Donald Hamilton - The Intriguers

She sighed. "Well, I must say, I find it a little shocking. If I'd thought there was any chance our little scheme would meet such direct and brutal resistance, I probably wouldn't… Well, the question is academic now, isn't it?" She was silent for a moment, looking down at me; then she said, "Give my regards to the man you call Mac, if you ever see him again. You realize, of course, that I can't do anything for you here. The situation is out of my control."

As she said it, she let her eyes touch, for an instant, the girl in the corner who had been bound and was now unbound.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

She turned on her heel. "I'll want your pilot to take me back to civilization right away, Herbert. Oh, and under the circumstances, I think I would like another man along, armed. How about the young man beside him? I don't altogether trust Mr. Helm's assurances; they were just a little too glib."

As she started down the stairs, or ladder, with Jernegan and Bostrom in tow, she glanced back casually, and I saw one eye close in what could have been construed as a wink. She was making certain that I was aware that, having first untied my accomplice, she was now reducing the odds against me by as many men as she could plausibly take with her. She wanted to be sure this was credited to her account. A tough, smart, old biddy.

"Don't bother to see me to the boat, Herbert," she said. "Just get on with your fun and games."

There were still too many men in the room, but two of them-Martha's guard and the radio operator-were basically non-combatant types, I hoped. At least they weren't, I hoped, the kind to die loyally for lost causes. I also h9ped that Martha was ready and not hampered by too many peaceful inhibitions after watching the terrible, brutal beating I'd received. I also hoped the gadget I'd given her would work after being soaked in swamp water. That was, 1 realized, a lot of hoping.

Leonard waited until the runabout had pulled away and the sound of its motor had faded in the distance. I got up as he came for me. He stared at me hard for a moment, his hands closing into fists, and I thought we were going to have the sock-and-slap routine some more. Then he wheeled abruptly.

"Give me that!" he snapped, snatching the revolver from the hand of Martha's nameless guard.

"But, sir-" Leonard ignored the protest, if that's what it was. He came back towards me, deliberately, his knuckles white with the tension of gripping the pistol. it was no way to hold a gun for accuracy, but at that range he could hardly miss. There was a convincing look of ferocity on his handsome face. Even pussycats get mad.

I circled warily past the houseboat's big steering wheel towards the electronics section, aware of movement behind me as the spectators scrambled instinctively out of the line of fire. Leonard raised the pistol and took aim. I stopped, facing him.

"Twice!" he breathed. "Twice I had it all in my hands, all I ever wanted, and you, always you, took it away from me, Helm! Well, you're not going to live to gloat about it-"

"Martha, now!" I shouted, throwing myself to the floor. He was an amateur to the last. He looked quickly towards the girl instead of doing his shooting first and his sightseeing afterwards. There was a sharp crack behind me, like the report of a firearm. An intense white light filled the pilothouse, brighter than the sunshine through the big windows. The light seemed to envelop Herbert Leonard's face, and his hands as well, as he tried to claw away the fiery, incandescent thing that had struck him. He screamed and fell to the floor, rolling back and forth in agony.

Nobody moved except the thrashing man on the pilothouse floor and I. I hitched myself over to pick up, with my bound hands, the gun he'd dropped. I struggled to my feet, moved to stand over him and, by twisting and craning, managed to aim accurately enough to put a bullet into the back of his head and stop the noise. After a little while the flare burned itself out.

I looked at the two men. Martha's guard raised his hands in a gesture of submission. The black radio operator spread his wide, with a little shrug, indicating that his field was electronics, not violence. Martha looked at me blindly for a moment. Then she threw the little flare gun away from her, turned, snatched the door open, and stumbled to the houseboat's rail, very sick.

It took me a while, unassisted, to cut my hands free with Herbert Leonard's pocket knife, find the signaling device again, reload it, and go out on deck to fire another flare straight up into the blue Florida sky.

Mac hadn't changed much. He still looked, if you didn't look too closely, like a banker strayed from the financial fold, in a neat gray suit that, in deference to the local climate, was a little lighter than his customary working uniform. His black eyebrows still made a striking contrast with his gray hair. His cold gray eyes hadn't changed much, either; but his voice was a little different, here in the admiral's living room, from the crisp, businesslike tones I was used to hearing over the phone or in his Washington office. It occurred to me that this was the first time in our long relationship that we'd met socially, so to speak, in a private house.

"I haven't had an opportunity to speak with you, Eric," he said.

"No, sir," I said.

He'd been waiting on the Priests' dock when the Frances II brought us in. I'd given him the mission-accomplished sign as I stepped ashore, and with that off his mind, he'd turned his attention to his daughter. What the two of them had found to say to each other under the circumstances, I didn't know; but they'd apparently worked out some basis for coexistence, and it was none of my damned business anyway.

"I want to thank you," Mac said.

I looked out the window of the bright room at the dark screened porch from which I'd once eavesdropped on a political meeting. That had happened only twenty-four hours ago, but it seemed like the distant past. Through the wire netting of the porch, I could see the big sportfisherman lying at the flood-lighted dock as if she'd never left it, the shovel-nosed Whaler that had brought me armed help that I'd no longer really needed; and my own little craft, well, I still thought of her as mine, although actually she belonged to Uncle Sam and always had. The chewed-up prop had been replaced, and she was ready to go again, but the assignment was completed, and there was nothing more for her to do here or myself either.

I turned to look at Mac. It was the first time I could recall that he'd ever thanked me for anything. Well, I guess it was the first time he'd had anything to thank me for. You can commend or reprimand a subordinate for the way he does his job, but you don't generally thank him for it.

"Por nada," I said.

He said, "I couldn't in good conscience put a sniper in a situation like that hampered by orders not to harm, particularly when a member of my own family was involved."

"No, sir."

"The other solution would have been acceptable. You understand that."

"Yes, sir."

He smiled faintly. "Of course, as the head of a government agency, I'm obliged to point out that your behavior was sentimental and reprehensible, but… Thank you."

"Yes, sir," I said. "The fact is that we've worked together for a hell of a long time. I couldn't shoot a kid of yours, job or no job. I hope you couldn't shoot one of mine. Where the hell does the admiral hide his liquor, anyway?"

It was an undigestible mixture of personal and business relationships, and I walked away from it. If he didn't like it, he could go for tarpon in the morning and take it out on a fish. I found the liquor cabinet by tracking down the sound of glass clinking against glass. Martha was pouring herself a stiff concoction involving, mostly, vodka. She'd washed off the mud of the morning's adventures, but as some kind of protest, I suppose, she was back in her grubby pirate costume: the striped jersey, the white pants, and the frayed sneakers. She was talking with the admiral. When I came up, I reminded her of something.