Nick Carter

The Death Strain

Dedicated to

The Men of the Secret Services

of the

United States of America

I

The jigsaw puzzle of death began on a calm, quiet Sunday in the Cumberland mountains where Kentucky and Virginia rub shoulders. On that afternoon Colonel Thomas MacGowan walked toward the two soldiers standing in front of the doorway to the gray, flat-topped, two-story building.

“Red” MacGowan to his classmates at “the Point,” but definitely the Colonel to everyone else, had already passed the outer security checkpoint and the main gate station. The two privates snapped to attention as he came up to the door. He returned their salutes with brisk smartness. Sunday was always a quiet day, in fact a boring day to stand duty, but he was in the rotating pool and this was the Sunday he’d drawn. He carried, the morning paper under his arm, crammed with the usual bulky Sunday sections.

As was his habit, Colonel Thomas MacGowan paused at the door to glance around at the stillness of the compound. He should have been relaxed, as befits a man on a boring tour of duty. Yet for some reason he was on edge, almost jumpy. Mildred had even passed comment on it during breakfast, but he’d chalked it up to a poor night’s sleep. The Colonel was a traditional military man and not given to thoughts of extrasensory premonitions.

Beyond the flat, gray, unattractive main building, but within the fenced area of the compound, were the small cottages of the scientific personnel. Almost everyone was away this weekend attending the big seminar in Washington. The main building and the houses in back of it had suddenly appeared in the fastness of the Cumberland mountains one month, almost as if set down there by some giant hand.

He doubted that any of the residents in a fifty-mile area even suspected the building’s purpose. Oh, there was talk of secret government work, and it gave spice to gossip during long winter nights. But communication between the scientific people at the compound and the residents was kept at a minimum.

The Colonel went inside the building, into a clean, antiseptically white interior with various corridors branching off from the main foyer and laboratories extending from each corridor. Before going up to his second-floor office, he paused at a steel door marked RESTRICTED-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He peered through the small glass window. Two soldiers stood inside, rifles in their hands. Beyond them another steel door, this one windowless with a slot across it, stood closed. Sergeant Hanford and Corporal Haynes were the two men on duty. They returned his glance with stone faces, and he knew they didn’t like the Sunday detail any more than he did.

He turned, went up the short flight of steps and into his office. General O’Radford was in command of the compound, but the General was away in Washington and Colonel Thomas MacGowan was in charge. Perhaps that was adding to his edgy feeling, he told himself.

Red MacGowan spread the newspaper on the desk and began to read. The caption on the lead-column item leaped out at him at once.

INTERNATIONAL BACTERIOLOGISTS MEETING VIRUS STOCKPILING A POSSIBLE ISSUE

The colonel’s smile was a little grim as he read the article.

“The International Symposium of Bacteriologists meeting in the nation’s capital was concerned with the increasing creation and maintenance of deadly germ warfare viruses for which man has no known defense. The leading government bacteriologist, Dr. Joseph Carlsbad, has called such viruses an invitation to disaster. He has called for a halt to further stockpiling. Government officials have said there is no cause for alarm and that such defensive measures must be continued.”

Red MacGowan’s smile broadened at the line about no cause for alarm. They were right. An unauthorized flea couldn’t get into the main building, to say nothing of the surrounding compound. He turned to the sports pages.

On the floor below, Sergeant Hanford and Corporal Haynes were peering through the small window at the tall, white-haired, thin-faced man on the other side of the door. They both knew him by sight, and he had to pass three security checks to reach that door, yet they had him hold up his ID pass.

Behind the man with the ascetic face there stood a mountain that walked like a man, some 325 pounds of flesh, Sergeant Hanford guessed, a Japanese, perhaps once a Sumo wrestler. He was flanked by two small, thin, wiry Japanese. The sergeant opened the door for Dr. Joseph Carlsbad and the scientist stepped into the small anteroom.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” the scientist said. “We want to go into the Repository area. Will you please tell the inside guards to admit us?”

“Have these men restricted clearance, sir?” the sergeant asked. Corporal Haynes stood back, rifle in hand.

