The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels (Mammoth Books) Page 28

  A fire siren was wailing in the distance. There were no more sounds of running feet above the torture chamber.

  An automobile exhaust ripped the night. There were heavier explosions from the seat of the fire; then a terrific explosion that burst in the warped door. An inferno of red, roaring flame showed its hideous maw. Heat transformed the room into an oven. The red flames were bordered with a twisting vortex of black smoke.

  Major Brane gave the inferno a casual glance, stood to one side to let the girl join him. She walked steadily to his side, and together, they walked along the passage, climbed a flight of stairs.

  They came to what appeared to be a solid wall. Major Brane pushed against it. It was plaster and lath, and doubtless swung on a pivot. Major Brane had no time to locate the catch which controlled the opening; he lashed out with his foot, kicked a hole in the plaster. When he looked through the opening, he was peering into a room, furnished as a bedroom. It was deserted.

  His second kick dislodged the spring mechanism which controlled the door. The section of plastered wall swung around. Major Brane led the girl into the room, Brinkhoff’s automatic ready at his side. They walked through the room to a passage.

  The open door led to the night, revealed a glimpse of the street outside, which was already crowded with curious spectators, showed firemen running with a hose. But Major Brane turned in the other direction.

  “This way,” he said. “It will avoid explanations.”

  They ran down the corridor, toward a rear exit. Major Brane recognized the stairs which led to the garage. He piloted the girl toward them.

  In the garage she paused, looked about her. There was a wooden jack handle lying on a bench. The girl stopped to pick it up.

  Major Brane grinned at her, “You won’t need it. They’ve all ducked for cover,” he said.

  The girl said nothing, which was as he had expected.

  A fireman came running down the alley, motioning calling instructions to other men, who were dragging a hose. He glanced sharply at Major Brane and the girl.

  “Get outa here!” he yelled. “You’re inside the fire lines. You’ll get killed, sticking your noses into danger zones.”

  Major Brane bowed apologetically. “Is this the danger zone?” he asked, wide-eyed in his innocence.

  The fireman snorted.

  “It sure is. Get out!”

  Major Brane followed instructions. They came to the fire lines at the corner, turned into a dark building entrance. Major Brane peered out, whispered to the girl.

  “We don’t want to he seen coming out of this district. The thing to do is wait until they run in that second hose, then slip along the shadows, and . . .”

  He sensed a surreptitious rustle behind him. He turned, startled, just in time to see the jack handle coming down. He tried to throw up his hand, and was too late. The jack handle crashed on his head. He fought to keep his senses. There were blinding lights before his eyes, a black nausea gripping him. Something seemed to burst in his brain. He realized it was the jack handle making a second blow, and then he knew nothing further, save a vast engulfing wall of blackness smothered him with a rushing embrace.

  When next he knew anything, it was a series of joltings and swayings, interspersed with demoniacal screams. The screams grew and receded at regular intervals, split the tortured head of Major Brane as though they had been edged with the teeth of a saw.

  Then he identified them. They were the wails of a siren, and he was riding in an ambulance.

  A bell clanged. The screams died away. The ambulance stopped, backed. The door opened. Hands slid out the stretcher. Major Brane groaned, tried to sit up, was gripped with faintness and nausea. He became unconscious again.

  The next thing he knew, there was a bright light in his eyes and something soothing on his head. He felt soft hands patting about in the finishing touches of a dressing.

  He opened his eyes. A nurse regarded him without pity, without scorn, merely as a receiving hospital nurse regards any minor case.

  “You got past the fire line and into the danger zone,” she said. “Something fell on your head.”

  Major Brane had presence of mind enough to heave a sigh of relief that the Chinese girl had taken his automatic with her. To have had that in his possession when he was found would have necessitated explanation.

  “A Chinese girl told them about seeing you try to run past the line, when something fell from a building,” said the nurse. “Her name’s on record, if you want a witness for anything.”

  Major Brane grinned. “Not at all necessary,” he said. “I was simply careless, that’s all.”

