presence, and it was nobody I’d ever seen before in real life or in photographs, just a hippie-looking youth sporting longish hair, a droopy mustache, and long fuzzy sideburns.

  I drew a long breath, realizing that, hair or no hair, small rifle or big, I’d subconsciously been expecting to see a man I knew—well, a man whom I’d never actually met, but whose dossier I’d studied very carefully, a man who was supposed to be good both with knives and rifles. Without quite realizing it, I’d been looking forward to finishing right here the principal part of my mission, the part assigned me by Mac. Somehow I’d convinced myself it was Holz I was up against already, although why Holz should be shooting down Nystroms wholesale hadn’t been quite clear in my mind.

  Still, as Mac had pointed out, couriers had been eliminated before by the people for whom they’d worked. Mr. Smith’s mysterious source of information to the contrary could be all wet. It still wasn’t totally out of the question that this espionage ring we were after had first summoned their kill-specialist to handle a personnel problem, and then sent him on to deal with an obvious impostor. But the man in front of me was not Hans Holz.

  I sighed and lowered the gun, wondering who the hell the young marksman was and what to do about him. Of course, he had been trying to kill me, which was naughty of him. It even prejudiced me against him rather strongly, but we’re not supposed to act on prejudice. Dead men are awkward to have around. They tend to get the local police all upset, and I still had work to do in Pasco that would be more easily done without police interference. Reluctantly, I started to let down the hammer of the Colt. Regardless of their age or importance—or unimportance—I don’t like leaving behind me, alive, people who’ve clearly indicated their eagerness to shoot me dead, but sometimes it has to be done.

  The young man in the bushes stiffened suddenly, watching something out in front of him. He put his face to the stock of the rifle once more, peering through the big telescopic sight. I looked where he was aiming, and there came the black pup, loping across the hillside straight toward us, pausing every so often to check his radar. I mean, he wasn’t tracking me; he wasn’t following the roundabout way I’d come. He was no ground-sniffing hound. He had his nose in the air, as a bird-dog should, and he was reading my scent on the gentle breeze, and making straight for the source of it.

  A foot and a half of chewed-off leash dangled from his collar. Well, nobody’d told him not to chew his leash in two. Nobody’d really told him to stay put, either. Orders, he might have obeyed, but a little leather string had been only a momentary hindrance to be disposed of with the nice, sharp, adult dental equipment that had recently replaced his puppy teeth. A couple of good chomps, and he’d been on his way to find the boss.

  I looked bleakly at the boy in the brush below me: he had the rifle ready, he was preparing to shoot. I remembered that the real Hank had been shot, we still didn’t know why. I knew a funny little stirring of anger: the juvenile sonofabitch was going to shoot my dog. This was sentimental and irrelevant, but professionally I was just as concerned, because the pup was essential to my Grant Nystrom cover. It occurred to me that I might have got hold of an important idea here, but I had no time to develop it.

  I just recocked the .357 and brought it back into line and put gentle pressure on the trigger. The drop-your-gun-and-stand-up-with-your-hands-above-your-head routine looks great on TV, but with a pistol at eighty yards I needed my target perfectly still. If I started shouting silly orders and gave him a chance to roll aside, I’d probably muff the shot, and that would give him a crack at me with his high-powered rifle. At this range, with that outfit, he couldn’t possibly miss. So I just steadied the coarse revolver sights on the widest point of the target and increased the trigger pressure until the piece fired.

  The .357 made an ear-splitting racket, rearing up in recoil in spite of the two-handed grip I had on the skimpy butt. For a moment, it blotted out the man in the bushes. When I got it recocked and lined up once more, he was lying exactly where he had been. The only difference was that all the sharpshooting tension had gone out of his body, and his head had dropped slightly, resting peacefully on the rifle stock as if on a pillow.

  6

  The address I’d been given for the afternoon rendezvous, to be used if the morning contact should fail for any reason, was out at the edge of the town’s business district, in the middle of an incompletely developed block containing several vacant lots. Diagonally down the street from a convenient corner drugstore—well, convenient for me—it stood by itself: a flat-roofed one-story building that wasn’t very wide across the front, but ran back some distance from the street. There was a neat sign above the door:

  PASCO ANIMAL CLINIC

  ARTHUR WATTS, D.V.M.

  OFFICE HOURS

  9:00–5:00 (Weekdays)

  8:30–12:00 (Saturdays)

  I couldn’t actually read the sign from the drugstore telephone booth in which I waited, but I’d got a good look at it, driving past. As I watched through the front window of the drugstore, a big yellow Cadillac convertible with California plates drew up in front of the building. A dark-haired woman with a figure that was youthful but not really young, if you know what I mean, got out deliberately.

