The Terminators Read online

  The silverhaired girl was sipping beer from a slim, tall, pilsner glass. It was her movement to reach the bottle for a refill that had caught my eye. Otherwise she sat perfectly silent, perfectly still, just watching and listening.

  Kotko had now proved to his own satisfaction, and logically demonstrated to everyone in the room, that the substitution must have been performed by me between the time I took the second batch of papers from Greta and put them with the first, and the time I handed the three substitute envelopes to Denison. That meant, he proclaimed, that since I hadn't been out of Greta's sight, she must have seen me cache the real, valuable documents somewhere, unless. . . .

  His timing was good. Right on cue, Gerald, the moustached pilot, appeared at the head of the stairs. He paused as he reached room level, then came forward at Kotko's signal.

  "Well, Jerry?"

  "There is nothing in the aircraft, Mr. Kotko. And Wesley says they hid nothing in the entrance, the hall, or the store-room. Here are their coats. Also nothing."

  Denison asked, "You're sure?" His voice was sharp.

  Jerry turned his head a bit. "Fuck you," he said, quite pleasantly.

  Kotko said, "If Gerald says there is nothing, if Wesley says there is nothing, there is nothing. All right, Jerry. Keep yourself available." . "Righto, Mr. Kotko."

  When he'd gone, Kotko looked at the small girl before him, rather sadly. "You heard, Miss Elfenbein? He did not hide them in the helicopter, or in this house." He sighed, and came around the table to stand over her. "Where did he hide them. Miss Elfenbein? By your own story, you must have seen—"

  "I didn't!" she gasped. "I didn't see anything. Why don't you ask him, instead of b-bullying me?"

  "Miss Elfenbein," he said deliberately, "we are not asking Mr. Helm, because Mr. Helm is a trained government professional who will not speak unless he chooses to speak, not unless we employ drugs that we do not, unfortunately, have. Mr. Helm has been subjected to interrogation before, we are informed. He has had a great deal of practice at keeping his mouth closed under duress, and is reported to be quite good at it. How much practice have you had, Miss Elfenbein? How good are you?" He gave her a sudden, violent shove that sent her sprawling. "Never mind ogling the young lady, Denison," he said, moving forward. "Watch the man."

  "I'm watching him, Mr. Kotko."

  It was out of character. I mean, the great man should have seated himself calmly behind the table, lighting a casual cigarette perhaps, keeping up a flow of clever conversation to show how little it all meant to him, while the menials did the dirty, rough-'em-up work for him. Instead, he moved in and performed the operation with his own hands. It took him about ten minutes, working methodically and without haste, to reduce a rather nice-looking young lady to something resembling a mauled and bedraggled and bloodied kitten that kept trying to crawl away on all fours whimpering that it didn't know, didn't know, didn't know. ...

  I drew a long breath and reminded myself that I didn't owe a damned thing to any Elfenbeins, quite the contrary. When the tall figure with the shaved head paused for breath, I spoke harshly: "If you've had your fun, Kotko, let's talk some sense for a change."

  He turned to look at me with a funny, glazed look in his eyes. ''Mister Kotko," he said.

  I shrugged. "How long is it going to take you to wake up, Mister Kotko? How long is it going to take you to realize you're looking for something that doesn't exist? There are no real documents; there never were. There is no Sigmund Siphon. There never was."

  XXI.

  GRETA Elfenbein crouched against the wall, sobbing helplessly, with her hair straggling damply down her blood-smeared face. The blood had made a mess of her white sweater and spotted her gay pants, and it hadn't done the room's rug any good, either; but it was nose-bleed blood, a dime a- pint, no indication of any serious damage. It had been a reasonably careful mussing-up job; just enough to persuade a sheltered young lady to talk, if she had anything to talk about.

  Kotko studied her for a moment, coldly, decided she wasn't worth any more exertion, and walked up to me wiping his hands on a handkerchief, which he dropped into a nearby wastebasket.

  "What are you trying to say?" he demanded.

  "I'm not trying to say it. I've said it."

  "Don't get flip with me, government boy!" I noticed he had discarded the royal plural. He turned sharply. "What do you think you're doing?"

