The Terminators Page 9

  "This way, please."

  The man had fallen into step with me as I moved along the busy sidewalk. He was a red-faced, white-haired, wiry little gent with a rolling, seaman's gait. I had a hunch I'd seen him before outside a Bergen restaurant. His dark suit

  was shabby and his dark work-shirt was frayed but he was wearing a tie. They all wear neckties over there when they come to town, at least the older ones do. It's a mark of respectability. His gnarled hands were in plain sight.

  "Sure," I said. "Lead on."

  We walked side by side down the main street, made a turn, and stopped in front of a restaurant in the middle of the block. It looked like a reasonably high-class place for the size of the town.

  "He waits inside," said my guide.

  "Thanks."

  Entering, I could tell at once I wasn't in a U.S. eatery, because there was an old man drinking his after-lunch beer near the door, slipping leftovers from his plate to his black-and-white spotted dog curled up under the table. I thought it looked kind of cozy and homelike. I hesitated. An elderly waitress looked around and jerked her head towards a door at the end of the room. I marched to it, and through it, closing it behind me. I found myself in a small meeting or banquet room. Hank Priest, alone at the end of the big table, looked up from a plate containing a couple of large sausages and some other stuff, and waved me to a chair beside him.

  "Hungry?" he asked as I sat down.

  I hesitated. "Well, I'm going to have to feed Diana when I get back on board ship," I said. "The poor girl's sitting in that cabin with a .38 Special in her hand, slowly starving to death."

  "She'll keep; she's a patient young lady. I have some things for you to take to her: hair dye and clothes. Meanwhile, have a little p0lse —sausage to you."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  He grinned. "Oh, that's right, you're a goddamned transplanted Swede, aren't you, son, just like I'm a transplanted Norwegian. I don't have to tell you about p0lse''

  "Actually, the Swedes call it korv." I said.

  "What did Denison have to say when you talked with him on the dock?"

  His voice was casual, but his eyes had narrowed slightly, watching me. I didn't know whether he expected me to act guilty about chatting with Denison, or just startled that he knew about it.

  "He said he was here to protect L. A.'s interests," I said. "We peasants call him Mr. Kotko, but Denison is a privileged employee of long standing, and has permission to use the great man's initials. It makes him happy all over, like a great big, bouncing puppy."

  "You know Denison? My man said you greeted each other like old friends. Or old enemies?"

  "I know Denison. His code name used to be Luke, when he worked for us."

  "Arthur didn't tell me that."

  Arthur was Arthur Borden, the man I generally refer to as Mac. His true identity is known only to a few. Priest, as a long-time friend, was one of the few.

  "There are some things you probably didn't tell him. Skipper," I said. "There are a lot of things nobody told me."

  "Well, if you've got business with Denison, don't let it interfere with your work for me, son."

  "No, sir."

  The aging waitress I'd encountered outside came in with a plate of sausages and a mug of beer, although I'd seen no signal passed. Maybe everybody got sausages and beer today. After she'd departed, I took a bite. They were very superior sausages, way out of the hot dog class.

  "You'll be happy to know the boy you put the fear of God into got into his little sports car and drove straight out of town," Priest said. "You won't have any more trouble with him. From what you were overheard to say to him, I gather you had some trouble with his partner last night."

  I regarded him grimly—Sigmund, the legendary underground hero brought back to life for reasons yet to be determined. I should have known, of course. If I'd been sharp, I'd have spotted him a couple of years ago when we'd just met, but I'd had other things on my mind at the time. I'd overlooked it then, and having got into the habit, I'd overlooked it last night. If I'd sensed anything at all, I'd attributed it to the Navy background. At a casual glance he was still the pleasant, stocky, crisply gray-haired, retired military gent whose liquor I'd drunk in Florida, with his deeply tanned face and the humorous, squinty little wrinkles around his faded blue eyes; but looking more closely I saw what I'd missed before.

