The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels (Mammoth Books) Page 30

  “It was quite a break to find your husband reported as killed in action instead of captured. If he’d been captured they’d never have transferred you to Unit Thirty, you know. So they told Lieutenant Aintrell the circumstances and he wrote that letter you’re holding. It got to you just as fast as it could be managed.”

  “He says he’s sick!” Francie exclaimed indignantly. “Why isn’t he being taken care of?”

  “Not many doctors and not much medicine on the Chinese mainland, Francie. They use what they have for their own troops.”

  “They’ve got to help him!”

  Betty came over, put her arm around Francie’s shoulders, “I guess, Francie, dear, that is going to be up to you.”

  Francie twisted away from her. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s out of our hands,” Stew Jackson said. “You can think of us as just messengers from the boys who make the decisions. They say that when, as an evidence of your good faith, they start to receive copies of Unit Thirty progress reports, they will see to it that your husband is made more comfortable. I understand that his wounds are not serious. You will get more letters from him, and he’ll tell you in those letters that things are better. When your services are no longer needed they will make arrangements to have him turned over to some impartial agency – maybe to a Swedish hospital ship.

  “He’ll come home to you, and that will be your reward for services rendered. Now if you don’t want to play ball, I’m supposed to pass the word along, and they’ll see that he gets transferred from the military prison to a labor camp, where he may last a month or a year. Now, you better take time to think it all over.”

  “How can you stand yourselves or each other?” Francie asked. “How can two people like you get mixed up in such a filthy business?”

  Stewart Jackson flushed. “You can skip that holier than thou attitude, Mrs. Aintrell. You believe in one thing. We believe in something else. Betty and I just happen to believe there’s going to be a good spot for us when this capitalistic dictatorship goes bankrupt and collapses of its own weight.”

  Jackson leaned forward with a charming smile. “Come on, Francie. Cheer up. And you should know that, as an individual, you certainly are not going to affect the course of world affairs by the decisions you make. As a woman, you want your husband and your happiness. The odds are that Unit Thirty research will get nowhere anyway. So what harm can you do? And the people I work with are never afraid to show gratitude. Certainly your Bob won’t thank you for selling him out, selling him into a labor camp.”

  “There’s more than one way to sell Bob out.”

  “Sentimentality masquerading as patriotism, I’m afraid. Think it over. How about the food, Betty? Join us, Francie?”

  Francie didn’t answer. She stood up and walked down the shore of the lake. She sat huddled on a natural step in the rocks. There seemed to be no warmth in the sun. She looked at the letter. In two places the pencil had torn the cheap, coarse paper. His hand had held the pencil. She remembered the marriage vows. To honor and cherish. A sacred promise, made in front of man and God.

  She felt as though she were being torn in half, slowly, surely. And she could not forget that he was in danger and frighteningly alone.

  She walked slowly back to Stewart and Betty. “Is that promise any good?” she asked, in a voice which was not her own. “Would he really be returned to me?”

  “Once a promise is made, Francie, it is kept. I can guarantee that.”

  “Like they’ve kept treaties?” Francie asked bitterly.

  “The myth of national honor is part of the folklore of decadent capitalism, Francie,” Betty said. “Don’t be politically immature. This is a promise to an individual and on a different basis entirely.”

  Francie looked down at them. “Tell me what you want me to do?” she asked.

  “We have your pledge of cooperation?” Stewart Jackson asked.

  “I – yes.” Her mouth held a bitter dryness.

  “Before we go into details, my dear Francie, I want you to understand that we appreciate the risk you are taking. If you ever get the urge to be a little tin heroine – at your husband’s expense, of course – please understand that we shall take steps to protect ourselves. We would certainly make it quite impossible for you to testify against us.”

  Betty said quickly, “Francie wouldn’t do that, Stew.” She laughed shallowly.

  “Now, Francie,” Stewart said softly, “I will tell you what you will do.”

  When they rowed away from her dock they waved a cheerful good-bye to her. Francie went in and closed the door carefully behind her, knowing that doors and bolts and locks had become useless. Then she lay numbly on the bunk and pressed her forehead against the rough pine boards. Until at last the tears came. She cried herself out, and when she awakened from deep sleep the night was dark, the cabin cruelly cold.

  She awakened to a changed world. The adjustment to Bob’s death had been a precarious structure, moving in each emotional breeze. Now it collapsed utterly. She was again the bride, the Francie Aintrell of the day before the telegram arrived. And as she moved about, she began, in the back of her mind, to stage the scene and learn the lines for the moment of his return, for the moment when his arms would be around her again.

  She pumped up the lantern and carried it over to the table. She set it down, and stood very still looking at the object. There, on the table, was one of the plugs manufactured by the Jacksons. It was a gay red lure, with two gang hooks, with yellow bead eyes.

  The doors were still locked. She tried to tell herself it was purposeless melodrama, the sort of thing a small boy might do. She turned down slightly the harsh white light of the lantern and slowly walked into her bedroom.

  Early next morning she parked her car behind the lab and walked in and sat at her desk. The smiling guards at the gate had a new look.

