The Infiltrators (27 page)

I said, “Tell me about Homer Walsh. I had the impression he was retired; but judging by what Baron said, he still has a voice in the affairs of the firm.”

Madeleine grinned abruptly, walking beside me. “Don’t you want to help me feel sorry for myself?”

“You’re doing fine all by yourself,” I said.

“Good man. Keep slapping me down whenever I start my martyr act. Homer Walsh had a very bad auto accident and wound up in a wheelchair; that was the year after I joined the firm. A thin, dark, intense little man, and a very good trial lawyer, but he never practiced law again after he got well—I gather that, apart from being crippled, he’s never been
really
well since. But he’s still a partner, kind of an inactive partner, and he does have some say in the policies of the firm. At least that was the way it was when I… left, and I gather it’s still that way.”

“What about Walter Maxon?”

“Walter’s a very nice boy, that’s his trouble. Nice and a little shy. He’ll never be a real cutthroat lawyer, but he’s conscientious and totally honest. Perhaps that’s why Waldemar’s apparently been pushing him along faster than he really deserves; he wants somebody obviously square and straight right there to pick up the pieces, and the firm, if things go badly for him, after what he was forced to do to me.” She grimaced. “What Walter really needs is somebody to tell him what a wonderful guy he is, and keep on telling him and telling him.”

I said deliberately, “It’s fairly obvious that, with your husband nine years missing, you could have the job anytime. Even legally, with just a little red tape.”

She said, “Maybe, but it’s kind of optimistic of us to arrange my future, Mr. Helm, before we’re sure I’m going to survive this perilous undercover operation I’m engaged in for you and the U.S. government.”

“I’ll do my best to see to it,” I said. “And when it’s over I think that guy’s going to be right there waiting for you loyally—like he’s been for eight years—and you’d better have made up your mind whether or not you want what he offers you. Meaning him.”

She said with sudden sharpness, “Want? What does
want
have to do with it, Matt? I had what I wanted, everything I wanted, and it was all snatched away from me. Even if I’m given every possible break from now on, even if the old verdict is set aside and my name is cleared and all my rights as a citizen are restored, with all those years lost to me I’m going to have to pass up all the great things I wanted for myself and settle for what I can get—what I can get that I can still make some kind of an endurable life out of. What I
really
want… God, I don’t even know what it is any longer! And I used to be so sure, so blissfully sure!” She shook her head abruptly. “Whine, whine, whine! You’re neglecting your duties, Mr. Helm. You’re supposed to kick the self-pitying bitch in the pants where they’re tightest—and that’s pretty damn tight—whenever she goes into that sad routine. What’s next on our agenda?”

“Well, as soon as possible we’d better check out that Conejo Canyon installation. I’ve got the names of two scientific guys who knew your husband there before he vanished, and who’re still there. One’s more or less running the place now. But it’s a forty-mile drive to Los Alamos, and you’ve got that appointment with your folks’ lawyer, Birnbaum, in less than an hour. We’ll have to see how much of the afternoon is left when you’ve finished with him.”

But when we reached the motel, we found a handwritten note awaiting her at the desk. She glanced through it and gave it to me to read.
My dear Madeleine: Unfortunately I find myself tied up in court this afternoon, how about ten tomorrow morning? Looking forward very eagerly to seeing you again and most sorry for the delay, your Uncle Joe.

Madeleine took it back from me when I’d finished. “I used to call him that when I was a little girl, although there’s no real relationship,” she said. “Well, what do we do now?… Oh, God, look at that!”

She was staring at the nearby newspaper-vending machine. The enormous headlines showed black through the slightly beat-up plastic:
PRESIDENT SHOT
! That was the
Journal
, making you read the paper to find out if the shooting had been fatal or otherwise. The
New Mexican
’s giant headline was equally terse, telling what had happened but not to whom:
ASSASSINATION FAILS
!