“They have visitors’ passes and general security clearance.” The scientist smiled. At a gesture, the three men produced their passes. Sergeant Hanford picked up the telephone. It rang at once in the windowless second-floor office where Colonel MacGowan had just finished reading the sports section.

“Dr. Carlsbad is here, sir,” the sergeant said. “He wants to go into the Repository area and he has three visitors with him.” He paused a moment and then went on. “No, sir, they only have general visitors’ clearance,” he said.

“May I speak to the Colonel,” Dr. Carlsbad said. The sergeant handed him the phone.

“Colonel MacGowan,” Dr. Carlsbad said, “I have three visiting bacteriologists from Japan with me. They’re attending the symposium in Washington. But of course you know about that. I didn’t think to get restricted personnel clearance for them but I’ll vouch for them. After all, I had to sign their general clearance myself, didn’t I?” He laughed, a small, comradely laugh. “I’ll assume full responsibility, Colonel. I just didn’t think to ask General O’Radford for restricted clearances when I saw him in Washington. I would be terribly embarrassed if my colleagues here came this distance for nothing.”

“Naturally, Dr. Carlsbad,” the colonel answered. Hell, he told himself, Carlsbad was Scientific Director of the place. He, if anyone, ought to know what he was doing. Besides, there were two more armed guards inside the area.

“Give me the sergeant, please,” he said. When the sergeant put down the phone, he turned and called through the slot in the steel door. In a moment it was opened by a soldier wearing sidearms. Dr. Carlsbad and the other men went into the Repository area and the door was shut after them at once.

It turned out the colonel was right about one thing. The good doctor knew very well what he was doing. Casually he took the other men down a corridor lined with rows of small steel boxes, each about the size of a cigar box but tightly latched and made of heavy-gauge steel. Beside each box was a chart listing the contents of the box and the scientific uses for it.

“No one can leave the base with one of these boxes,” he explained to the huge Japanese, “without orders countersigned three times by the Commanding Officer, the head of Bacterial Warfare Section Ten and by one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Dr. Carlsbad pulled one of the steel boxes out of its slot and out of the corner of his eye he saw the two soldiers, one at each end of the corridor, reach for their guns. He smiled and pushed the box back into its slot again. The huge Japanese strolled casually to the far end of the corridor and smiled pleasantly at the soldier while Dr. Carlsbad and the other two men moved to the opposite end of the room. Still smiling, the large man lashed out with one arm and grabbed the soldier’s throat with a hand that closed entirely around it. Squeezing at the right spots, the Japanese killed the soldier in less than five seconds.

Meanwhile at the opposite end of the room the two men had casually sauntered over to the guard and, acting as one, plunged two daggers into him. That also took a matter of seconds. Dr. Carlsbad yanked a particular box from its slot; he knew the vial inside the metal box was securely locked in place and protected from breakage and accidental dislodging.

“The window is behind us on the right wall,” he said tensely. Later on, Sergeant Hanford was to report that Dr. Carlsbad’s usually bright eyes had seemed extremely intense and burning, the eyes of a man on a holy mission.

The windowpane was found later, cut out silently with a plastic-handled, diamond-tipped glass cutter which had gone through the electronic eye at the main gate undetected. It was left behind with a note. The four men were last observed walking casually across the grounds to the rear of the compound where the cottages stood. Private Wendell Holcomb, on sentry duty near the side fence, saw the quartet. He had no reason to question them inside the compound, knowing that they had to have passed all previous checkpoints of the security system. Besides, he recognized Dr. Carlsbad at once.

In his windowless office, Red MacGowan was feeling more restless. He wasn’t worried about Dr. Carlsbad, not really, but he had permitted him to take in three people not cleared for restricted area. In twenty years Red MacGowan had never violated a rule, and it ate into him that he’d done so in this instance. He picked up the blue telephone and rang Sergeant Hanford downstairs. When the sergeant told Colonel MacGowan that the doctor hadn’t come out yet, MacGowan slammed down the phone and took the short flight of steps three at a time.