  “I’ll say you were,” said the nurse, helping him to sit upright. “Feel better?”

  Major Brane slid his feet over the edge of the surgical table.

  “I think I can make it all right,” he said.

  She helped him to a chair, gave him a stimulant. Fifteen minutes later he was able to call a cab and leave the hospital. He went at once to his hotel.

  He brushed past the clerk, who stared at his bandaged head curiously; he took the elevator, went to his own room. He fitted a key, opened the door. The smell of Chinese tobacco assailed his nostrils.

  “Do not turn on the light,” said a voice, and Major Brane recognized it as that of the old Chinese sage who had started him upon his mission.

  Major Brane hesitated, sighed, walked into the room, and closed the door.

  “I came to give my apologies,” said the old man, a huddled figure of dark mystery in the darkened room, illuminated only by such light as came through the transom over the door.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Major Brane. “I was careless.”

  “But,” said the sage. “I want you to understand . . .”

  Major Brane laughed. “I understood,” he said, “as soon as I saw the jack handle coming down on my head. The girl had the check hidden, and she wanted to get it right away. She couldn’t be certain that my rescue wasn’t merely a ruse on the part of her enemies. I didn’t have anything to identify me as having come from her friends. Therefore, it was possible that her enemies, seeing that torture would do no good, had staged a fake rescue, hoping to trap her into taking her supposed rescuer to the place where the check was hidden. I should have anticipated just such a thought on her part.”

  The old man got to his feet.

  Major Brane could hear him sigh.

  “It’s satisfying to deal with one who has understanding,” he said.

  Major Brane saw him move to the door, open it, saw the hunched figure silhouetted against the oblong of light from the corridor.

  “She had dropped the check in the waste basket by the side of her desk when she knew her theft was discovered,” said the old man, and closed the door.

  Major Brane sat in the dakness for some seconds before he turned on the light. When he did so he saw two articles on the table near which the old man had sat. One was a white jade figure of the Goddess of Mercy, a figure that was carved with infinite cunning and patience, a figure that thrilled the collector’s heart of Major Brane. Instantly he knew that it was something that was almost priceless. The second object was a purse, crammed with bills of large denomination.

  Major Brane inspected the jade figure with appreciative eyes, touched it with fingertips that were almost reverent for a full ten minutes before he even thought to count the currency in the purse. The amount was ample.

  Then Major Brane undressed, crawled into bed. He got up an hour later, took ten grains of aspirin, and drifted off to sleep. He awoke in the morning, jumped from bed, and pulled the morning paper out from under the door.

  Headlines announced the representatives of the Cantonese government had consented to consult with Chiang Kai-shek at the international port of Shanghai, the object being to patch up their internal difficulties so that China could present an unbroken front to her external enemies.

  Major Brane sighed. It had been a hard night’s work, but the results had been spe
edy.

  On his way to breakfast, he encountered the night elevator operator.

  “There was an old Chinaman who called on me last night,” he said. “‘What time did he come in?”

  The operator stared at him with wide eyes. “There wasn’t any Chinaman came in while I was on duty,” he said.

  Major Brane nodded. “Perhaps,” he said, “I was mistaken.”

  When he came to think of it, the Chinese sage would never have left a back track which could be traced to Major Brane. Doubtless the events of the preceding night had been such that no man and no government wished to be officially identified either with their success or failure.

  Major Brane was a lone wolf, prowling through a diplomatic danger zone; but he would not have had it otherwise.

  JOHN D. MACDONALD

  Betrayed

  It was an Indian summer afternoon in mid-October – Sunday afternoon. Francie had gone back to the lab, five miles from the lakeside cabin, but Dr. Blair Cudahy, the Administrator, had shooed her out, saying that he was committing enough perjury on the civil service hours-of-work reports without having her work Sundays, too.

  And so Francie Aintrell had climbed back into her ten-year-old sedan and come rattling over the potholed highway back to the small cabin. She sat on the miniature porch, her back against a wooden upright, fingers laced around one blue-jeaned knee.

