The Saint and the People Importers (13 page)

“To the end,” she muttered. “And this was almost it.”

“It still will be if Mahmud comes in here before you’ve got me loose,” he said. “But I don’t think he will. Listen.”

He turned his head slightly, and Tammy concentrated too, without letting up in her careful work behind him.

“He’s mixing our concrete comforters,” Simon said. “It’ll keep him occupied for a while.”

The ropes gave way. Shortwave was still motionless, bleeding quietly to himself. Simon turned quickly, took the knife from Tammy, and untied the ropes that held his ankles. Then he untied her hands, also without using the knife, and turned to search Shortwave for his gun.

At that moment the busy scraping outside stopped. Both the Saint and Tammy reacted as if the silence had been a sudden loud noise.

“Is he coming?” she breathed.

“I’ll see. You take what’s left of those ropes and tie up Shortwave. If you can find his gun, keep it handy-and use it if you have to!”

Simon was talking on the run. He kept Anna in his hand and hurried through the outer part of the boathouse and across to the side door.

The scraping of metal on wood started again. The Saint peeped cautiously out. The light from the cobwebbed window fell across Mahmud’s heaving back as he worked with a hoe to mix cement in a low wooden trough on the ground in front of him. Beside him were bags of sand and lime, and a garden hose was squirting water into the straggly grass near his feet.

The Saint glanced around, saw no better weapon than he was holding already, and decided to move on Mahmud immediately while his back was turned and he was preoccupied with his work. He pushed the door wider, with tentative fingers, praying that the hinges would not squeak: they didn’t.

About twenty feet away, Mahmud went on stirring the cement. Simon opened the door just enough to let himself through and slipped out. Mahmud could have noticed the variation in the light falling from behind him, but he did not.

Planting his feet very carefully, the Saint moved stealthily towards his prey: he still hadn’t located the Pakistani’s rifle, and had to reckon with the possibility that Mahmud might have put it down somewhere within easy reach.

When he was about ten feet away, Mahmud stopped pushing and pulling the hoe through the heavy mixture and straightened up to stretch his muscles. Simon froze. No stalking tiger could have attained a state of more absolute motionlessness. The only sounds for several seconds were Mahmud’s laboured breathing and the quiver and squeak of branches overhead in the night wind.

Then it looked as if Mahmud was going back to stirring. He prodded the mixture, and apparently disapproved of its consistency. Holding the hoe with one hand, he turned and stooped to pick up the garden hose.

At that point he caught a glimpse of the legs of the man behind him, and it was his turn to freeze.

“What’s for breakfast, chef?” the Saint asked genially. “Long pig in a blanket?”

Mahmud leapt up, almost falling back into the tank of cement he had made, and grabbed the hoe defensively in both hands. He was staring at the Saint with an incredulous horror that gripped even his vocal cords when he tried to shout for help.

“Shortwave!” he croaked. “He’s out here! Shortwave! quick!”

“Shortwave is more with the dead than the quick,” Simon informed him. “Which would you rather be?”

Mahmud had already noticed the knife balanced all too comfortably in Simon’s right hand, the direction of its point indicating that he, Mahmud, had been singled out for its undivided attention. He swept the hoe to one side and fanned it back and forth between himself and the Saint, not so much trying to attack as to keep Simon at bay.

“Shortwave?” he called shrilly, but no longer very hopefully.

“He won’t be answering,” the Saint assured him. “But if you’ll answer a few questions, I’ll consider not sinking your floating kidneys with this pig sticker. While you’re pondering, let me remind you that people who shoot up other people’s cars and try to kill them can’t expect very friendly treatment unless they’re willing to make amends.”

The Pakistani’s eyes telegraphed his next move, and before he could make a dash for the car parked around beside the house Simon took four sudden paces and cut off that path of escape.

“I’m warning you, Mahmud,” Simon said more harshly, “unless you want your appendix removed by a rank amateur, you’d better drop that hoe and start telling me all about Fowler.”

