Donald Hamilton - The Interlopers

"No, I mean his full name. He's pedigreed, isn't he?"

I said, "His registered name is Avon's Prince Hannibal of Holgate."

"Thanks," said the man and turned to the woman, "See, I told you that was a pedigreed Labrador, dear."

She said, "I'm getting wet. Let's grab a cup of coffee and get going before this whole miserable country melts and runs away. Whose bright idea was it, coming to Alaska, anyway?"

They went into the cafй. I checked the time surreptitiously. Ten minutes later, I whistled in the pup and locked him up in the camper, since he was pretty wet and Libby had made it abundantly clear that she didn't even like dry dogs very much. Exactly fifteen minutes from the time the plump dog expert and his unhappy wife, if that's what she was, had gone through the door, I went in after them.

Inside, the tiny cafй looked pretty much like a railroad dining car, with booths on either side and an aisle down the middle. My people had the middle booth on the right-hand side. They'd finished their hasty coffee and were just leaving. There was no competition; I had no trouble establishing myself in the same booth, after first letting them go by.

I ordered coffee, orange juice, eggs, and bacon, and went to work on the canned juice and the coffee while waiting for the main event. Only after the plate was put in front of me did I reach for the salt cellar. Seasoning my eggs carefully, I palmed the wafer of tinfoil stuck to the bottom of the cheap glass container, and contact number five was completed-but it still seemed like a silly game for grown-up men and women to be playing.

When I returned to the room, Libby emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed, to greet me. She retreated hastily as Hank romped forward to say hello.

"Damn that mutt!" she snapped, brushing at herself. "Why does he always have to put his great big dirty feet on… ah, hell! Come here, you black monster. I didn't mean to hurt your damn little feelings."

She held out the back of her hand to let Hank sniff it and give it a couple of licks; then she scratched his ears forgivingly and laughed.

"What are a few paw prints between friends?" she said ruefully. "After yesterday, I look like I'd been sweeping out the stables anyway; but I didn't see any sense in putting on something clean until we get out of this mud and dust. If we ever do." She glanced at me quickly, as if only now remembering what I was supposed to have been doing this morning. "My God, I forgot! How did the contact go? Did you get it?"

"I got it," I said. "I thought, as my self-appointed partner in this caper, you'd like to see it stashed away; that's why I brought the pup inside. Hank, sit!"

Obediently, he plunked his fanny on the floor, and I bent down to remove his collar, then stopped. There was a long silence as I looked thoughtfully at the black, metal-studded strap around his neck. It was the right color, and it had the right number of decorations of roughly the right shapes in roughly the right places. It even had the right, slightly faded, well-worn look. But it wasn't the dog collar I'd come to know and love.

I stood there for a long moment, thinking back; but I already knew the answer. The collar had been right yesterday. This morning it was wrong…

"Is this what you're looking for?" Libby's voice said softly behind me. I turned, and there it was, in her hand. She smiled. "As your self-appointed partner, darling, I thought you were being just a little careless, letting him run around with all that priceless NCS information around his neck. So last night, after you were asleep, I just switched them to show you how easily it could be done."

I drew a long, slow breath. "Where'd you get the duplicate?"

"I've had it right along. It was an obvious thing to bring, just in case. Here. Take this one." I didn't move at once, and she looked at my face hard. "Matt!"

I said, "Damn it, the name is Grant."

"To hell with you, Matt! You really thought…! Don't you ever trust anyone?"

"Sure. And I can show you a scar for every damn time."

"After… after everything, you really thought I… you really thought I'd stolen…!" Her voice was choked. "Oh, damn you, Matt Helm! Damn you, damn you, damn you! Here, take your precious strap!"

I ducked as it came flying at me. She grabbed her coat and suitcase and marched out the door. It was a great performance.

All her performances had been great, I reflected grimly. She was a real trooper, a real pro, and I was full of admiration for her. I mean that. There wasn't any resentment in me, any indignation, any feeling of wounded pride for the way she'd fooled me. I respected and admired her, and I was sorry she'd been given such a lousy script to play, because she deserved better. Holz and his associates should have been ashamed of themselves, to give such a fine actress such crummy material.

I mean the richbitch routine with which she'd started out had been unconvincing enough, but the U.S. secret-agent line she'd had to fall back on had been a real turkey. Yet she'd put it over, selling me the farfetched notion that not only was she working for Mr. Smith, but that that gentleman operated his respectable government agency in a peculiarly complicated and two-faced manner. I must have been in an impressionable state when I bought that one, but bought it I had, at least provisionally.

She'd been good all the way. As a pro, I thought with real pleasure of the casual way she'd treated security, to make me believe she was really pretty amateur after all. As a man who'd had a lot of approaches tried on him with sinister motives, I couldn't help recalling fondly the infinite variety of her treatments of the sex theme.

Of course, she'd made some mistakes; we all do. Her worst ones had been with the pup. Well, she'd had a difficult problem to solve. To forestall suspicion, she'd wanted to give me the idea that she hated and feared animals and wanted nothing to do with them, while at the same time she'd had to gain Hank's trust so his collar would be available to her when the right time came.

I should have spotted the inconsistency at once, when he started putting his paws on her. A trained hunting dog does not jump on people unless actively encouraged-you don't want sixty-odd pounds of retriever hitting you in the chest while you're holding a loaded shotgun. Hank might lick my face when it was within his reach, in bed or in the camper doorway, but he'd never dream of expressing his joy at seeing me in the undisciplined way he'd suddenly started greeting Libby. She must have taken advantage of the morning they'd been alone in the camper, on shipboard, to get across to him what she wanted, so that later she'd have an excuse to put on her I-hate-dogs act for me.

On the whole, however, her performance had been very, very good. She'd overcome the handicaps of a poor script beautifully. In the end what had betrayed her was a faulty intelligence system. She'd gambled and lost because nobody had informed her of the one thing she was bound to know if she was the trusted agent of Mr. Smith she claimed to be. She hadn't known about the lab truck; she hadn't known that we U.S. troops had, right along, been playing tricks with the stolen NCS data as we intercepted it. She hadn't known that the stuff in the pup's collar not only wasn't priceless any longer, but was stuff we'd be happy to get into enemy hands. No matter how secretive Mr. Smith might be, he would have confided such essential knowledge to a trusted operative working for him on the sly. But Libby hadn't been aware of it.

I drew another long breath. My next move was obvious. Now that I had her spotted, now that I could guess how, or at least through whom, Holz planned to move against me, it was clearly up to me to act totally stupid, trusting, and fondly bemused, until I could see what kind of deadfall she was supposed to lead me into. That meant reassuring her by letting her have what she wanted-the real collar-regardless of how this would louse up the careful plans of Messrs. Davis and Smith.