  Work, she had learned, was one of the anesthetics. Work and time. They all talked about the healing wonder of time. As though each second could be another tiny layer of insulation between you and Bob. And one day, when enough seconds and minutes and years had gone by, you could look in your mirror and see a face old enough to be the mother of Bob, and his face would remain young and unchanged in memory.

  But she could look in the wavery mirror in the little camp and touch her cheeks with her finger tips, touch the face that he had loved, see the blue eyes he had loved; the black hair.

  And then she would forget the classic shape of the little tragedy. West Point, post-World War II class. Second Lieutenant Robert Aintrell. One of the expendable ones. And expended, of course, near a reservoir no one had ever heard of before.

  KIA. A lot of them from that class became KIA on the record.

  When he had been sent to Korea, she had gone from the West Coast back to the Pentagon and applied for reinstatement. Clerk-stenographer CAF 6. Assigned to the District Control Section of the Industrial Service Branch of the Office of the Chief of Ordinance.

  And then they send you a wire and you open it, and the whole world makes a convulsive twist and lands in a new pattern. It can’t happen to you – and to Bob. But it has.

  So after the first hurt, so sharp and wild that it was like a kind of insanity, Francie applied for work outside Washington, because they had been together in Washington, and that made it a place to escape from.

  Everyone had been sweet. And then there had been the investigation. Very detailed, and very thorough. “Yes, Mrs. Aintrell is a loyal citizen. Class A security risk.”

  Promotion to CAF 7. “Report to Dr. Cudahy, please. Vanders, New York. Yes, that’s in the Adirondacks – near Lake Arthur. Sorry the only name we have for that organization is Unit Thirty.”

  And three miles from Vanders, five miles from the lake, she had found a new gravel road, a shining wire fence at the end of it, a guard post, a cinder-block building, a power cable marching over the hills on towers, ending at the laboratory.

  She had reported to Blair Cudahy, a fat little mild-eyed man. She could not tell, but she thought that he approved of her. “Mrs. Aintrell, you have been approved by Security. There is no need, I’m sure, to tell you not to discuss what we are doing here.”

  “No, sir,” she had replied. “I quite understand.”

  “We are concerned with electronics, with radar. This is a research organization. The terminology will give you difficulty at first. If we accomplish our mission here, Mrs. Aintrell, we will be able to design a nose fuse for interceptor rockets which will make any air attack on this continent – too expensive to contemplate.”

  At that, Cudahy hitched in his chair and turned so that he could glance over his shoulder at an enlarged photograph of an illustration Francie remembered seeing in a magazine. It showed the fat red bloom of the atom god towering over the Manhattan skyline.

  Cudahy turned back and smiled. “That is the threat that goads us on. Now come and meet the staff.”

  Most of them were young. The names and faces were a blur. Francie didn’t mind. She knew that she would straighten them out soon enough. Ten scientists and engineers. About fifteen technicians. And then the guards and housekeeping personnel.

  The bachelor staff lived behind the wire. The married staff rented cabins in the vicinity. Dr. Blair Cudahy’s administrative assistant was a tall, youngish man with deep-set quiet eyes, a relaxed manner, a hint of stubbornness in the set of the jaw. His name was Clinton Reese.

  After they were introduced, Cudahy said, “I believe Clint has found a place for you.”

  “Next best thing to a cave, Mrs. Aintrell,” Clint Reese had said. “But you have lovely neighbors. Mostly bears. You have a car?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. His casual banter seemed oddly out of place when she looked beyond his shoulder and saw that picture on Cudahy’s office wall.

  “I’ll take you to the local car mart and we’ll get you one.”

  Cudahy said, “Thanks, Clint. Show her where she’ll work and give her a run through on the duties, then take her out to that place you rented. We’ll expect you at nine tomorrow morning, Mrs. Aintrell.”

