Donald Hamilton - The Betrayers

I looked up. She was wearing a different bathing suit this morning-if you could call it a suit-and the guy who'd invented checked blue gingham would have wept to see what she was doing to a couple of scraps of his theoretically demure and modest material. She had the same old red board on her head, however.

I said, "Hell, are you still around, Sexy? I figured after last night's flop, you'd run to Big Brother and have him find you somebody easier to seduce."

Jill turned pink. "I… I brought another board," she said resolutely after a moment.

"My God, you're a real little optimist." I said. "If I don't trust you on dry land, what makes you think I'm going to trust you in forty feet of water?"

"It's not that deep," she said. "Just a minute. Let me get rid of this one." She started toward the water's edge, and looked back awkwardly, hampered by her unwieldy burden. "Please? Be nice, Matt. You know I'm only obeying orders."

"That's what the commandant of Auschwitz said as he fired up his ovens each morning." I sighed and rose.

"Oh, all right. Where is this damn board? I suppose you've got it rigged so it'll either blow me up or sink me…

The boys with the dog tags revised their opinions of me steeply upward when they saw what I'd drawn for a surfing instructor. They stared so hard and so long that their girls turned audibly peevish. Meanwhile I was learning how to stand on a surfboard in shallow water, not the easiest balancing act in the world, even with Jill to steady the thing. After I'd fallen off three times, she said I had the general idea, and got her own board, and demonstrated the prone paddling technique. You could also paddle kneeling, she said, but I'd better not try that until I got my equilibrium working a little better.

It was quite a lesson. Just getting out there wasn't easy and catching a wave right, even with Jill to give me the timing and an initial shove, seemed for a while to be next to impossible. I hadn't tackled a new sport for a good many years, and I'd forgotten how clumsy a reasonably well-coordinated man can be when he really tries.

Then a big one came along, curling nicely as it reached us, and she pushed me off and called to me to stand up, as she had half a dozen times before. This time, however, I made it all the way to my feet without falling off, and as I found my balance I felt the thing really start to go. It was a strange sensation, hissing shoreward on a tender, tricky little plank with the wave roaring angrily right astern. I saw how it could become habit-forming, like skiing or auto racing.

I rode it clear out, and dropped down at last, and paddled back out to where Jill sat on her board, waiting for me.

"Not too bad," she said. "Now on the next one, try to steer it a little, just to get the feel. Throw your weight back a bit and tilt the board in the direction you want to go. You're not going to be able to ride big surf straight off like this, you know. You'll want to turn at once, the minute you catch the wave, and slide across the face of it, away from the break… Matt?"

"Yes?"

"Who's the frigid brunette, anyway? The one you were talking to at the party?"

I grinned. "What makes you think she's frigid?"

"Sorry. Didn't mean to insult your dreamboat. I hope you had a lovely time in her room last night."

I said, "You're just jealous because I spurned you for another woman. Maybe I'm tired of tanned blondes. I could also get tired of being watched all the time."

"That would be tough," she said coolly. "Real tough. Take it up with Washington, Mart. You know there's nothing I can do about it. And you haven't answered my question."

I said, "If she's anything but Mrs. Kenneth McLain from Washington, D.C., I don't know about it."

Jill said, "She may be Mrs. Kenneth McLain, but she's not from Washington, D.C. We've checked her out that far already. And she was asking for you here. Before you arrived. Here at the hotel."

I thought this over for a moment. "Thanks for the tip," I said. "I had a hunch she was a little too good to be true. So that's why Monk decided to have her room searched. I wondered. Of course you could be lying to me."

"Of course," Jill said, smiling.

I grimaced. "Well, whatever she is, tell your friends that batting folks over the head with gun barrels is clumsy technique, not to mention the fact that it's hard on the guns. There are plenty of other ways to take people out of action."

"How did you know it was a gun barrel?"

"A sap wouldn't have cut the scalp that way. You're sure she was inquiring about me? Before I came?"

"Quite sure." Jill glanced past me. "Outside! Get ready. See if you can catch this one all by yourself. When I say go, paddle like hell… Go!"

I felt the lift of the wave, stroked hard with both arms, and felt the board start to plane; then the nose dug into solid water, the rear end rose, and I was thrown off. Half the Pacific Ocean landed on top of me. I clawed myself to the surface, retrieved the board, and returned to Jill. She wasn't laughing when I got there, but that wasn't saying she hadn't laughed earlier.

"That's known as pearling, or pearl diving," she said. "You had your weight too far forward, so your board just dove for the bottom. Are you tired? You've been at it for almost an hour."

I said, "Let's see if I can't make just one more reasonably good ride so I know I've got the idea." I kicked my feet a bit to keep my board from swinging away from hers, and looked down into the clear water, some six feet deep. The coral down there looked brown and slimy alive, not bright and clean like the dead stuff you see in the stores. I said, "I hope you don't have any sharks around here. California's having a rash of them, from what I read in the papers."

Jill shrugged. "Oh, once in a while somebody reports seeing one, generally a hysterical tourist."

"Yeah," I said dryly, "I know those hysterical tourists with arms and legs bitten off. You can't trust those people not to exaggerate."

Jill laughed, and we waited for a wave, rocking gently so far from the beach that it felt like the middle of the ocean. I'd never been so far offshore without a real boat to support me, but I was gaining confidence in my board and my swimming ability-it occurred to me that I'd been doing a lot of swimming lately, in various parts of the world, with various companions, some of whom were no longer alive. It wasn't a happy train of thought, and I shunted it out of my mind.

The sun was up now and the water was suddenly warm and pleasant. The beaches were filling with bathers. A couple of tiny sailboats had ventured out from shore and were jockeying around to seaward of us. Both of them caught a wave at an outer line of breakers and came planing in toward us. One got crosswise and capsized, but the two kids in bathing suits flipped it back up with hardly an effort and scrambled back aboard, laughing.

I swung my board around, expecting the same wave to reach us, but it died before it got that far and rolled by as a smooth and useless swell. I watched a water-skier go by far out, bouncing along behind a small speedboat with an enormous outboard motor. It seemed kind of unnecessary to get hauled around the ocean by all that horsepower when there were waves you could slide on for free.

"Matt?" Jill said. "Yes," I said.

"Is that what you really think?"

"What?"

"What you're reported to have said in Washington. About… about our involvement in Asia."

I regarded her for a moment, with some irritation. She was straddling her red board casually, riding it like a horse, obviously just as comfortable on it as a cowboy in his favorite saddle. Her soaked blonde hair streamed down her back, and her slender body, practically naked, was brown and wet and intriguing. I was annoyed with her for breaking the pleasant, lazy mood of the morning. I was even tempted to play along with her a little, just to maintain our happy relationship, but it would have been out of character and I couldn't take the chance.