  The girl with the long blond hair had crossed the room to kneel beside Greta. When she looked around, I understood the reason for the elaborate eye makeup. Her right eye sported a rather spectacular shiner, visible now in the light from the big windows.

  "I'm just sticking her back together a little, Line," she said calmly. She had a nice, throaty, sexy voice—well, she would have. She went on: "You can take her apart again later, if you feel like it. More fun that way, huh?" She spoke to the weeping girl: "Come on, darling, cooperate. Misty can't pick you up all by herself. Here, hold this against it so you don't get it all over. . . . That's the girl!"

  Kotko watched the two of them make their unsteady way into the corner by the fire. The silvery blonde who'd called herself Misty seated her patient in one of the big armchairs. Kotko shrugged and turned back to me.

  "That's a very funny story you just told. Helm. I don't like funny stories, or people who tell them."

  I said, "We've been conned, Mr. Kotko. We've been tricked into playing charades to entertain each other, particularly you. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that you've been the audience, and we've been the dolls putting on a thrilling little puppet melodrama entitled The Great Norwegian Oil Robbery. The U.S. government, Elfenbein, and that model of youthful integrity, the handsome, hungry P.R. boy from Aloco, not to mention yours truly, we've all been dancing on invisible strings to persuade you there was a great plot afoot that could be turned to your benefit. Benefit, hell! You had the Torbotten concession, or whatever you oilmen call it, quite legally; but you didn't like the terms of the contract so you tried to improve on it a bit, right? But how long do you think you'll be drilling and pumping out there after the Norskies discover that you tried to help yourself to a larger serving than you were signed up for? We've all been suckered, Mr. Kotko, but guess who's the biggest sucker of the lot!"

  He had a good poker face. He said without expression: "I don't think our Norwegian friends like being called Norskies."

  I said, "Hell, I'm Svensk by blood; I can call them anything I damned well please. We've feuded for generations, in a neighborly fashion. They even went to a lot of trouble to louse up their language so it wouldn't look like Swedish the way it used to. Does the subject interest you, Mr. Kotko? Do you want to hear a lecture on Norsk-Svensk relations? Norway used to be ruled by Sweden, you see, so—"

  He slapped me hard across the face. "I told you. I don't like funny stories. Or funny men."

  I said, "That wasn't very smart, Mr. Kotko. Why go around making new enemies when you've got enough old ones to go around, some you don't even know about." He didn't rise to that bait, so I went on smoothly, "Are you ready for a bit of sensible action for a change, like taking a look at what's actually on that table? Or do you have to beat up somebody else first? Go on, take another swing. Be my guest."

  He stared at me bleakly for a moment. "There's nothing on the table. Nothing but valueless paper. The real information, the real plans—"

  I glanced at Denison. "Is he always like this? Doesn't he ever listen?" I swung back to Kotko. "Goddamn it, I just told you! There is no real information. There are no real plans. All there is, all there ever was, is what's on that fancy-pine table. Now, can we go look at it and see if it'll tell us something; or do you want me to kill some more time chattering brightly while you make up your cotton-picking mind? I can tell you a yarn I heard in a bar once—I don't vouch for the accuracy; the guy was drunk and so was I—about what happened when the Nazis invaded Norway. There was this old fort, see, in Oslofjord—"

  Kotko was staring at me hard, as if debati
ng whether or not to slap me once more. He turned sharply, walked around the table, and leaned over the papers there.

  I went on talking. "—this old fort in Oslofjord, Oskarsborg, with two elderly cannon dating from the days when artillerymen actually made up affectionate pet names for their pieces. These big old coastal guns were called Moses and Aaron, as I recall, don't ask me why. Something Biblical like that, anyway. They were really ancient, this fellow told me, so old I guess Nazi intelligence had kind of discounted them. Anyway, on that day in April, 1940, without any warning or declaration of war, there came the Nazi invasion fleet up the fiord led by the heavy cruiser Blucher, a fine modem warship in the van of a great modem armada, invincible, irresistible. Taking Oslo was going to be a Sunday picnic. But suddenly, the guy said, there was a sound like a freight train rolling through the sky. The shores of Oslofjord started shaking. The Oskarsborg fortress had opened up. Big old Moses and Aaron were speaking at last, after all the long years of silence. Two military antiques against the whole German Navy, they were doing the job they'd been put there for, they were defending the capital of Norway. When they ceased firing, the Blucher was sinking in flames, and the great Nazi armada was fleeing for its life. Oh, it landed elsewhere later, but most of the invasion command had gone down with the flagship; and what with the delay and confusion, the Norwegian king and government, whom the Nazis had hoped to capture in Oslo, had escaped—"

  "Shut up."

