Understrike (8 page)

“
Nice-minded sort of character who thought this one up,” said the cop as Chicory rejoined them. “OK, Mr Oakes? Miss Triplehouse?” He looked briskly at his watch. “Time to get moving. Joe’s office say they’ll be keeping an eye on you, and that you’ll be moved off the bus at the first opportunity. We got some of their boys coming over to square the hotel and get things done nice for Joe.”

“
He was a great guy,” mused the other man. “A regular guy.”

They
took Boysie and Chicory out of the hotel, by a back exit, to a stunned and silent Avallon who drove them through the hot blaring streets to the crowded Port Authority Bus Terminal. The big, air-conditioned Scenicruiser growled out into Dyer Avenue, bound for Los Angeles, dead on noon.

“
Ya change buses at Flagstaff, Arizona—that’ll be day after tomorrow,” the driver had said examining their tickets.

Boysie
and Chicory, leaning back in their comfortable airline-type seats, held hands and wordlessly tried to wipe from their minds the picture of Joe Siedler’s face contorted by fear and anguish as the great slim snake clung to his arm. As the bus turned down the ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel, heading towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the full dimensions of what had happened suddenly rammed home into Boysie’s whirling mind. He felt unclean, as he always did when death moved near to him. The black mamba had been meant for him. By rights it should be him, and not Joe Siedler, lying in a mortuary, cold and rigid as frozen meat. For once he seemed to be facing the situation with relative calm. Shock had pushed out panic. But those clear blue eyes gleamed hard and the left corner of his mouth jerked up in the reflex which was almost his trademark. Both were signs of the ingrained fear, which Boysie Oakes had to fight nearly every day of his life.

At
the same moment, the skull-faced youth was standing in a telephone booth in the big, glistening babel that is the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal.

“
Yea, kid, we just heard,” said Cirio at the other end of the line. “Thanks, kid. You’d better come on over here. We all got work to do.”

In
his office at the
Club
Fondante
Cirio put down the telephone and gazed across the desk at a disconsolate Ritzy.

“
You’re the boss,” he said—sort of snide.

“
Yea. I’d better call head office,” said Ritzy.

*

Mostyn was just about to leave the headquarters building off Whitehall when his secretary brought in the decoded cable from
USS
One
: the Department’s undercover man in New York. Mostyn was a very worried man. The signal, now on the desk in front of him, read:

ONE
ATTEMPT TO ABDUCT ONE TO LIQUIDATE ‘L’ YOUR DEPUTY OBSERVER PLAYBOY AND TREPHOLITE TRIALS STOP CIA ESCORT KILLED STOP ‘L’ AND OUR FEMALE ESCORT NOW EN ROUTE STOP ADVISE STOP

Mostyn
felt lonely. His intuition had been right again. The final word, ‘ADVISE’ winked at him hysterically from the paper. The ball had been pitched firmly into his court. Somehow Boysie was in it again. Right up to his neck. “Hope to God he’s got his brown suit on,” muttered Mostyn as he picked up the direct line telephone to the Chief.

The
Chief had already left. Mostyn got through to the Duty Officer. “Number Two here.” He spoke rapidly, his senses alert to the urgency which, presumably, lay behind the cable. “Get me the Chief. Top Priority.”

*

In the middle of the afternoon they stopped, along the Turnpike, at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Mechanicsville—a regulation building of clean stone with a slate roof. It reminded Boysie a little of the quiet afternoon he had spent in the Cotswolds on his last leave. Elizabeth, the girl who had been with him then, was very different from Chicory, and his world far more peaceful. They ate Mr Johnson’s celebrated Southern Fried Chicken (which tastes not unlike his American Baked Ham—so fine is the art of cutting the highs and lows off the taste spectrum) and French Fries, washing the meal down with scalding coffee. The whole business took only twenty indigestible minutes. Then, rest stop over, the bus grumbled its way out on to the ribbon of tarmac once more.