Hanford and Haynes still wore their expressionless stone faces, but there was worry in their eyes. It grew when the Colonel didn’t get an answer as he called through the slot in the Repository door. Suddenly feeling very cold, MacGowan took out a set of keys and opened the slotted door. The body of the nearest interior security guard half-blocked the door as it swung open. The colonel didn’t have to see any more.

“Red Alarm!” he shouted. “Hit that button, dammit!” In three seconds he heard the high-pitched intermittent horn as it echoed from one end of the compound to the other. The colonel and the two soldiers entered the repository. When they saw the empty slot, their eyes met, communicating confused astonishment, anger — and more than a little plain everyday fear.

That’s how it began, the start of a tapestry of terror that was to threaten the world itself.

Exactly one hour later David Hawk, Director and Chief of Operations of AXE, U.S. Special Espionage Agency, heard the phone ring in his living room. He’d just finished pruning the trellised roses around tie small arbor near the door of his modest frame house outside the capital. It was his Sunday afternoon labor of love. Flowers were soothing to him. A little sun and water and they grew. Uncomplicated, and so unlike the rest of his world. He took off his thick gardener s gloves and picked up the phone. It was the President of the United States.

The events of that quiet Sunday afternoon were reaching out for me, too, only I didn’t know it then. I was busy doing my own reaching. I’d just finished the third very cold dry martini at the end of a lazy Sunday in an elegant town house in the charming Washington suburb of Georgetown. Across the way from me, also very gracious and elegant, was Sherry Nestor, daughter of the billionaire shipping combine owner, Harry Nestor. Sherry, very tall, very langorous and very passionate, reclined on the couch in an ice-blue hostess gown cut extremely low. Her breasts, rounded and softly curved, peeked out around the edges of the deep V-necked gown. I’d met Sherry when I was on a job for AXE involving a lot of “Daddy’s boats” — said boats being a fleet of some fifty oil tankers. Sherry had taken a liking to me, something I never discouraged. It was a happy coincidence that on the weekend Hawk had ordered me to attend the dry symposium on bacteriological warfare, the town house was all Sherry’s, except for the servants, of course.

Now Sherry drained her martini and looked at me from under half-drawn eyelids. She spoke slowly. Sherry did everything slowly, until she got in bed. I was still wondering how such a relaxed, slow-moving, almost diffident girl could generate so much energy when it came to sex. Maybe it was just a case of saving up. Anyway, Sherry speared me with her gray-green eyes and her lips pursed, edging out into a half-pout.

“Dinner won’t be until eight and Paul and Cynthia Ford are coming,” she said. “They’re night owls and I’m not waiting that long. I’m hungry now!”

I knew what she meant. We were in her rooms on the top floor, and as I stood up, Sherry ticked off the tiny latch holding the top of the gown together. It fell open and her rounded breasts came out like two pink-tipped buds blossoming in the morning sun. Some girls’ breasts thrust out, some point up piquantly. Sherry’s breasts were all soft roundness and I found them with my lips, caressing them, reveling in their softness.

“Like last night, Nick,” she breathed. “Like last night” It had been the first time for Sherry and me, and I’d promised her more and better. “Oh, God, it couldn’t be,” she had said in my ear. I was about to show her. I lifted her up and put her down on the bed, and her legs, moving up and down, kicked off the gown and searched for my body. I traced my lips down her body, between her breasts, over her abdomen, down across the curving line of her belly.

I was glad the doors of the old house were thick oak. Sherry screamed in ecstasy, her cries growing louder as I made love to her. With each new sensation she’d gasp long, lingering cries, sometimes ending in a laugh of pure pleasure.

“Oh, God, God,” she cried, and her long legs circled my waist as she thrust herself up at me. Faster and faster went the rhythm and suddenly she buried her head against my chest and cried out in the eternal rapturous cry of fulfillment. Her body quivered for a long moment before she fell back and her legs fell limply apart. I stayed with her and she moaned, little sounds of pleasure. I moved to her side. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and we lay with bodies touching as I took in the beauty of her figure. Finally she turned her head toward me and opened her eyes.

“Don’t you want to go into the shipping business, Nick?”

I grinned at her. “I might someday. Can I think about it?”