  "Yes, Mr. Kotko."

  "Come here."

  "Yes, Mr. Kotko."

  "What do you expect this gibberish to tell us?"

  Moving deliberately so as not to startle Denison into doing something hasty, nervous as he undoubtedly was about that pistol in my sock, I walked around the table to stand beside Kotko. I pointed to a column of figures.

  "What does that say?"

  "Nothing," he said.

  "There are words beside the numbers," I said. 'It's got to say something."

  "All right, take this line," he said, putting his finger on the paper. "It translates to something like 'Barrier Density .0918 percent.'"

  "And?"

  "I've been dealing with petroleum and oil fields for a number of years," Kotko said. "I've never heard of a barrier density. I don't think there is any such thing. And if there were, a density should be expressed not in percents, but in units of mass and volume, like grams per cubic centimeter, shouldn't it? And it's all like that, damn it, like that poem by Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky. It's all scientific jabberwocky. Helm."

  Baffled and bewildered, the guy sounded almost human. I had to glance towards where the blond girl was trying to make Greta Elfenbein look slightly less like a battlefield casualty, to remind myself that he wasn't a guy of whom I really approved.

  "In other words," I said, "somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it up. Jabberwocky doesn't come easy. It takes, you might say, imagination. Why not just copy a couple of pages out of a Norwegian technical magazine if all you wanted was some scientific-looking material to fool somebody? What about this drawing? Can you make anything of it?"

  He shrugged. "It's no machinery I've ever had any dealings with. That's a detail sketch. This one gives the overall picture of the system, whatever the hell it is. ... Do you recognize it. Helm?"

  I'd pulled the mechanical drawing in front of me. I studied it for a while, frowning. There was something faintly familiar. ... I swung it around so I could see it upside down. It was no time to laugh, I told myself firmly, but I couldn't help a choked-off snort, anyway.

  Kotko said sharply, "What do you find so amusing?"

  "It's a long story," I said.

  "I'm a little weary of your long stories," he said. "Do you recognize this drawing."

  "Yes, sir," I said. You can stick the needle much deeper, with reasonable safety, if you remember to call them sir and mister. "That is, I know where it came from. There were three drawings when I saw them. They've been combined in a very interesting way by a skilled and ingenious draftsman—"

  "Where did you see them?" he snapped.

  "In Florida, a couple of years ago," I said. "Let me give you the background, Mr. Kotko. Living overseas, you may not be aware of it, but in America we nowadays have a fine organization known as the Environmental Protection

  Agency, or EPA, dedicated to keeping our air and water pure, a very worthy purpose. Only sometimes, like all ecological bureaucrats, these folks get carried away by their own virtue—particularly when they find some nice, easy, obvious subjects for purification that aren't big enough or rich enough to fight back very hard. Well, in the U.S., we also have a relatively small number of private boats sizable enough to be lived on for longer or shorter periods, a few hundred thousand I'm told, certainly less than half a million. They produce only a fraction of a percent of the total water pollution in even the most crowded areas; but for some reason the EPA considers this little bit of contamination peculiarly offensive—"

  "Get to the point. Helm!"

  "I'm getting there," I said. "The EPA in its wisdom has decided that the human waste from a few hundred thousand private vessels is a clear and present danger to life upon this earth and must on no account be deposited in the ocean. Cities of millions discharge their effluents into the world's waters; great industries dump deadly poisons practically where they please; giant whales, porpoises, and fishes large and small use the seas for their bathrooms in a totally disgusting manner; but the yacht owner. . . . This isn't my diatribe, Mr. Kotko. I'm just repeating what I was told two years back, as well as I remember it"

  "And?"