Night
closed in and the bus ploughed into the neon jungle of advertising which is the unnatural scenery of the Eastern States: Piggly-Wiggly Stores, Go TWA, Shop at Schneiders, El Rancho, Bar-B-Q, He’ll be Safe With Jukey’s—Best Morticians in Town. Indianapolis went by unnoticed in the early hours, and when they woke the view was of the long tobacco fields, elegant clapboard houses and high barns of Indiana.

Throughout
the day they chatted in fragments, Boysie shifting the conversation over to Chicory’s past whenever the talk came dangerously near to his own. By the time they reached Springfield, Missouri, he had heard about her childhood in Joplin (Springfield made her nostalgic), home-made cookies, wire teeth braces, pigtails (all part of the great American saga, thought Boysie: Andy Hardy and all that jazz). After Springfield there were the more interesting, and undoubtedly more glamorous, tales of New York and the model racket; then the wealthy husband who, after a two-year idyll with Chicory, had walked off with a counter assistant from Woolworths, called Ophelia Cocks. Thus Chicory reverted to her maiden name of Triplehouse and accepted the wayward husband’s sizeable alimony.

“
Now,” she said with a pout, mimicking a hick accent, “I’m nuthin’ more’n a bored pussy, holdin’ off the tom cats and keepin’ out of the kitten way.”

Night
again, and the conversation petered out in fitful sleep. Boysie’s mind clicked back to New York: the abortive attempt to entice him from the hotel, and the subtle horror of the mamba. Try as he would, the pictures kept returning, shouldering their way into his dozing thoughts. The conclusion was always the same. Behind this seemingly simple operation, there lurked that old last enemy, death. Twice in New York. They would not let it go at that. There was purpose and method behind the two attempts. Sometime, soon, they would have another go. Boysie swallowed, and allowed his hand to stray to the satisfyingly hard butt of the pistol in his hip pocket. Third time lucky? It was all Mostyn’s fault. It was always Mostyn’s fault. Boysie began his favourite pastime of silently cursing his Second-in-Command.

They
slept a little and woke in Tulsa (“This is the place that chap was twenty-four hours from,” said Boysie. Chicory giggled), again in Oklahoma City, and once more in Amarillo, Texas, where the crickets were singing fit to snap their tiny wings. Sleep again, a little deeper, and at six in the morning, with the sun rising over the spectacular desert, the Scenicruiser pulled up in front of the Posting House Cafe, Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

“
You gotta nour here, folks,” said the driver.

Yawning
and stretching, the bleary passengers lurched stiffly towards their respective rest rooms—cutely labelled “Señors” and “Señoritas”—and allowed the gastric juices to flow unimpeded at the thought of breakfast served by raven-sleek Spanish-American beauties who could be glimpsed behind the restaurant counters.

The
water was cold, the other male passengers bawdy and loud. It reminded Boysie of army days; freezing in the ablutions surrounded by false heartiness. He never could shave with cold water, and performed the operation painfully, cutting himself twice and drying the blood with little pieces of toilet paper. His tingling Onyx after-shave lotion stung more than usual; there was a very rude drawing, accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon word, etched on the lavatory wall. “Just like home,” murmured Boysie, realising that his travelling companions had all shaved, shined their shoes, and done the other thing at the double. They were now probably wolfing all the remaining hotcakes, crispy cereals, bacon, sunnyside-up eggs and coffee. He packed his shaving gear back into the neat green Lentheric Onyx de Luxe travel kit and—after taking one last look at his parting in the cracked mirror—turned towards the door.

“
Mr Oakes?” The man spoke conspiratorially, leaning against the wall outside the rest room. He looked nattily expensive, his chin barbered as though someone had plucked out each hair independently by the roots and then given the skin a going over with varnish. Boysie stared into a pair of eyes which commanded attention. At first sight this was not the kind of man with whom Boysie felt an instinctive kinship.

“
Yes?” Boysie’s hand prepared to move towards his hip pocket. The man’s right hand came forward and flipped open a leather identity wallet. Boysie caught sight of a badge and official-looking card.

“
Henniger,” said Henniger. “United States Security. Have your breakfast with the girl, collect your baggage from the bus, and meet us at the car out in back. Red Mustang convertible.”