Mahmud cocked back the hoe and hurled it at the Saint. It came as no surprise, but even so Simon had to duck, dodge, and momentarily lose his balance in order to keep from getting hit. That gave Mahmud a chance to whirl and dive for something in the dark shadows where the garden hose joined the wall of the house. With a sinking heart Simon saw the long barrel of the rifle flash dully into the light as Mahmud jerked it to his shoulder. Simon’s heart sank more for Mahmud than for himself: he had felt the Pakistani had been forced into the role of assassin and deserved something less than what Simon would instantly have to do to him in order to preserve the sanctity of his own skin.

There was no tune for calculation. Few men on earth but the Saint could have thrown a knife with lethal accuracy in that light and in that split second of urgency. He scarcely had time even to move his arm. It was a throw from the wrist-the flick of a deadly dart with an almost imperceptible effortlessness at a dim slender target whose finger was even at the instant tightening on a trigger.

But the Saint’s aim was so sure and his reflexes so swift that Mahmud’s finger never even finished the short movement it would have had to complete in order to send a bullet smashing into Simon’s chest. Instead, the knife found its target with the precision of a guided missile.

Mahmud gasped. First the rifle clattered to the ground, and then he fell beside it. By the time Simon got to him, the last embers of life had faded from his open eyes.

3

As the Saint walked back towards the room where he had been held prisoner, Tammy Rowan poked her head out.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“For us it is,” he answered. “I had to kill Mahmud.”

He said it as he reached her. She looked at him questioningly and saw from the simple directness of his eyes that he was doing no more than stating a fact.

“Good,” she said firmly, and her knees unco-operatively gave way and she started to faint.

He caught her in his arms and held her until she got back her equilibrium. Holding her, for whatever reason, was an act that really merited a man’s absolute attention, but even so the Saint could not help noticing that she had trussed up Shortwave with so many windings of rope that he would have looked completely at home in the Egyptian sarcophagus section of the British Museum.

“Oh, Simon, it was so horrible while you were gone! I imagined all sorts of awful things.”

“Mahmud went for his rifle and I had to use my knife,” he explained casually. “How’s our friend here?”

“Oh, he’s awful! He looks like a dead rat.”

“Well, I suppose even that’s some improvement over what he looked like before. Just so long as he’s not really dead. He’s our only easy way to finding out how to catch up with Kalki the Creep and Fowler.” He moved Tammy a little away from him and had a physicianly look at her face. “Do you think you can navigate on your own power now?”

She looked at him uncertainly, with a warmth in her sea-green eyes that he had not seen beneath their businesslike intensity before.

“I’m not sure I want to,” she said.

But before he could react she pulled away and walked over to Shortwave’s prone form.

“I have a feeling he’s not going to be answering any questions for quite a while, don’t you?” she said.

“In that case we may as well settle down in this luxurious hideaway and pass the hours in cheerful dalliance and-“

She looked at nun with incipient panic in her expression.

“Please, just get me out of here as fast as possible,” she begged. “Otherwise I’ll come down with the screaming heebie-jeebies. I really will! And anyway, somebody might come back.”

“Not right away,” the Saint said. “And where could we take our limp little friend without being importuned with offers from every taxidermist in. the south of England? And just think of the scandal if he were found in your flat…”

“My flat?” she squealed.

“Yes. You could be up on fifty different charges: operating an illegal radio station, taking in lodgers without a licence, cruelty to animals-“

“Never mind the other forty-seven,” she interrupted. “Because nobody’s ever going to find him anywhere near where I live.”

“Well, I’m not interested in entertaining him either. So let’s see what the other accommodations are like in this riverside château.”

The upstairs was no startling contrast, but it was an improvement. It did not suggest that Fowler himself spent his leisure hours there, but rather that it served as an occasional billet for such minions as Mahmud, Kalki, or Shortwave, who might be left in charge of even more transient guests. The furnishings were sparse and old and depressing, overlaid with stained lace and yellowed antimacassars; however, one of the two bedrooms seemed to have been unused since its linen was last changed, and there was a reasonably clean bathroom.