  "The EPA is—or was at that time—busy considering elaborate, not to say impossible, standards for marine plumbing on small private vessels," I said. "What you've got here, Mr. Kotko, is an imaginative and artistic version of a nonpolluting head built to slightly—but only slightly —exaggerated EPA specifications." I kept my voice expressionless. "In other words, Mr. Kotko, there's your Sigmund Siphon. A seagoing crapper."

  There was an odd silence in the room. I guess everybody expected the man to explode. Even the girls were motionless, blond Misty freezing with a stained Kleenex in her hand. But I guess you don't get to be, and stay, a millionaire just by shaving your head and beating up little girls. Kotko was perfectly still for a moment, looking down at the drawing. When he spoke, his voice was steady and very soft.

  "You say you saw the plans from which this was derived? In Florida?"

  "Yes, sir. There were, you see, three systems being considered for a thirty-foot fishing vessel belonging to a gent of my acquaintance. He was kind of upset about having to tear up his beloved boat to install a lot of Mickey Mouse plumbing, and he held forth to anybody who happened to be handy; and I was handy for a week or so. He described the three possibilities in very colorful terms. One involved chemical treatment, the second used a combustion process, and the third employed a holding tank, meaning that you had to live with your stinking waste products until you could find an official pump-out station on shore —that was the system being pushed by the EPA. Just what you were supposed to do on a cruise in an area where there were no official facilities, or if you merely stayed off shore for more than a few days, had never been clearly explained, said my informant."

  "Who?" Kotko's voice was still low, but kind of strangled.

  "It's a very nice job," I said. "He got a clever draftsman to combine all three systems into one, you see. The EPA should be very pleased: first you treat it chemically, then you bum it, then you flush the ashes into the holding tank for respectful burial ashore. Foolproof; not one little pollutant can escape. Here's the seat, see, kind of an odd perspective, but when you turn it this way you can recognize—"

  "Damn you, who?"

  "You know the answer," I said. "Unfortunately, I spoiled his great moment, Mr. Kotko. He went to a lot of trouble to deliver it to you himself and watch your face as he explained it to you."

  He yanked me away from the table, and swung me around to face him. It was just
as well. I don't like people who maul me and, having certain plans for him, I wanted to keep right on not liking him. He was making it easy.

  "You mean your lousy little retired Navy captain played this crazy joke—"

  "Wake up, Mr. Kotko," I said. "He isn't so lousy and he isn't so little. If your boy here had done his homework you'd know that." I said it without looking at Denison and I went on before he could speak: "And you played a joke on Hank Priest once, Mr. Kotko. He's just paying you back in kind."

  "I played. . . ?" He snorted. "I've never met the man!"

  "Not in person," I said. "But some years ago you gave him, by proxy so to speak, a pretty little plastic card saying PETROX on it. You told him that if he presented that card at any of your installations, he could get all kinds of nice petroleum products for it. Well, the joke was on him. A very funny thing happened a little while back, Mr. Kotko. Hank Priest took your little card to his local marine Petrox station, or dock, and haha, what do you know? It was as worthless as that nautical pisspot he's just presented to you, which won't produce any oil, either."

  Kotko looked genuinely shocked. "You mean, this lunatic is holding me responsible—"

  "You're dealing with a Navy man, Mr. Kotko," I said. "In the Navy, the man on top gets all the credit when things go right. And all the blame when things go wrong. You're the man on top. Things went wrong. The way he looks at it, it's your baby."

  "The Arabs—"

  I shrugged. "Don't argue with me, Mr. Kotko. I'm not the guy who's mad at you." That was not, of course, strictly true; but it wasn't a moment for slavish adherence to the truth.

  He was still shocked and baffled. "But he had the U.S. government behind him!"

  "The U.S. government is a hell of a big place," I said. "Hank Priest knows his way around Washington. He undoubtedly knew where to find the right, unprincipled officials who'd give him a little cautious backing for an illegal project if he showed them how they could make a profit out of the deal. There are a few unscrupulous people around that town, or hadn't you heard? Of course, he just wanted their support to make the deal look attractive to you, figuring, I suppose, that you wouldn't examine the details quite so closely if it was all stamped U.S. Approved."