“
Thank God for that,” said Chicory, her mouth full of hotcake and syrup, when Boysie told her. “I’ve just about had that bus. Or I should say it’s just about had me. Those seats on your tail! Yow!”

The
car was parked at the rear of the Cafe—the sun, already climbing with all systems ‘Go’ on a smooth trajectory, reflecting in a bonnet which looked hygenically clean. Henniger made no move to help Boysie as he humped his Revelation, and Chicory’s lightweight case, over the few yards of parking lot. Behind the wheel sat a tall lean man with grey well-toned hair and glasses.

“
This is Mr Henniger,” said Boysie affably as they reached the car. Chicory smiled.

“
Miss Triplehouse.”

“
Howdy, Miss Triplehouse; you and Mr Oakes in back, please.”

“
Gee, are we glad to see you,” said Chicory, ducking her head and sliding delicately into the rear seat. “We thought we’d be on that bus till ever.” Boysie stood, looking lost, with the cases.

“
Better put those in the trunk, hadn’t you, Mr Oakes?” smiled Henniger, still making no move to help him. “It’s unlocked.”

With
the luggage stowed away and Boysie snug beside Chicory, the car boomed out on to the road and began to eat up the miles which lash out painfully between the vast stretch of scrubby New Mexico desert. Henniger shifted in his seat, turning half way towards the couple behind him.

“
We’re goin’ to a little motel, ‘bout twenty miles off the main Highway here. Got one of the big boys from the Top wants to see ya Mr Oakes. We stay there tonight, then fly ya down to San Diego from Albuquerque in the morning. Ya gotta be there for briefing Sunday noon.”

“
What’d I tell you, Boysie honey? Albuquerque! Yuck!” said Chicory.

Boysie
reflected that all this piddling about was seriously cutting into his living-it-up time. But then, without the piddling about there might not be any time in which to live it up.

“
Incidentally, Miss Triplehouse, you’ll be able to fly back direct to New York,” continued Henniger. “You’ve done your job and you’ll be contacted on return.”

“
To hell with that!” Chicory’s reaction was violent. “I’m goin’ on down to San Diego.”

“
Sorry, Miss Triplehouse, them’s my orders.” Henniger was firm.

“
I’m going on down to San Diego of my own accord then. Vacation.”

“
You’ll go straight back to New York.”

“
Now look here ... I can do just as I goddam please. I’m a free agent.”

“
There is no such thing as a
free
agent.” The voice was clipped. Final. The conversation had finished as far as Henniger was concerned. Chicory opened her mouth to speak again, then thought better of it. They had pulled off the main Freeway, and seemed to be hurtling unsteadily along a disused stage coach track. Boysie put out his hand and felt Chicory’s hot in his. He could sense her blazing. “Why don’t you do something about the little shit?” she hissed in Boysie’s ear. Boysie considered the situation and decided that there was very little he could do in the circumstances. The atmosphere was not unlike that of a Mothers’ Union Meeting at which the chairwoman had just advocated free love.

Fifteen
minutes later they were back on the main highway. No one had spoken since Chicory’s hiss. She still simmered, while Boysie remained perplexed. The two men in front seemed quite at ease. A notice on their right said, “Rio Grande Motel One Mile. TV. Pool. Air conditioning. Twenty Units.”

The
Rio
Grande
Motel
was a two-tiered, pink stucco monstrosity trying to look like a hacienda, built to form three sides of a square. It gave the impression of being a tired oasis in the midst of the hot dry prairie.

“
Looks a bit seedy,” ventured Boysie.

“
Old guy who built it thought he’d gotta gold mine—catch passing trade too tired to go on to Albuquerque. Just didn’t pay off. Who’s goin’ to stay in a place like this when they can get the real thing in half an hour’s driving?” replied Henniger. “Anyhow, he’s got the trade today. We’ve taken the whole place justa be on the safe side.”

They
began to disembark from the ear. The patio was deserted. The pool looked stagnant “The living desert,” breathed Boysie, and, trying to make light of what promised to be a very fraught situation, began to sing softly, “There’s a small motel . .”