  Clint Reese came out and gave her an impersonal good morning, and spun the dial on the locked file for her. She took the current Sherra folder from the drawer back to her desk, found her place, continued the transcription of notes that had been interrupted on Saturday.

  They would want a full report, she told herself. Not just the final three or four pages. No one watched her closely. It would be easy to make one additional carbon. She planned how she would do it. Fold the additional carbons and stick them in the blue facial-tissue box. Then take the box with her to the lavatory. There she could fold them smaller and tuck them into her bra. But she would do it with the next report. Not this one, because it was only a portion of a report.

  Sherra’s report took twice as long as it should have. She made continual errors. Twice Clint Reese stopped by to pick up the completed report for checking by Cudahy and each time she told him it would be ready soon. When she took it to him at last she imagined that he gave her an odd look before he went on into Cudahy’s office, the report in his hand.

  Big Tom Blajoviak’s note was on her spindle: Come and get it, sweetheart.

  She took her book and went toward the cubicle in the corner where there was barely room for Blajoviak and a desk.

  The door was ajar a few inches. He glanced up at her and said, “Enter the place of the common people, Francie. Just because I’m not a doctor, it’s no reason to – ”

  “Have you really got something this time, Tom? Or is it more repetition?”

  “Child, your skepticism is on the uncomplimentary side. Open thy book and aim your little pointed ears in this direction. Hark to the Blajoviak.”

  “Honestly?”

  His square strong face altered. The bantering look was gone. “At five o’clock yesterday, Francie, we began to get a little warm. Here we go.” He held his copy of the last report in front of him. “This would be new main subject, Francie. I make it Roman numeral nine. Isolation of margin error in Berkhoff Effect. Sub A. Following the series of tests described in Roman eight above, one additional memory tube was added – to circuit C. The rerunning of the tests was begun on Octo
ber twenty-third – ”

  He dictated rapidly. Francie’s pencil darted along the notebook lines with the automatic ease of long practice. It took nearly an hour for the dictation.

  “So that’s it,” he said, leaning back, smiling with a certain pride.

  “Not that it means anything to me, you know,” she said.

  “It just might, Francie. It just might mean that instead of getting fried into the asphalt, you might look out to sea and say, ‘Ah’ at the big white lights out there. Fireworks for the kiddies instead of a disintegration.”

  She glanced down at her whitened knuckles. “Is it that important, Tom?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  She shook her head. “No, I just don’t understand – all this.”

  “There was a longbow, and some citizen comes up with body armor. And then the crossbow, and so they made heavier armor. And then gunpowder, which eventually put guys into tanks. Every time, it sounded like an ultimate weapon, and each time a defense just happened to come along in time. Now our ultimate weapon is the thermonuclear missile. Everybody is naked when that baby comes whining down out of the stratosphere. So we have to stop it up there where it won’t do any harm.”

  He paused an instant, then went on earnestly. “We can’t depend on the slow reaction time of a man. We’ve got to have a gizmo. And now, for the first time, I think we’re getting close to the ultimate interceptor. If you-know-who could find out how close we are, I’ll bet they’d risk everything to try to knock us out before we could get into production on the defensive end. Cudahy wants this one fast as you can get it out, honey.”

  She stood up. “Al! right, Tom. As soon as I can get it out.”

  Francie went to work. She watched her hands add the extra onionskin sheet to the copies required by office routine. At five o’clock Cudahy came out of his office to check the progress. He seemed to be concealing jubilation with great difficulty. He patted her shoulder.

  “Take a food break at six, Mrs. Aintrell,” he said, “and then get back to it. I’ll be here, so you won’t have to lock anything up.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said in a thin voice.

  Cudahy had not noticed the extra copy. But she could not risk leaving the extra copy in sight while she went to the mess hall. At five to six she took the tissue box, containing the folded sheets into the lavatory. She tucked the sheets into her bra, molding the papers into an inconspicuous curve.

  She looked at her face in the mirror, ran the finger tips of both hands down her cheeks. Bob had told her she would be lovely when she was seventy.

  She looked into the barren depths of her own eyes and she could hear the voice of Tom Blajoviak: “Fireworks for the kiddies instead of disintegration. Knock us out before we could – ”

  Francie Aintrell squared her shoulders and walked out of the lavatory. She took her red shortcoat from the coat tree.

  Clint Reese sat on the corner of a desk, one long leg swinging. He said, “Remind me to put all my black-haired women in red coats.”

  She found that she was glad to see him. His lighthearted manner made the lab work seem a little less important, made her own impending betrayal a more minor affair. And she sensed that during the past month Clint had grown more aware of her. A subtle game of awareness and flirtation would make her forget what she was about to do – or almost forget.

  She said, “If you want to see a woman eat like a wolf, come on and join me.”

  He put on his wool jacket. “I’ll take care of all the wolflike characteristics around here, lady.”

  They walked to the small mess hall. Wind whined around the corner of the building and they leaned into it.

  “And after the dogs are gone, we can always boil up the harness,” he said.

