Donald Hamilton - The Interlopers

I poked along deliberately, therefore, up through the spectacular canyon of the Frazer, and north across the rolling country beyond. Once out of the canyon, I didn't find it particularly interesting driving. The scenic mountain ranges pretty well hug the coast in that part of the world. Inland it's just forests and fields, lakes and rivers and more forests. After a few hours, one evergreen begins to look pretty much like another.

Nystrom Three kept up pretty well, considering his limited mechanical resources. It occurred to me that if he continued to come along like a good boy to a suitably lonely place-discreet, was the word Mac had used-I could get started on the secondary phase of my assignment and, incidentally, promote myself a couple of nights of bliss with Libby Meredith, one for each man in the car behind. It seemed like earning your sex the hard way. Maybe I should have checked to find out just what she was willing to pay in cash.

How the Opel had managed to pick me up was, of course, no real mystery. After all, these interlopers, whoever they might be, had managed to learn about the last rendezvous somehow. Presumably they'd found out about the next one the same way. I considered the possibility that the real Nystrom might have talked a little more than was good for him, but the precise source of the information didn't concern me greatly. Obviously there had been a leak in Communist security somewhere, but it wasn't my problem, at least not at the moment.

Knowing I was heading for Francois Lake, the boys in the Opel would only have had to start early, get up here in B.C. ahead of me, and pick a suitable spot to wait for me to go by. There weren't enough good roads this far north to make my route even slightly unpredictable.

It occurred to me that others might be using the same leapfrog system for keeping tabs on me. Pat Bellman, for instance, could have buzzed up here in her little maroon pseudo-sports car and stationed herself somewhere along the road ahead to tag me if I should elude or outrun this pair. She might even have other reinforcements spotted around: a real dragnet.

And the fact that I'd seen nothing of Stottman and his Indian-faced partner didn't necessarily mean I was through with them for good. They could also have gambled on my running a predictable course, like a circling rabbit, and headed up here to cut me off. I sincerely hoped they hadn't. I hoped the pudgy man had given up trying to prove I was an impostor and returned to his own stamping grounds farther south. He was a pro, and I preferred not to tangle with him unless I had to.

Judging by their performance so far, the rest of them- all the bright young interlopers, alive and dead-were strictly amateurs and nothing to worry about. If I had needed evidence on this point, the clumsy tailing job being done by the characters in the Opel would have set my mind at rest. There are circumstances under which a clever agent will deliberately let a man know he's under surveillance, but instinct and experience told me these people weren't that clever. They were doing their best to be inconspicuous, but they hadn't had much practice at it, and it wasn't very good.

We passed through small communities with names like Seventy-Mile House and Hundred-Mile House, reminders of the days when every mile up this pioneering road, away from civilization, had represented a real achievement. Farther on, we came to a good-sized lake with a sandy beach, and I pulled up to the office of a motel in the nearby village and rented a large and pleasant unit complete with bath and kitchenette for six dollars, which didn't seem exorbitant.

With Hank romping outside, happy to be free after the long ride, I carried the essential luggage, and groceries enough for breakfast, into my room. Then I whistled in the pup, closed the door, drew the blinds, and took off his collar. It was time for me to make like a real secret agent once more; I'd stalled long enough. I got the bottle of dog-vitamins Stottman had given up so reluctantly. With the point of my knife, designed for more lethal purposes, I pried the waxed cardboard liner out of the metal cap. Underneath was a small round wafer of tinfoil about the size of a dime-to be exact, two thicknesses of foil with something sealed between them, perhaps a little disk of film, perhaps not.

I was tempted to separate the layers of foil and do some snooping. What stopped me wasn't my orders from Mr. Smith to leave everything in this line to his boys, but the possibility that the communication I held might be rigged to destroy itself somehow-perhaps by exposure to light or air-if not handled in a specified way. Besides, I'd never be able to reseal the wafer properly, and I probably couldn't make much sense of what was inside, anyway. Weapons are our specialty; microdots and ciphers and such are out of our line.

I followed instructions, therefore, and used the knifepoint to pry one of the big metal studs from Hank's collar the way I'd been shown. I fitted the wafer inside, and refastened the shiny stud to the black leather collar. There were five flat studs in all, alternating with five smaller and more pointed metal decorations, perhaps designed to keep hostile dogs from chewing on Hank's neck. If everything went according to plan-which would be a welcome change-I'd fill another receptacle tomorrow evening, leaving three to go. By this manner of reckoning, the job was barely started. It was a discouraging thought.

In the morning, I rose early, cooked myself some breakfast-I'm no great chef, but I can manage bacon and eggs-and hit the road well before daylight. No headlights followed me away from Lac La Hache, as the place was called, but by the time the sun had come up and burned the mists out of the hollows where it lay like cotton, the beat-up red car had taken up its station behind me once more. You had to say this for the boys: they might not be expert but they were persistent.

Later, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a doughnut in the good-sized town of Prince George. The road forked here, the right-hand branch leading inland to Dawson Creek and the Alaska Highway proper, while the left-hand branch led to the coast and the town of Prince Rupert, the southern terminal of the Alaska Ferry system. By taking the ferry, the less rugged traveler could bypass all but a few hundred miles of that he-man highway in smooth comfort.

I didn't think comfort was the reason Grant Nystrom's Communist superiors had chosen to send him by the latter route. The Alaska Highway, built in wartime, had been routed through the remote interior where it would be reasonably safe from hostile action by sea. The ferry, on the other hand, went up the coast; and the coast presumably was where most information on the Northwest Coastal System was to be found.

I reached Francois Lake in the afternoon with plenty of time to spare, and found the lodge at which I was supposed to stay without any difficulty. It was some miles off the main highway on a small dirt road, but there were plenty of signs to point the way. The place, when I got there, consisted of a good-sized main building, half a dozen log cabins overlooking the outlet of the lake, and a dock with some boats. I checked in, rented one of the boats, and went fishing.

There was just one hitch, when Hank refused to enter the boat. Apparently, he'd never ridden in one, and none of Mr. Smith's canine experts had taken the trouble to check this aspect of his education. But he was a good dog, and I managed to coax him aboard, hoping that nobody was watching the performance, at least nobody who counted, like Stottman or the local contact I was to meet. Grant Nystrom's rig sported a trailer hitch, and I'd been told that he'd used it for towing some kind of fishing boat, but that we didn't have to worry about it since he hadn't brought it along on this jaunt. But if Nystrom had owned a boat, his dog had probably been a seasoned sailor. My dog was making it quite clear that he wasn't.