The Terminators (26 page)

"I understand."

They were still working at the lock down there. I spoke softly enough that they'd hear the steady murmur of undisturbed conversation without recognizing my voice, if they knew it.

"Sigmund," I said. "Isn't that a real name, now; a name with which to call the old gods out of the hills? Wagner went ape about Siegfried, but he was just Sigmund's pup, born posthumously, according to the old sagas. Sigmund died in a roaring battle on a bloody beach —anyway, that was the way I always pictured it as a kid. He was marked for death. Odin said: that man, that man, and that one there. They go today; see to it. But the Valkyrie, Brynhild, kind of liked our friend Sigmund, a fine figure of a Viking. She shielded him with her cloak through the hours of fighting. Odin spotted her doing it and was annoyed at this infraction of Valkyrie discipline. Sigmund saw a tall old gent with a staff and a ragged cloak approaching through the smoke of battle. The staff thrust out, and the great sword, the sword of the Nibelungs, broke into three pieces. Defenseless, Sigmund died. Brynhild, for her disobedience, was penned up inside the famous circle of fire. For further details see your friendly neighborhood opera house. . . . Okay, it's about time. Misty Moreau. I'm terrified, a broken man. Comfort me."

I lowered my face onto the furry sleeves of Kotko's coat. The girl put her arm across my shoulders. Her long hair tickled my neck and cheek as she leaned over me. I felt her start as, losing patience, somebody below hosed down the recalcitrant lock with a machine pistol, making a fearful racket. Somebody else kicked in the riddled door with a crash.

"Line, darling," the girl said loudly. They were coming up the stairs now "It's all right, Line. . . . Damn you, leave him alone! Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want with him? You have no right—"

"Please be quiet. Miss." The voice was familiar. "Kotko? I've come for you, Kotko."

I raised my head, and shrugged off the girl's arm. Hank Priest was standing a couple of yards away, beyond the table, holding a revolver that looked very familiar. That was stupid of him, I reflected, stupid and overconfident, waving my own gun under my nose, reminding me of where and how and from whom he'd got it. Of course, he hadn't known he'd been aiming it at me, but in my mind, the legendary resistance hero with the Wagnerian name faded away, leaving only a treacherous and double-crossing old son-of-a-bitch who owed me something.

"Wrong man, Skipper," I said. "But then, it always was the wrong man, wasn't it?"

XXIII.

FOR a minute or two, I didn't know which way it would go. It was very confused, very close, with a remarkable number of interesting old automatic weapons being aimed my way, and a number of hard-bitten, middle-aged Scandinavian gents, once they understood what had happened, vying for the privilege of pumping me full of World War II lead. There was also a faction that wanted to give chase to the Mercedes, until it was pointed out to them that the car was probably well into the suburbs by now and that it was hardly feasible to mount an armed attack on the city of Narvik.

The discussion took place, of course, in Norwegian but you'd be surprised at the linguistic understanding that comes to you when your survival is the subject of the discussion.

"You shouldn't have done it, son," Hank Priest said gently at last, facing me across the table.

I shrugged. "You shouldn't have done it. Hank." It was too late for the sirs and other titles. "Nobody cares about Kotko. You can have all the Kotkos you want. Be our guest. But deal with him privately, for Christ's sake! When you drag the United States of America into your fancy act. . . What the hell's the matter with you, Captain Priest? It's not a bad country, as countries go; and you served it for what? Thirty years? Forty? And now you go manufacturing a lot of international trouble for it just to serve your private grudge! Not to mention abusing the friendship of a gent who hasn't got a lot of friends. Me, I don't care much. I've had tricks played on me before in the line of duty and you're no friend of mine. And maybe you've got no obligations to the kids you set up for tin ducks in your private shooting gallery; Wetherill, Benson, Lawrence. But you went to him for help and he gave it to you, trusting you, stretching the rules to lend you one of his people for a project you assured him was in the country's best interests, maybe a little crooked, but advantageous "

"Search him, Lars. Be careful."

Priest turned away towards the girl, who was being held off to one side. Besides him, there were actually only four men in the room, although it had seemed at first like the best part of a regiment. I could hear more downstairs and there were probably still more outside. One of the four in the room had moved forward at Priest's command. I recognized him. He was the tough little seaman-looking gent who'd once led me to a rendezvous in the town called Alesund. I remembered Priest telling me that this man had fought beside him and saved his life. He seemed to be functioning as second in command.

