Nick Carter: The Living Death

"Put that down, Teddy," I said quietly. "Put it down or I'll cut your damned head off with it."

He was grinning, or trying to anyway, and his eyes were cold and cruel. His willingness to kill told me one thing, at least. He was more than casually involved. I backed away as he slowly came toward me. I could blow his head off with one shot, I knew, but I didn't want that. I wanted him alive, or alive enough to answer questions. But I was trying to walk a very dangerous road. I didn't want to kill him but he sure wanted to kill me. He swiped out at me in an arc, fast, almost too fast for the eye to see. I jumped backwards and felt my legs hit the edge of the bed. He laughed and drove forward with the bottle. I did a back-flip onto the bed, somersaulted and landed on my feet on the other side. I yanked the top sheet off the bed and held it before me, quickly pressing it into three folds. As he came around the end of the bed, I met him, tossing the sheet over his hand and the bottle. He ripped upwards and the sheet tore apart. I jumped back in time to avoid my stomach taking part.

I could have skewered him with Hugo, and my hand itched to let the pencil-thin shaft of the stiletto drop into my palm. I resisted the impulse. I still wanted the bastard alive, though it was beginning to look more and more like an impossible goal. Teddy feinted to the left, once, twice, and then slashed out from the right. The jagged glass ripped the button from my jacket. I grabbed for his arm at the end of its arc but he swung the bottle backhanded and I had to twist away again. This time I retreated fast to put some air between myself and the wicked, slashing weapon. The wooden chair with Teddy's carefully draped mod outfit on it stood in the corner. I grabbed it, dumping his clothes on the floor. I saw him stop in the center of the room as I advanced with the chair upraised.

"That's it, mate," he breathed. "Come on, now. Sock it to me." Of course the sonofabitch wanted me to swing the chair at him. One swing and I'd be ripped apart. He'd duck from the swing and come in on me before I could recover position. I let him think that was just what I was going to do. I moved toward him, the chair upraised, holding it with both hands. He waited on the balls of his feet, ready to duck away and counter. I came at him, and then, dropping the chair halfway, I drove forward, using it as a battering ram, putting all my strength and weight behind it. The four legs hit Teddy full face, driving him halfway across the room and into the wall with such force the whole flat shook. I had lowered my head, putting my shoulder behind the seat of the chair. When we hit the wall I looked up to see the blood spurting from Teddy s mouth. One leg of the chair had driven halfway into his throat. I pulled back and he slumped to the floor, his eyes open in the staring sight of the dead.

"Damn the luck," I growled. I was conscious of Vicky moving over, one hand on her mouth, eyes wide in horror.

"He… he's dead," she breathed. "Teddy's dead. You killed him."

"Self-defense," I said automatically. While she stood there transfixed, looking down at Teddy's lifeless form slumped on the floor, propped up against the wall, I went through the pockets of his clothes. They contained the usual trivia, money clip, loose change, driver's license, credit cards. Inside the inner jacket pocket I came upon a small, white card with a single name handwritten on it: Professor Enrico Caldone. It rang an immediate bell. Professor Caldone was an Italian, an expert on space biology. He'd recently gotten some award, I recalled, for his work on protecting astronauts from possible microorganisms in space and the possibilities of man contaminating other planets. What was a two-bit punk like Teddy doing with Professor Caldone's name on a card — handwritten, yet? I held it out to Vicky, who had finally torn her eyes from Teddy's inert form.

"What do you know about this?" I asked sharply. "Who was he dealing with? If you're holding out on me I'll find out, honey. I've had it with you."

"I don't know anything more… hardly," she said.

"What's 'hardly' mean?"

"Teddy told me about being paid to take messages back and forth," she half-sobbed. "He was paid real well by these people. He said there was someone else on the other end and that's all he ever told me. Teddy wasn't a bad sort."

"A matter of opinion," I said. I pocketed the card and opened the door. She called after me.

"What do I do now, Yank?"

"Get lost and find a new boyfriend," I flung back at her as I took the stairs three at a time. The little card with the name on it burned in my pocket. Maybe I had something at last. Maybe I had nothing, but I'd reached the end of the line here. It was time to dump this collection of bits and pieces into Hawk's lap. A woman with an important message to deliver. I had her name, Maria Doshtavenko. That much was to the good. I also knew that someone didn't want that message delivered. The last thing was a cheap punk with the name of an important scientist on a card in his pocket, handwritten by someone. Maybe Hawk had something that could make a picture out of the pieces.

I called Denny from the airport but there was no answer and I felt really sorry about that. The unfinished symphony would stay that way for us, for a while longer at least. I boarded the airliner and sat back. It had been a frustrating two days with bad luck and bad timing all around but I was onto something damned important. Too many people had taken too much effort for it to be anything else but important.

Not too many hours later I sat across the desk from Hawk, watching those steel-gray eyes as he listened to my briefing. He was digesting what I'd laid out before him, his face impassive. He hunched low in his chair, studying the little slips of paper on which he'd noted each item separately. He shifted them around as one shifts the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. He had already called Vital Statistics for a check of the woman's name, Maria Doshtavenko. Vital Statistics kept a fantastic file of names on all known personnel employed by foreign governments in any capacity. Most of the major intelligence outfits keep a similar one on us. On some people, of course, they have quite a dossier of information. On others, nothing more than a name. As I watched, Hawk picked up the index card I'd taken from Teddy's pocket.

This could be the key item, Nick," he said. "This could be a light in the dark, a connection we'd never have made otherwise."

"Light it up a little more," I said. "I'm still in the dark."

"We don't know what this Maria Doshtavenko wanted to tell us," he answered. "But from this, we might deduce what it was about."

"From just that name?"

"This, my boy, is not an ordinary name, as you know. Take a look at these names."

He took a sheet of paper from the top drawer of the desk and pushed it at me. There were seven names on it, each one that of a leading scientist who I recognized at once. These were men whose contributions to the world covered a vast area, medicine, physics, metallurgy, abstract theory and applied science. Hawk's tone was grave, almost sad.

"The whole thing's been kept semi-quiet for obvious reasons but each one of these men is, today, nothing but a vegetable," he said. "A mysterious and terrible illness has hit each one of them during the past year, resulting in a complete mental deterioration. They exist today in a kind of living death, vegetables, their minds lost to mankind."

"Medical research hasn't come up with an explanation?" I asked. "A brilliant scientist doesn't become a vegetable without some reason, to say nothing of seven of them."

"The neurological reason is that their minds have absolutely disintegrated," Hawk said. "They are in the total mental collapse that comes only with congenital retardation or massive brain damage. The scientific community is terribly concerned, of course. Scientists like the rest of us, are human and subject to the same fears and alarms as everyone else. A team of leading neurologists and psychiatrists have examined each of these men. They're completely baffled."