  It was quite a production. She was wearing a yellow silk pantsuit—tailored jacket and slim trousers—plus yellow sandals and a white blouse with a million raffles. At least that was the impression I got from a distance. A white froth of lace encircled her neck, spilled down her bosom, and dripped from her wrists. It was quite a t
ourist costume to spring on a backward little town like Pasco; or any town for that matter.

  She walked around to open the curb door of the Cadillac and brought out a big, gray poodle, clipped and brushed to perfection. They disappeared into the veterinarian’s office together.

  “Yes, sir,” I said into the phone. “It was a big disappointment. No Holz.”

  “There was no reason for you to expect him, Eric.” Mac’s voice lost no crispness traveling three thousand miles from Washington, D.C. “Not yet. Who was the man you shot?”

  “Just a fuzzy-faced punk with a fancy rifle. He’s not in our files, I’m pretty sure. Oregon driver’s license issued to Michael P. Bird.”

  “Bird?”

  “Like with feathers.” I said. “He was using a heavy Douglas barrel on one of the good Mauser actions with a custom stock. Mesquite or some such light wood with caps and inlays of horn or dark plastic. A three-to-nine power variable scope cranked up to maximum magnification. I guess he wanted to see which button of my shirt he was going to perforate.”

  Mac’s voice was dry: “The young man seems to have gone to a lot of trouble with his murder weapon.”

  “I doubt that it was originally designed as a murder weapon, sir,” I said. “With its small caliber and that big telescopic sight, it’s the kind of outfit you’d have made up for varmint-shooting, as they call it: accurate long-range popping at nuisance rodents like groundhogs and prairie dogs. It’s a hobby with some people, and most farmers and ranchers are all for getting rid of the little pests and the holes they dig. Our lad just switched to a heavy big-game bullet instead of the light varmint type. So loaded, he could take anything up to deer easily, not to mention man. Hell, a .243 is considered heavy artillery these days. They’ve been using a lousy little twenty-two in Vietnam.”

  “Very well, Eric. What about the girl?”

  “You have the description and the name she’s going under and the car she’s driving. Mr. Smith’s boys have been checking her out, but I should have known all about her from the start—all I needed to know, anyway. Any girl who has an automatic transmission handle masquerading as a sports-car gearshift lever, and stick-on hubcaps pretending to be instant wire wheels, is bound to be kind of a fake herself.”

  “Still, it seems her trap didn’t catch you totally by surprise.”

  “I can’t take the credit for that, sir,” I admitted. “She had me pretty well convinced she was on the level; she’s a very convincing young lady. If the pup hadn’t tipped me off, I’d probably have walked right into it.”

  “You haven’t made it clear just how he tipped you off.”

  I said, “Why, he’s a retriever, sir. A good nose is part of the package. Also he’s a male dog; a little young but very definitely masculine. And still he sat there calmly grinning at me within three feet of an enclosure that was supposed to have held a bitch in heat! Discipline or no discipline, if there’d recently been a receptive lady dog in that kennel, he’d have made some kind of an attempt to investigate those fascinating female smells, wouldn’t he? When he took off with me into the brush without even a sniff in that direction, I knew our Pat was lying like hell.”

  Pausing, I grimaced at the Cadillac half a block away, wondering if it had anything to do with my problems. I hoped not. One woman in pants was plenty for one assignment.

  When Mac didn’t speak, I said into the phone: “Well, it’s too bad the girl didn’t return to the scene of her unsuccessful crime. I’d like to ask her a few questions, and doing it over her partner’s dead body might have given me a certain psychological advantage. I waited up there to the last minute that would still let me down here with a little time to spare, but she didn’t show.”

  “And the man? He said nothing useful before he died?”

  “No, sir. The bullet got the spine; death was instantaneous. Just plain dumb luck with a pistol at that range. Good or bad depending on the point of view. Something will have to be done about him fairly soon or I’ll have cops coming out my ears.”

  “That is, of course, if we decide it’s worth our while to have you stay and continue with the job according to plan—according to Mr. Smith’s plan. But this girl and her marksman friend are turning into a serious complication. Apparently we’re dealing with a gang of interlopers playing a game of their own; a gang that first shot the real Communist courier and then tried to murder you for taking his place. The question is—”

  “Just a moment, sir,” I interrupted. “Just one moment. I believe the answer to your question is coming up the street.”