  A lot of those uniformed, career characters are mere pushbutton, remote-control killers. They keep their hands clean and don't really know what death is all about. To them, it's a technical, scientific exercise in velocities and trajectories. That is, of course, particularly true of the Navy, where the big guns do the dirty work beyond the horizon and the spotter planes radio back the score— come to think of it, I guess the big guns are pretty much. obsolete, but the operating principles remain the same. Naval warfare is seldom if ever a gunwale-to-gunwale, pistol-and-cutlass business nowadays. I wouldn't be surprised if there are naval officers around responsible for hundreds of deaths in action, in one war or another, who have never come within a mile of a live enemy, or a dead one.

  But this wasn't one of them. This was a man, I was realizing belatedly, who'd seen death at close range, who'd administered it with his own hands, coldly and efficiently, maybe even smiling a little with those pale Norse eyes. I remembered Mac's description of his wartime way of working: ingenious, effective, and totally ruthless. I drew a long breath, and reminded myself not to be so damned hasty about sizing up situations, and people, in the future. I'd already made a couple of bad mistakes here.

  "Oh, that big, blond guy?" I said to Priest. "He had trouble. I had no trouble."

  It was a little gaudy. Hell, let's be honest, it was Tarzan pounding his chest and making with the victory cry of the Great Apes. I guess I was trying to make some kind of an impression on the older man facing me, who'd once rated pretty high in something approximating my own line of endeavor. Or maybe I was just trying to correct an impression already made.

  I couldn't help realizing, of course, that he must have had a good laugh watching me doing my best, like a dutiful seeing-eye dog, to show the blind and bumbling old seafaring gent through the dark, unfamiliar mazes of shoreside intrigue. Unfamiliar, hell! He'd been there before me; he knew the way as well as I did—at least he'd known it once, and once is all it takes. Well, I'd asked for it. I'd been a little too eager to play the cynical pro dealing with naive amateurs, without bothering to check just how naive they really were. I saw an amused gleam in the sea-faded blue eyes.

  "Very well, Matt," Priest said. "By now you must have been told I once spent quite a bit of time along this coast. I still have contacts here—well, you've seen some of my old associates hanging around. If you should need help, local help, don't hesitate to ask."

  It was a good thing, I reflected sourly, that I had no designs on the throne of Norway. With the amount of assistance I'd had offered me on this job, I could have taken Oslo without firing a shot.

  "Yes, sir," I said. "But the only help I really need at the moment, sir, is whatever is required to let me understand how you can get all these nice Norwegian citizens to help you rob their country of its precious natural resources." He watched me, still smiling a little, but his eyes had narrowed again. He didn't speak and I went on: "Or could it be, sir, that you're telling your Norska troops one thing, and your Amerikanska forces something else?"

  He grinned abruptly. "It's the old underground razzle-dazzle, son," he said cheerfully. "You tell your eager young resistance fighters, full of piss and patriotism, what they want to hear. You certainly don't ever tell them the truth. Hell, they might panic if they knew the truth. Or get sick to their delicate little guts. Or they might even spill it to somebody who shouldn't know. You never can trust an idealist with the truth, Mr. Helm, you ought to know that. Truth is the one thing he just can't stand."

  "Or she?" I said, watching him.

  "Precisely," Priest said. "Just because a young girl's beautiful idealism has got temporari
ly reversed, like the polarity of a circuit, doesn't make her any less of an idealist, does it?"

  "I think you're underestimating the kid, if we're talking about the same thing," I said. "Of course, there was Evelyn Benson, too. And a guy called Robbie nobody's bothered to tell me much about. The mortality seems to be high among reversed idealists, if that's what they were." Priest said nothing. I went on: "And then there's a guy called Helm. No idealist he, backwards or forwards. Does he get to hear the truth, sir?"

  Priest laughed shortly. "If I'm not confiding in men like old Lars, who just brought you here, who once fought beside me and saved my life, what makes you think I'll confide in you, son? This is a fairly important project, and security is absolutely imperative."

  "Yes, sir," I said. "Excuse me while I puke, sir. That word always does something funny to my insides."