  She heard the false note in her own laughter. They shut the mess-hall door against the wind, hung up their jackets. They filled their trays, carried them back from the service counter to a table for two by the wall. Clint Reese sat down and shut his eyes for a moment. She saw a weariness in his face that she had not noticed before.

  Reese smiled at her. “Now make like a wolf,” he said.

  She had thought she was hungry, but found that she couldn’t eat.

  “OK, Francie,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  She gave him a startled look. For once there was no banter in his voice, no humor in his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” she asked him.

  “As official nursemaid to all personnel, I keep my eyes open. Something has been worrying you all day.”

  “Then make some jokes; and cheer me up, why don’t you?”

  He was grave. “Sometimes I get tired of jokes. Don’t you?”

  “Aren’t you a little out of character, Mr. Reese? I thought you were the meringue on the local pie.”

  He looked through her and beyond her. “Perhaps I am. Tonight, my girl, I am lonesome and in a hair-taking down mood. Want to see my tresses fall?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  He took a sip of his coffee, set his cup down. “Underneath this tattered shirt beats the heart of a missionary.”

  “No!”

  “And perhaps a fool. I own a tidy little construction business. I was making myself useful, and discovering that I had a certain junior-executive type flair for the commercial world, when the Anmy put its sticky finger in the back of my collar and yanked me off to the wars. I was flexing my obstacle-course muscles on Okinawa when they dropped those big boomers on the Nipponese.

  “Now get the picture. There I was as intrigued by those big boomers as a kid at the country club on the night of the fourth Siss boom, ah! A big child at heart. Still thinking I was living in a nice, cozy little world. I was in one of the first units to go to Japan. I wangled a pass and went to Hiroshima. It was unpretty. Very.”

  In the depths of his eyes she saw the ghosts that he had seen.

  “Francie, you can’t tell another person how it is to grow up in one day. I wandered around in a big daze, and at the end of the day I had made up my mind that this was a desperate world to live in, a frightening world. And it took me another month to decide that the only way I could live with myself was to try to do something about it.

  “When they gave me a discharge I turned the management of the company over to my brother and went to school to learn something about nuclear physics. I learned that if I studied hard I’d know something about it by the time I was seventy-three, so I quit. What resource did I have? Just that little flair for administration, the knack of getting along with people and keeping them happy and getting work done.

  “So I decided to be a dog-robber for the professional boys who really know what the score is. By being here I make Cudahy more effective. Cudahy in turn makes the teams more effective.

  “And now I understand, we’re beginning to get someplace. Maybe because I’m here we get our solution a month sooner than otherwise. But if it were only twenty minutes sooner, I could say that I have made a contribution to something I believe in.”

  Francie felt a stinging in her eyes. She looked away from him, said huskily, “I’m just a little stupid I guess. You seemed so – casual, sort of.”

  He grinned. “With everybody going around grinding their teeth, you’ve got to have some relief. If I landed in a spot full of clowns I’d turn into the grimmest martinet you ever saw. Any administrative guy in a lab setup is a catalyst. So let’s get back to the original question, now that you’ve made me prove my right to ask it. What’s bothering you Francie?”

  She stood up so abruptly that her chair tilted and nearly fell over. She went through the door with her coat in her hand, put it on outside, walked into the night with long strides.

  There was a small clump of pines within the compound. She headed blindly toward them. He caught her arm just as she reached them. He turned her around gently.

  “Look. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. If this is just one of those days when you remember too much, please forgive me, Francie. I’d never
do anything to hurt you.”

  She held onto his wrist with both hands. “Clint, I’m so terribly mixed up I don’t know what to do.”

  “Let me help you if I can.”

  “Clint, what is the most important thing in the world to any individual? It’s their own happiness isn’t it? Tell me it is?”

  “Of course it is, but you don’t need a definition of terms. Isn’t happiness sort of a compound?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Don’t too many people confuse happiness with self-gratification? You can be happy if you have self-respect and also what an old-fashioned uncle of mine used to call the love of God.”

  She was crying soundlessly. “Honor, maybe?”

  “That’s a word, too. Little dogeared through misuse, but still respectable.”

  “Suppose, Clint, that somebody saved your life and the only way they could do it was by violating all the things you believe in. Would you be grateful?”

  “If someone saved me that way I think I’d begin to hate them, and hate myself too, Francie. But don’t think I’m a typical case. I’m a little top-heavy in the ethics department, they tell me.”

  “I married that sort of man, Clint. I understand.”

  “You still haven’t told me how I can help you.”

  She turned half away from him, knowing that unless she did it quickly, she would be unable to do it at all. She unbuttoned the red coat, the jacket under it, the blouse under that. She found the folded packet of onionskin sheets and held it out where he could see it.

  “You can help me by taking that, Clint. Before I change my mind.”

  He took it. “What is it?” he asked.

  “A copy of what Tom dictated today,” she said tonelessly.

  “Why on earth are you carrying it around?” he demanded sharply.

  “To give it to someone on the outside.”

  After a long silence he said, “Holy jumping Nellie!” His tone was husky.

  “I was doing it to save Bob’s life,” she said.

  “Your husband? But he’s dead!”