Mac said, “You would have been notified immediately if it had concerned you, Eric.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, making a face at Madeleine over the phone. We were in my motel unit, and she was half rereading the newspaper stories and half listening, sprawled in one of the large chairs by the window in the unladylike fashion that seems to go with jeans. “Yes, sir,” I said. “But I would like to protest, sir. Here I am in my rusty tin suit playing knight errant or something to a distressed lady while there’s work of national importance peculiarly suited to my talents and training…”

It had not been the crime of a wild-eyed gent with a cheap rifle and a political grievance, or an unbalanced youth with a target pistol trying to attain some kind of national importance, any kind, as long as it made the headlines. It had been a systematic and well-organized commando raid, somewhat similar to the Sadat assassination, executed by six men with automatic weapons of the submachine-gun persuasion, exact make unspecified. The chief executive had survived through the devotion of a couple of Secret Service men who’d thrown themselves into the line of fire and hustled him back into his car, taking a good many bullets in the process. Fortunately, while one of the men had died on the spot and the other was in the hospital fighting for his life, those feeble little 9mm slugs don’t have all the penetration in the world, and only one had got through to the man they were protecting, inflicting a minor wound.

The other Secret Service men in attendance had not only been badly outgunned, they’d been handicapped by their consideration for the innocent bystanders, something that never concerns us. I mean, if you ask us to protect somebody in public life he gets protected, and to hell with the women and children and stray dogs; which is probably why we’re so seldom asked. In this case, however, on request, we’d had two riflemen covering the scene, one from a rooftop two hundred and fifty yards away, the other from a high window at about four hundred. They’d started cutting down the commandos the instant they revealed themselves. There had been only the initial burst of fire before the attackers started dropping mysteriously—in the melee down in the street nobody’d heard the distant reports at first. With two down and then, in the time it takes to operate a bolt-action sniper’s rifle, another two, the final pair had tried to run for it, but had been smashed to the pavement in their turn by the heavy rifle bullets. Of course there had been some breakage. What with the close-in 9mm automatic fire, and several of the long-range .30-caliber projectiles ricocheting and breaking up after perforating their targets, seven people in the crowd had been hurt, two fatally.

Mac said severely, “We have enough brainless snipers available; we don’t need another. What we need is somebody with intelligence enough to stop this conspiracy at the source, which means, of course, finding the source. Are you making any progress?”

“Yes, sir,” I said sourly. “But I wouldn’t want to say in what direction.”

“There seems to be less time than we’d hoped,” Mac said. “Indications are that these people may have completed their initial infiltration, if we may call it that, of our society and are now starting the action phase of their campaign. The confusion following the violent death of the President was presumably expected to give them the opportunity to make their political move, whatever it may be. Well, we’ll try to parry it if it comes, and in any case to keep him alive. A man in the White House who’s humble enough to admit he’s no rival to Washington or Lincoln is a jewel to be preserved. We’ve had some who thought they belonged on the shining throne of heaven right alongside, or perhaps a little ahead of, the Almighty. Your job is to see that we don’t have to shield him too long, since the advantage is always on the side of the assassins.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and the line went dead.

Madeleine was looking at me curiously. “You’re envious,” she said.

I said, “Those boys got to shoot. All I’ve been getting is shot at.”

“Is that
all
you’ve been getting?” she asked slyly. Then a little color came into her face, and she said quickly, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for, considering the lady’s current chastity program.”

“The Lily Maid of Astolat,” I said. “Come on, Lily Maid, let’s go visit some geniuses.”

Fifteen minutes later, after I’d made a couple of preparatory phone calls, we were on the four-lane interstate heading north up the Rio Grande valley. Another twenty minutes saw us turning west on the twisty two-lane blacktop road that leads to Los Alamos. We crossed the Rio Grande, which was running silty and yellow as always under the old-fashioned, steel-girdered highway bridge; but the water was not too high yet, since the winter’s snowpack hadn’t really started melting up in the mountains. Leaving the river behind, we drove up through the Jemez foothills. It had been a silent drive so far, but now Madeleine, at the wheel, turned her head to glance at me.