  I stood in the booth, strategically located at the front of the drugstore, and looking slantingly out through the big window, I watched myself approach. Or maybe I should say I watched Grant Nystrom approach, complete with dog and whistle and cowboy boots. At least, a tall man, in high-heeled footgear that made him seem even taller, was heading for the animal clinic, accompanied by a black Labrador on a leash.

  The man was younger than Grant Nystrom had been, by about the same amount that I was older, but he was the right, tanned, lanky outdoors type. The dog, I was interested to note, was a better impostor than my Hank in some respects. He was taller and rangier, more nearly the size and conformation of the dead dog.

  On the other hand, he was not a very good Labrador. His coat was a little too rough and shaggy for one thing, and his tail was too pretty; a great, waving black plume. A good Lab should have a smooth coat and kind of an otter tail. Don’t ask me why; that’s what it says in the breed specifications. Furthermore, the stranger’s dog wasn’t particularly well trained. Even on leash, he didn’t walk properly at heel, but surged ahead, half dragging his master along the sidewalk.

  “Eric?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said softly. “A man calling himself Grant Nystrom is just going into the vet’s office, sir, accompanied by a black Labrador retriever he calls Prince Hannibal of Holgate. At least I’d be very much surprised if those weren’t the names he was using.”

  The telephone was silent for a second or two; then Mac spoke quietly: “Indeed. So now we know the game they’re playing.”

  “Yes, sir. The same one that we’re playing or trying to play. Obviously Mr. Smith wasn’t the only one to think of having somebody take Nystrom’s place. Only these kids, or somebody doing their thinking for them, thought of it first and killed the guy to do it. Mr. Smith’s agent interrupted them before they could dispose of the bodies properly, human and canine. When there was no publicity about the murder, no public report of Nystrom’s death, they gambled on being able to carry out their impersonation regardless. And then, when they found me here ahead of them—a second Grant Nystrom—they tried to put me out of the way, too, so that their Nystrom Number Three could move in to make the pickup.”

  I paused. Mac’s voice said something in my ear, but I wasn’t listening. A short, rather plump man in a business suit was approaching the clinic, carrying a brown glass screw-top jar. I recognized him at once, although he’d been dressed more roughly when I’d seen him last.

  I spoke into the phone: “More fun and frolic, sir. Here comes the other party to the rendezvous. At least, it’s one of the fisherman I saw on the beach this morning. It could be coincidence, his coming here at just this time, but it doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No.” Mac’s voice was thoughtful. “If you saw him, he presumably saw you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then, when he sees the tall individual inside the clinic, he will know it’s not the same man. Or the same dog. He will know there are two Grant Nystroms competing for the information he is about to deliver.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If your Miss Bellman is in charge of the independent operation that conflicts with ours, she should have anticipated this.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I didn’t know those other fisherman had anything to do with the job; probably Pat Bellman didn’t either. It’s apparently a favorite fishing spot for a lot of local people. What probably happen
ed is that Bellman and her impostor arrived at the river just a little late and found me there ahead of them. She had to think fast. Obviously there was no sense in putting two phony Nystroms on the beach; that way neither of us would get anything. The only thing she could do was pray that the other party to the morning contact simply wouldn’t show up, giving her a chance to make friends with me and get rid of me before the afternoon appointment.”

  “It was a long gamble to take,” Mac said.

  “What else could she do?” I asked. “Sure, she knew the two guys with the station wagon might be the people for whom we were waiting, the people with the stolen information. In that case they’d seen me and my dog and she was out of luck. But as long as there was a faint possibility that they were just innocent fishermen, and that the real contact had overslept or had a flat tire, she had to act on it. Hell, her impostor and dog were ready, she’d come a long way to use them, she might as well shove them into the action and hope for the best. Even if it meant having me and Hank murdered to give them a clear field.”

  “I doubt that killing a dog is murder in the eyes of the law, Eric.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sometimes I get the impression that killing an agent is just a minor misdemeanor. But then, there’s a theory to the effect that we’re not quite human, either.”

  He ignored this. “Can you stop the man, Eric?” he asked.

  “Are you sure I should, sir? Suppose he does go in and learns that there are two Grant Nystroms; he still won’t know which is the right one. But he’ll most likely assume that one of us is. It probably won’t occur to him that both of us are phonies. With a little luck, I can work it for me instead of against me.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  I said, “Suppose I take a crack at selling myself as Nystrom Number One, the real thing, victimized by these other characters who’re trying to impersonate me. We’ve got a little time. The guy isn’t going to pass the stuff over yet, whatever it is; not until he gets us sorted out.”