“We might do worse than stay here,” Simon said. “For a while, anyway. Driving around in the middle of the night, we could always be unlucky enough to get stopped by a police patrol looking for somebody to try their breathalyser on, and then Shortwave might be an embarrassment.”

“But what if the others come back?” she asked.

“They weren’t planning to, apparently, but if they do, so much the better. The last thing they’ll be expecting to find is me with a rifle and Mahmud up to his scalp in instant quicksand.”

“Delightful.”

Simon countered her shudder with a cool shrug.

“You may find the idea easier to swallow if you’ll recall that you and I would have been hamburger or roasted pigeon if your car had cracked up the way he wanted it to. Now why don’t you curl up and rest a bit while I take care of Mahmud and stand the first watch. You can keep Short-wave’s popgun for a comforter. When I’m finished outside I’ll see that you’re okay and then guard our little nest with my trusty blunderbuss. I hope Fowler or Kalki does come back. They’d save us a lot of chasing around.”

Tammy brushed her blond hair wearily away from her face.

“I’m exhausted, but I’ll never sleep here,” she complained. “On the other hand, how can you be sure you’ll stay awake all night?”

“My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” Simon explained. “And the blood of Lancelot and Siegfried surges in my iron veins, reinforced by charms and talismans which make me impervious to all human weakness …” His eyes held hers for a moment. “Or almost all.”

He went back downstairs, again checked the trussing of Shortwave, who still showed no signs of returning animation, and took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he went outside and turned to the necessary job that was waiting for him.

When he had finished almost an hour had passed, and his shoulders ached a little from the unaccustomed effort of stirring wet cement and shovelling it into the two big metal drums. One of the drums took more cement, because Mahmud’s body helped to fill up the other. In the second container the Saint put a partial stuffing of leafy twigs cut from nearby bushes, so as to make the weight of the two drums not too greatly different.

He left the two steel barrels brimming with concrete near the side door, where anybody arriving would see them right away and-assuming the arriver was in on the plot- think that Shortwave and Mahmud had done their jobs according to plan. He mentally ran over the current situation: Kalki and Fowler on their way to parts unknown, Fowler planning a “pick-up” at the end of the day which would presently be dawning, which undoubtedly meant the joyous arrival on England’s shores of another misguided batch of reverse-order colonists. Meanwhile, a pair of minor pests had been taken out of circulation, one of them permanently, but the major miscreants still had their bill to pay-to which, Simon reflected, could fairly be added the write-off of Tammy Rowan’s car.

He pondered his next move as he watched the branches of the big trees behind the boathouse quiver and flail in the wind against the barely perceptible luminescent background of the sky. Once more in his miracle-punctuated life he was standing with the good earth beneath his feet and sniffing the good air when by all acceptable guesses he ought to have shuffled off this mortal coil and-as the mystically minded might say-begun operations in another sphere. He savoured the sensation with the quiet gratitude of a man who has come to accept marvels as a part of his everyday experience without ever losing his respectful appreciation of them.

But while one such escape would have been more than enough in the life of most men, Simon Templar was already thinking of courses of action that would more than likely bring him face to face with death again within twenty-four hours. He could not afford to waste time. Men like Fowler, who apparently took care of the nautical end of the immigration game, were not likely to continue their normal routine once persistent investigators started showing up in upsetting numbers. If the Saint was not able to trace Fowler and Kalki before this same time tomorrow, a lot more sunrises might follow before he was able to pick up their trail again.

Shortwave knew where Fowler would be during the crucial day that was now on its way towards dawning, so it was to Shortwave’s health and immediate future that Simon turned his consideration.

He picked up Mahmud’s Winchester, which he had already emptied, tested, and reloaded for use in case he had been interrupted during his work, and went back into the boathouse.

The scrawny killer lay as still as ever in his windings of secondhand rope. The Saint began to fear that his two-legged kick might have had fatal consequences, which would undoubtedly have brought satisfaction to the grim gods of justice, but not to anybody wanting to dredge Shortwave’s transistor brain for information.