Donald Hamilton - The Devastators

I told myself to quit stalling, but I couldn't help the nasty sense of uncertainty you get before you commit yourself irrevocably to a risky course of action. There's always the nagging question: Have I figured this right? I couldn't help remembering that Buchanan and several others, who'd probably thought themselves, rightly or wrongly, just as smart as me, had figured wrong. They must have. They were dead. I tried to encourage myself with the thought that each man had lived long enough after being caught to get himself infected with a super-virulent disease, but somehow it didn't make the future look very much brighter.

I nursed the glass in both hands, warming it as if it contained precious old brandy, while I pretended to look over the papers on the table. Then I raised it deliberately to my lips. The girl was examining one of my photostats with absorbed interest. I started to drink. It was the lack of ice, and the stalling I'd done, that saved me. Just as the stuff touched my lips, I caught the faintest hint of a scent rising from the warmed-up liquor that I probably would not have detected if the drink had been cold: a flowery scent that never came from good Scotch, or bad Scotch either.

Incongruously enough, it was the fragrance of violets. It told me what I was dealing with. We'd first encountered this stuff a couple of years before in the possession of a man we'd captured, something nice cooked up by their backroom boys: a colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid completely miscible with water and alcohol. It was volatile enough so that if the medical authorities on the scene didn't take all kinds of precautions and work very fast they wouldn't find much to analyze in the dregs of a drink in an open glass, or the body of a man who had drunk of it. It worked almost instantaneously. They'd called it Petrozin K.

Potentially, it had been a fine weapon for their dirtyworks armory, and it had apparently passed all their laboratory tests, but in field use, like so many new products, it had revealed a significant flaw: it wasn't quite stable. Although it had presumably been given all the usual lab-checks for sensitivity to light, temperature, and agitation, when it actually came to be carted around in agents' pockets under normal operating conditions, it started to break down very slightly, and to react with its breakdown products in a peculiar way. It lost none of its potency, but traces of an aromatic contamination were produced-an ester, according to our chemists-that gave it a faint, betraying odor that might, by a romantic individual, be likened to the scent of violets.

Apparently they'd never managed to lick the problem. After six or eight months we started coming up against other unpleasant concoctions and heard no more of Petrozin K. However, an ex-agent of theirs-or a man pretending to be an ex-agent of theirs-who'd fallen into disgrace about that time might still have a little of the older poison in his possession; enough, say, to give to a green-eyed girl to spike a glass, or even a whole bottle, of Scotch.

I managed not to look at Nancy Glenmore, so-called. After all, it wasn't the first time somebody had tried to kill rue. It wasn't even the first time somebody had tried to send me to hell by the chemical route. I just hadn't been expecting it tonight. I'd been assuming that, like Buchanan and the others, I was wanted alive, at least temporarily. I guess it wasn't the attempt that shook me so much; it was the fact that, thinking myself clever, I'd almost cooperated in my own murder. Well, the next step was obvious.

I turned slightly away from Nancy and threw my head back as if I were taking a good-sized swallow. I started to set the glass down; then I let it fall with a crash to the floor. I made a thick, strangling noise in my throat, started to rise, and picking a spot uncluttered with broken glass, fell face down on the rug. I thought it was quite a good performance.

There was a brief silence; then I heard a kind of hasty rustling and rattling of papers. That would be my pretty, murderous relative clearing her lap for action.

"Mr. Helm?" she said in a tentative voice, and more sharply: "Mr. Helm!"

I heard her get up and come forward to bend over me.

I felt her touch my arm cautiously.

"Mr. Helm. Matthew?" Her voice had turned a bit shrill. "Damn the man, he's passed out! Oh, dear, what do I do now?"

She was obviously playing it safe; maybe she, too, had reason to beware of hidden microphones. She rose again without taking my pulse or testing my eyeball reactions, which was sloppy technique but understandable: she was, as I'd hoped she would, just taking for granted that her lethal stuff had done its work. Now, if I had a bit of luck, she would pick up the phone to report success. Even if she talked in code, it might give me a hint.

I heard a sudden, choked little cry of distress and fear. I opened my eyes. Nancy Glenmore was standing by the table with her own glass, partially empty now, in her hand. She was staring into it with a kind of paralyzed horror. Her mouth was open and she seemed to be trying to breathe, at the same time as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her. Then the glass slipped from her hand and hit the rug and spilled but did not break, and she crumpled to the floor beside it.

When I reached her, she was quite dead.

A s I crouched by the motionless body, I couldn't help thinking that it just wasn't my day where women were concerned. In less than six hours I'd mislaid one carelessly, roughed one up uselessly-and now I'd lost one permanently by letting her drink poison right before my eyes. The fact that my eyes had been closed at the time didn't really mitigate the error.

Well, with a dead girl before me, that was a hell of an egocentric way of looking at things. It wasn't Nancy Glenmore's day, either, and would never be again. She looked small and broken, lying there, with a wisp of dark hair trailing across her face and her Glenmore kilts kind of bunched about her thighs-that damned, muted, airy-fairy version of the brave old hunting tartan that had prejudiced me against her from the start. I wondered if I would have had sense enough to believe her if she'd had sense enough to dress in the true, old-fashioned plaid.

Because her death made it fairly obvious that her story had been straight from start to finish. Certainly, if she'd been what I'd thought, an enemy agent who'd lured me here to poison me, she'd have left the liquor strictly alone. There was still a remote possibility that she'd been an enemy agent who'd miscalculated in some way, or who'd been double-crossed, but that was straining pretty hard to account for what she'd done and what had been done to her.

The simplest explanation, and the most likely one, was that she'd been exactly what she'd claimed to be: a tourist kid from the States who'd thought it would be cute to devote her European vacation to family research, in the course of which she'd heard of a distant relative similarly engaged, and had quite naturally looked him up. Probably she'd been feeling adventurous and daring, so far from home, reckless enough to indicate-somewhat nervously and amateurishly, to be sure-that she was available for just about any interesting project, including sexual intercourse, that Cousin Matthew might have in mind.

I'd seen her willing attitude as part of a dark plot because I'd been looking for a dark plot, even hoping for one. But everything that had aroused my suspicion could be explained quite simply as the behavior of an inexperienced young girl, in a travel wardrobe bought new for the great occasion, blowing herself to what she'd hoped would be a giddy, uninhibited, memorable fling abroad, and let the stodgy old morals fall where they might. But she'd come to London at the wrong time, visited the wrong office, offered herself to the wrong man, and now she was dead.