Lars laid aside his weapon, an old U.S. carbine, caliber .30, M-1. I never can understand what anybody sees in that bastard weapon—neither a good rifle nor a good submachine gun—but it's got a lot of friends in strange places. With another man covering me, he had me stand up and remove the big coat. He looked it over carefully and laid it aside. Then he searched me thoroughly from hair to shoes, finding the big, obvious Browning first, of course. Further exploration of my anatomy yielded up the Llama. Finally he discovered the folding knife in my pants pocket; but he was thorough, he carried his investigation clear down to the floor.

"You are well armed, Herr Helm," he said, straightening up and stepping back. "You could have given us a good fight." There was a hint of regret in his voice.

"Against that?" I gestured towards the ancient Sten gun covering me. "Anyway, I've got nothing against any Norwegians except the lousy way they garble the Swedish language. Was the pilot killed?"

"No. He jumped and ran at the first burst. We put it well aft, hoping that would happen. We have him prisoner."

"Even so, there has been much killing for a little bit of revenge," I said.

"I know nothing about that," Lars said. "Sigmund— Captain Priest—wants a man, for reasons of his own. I do not ask. We do not ask." He stuffed my weapons into various pockets of the pea jacket he was wearing, and picked up his carbine, and patted it fondly. "It is enough to be in the woods once more with Sigmund and this old friend, Herr Helm. It is not so interesting a life we live today; it is good to remember the old way just once more. Now sit down, be so good, please."

Priest was questioning Jan Morrow. I heard her saying, "I don't know, I tell you. Line didn't say anything to me about his future plans, if he had any."

I said, "Stop heckling the girl, Hank. I told Denison to send your target out of this country ASAP, to some place that had no legendary underground supermen roaming around. If you want another crack at the invisible millionaire, you'll have to do it alone in an unfriendly land."

He turned and regarded me bleakly. After a moment, he said, "Lars, take the girl downstairs. The men, too. I want to talk with Mr. Helm." When they were gone, he drew a long breath and asked, "What the Hell am I going to do with you, son?"

"That's what the cowboy asked after he lassoed the bear," I said. "But you'll think of something to do. Like, for instance, what you did to that young guy named Wetherill, another sap who had a lot of faith in you, Skipper, if my information is correct. Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me why he had to fall off a mountain in his car. What was his crime?"

"So you guessed that." His voice was flat.

"There were only three choices. A real accident; and I don't have much faith in coincidences like that. Elfenbein; and why should he kill the goose that was laying the golden information. You."

Priest came to the table and faced me across the phony drawings of the Sigmund Siphon. He still looked like the same sturdy, weathered old seadog, with his pale blue eyes and cropped gray hair. He was still wearing the raincoat, tweeds, and cap of his British incarnation. There was a change, however, a kind of weariness. Well, maybe I looked a bit tired, too. We'd come to the end of the line and it had been a tough trip.

"I was sorry about Robbie," he said quietly. "You probably know I'd had him feeding information to Elfenbein, who'd been hired by the Aloco people after I'd tipped them off, never mind how, to what was going on up north." ,

"Except that it wasn't really going on," I said. "It was just something you dreamed up to keep them—us—all busy chasing each other. Just like that phony attack you set up at Varsj0en during the last big war, so you could hit the transport in Rosviken without interference."

He smiled thinly. "I can see you've been doing your homework, Mr. Helm. Well, Elfenbein was a real break for me. You see, Kotko was suspicious, or at least dubious. It was a far-out proposition I'd offered him, through intermediaries, and he wasn't really interested in gambling on it. After all, he already had a sure thing in Torbotten, why risk it for a little additional profit based on somebody's pipe dream, even if the pipe dream did have U.S. support? That's why I leaked information to Aloco, hoping that the hint of competition for the Siphon would change Kotko's mind. And they did the best thing they could have done, from my point of view: they hired Dr. Elfenbein, who had a reputation Kotko respected."

"Complicated," I said.