  He stared at me bleakly. "You're going to have to take me on faith, Mr. Helm. When you come across contradictory bits of information you don't like, just remind yourself that this mission was not initiated to make you happy. What you don't like may confuse somebody else, somebody we've got to keep confused in order to succeed. When your faith wavers, son, remind yourself that this operation has been cleared in Washington; it has even been cleared with your own superior. Tell yourself firmly that Captain Henry Famham Priest, USN, is a man who's served his country all his life and is pretty much in the habit; he's not likely to go Benedict Arnold all of a sudden in his old age." The pale eyes watched me unblinkingly. "Either that, son, or you're going to have to haul your ass the hell out of here. I can use you but I can do without you. Make up your goddamned mind."

  I let a little time go by in silence; then I said, "That's quite a speech, but may I make a suggestion, sir?"

  "What?"

  "Don't use the word 'faith.' People get suspicious when you ask them to take you on faith. It's been overdone. Skipper."

  It was a calculated risk. I was going to have to work with the guy; I couldn't have him thinking I was a sucker for inspiring, patriotic speeches, even if I had been a little slow-witted earlier. There was a moment of silence; then he threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

  At last he drew a long breath and wiped his eyes. "My apologies, son," he said. "I forgot I was dealing with a pro. I've got in the habit of schmaltzing it up a bit for the impressionable civilians. No hard feelings, I hope."

  He held out his hand. I shook it and retrieved my fingers, more or less intact. There was no reason to change a winning game, so I went on: "Even if you want to, you can't get rid of me, sir. I've got orders to stick around and look after you like a baby. I just got instructions from Washington, and the word is you're kind of a helpless old character who could get into serious trouble, forgetting that World War II was a long time ago. So if you need your nose wiped, sir, or your diapers changed, or the nurse doesn't bring your two a.m. feeding on schedule, just let me know right away, please."

  Again, it was nip and duck. We sat there for several seconds while he fought back an attack of angry seniority. Then he grinned slowly.

  "Very good, Mr. Helm. Very good indeed. Now we know where we stand, don't we?"

  I wasn't so sure about that, but at least we'd redistributed the local balance of power slightly. I said, "That was the general idea."

  "Well, finish your goddamned p0lse so I can spread out the chart and show you the general layout. . . ."

  He'd obviously had a lot of practice at explaining geography to stupid subordinates. By the time he was through I knew the North Sea like my favorite fishing lake near Sante Fe, New Mexico—it had damned well better be my favorite since, in that dry country, it's just about the only water around, besides the Rio Grande, big enough to swim a trout. But here there was more water, a hell of a lot . more, and we weren't concerned with fish.

  He showed me the locations of the submerged oil and gas fields: the British operations over to the west—one named Indefatigable, in true British fashion—the Belgian, Dutch, German, and Danish areas to the south; and the Norwegian fields, Ekofisk, Frigg, and particularly Torbotten, the latest discovery way up north where nobody'd really expected to hit anything, he said. We also discussed a bit of strategy dealing, mainly, with the Elfenbein problem. I offered a solution he didn't think much of.

  "You're not going to bluff Ivory like you bluffed that little boy of his," he warned me.

  "Who's bluffing?" I asked. "Anyway, nobody'll call me. Dr. Elfenbein's been around. He knows better than to confront a man in my line of work with a direct challenge. He knows, or thinks he knows, that we homicidal types are all unbalanced, dangerously unstable, apt to go completely berserk if crossed. He won't risk it, not if he's looked up my record, as he undoubtedly has."

  "You're running hard on that record of yours, son. One day you'll rely on it and it won't work."

  "Maybe," I said. "But it's what you hired me for, so let's make use of it while it is working. I wouldn't be fool enough to try it on Denison; but if I can't back down a white-haired little laboratory genius, even one with a criminal bent, I'll turn in my invisible ink. Who's he working for, anyway?"

  "What?"

  "Ivory," I said. "Who's his client here, who's paying his freight?"