“Please do,” she murmured. “I’m going to nap till dinner. I want to restore my energies... for later on.”

I cradled her against me and we both slept.

We were halfway through dinner when the butler announced that I had a phone call. I took it in the study, knowing damn well who it would be. Hawk was the only one who knew where I was. Leaving word of one’s whereabouts was a strict rule for all AXE agents. The tight, strained flatness of Hawk’s voice told me there was trouble before he’d said half-a-dozen words.

“Who’s there besides the Nestor girl?” he asked. I told him about Paul and Cynthia Ford and that we were midway through dinner. Usually Hawk didn’t care what I was midway through. This time I heard him pause.

“All right, finish dinner,” he said. “I don’t want you dashing out of there because I called. After dinner, be casual and say that I want to talk to you for a little while and that you’ll be back. Tell them it’s nothing important. Then excuse yourself and get the hell over here at once.”

“To your place?” I asked.

“No, the office. I’m there now.”

He hung up and I went back to eat, just as the man had said to do. But during the remainder of dinner my mind was racing, consumed with curiosity. Hawk’s insistence on my being unhurriedly casual was a tip-off. It meant that whatever was happening, it was anything but casual. I kept my cool through coffee in the Nestors’ antique-gold drawing room and then through some small talk. Finally, glancing at my watch, I excused myself for an hour or so. Sherry went to the door with me, her shrewd gray-green eyes studying me.

“Are you really coming back?” she asked. “Or is this one of your little ploys. I know you, Nickie boy.”

I grinned at her and caressed her breast, outlined through the hostess gown. She shivered.

“Damn you. You better come back now,” she said.

“If I can come back, I’ll come,” I said. “And you know it.” A fleeting smile in her eyes told me she did.

The lights of the AXE offices on DuPont Circle in the heart of Washington were yellow eyes watching me as I approached. A long, black Lincoln pulled away from the curb just as I reached the front door and I saw the small State Department seal on it. Full security was on, I noted as I showed credentials three times, right up to the pretty little thing in the outside office.

Two men sat there, briefcases beside each of them, looking for all the world like salesmen, Their fast, probing eyes that watched my every move gave them away. I smiled pleasantly at them and grinned inwardly at the effort it took them to nod back.

The girl had put my card through her little computer and a tiny screen beside the desk showed her my picture. It also told her I was AXE Agent N3, rating Killmaster, could pilot a plane, drive Formula 1 racing cars, speak three languages perfectly and four more passably. It also told her I was single, and when she handed me back my card her eyes were full of interest. I made a mental note to get her name. The Chief, for all his New England conservatism, knew how to brighten up the outer office.

He was in his leather chair, spare, lean face controlled as usual, steel-blue eyes alert. Only the way he kept shifting the unlit cigar from side to side told me he was unusually agitated. He always chewed rather than smoked his cigars. It was the speed at which he chewed them that was the tip-off.

“Big visitors at this time of night,” I commented, sliding into a chair. He knew at once I was referring to the State Department limousine.

“Big trouble,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want it spread that you dashed out of tie Nestors’ house. We’ve already got enough newshawks sniffing around.”

He sighed, sat back and regarded me with a long stare.

“I only sent you to attend that bacteriological symposium because I wanted you to get up to date on the stuff,” he mused aloud. “But sometimes I think I’m psychic.”

I didn’t debate the point. I’d seen plenty of evidence of it.

“You’re aware of the Cumberland Research Operation, of course,” he said.

“Only aware of it,” I answered. “Our virus factory. The stuff that’s been getting such a second look from so many people lately.”

Hawk nodded. “In the Cumberland operation there are sixty bacterial strains for which man has no known antidote. Let loose, they could wipe out whole areas and perhaps more than just areas. Of them all, the deadliest strain is one called X–V77, X–Virus seven-seven. Sometime between four-ten and four-twenty this afternoon, X–V77 was removed from the Cumberland Repository.”

I let out a low whistle. “It was,” Hawk continued, “removed by the Director of Cumberland, Dr. Joseph Carlsbad, and three other men unknown to us. Two guards were killed.”