  Clint took her to her desk. He said, “Those crazy people you met are scientists and engineers. They work in teams, attempting different avenues of approach to the same problem. Left to their own devices, they’d keep notes on the backs of match folders. Because even scientists sometimes drop dead, we have to keep progress reports up to date in case somebody else has to take over. There are three teams. You’ll take notes, transcribe them, and keep the program files. Tomorrow I’ll explain the problems involved in the care of madmen. Ready to go?”

  They stopped at Vanders and picked up her luggage from the combination general store and bus depot. Clint Reese loaded it into the back of his late model sedan. He chattered amiably all the way out to the road that bordered the north shore of Lake Arthur.

  He pulled off into a small clearing just off the road and said, “We’ll leave the stuff here, in case it turns out to be a little too primitive.”

  The trail leading down the wooded slope toward the lake shore was hard-packed. At the steepest point there was a rustic handrail. When Francie first saw the small cabin, and the deep blue of the lake beyond it, her heart seemed to turn over. Bob had talked of just such a place. A porch overlooking the lake. A small wooden dock. And the perfect stillness of the woods in mid-September.

  The interior was small. One fair-sized room with a wide, built-in bunk. A gray stone fireplace. A tiny kitchen and bath.

  Clint Reese said, in the manner of a guide, “You will note that this little nest has modern conveniences. Running water, latest model lanterns for lights. Refrigerator, stove heater, and hot-water heater all run on bottled gas. We never get more than eight feet of snow, so I’m told, and you’ll have to have a car. The unscrupulous landlord wants sixty a month. Like?”

  She turned to him smiling. “Like very much.”

  “Now I’ll claw my way up your hill and bring down your bags. You check the utensils and supplies. I laid in some food, on the gamble that you’d like it here.”

  He came down with the bags, making a mock show of exhaustion. He explained the intricacies of the lanterns and the heaters, then said that he’d pick her up in the morning at eight-fifteen.

  “You’ve been very kind,” she said.

  “Dogs and children go wild about me. See you tomorrow.”

  After he had disappeared around the bend of the trail, she stood frowning. He was her immediate superior
, and he had acted totally unlike any previous superior in the Civil Service hierarchy. Usually they were most reserved, most cautious. He seemed entirely too blithe and carefree to be able to do an administrative job of the type this Unit 30 apparently demanded.

  But she had to admit that he had been efficient about the cabin. And so, on a mid-September afternoon, she had unpacked. The first thing she took out of the large suitcase was Bob’s picture. She could imagine him saying, “Baby, how do you know there aren’t any bears in those woods? Fine life for a city gal.”

  “I’ll get along, Bob,” she told him. “I promise you, I’ll get along.”

  And with his picture watching her, she unpacked and cooked, and ate, and went to bed in the deep bunk, surrounded by the pine smell, the leaf rustle, the lap of water against the small dock.

  The work had been very hard at first, mostly because of the technical terms used in the reports, and also because of the backlog of data that had piled up since the illness of the previous girl. During the worst of it, Clint Reese found ways to make her smile. He helped her in her purchase of the ten-year-old car.

  The names and faces straightened out quickly, with Clint’s help. Gray chubby young Dr. Jonas McKay, with razor-sharp mind. Tom Blajoviak, with Slavic slanting merry eyes, heavy-handed joshing, big shoulders. Dr. Sherra, lost in a private fog of mental mathematics and conjecture.

  Francie had pictured laboratories as being gleaming, spotless places full of stainless steel, sparkling glass, white smocks. Unit 30 was a kind of orderly, chaotic jumble of dust and bits of wire and tubing and old technical journals stacked on the floor in wild disarray.

  She soon caught the hang of their verbal shorthand, learned to put in the reports the complete terms to which they referred. McKay was orderly about summoning her. Tom Blajoviak found so much pleasure in dictating that he kept calling for her when he found nothing at all to report. Dr. Sherra had to be trapped before he would dictate to her. He considered progress reports to be a lot of nonsense.