  "We haven't been able to determine that. As far as we know, Elfenbein is working on speculation, hoping he can find a customer once he gets hold of something to sell." Priest shrugged, dismissing the subject. He went on: "You have two contacts to arrange. Matt, in Trondheim and in Svolvaer. Well, the arrangements have already been made, and Diana knows them, so I won't waste time on them here; but your job is to see that the people up there get met, and their material picked up, according to plan. Just remember, a lot of these folks aren't quite as brave as they were back when their country was in the hands of the Nazis. They're helping me out, but they're not very, happy. Anything out of line, and they'll crawl back into the woodwork; so be careful."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "The important delivery is the one near the end of the line," he went on. "You'll get plans for a certain piece of machinery invented by a drunken, middle-aged, oilfield bum who once was a bright, young, mechanical genius with a knack for explosives. He sank a small troopship for us and did a fine job, but he was one of the sensitive ones, you know the type, and he started seeing drowning Germans in his dreams. Do you ever see dead men in your sleep, son?"

  "No, sir," I said. "I'm told I have no imagination."

  "Well, this chap had too much imagination, and it more or less finished him; but once in a while he gets lucid and tosses off an invention, something so simple nobody ever thought of it before, if you know what I mean. This gadget of his is one of them. He named it after me, you know."

  "So I understand."

  "Don't think the gesture was flattering, Mr. Helm," Priest said, smiling thinly. "The boy—well, he's no boy now, but he was then—hates my cold-blooded, murdering guts, and told me so, in several languages, at the time. Apparently he feels this is just the kind of lousy device that ought to be named after a bastard like Sigmund, the sadistic, heartless slob everybody else in Norway considers a hero. I'm just giving you a rough idea of his attitude, using his words as well as I can. To put it differently, it's his big joke. Everybody else will consider it a tribute to a national hero; only Johann and I know what he really means by it. And now you."

  I said, "The motivations are getting a little complicated, but I think I'm still with you, sir."

  "Don't fall for this Sigmund crap, is what I'm trying to tell you," Priest said. "My job was to do as much damage as I could, and I did it. Some of them hated me for it and some of them loved me, and to hell with all of them. Well, that's putting it too strongly. They were good tough men. Some of them still are. But you know how these things go. A bunch of mean, ragged bastards, scared shitless, prowling through the fjells like hungry wolves, becomes, in the history books, a band of clean, noble patriots led by a saint on a white horse. You sneak into a village one night and slit the throa
ts of five poor, stupid Nazis from behind and ten years later you're reading about the goddamned battle of Blomdal complete with cavalry, band, and bugles. But just don't expect that if you say Sigmund they're all going to knock themselves out helping you. Some of them got hurt, including some who didn't expect it, and didn't think it was fair it should happen to them. Fair, hell! Who ever heard of a fair war, for God's sake?"

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Well," he said, "you know the standard German method of retaliating for guerrilla attacks back in those days. What the hell made them think we'd pay any attention to their lousy hostages, son? We were getting shot; if somebody else got shot, too, we were just as sorry as we could be. It was too damned bad, and all that, but we had a war to fight and we just got the hell on with it. If those people wouldn't get out into the hills and fight with us, the least they could do was stay in town and die with us, was the way we felt at the time."

  The room was very quiet after he stopped talking. Then a truck drove by outside, and he reached for his mug and finished off his beer and ran the back of his hand across his mouth.

  "The old man's getting garrulous," he said dryly. "Let's get back to business. In addition to the Siphon drawings, we need some information about the area that's kind of specialized and not in the oil and gas journals. Johann's done the work on Torbotten; he'll hand it over with the plans. He's in bad shape, he needs what I'm paying him, but don't discount the possibility of a doublecross anyway. In other words, make sure there's a girl at the right place at the right time, but be careful."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  He didn't go on at once. The door opened, and the waitress came in with another beer. I wondered about ESP and decided there was probably a buzzer under the rug at the head of the table where he sat.