“Any instructions for the chauffeur, Boss? As I recall, that’s kind of a nasty hill ahead, just the kind I’d pick if I were planning a fatal accident.”

I said, “Just go up it fast. Well be on the outside most of the way, and you don’t want to give anybody a chance to pull alongside and nudge us over the edge and into the canyon. Particularly not that blue pickup that’s trailing us.”

She nodded. “Yes, I’ve been watching him… Matt.”

“Yes?”

“There’s something I want to say before… before anything happens; and I don’t want any interruptions while I say it; and no answer is required.” She was looking straight ahead through the windshield as she spoke. “In other words, just shut up and listen. The President of the United States has just been shot. You have a bullet hole in your shoulder. We’re being shadowed right this minute. We’re obviously bucking something pretty big, and I don’t think it’s too melodramatic to consider the possibility that… that I might just possibly be killed sometime during the next few days… No, goddamn you, shut up!”

She glared at me fiercely, and returned her attention to the road, making the right-hand turn that would take us up the canyon to Los Alamos. The road straight ahead was the big-truck route that went the long way around and came in by the back door.

Madeleine said, “What I want to tell you is, if it happens, don’t brood too much about it. Don’t blame yourself. What I’ll be losing is something I didn’t even have that day you picked me up at Fort Ames. For all practical purposes, I was dead then, ready to slink off to some kind of a bleak and hopeless half-life, and quite possibly eventual suicide. At least now I’ve had a little chance to live again, and if I get dead again, permanently this time, it’s just too damn bad. It would have been nice to see what I could do with this new life you’ve helped me find, but at least you won’t remember me as that dough-faced zombie dame in that awful brown suit. I’ve had a chance to be me again—kind of whiny and complainy, I know, but still me—and that’s worth everything that happens next no matter how bad it may be.”

After a little, I cleared my throat and said, “I wish we didn’t need you so badly. Somehow, you seem to be the key to things around here, at least the only key we’ve got. Otherwise I wouldn’t risk—”

She shook her head, a little impatiently. “I’m trying to tell you, don’t worry about it! I’m alive again, I’m having a good time, I’m even being allowed to help my country a little after being convicted of betraying it. What more can a girl ask? Nobody lives forever, and there have been times when I didn’t even want to. So driving a nice car on a lovely, sunny day like this with a… a man I kind of like beside me is all I need. My God, there were years and years when a pleasant drive in the country was so far out of reach I didn’t even dare let myself dream about it!” Before I could respond she laughed and said, with a quick and deliberate change of mood: “I don’t really think anybody’s going to run us off this road, with all the Armco barriers, or whatever they call them, that they’ve put up since I last drove up here. You can’t even see down into the canyon any longer for all that fencing.”

It was really a rather claustrophobic ride, roaring up the steep, winding little mountain road between the rock wall and the steel protective barrier that allowed only occasional glimpses into the valley below.

I said, “Just the same, I’d rather not put them to the test, if you don’t mind.”

“Do you have some reason to believe that there’ll be… that somebody’s going to try to kill us today?”

I said, “When I called him just now, and let him know where we are heading, our guardian angel, Jackson, seemed to think it was a distinct possibility. He’s under the impression that somebody won’t like us snooping around the Center where your husband used to work, and that they may try for us either coming or going. Keep your eyes open for his signal. He’s got plans for some kind of an escort to see us through, if things get hairy.”

But there were no signs of Jackson or his people as we surmounted the last rise and topped out by the fenced-in strip of the Los Alamos airport, passing the building that used to be a guard post where all visitors were checked into and out of the town, back in more secure and suspicious days.

Now the barriers and guards were gone—the security blanket no longer covered the community as a whole, only the individual installations—and this was no longer the legendary Secret City; it was just another shiny-new little western town, planted on the side of the mountain where there used to be nothing but pines and pinons and a rambling school for boys. We took the right-hand fork where the road branched; and the blue Chevy pickup went off to the left and was seen no more, at least for the moment. Madeleine guided us through the center of the town and out into a residential area that soon gave way to empty scenery, mostly standing on end.