"Not too complicated, son. Remember, all I really wanted was to get Kotko to Norway. The more confusion I could stir up, the more it would look as if something really important was going on, something worthy of the great man's attention, the hairless bastard. Well, I wanted to encourage Dr. Elfenbein, of course, make him think that he was being very clever, so I told Robbie to let himself be bribed. I told him what to say. I told him we were laying a false trail; that we were actually going to pick up all the material by a different route from the one he was supposedly 'betraying.' Unfortunately, what I didn't realize was that he was madly in love with the sanctimonious young lady, Benson, I was using as a courier. He became afraid, and rightly so of course, that the information he was passing would make trouble for her. He insisted that she be given protection, so I got you on the job. But even that wasn't enough for Robbie. He didn't think it right we should leave the girl in the dark; he insisted she should be warned she was being used as a decoy. I could see that he was becoming suspicious of the whole operation, and that if he and the girl got together. . . . Well, I was sorry to do it, but you can see that it was necessary, can't you, son?"

It was kind of touching, I suppose. He really wanted me to understand, as between one pro and another; and I understood, all right—but it was still my gun he was aiming at me, and I still remembered how he'd got it.

"Sure," I said. "Necessary."

"It worked out very well in the end," Priest went on in that calm and reasonable voice. "You helped a lot, Mr. Helm. With a real U.S. agent on the job, one well known to his man Denison, Kotko had living proof that our claims of government backing were genuine—I won't deny I had that in mind when I got hold of you. And with Elfenbein involved, with his impressive reputation, Kotko decided that it had to be a lot more profitable deal than he'd thought originally. I had him where I wanted him at last, hungry and eager; eager enough to come to Norway and close the deal in person." Priest grinned boyishly. "I tell you, son, it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. All those damned thieves, government and otherwise, fighting over a glorified crapper."

"Yeah," I said. "But Wetherill died. Evelyn Benson died. I killed a guy on that ship, thinking we were doing something important enough to warrant it—"

"You killed that man because he'd put your nose out of joint, making you look like an incompetent bodyguard."

"Maybe, a little," I conceded. "Okay, I'll concede Bj0rn, with reservations. But what about Diana Lawrence?"

"You left her there deliberately, Mr. Helm. A coldblooded sacrifice play if I ever saw one."

"Not that cold-blooded," I said. "I'd have been very happy if she'd made it; I simply made provisions for if she didn't. And I left her with a gun. You took it away from her. You're the only man in the world who could have done it. She had clear instructions, and she might have got through—but she made the mistake of trusting you. Like a lot of other people during the past few weeks. You had a lot of credit, Skipper, and you've deliberately used every bit of it, haven't you?"

He moved his shoulders. "When did you catch on?" he asked after a moment.

I said, "Well, the two contacts weren't exactly the cowards you'd led us to expect, one sitting in that restaurant calmly feeding scraps of pancake to his dogs, the other waiting steadily by the airport half the night, disregarding all the games being played under his nose. But of course you had to make us think they were cowards. If they weren't, there was no point to all this elaborate, cautious business with passwords and secret meeting places, all cooked up, we were supposed to think, to protect them." I shook my head ruefully. "But I didn't really like it from the start," I went on. "I mean, Skipper, a guy like you, or a guy like me, when somebody we love gets hurt, we don't go around doing patriotic good for their memory's sake— if you want to call grand larceny good. We find somebody to kill, and we kill them. The whole thing was just a little out of character, particularly when I learned how you'd spent that war."

He said, "The stupid bastards." His voice wasn't gentle anymore. "There was that son-of-a-bitch who'd murdered Frances, I mean murdered her just as if he'd used a gun. A few gallons more and we'd have been through that pass and she'd still be alive. So I went over and showed him the error of his ways. Very well, I put him into the hospital, what the hell did he expect? If he wants to play games like that, he can damn' well reserve a permanent bed in the ward! But the backlash I got, you wouldn't believe it! You'd have thought I'd knocked out a couple of teeth belonging to Jesus Christ Almighty. I'd have gone to jail, if I hadn't played the poor bereaved husband momentarily deranged by grief. I paid damages, I smoothed down the oil company lawyers, I even apologized to the sonofabitch himself and said I was sorry, I'd been beside myself, I hadn't known what I was doing. . . . Well, I hadn't known what I was doing. I started realizing that. What the hell was I making myself all this trouble for over a lousy little pump jockey, when the man really responsible was sitting on the Riviera pinching the bottom of a blonde?"