Donald Hamilton - The Interlopers

The dark-faced man said, "I don't know, Mr. Stottman. What happened in the vet's office?"

"Another guy was there. Tall, like this one. With a dog, like this one. But he wasn't the right man. When I got the negative sign, I just walked out again with my muttvitamins without making the switch."

"Well, if he wasn't the one, this one's got to be, doesn't he?"

"Logic is not your strong suit, I'm afraid, Pete. Just because one man isn't, it doesn't follow that another man is. I wish I'd asked Meredith to stick around."

He said this very casually, as if it were a remark of no importance. He was carefully not looking my way when he said it. You'd have thought that whether I caught the name or not didn't matter the slightest.

Fortunately, I'd heard it before, during the briefing. I'd had to dig for it, and for what little I knew about it, but I'd finally got it, from one of Mr. Smith's fresh-faced young men, pink and sweating as they always get-those well-tailored, well-educated young agents-whenever you crowd them on matters relating to sex or security. This matter, apparently, had involved both.

It had started very innocently, I'd thought. I'd simply asked, "What about girlfriends?"

"What do you mean, Mr. Helm?"

I'd said, "Here's a healthy, tanned, virile-looking outdoors character I'm supposed to impersonate and you've told me everything about him except the most important thing: whom does he sleep with? Does he like the girls, or the boys, or does he just take the damn dog to bed with him?"

That was when the young guy had turned pink. He'd said stiffly and rather disapprovingly, "As far as we know, Nystrom's sex life was perfectly normal."

"Fine, fine," I'd said. "In other words, he liked girls. What girls? Since he was so damn normal, by your standards, he was probably concentrating on one, currently, so let me rephrase the question: what girl?"

"It doesn't matter, Mr. Helm. You won't meet her up north where you're going, so there's no sense in cluttering up your mind with irrelevant…"

I'd said, "Who's doing this impersonation, you or I? Suppose you let me decide which irrelevancies I want to clutter up my mind with and which I don't. Who's the girl in Grant Nystrom's life-my life, now?"

"Well," he'd said very reluctantly, "well, there seems to be a wealthy society lady with radical inclinations, named Elizabeth Meredith…"

Stottman was waiting. I could feel him waiting. He was waiting for me to ignore the name he'd mentioned. It would have been a mark against me, since no man, under these circumstances, would be likely to let pass even a casual reference to his lady love. Or he was waiting for me to betray myself completely by asking who Meredith was, or by referring to the possessor of the name as masculine instead of feminine. He was a bright guy, for all his piggy looks, and he had the instinct for something wrong that makes a good agent.

"Meredith? Libby Meredith?" I said quickly. "Is she here? Where'd you see her?"

Stottman turned to me slowly. If he was disappointed again, he didn't let it show. He said, "You ought to know where I saw her. Even if you didn't get there in time to spot her going into the clinic, her car was parked right in front. I'm surprised you didn't recognize it, Mr. Nystrom."

My mind was working fast. "That yellow Caddy? Hell, Libby trades Cadillacs like some people trade stamps; I'd never seen this particular boat before. You mean that was hers? What's she doing here, anyway? I left her down in San Francisco, and she didn't say anything about coming up this way. Where is she now?"

"By this time, I suppose she's well on her way back to Seattle. At least that's where she came from, when I called Command and asked if there wasn't somebody handy who'd check your identification for me. After watching you play footsie with that blond girl on the beach this morning, when you should have kept yourself available to take delivery, I wanted to be absolutely sure before I handed you the stuff."

"You made absolutely sure, all right!" I said sourly. "You gave me a hell of a check. You never even let Libby see me! If you had, she'd have told you right away-"

"How did I know there was going to be a ringer waiting in the clinic, instead of you? We just set it up that she'd borrow a fancy dog to make it look good and be there when you came. She'd give me the signal, one way or the other, and go on back to her business in Seattle, whatever it is. There was no need for us to take the risk of talking together, or I didn't think there was. By the time I realized there were two guys to identify, she'd got back into her car and driven off."

I hesitated, frowned, and said, "Well, there's an obvious way to settle this. How far is it to Seattle? Do you know where she's staying?"

"She was at the Holiday Inn. At least that's where I called her, setting it up over the phone. Room twenty-seven." He hesitated. "It's a couple of hundred miles to Seattle. But..

I said, "If Libby gives me the okay, will you condescend to make delivery like you're supposed to, and let me get on with my route. Or will you just think up a bunch of new reasons for not following orders?"

The dark-faced man called Pete said unhappily: "It's a long drive, Mr. Stottman, and it's getting late. Hell, he's all right, he knows about Miss Meredith, he knows about everything. He's got to be the right man. Can't you just turn it over to him and-"

"Nobody's got to be anything," said Stottman coldly. "You take care of this stiff, Pete. Take care of it good, and then join me at the Holiday Inn, in Seattle. I'll ride along with this guy." His small, suspicious eyes studied my face. "I think he's bluffing, Pete. I think he's bluffing like hell."

The trouble was, he was perfectly right.

IT TOOK US NEARLY SIX HOURS TO reach Seattle. The roads weren't bad and I could have made it faster if I'd wanted to-the new pickups handle better than a lot of passenger cars-but I wasn't really in a hurry to get there just so I could have the rug yanked out from under my feet and the boom lowered on my head, to mix a couple of metaphors, if that's what they Were.

We entered the city from the east after crossing a mountain range or two in the dark. I had a hunch we'd missed a lot of beautiful scenery by making the drive at night, but at the moment I had other things to worry about besides picture-postcard views I hadn't got to see.

The sudden, unexpected emergencies are one thing: you can do nothing about them except deal with them as they come. It's the ones you see approaching a long way off, the ones that are neither unexpected nor unavoidable, that cause a lot of wear and tear on the mental gears.

In this case, I was obviously walking, or driving, straight into serious trouble. The minute Miss Elizabeth Meredith saw me and opened her mouth, I was dead- well, maybe not instantly, on her motel room rug, but at least as soon as I could be transported from there to a suitably discreet and private place. I wouldn't even have the satisfaction of getting myself killed by Hans Holz, as we'd planned. Stottman was clearly willing to attend to it personally, and to hell with the imported talent. Mac's theories in this regard seemed to be springing a few leaks in practice.

The question I had to answer, then, was how far to carry this doomed masquerade, hoping for a miracle. Obviously the safest course was to extract myself from the mess right now, before we ever reached the woman. I could probably handle Stottman at the moment. He was suspicious, but there were undoubtedly some questions on his mind about the correctness of his suspicions; there had to be. It had been a long drive and I'd made no false moves. The chances were good that his guard had slipped a little. Furthermore, he was alone.

If I acted decisively now, before his partner rejoined him, and before his suspicions were confirmed by the Meredith woman, I could probably take him. Later, the job would be a lot harder, perhaps impossible.