“Carlsbad is the guy who’s been making noises of late,” I recalled. “Is he some land of kook?”

“That’d be too simple,” Hawk said. “He’s a brilliant bacteriologist who, as we piece it together, worked along with us so he’d be in a position to influence government thinking. When he found he couldn’t really do that, he began planning to take things into his own hands.”

“You say planning. That means you feel this wasn’t a sudden, impulsive action.”

“Hell, no,” Hawk said. “This move took a lot of planning. This was left at the scene.”

He pushed a note at me and I read it quickly, aloud. “I have stopped talking,” it said. “This is my ultimatum. Unless all bacteriological warfare stockpiles are destroyed, I will destroy those who would destroy mankind. Science cannot be misused for political ends. I shall be in further contact. Unless what I say is done, I will strike a blow for all people everywhere.”

Hawk got up, paced the room and gave me a total picture as it had been reconstructed. When he’d finished, the lines in his face were even deeper.

“This has to come on top of the World Leadership Conference scheduled for next week,” Hawk muttered. I knew about the Conference, hailed as the first real gathering of the world’s leadership to try and solve the problems of this old planet, I didn’t know AXE was involved in it, and Hawk grimaced at my question.

“Everybody’s involved,” he said. “They’ve got the FBI on internal security, State on operations, the CIA on watching known problem areas. Here, just look at this list of biggies due at the United Nations General Assembly building on the opening day of the Conference.”

I scanned the list briefly and saw some one hundred and thirty names. My eyes picked out the chiefs of state of all the major powers, Russia, France, Japan, Italy. I saw that the Queen of England was listed. So was Chairman Mao of the People’s Republic of China, his first trip to the UN. The head of the International Council of Churches was on the list as was the Pope, all living past Presidents of the United States, the prime ministers., presidents and kings of every country on the globe. It was to be a first of its kind, all right, a major step in assembling the world’s leaders in one place to act, even superficially, as one body. I gave the list back to Hawk.

“Got any leads on Carlsbad, any particular person he might be after?” I asked.

“We gave everything we know about the man to the Chief Psychiatrist at the Pentagon, Dr. Tarlman,” Hawk replied. “His conclusion is that Carlsbad’s real desire is to injure the United States, probably by infecting one of the world’s leaders. Carlsbad’s parents and sister were killed at Hiroshima where, as Methodist missionaries, they were interned during World War II. Dr. Tarlbut says Carlsbad’s principles may be sincere, but they’re abetted by his repressed hatred of those who killed his parents and sister.”

“Interesting,” I commented. “In any case, it all means that the doctor might do any damn thing with his deadly strain of bacteria. And if we start alerting every prominent person in the world, the cat’s out of the bag.”

“Exactly,” Hawk agreed. “So for now, at least, this is still top-secret security. Our one lead is Carlsbad’s niece, Rita Kenmore. She lived with him, and we know be is very devoted to the girl. She’s still at his house. I’ve got men watching it on a twenty-four-hour basis. Tomorrow, I want you to go to her and see what you can find out. I’ve a feeling that Carlsbad will try to contact her.”

“Should I go back to Sherry Nestor tonight?”

“Absolutely,” Hawk snapped, and I knew it was hurting him to give me another night of pleasure. Normally he’d have me on some plane within the hour. “I want nothing added to the rumors already starting to fly. Boxly of the Post-Times has wind of something already, and hell have his crew beating the bushes in all directions. In the morning, instead of going to the symposium, you’ll go to Carlsbad’s home here in Washington. Check with me first, though.”

Hawk swiveled and gazed out the window and I knew he was through.

I left with a chill wrapped around me, a feeling of elements outside man’s control waiting to descend. The pretty little thing in the outside office smiled at me. It was an effort to smile back, and I forgot to get her name. It didn’t seem important anymore. I walked slowly through the night, thinking about what I’d just been told and putting together what few things we knew. Carlsbad had not been alone. He had some kind of organization. A giant Japanese ought to be easy enough to spot.

I had no idea then what land of an organization Carlsbad had put together. I was to find out, however, that it was kind of an elite of the damned.

When I got back to Sherry’s, Paul and Cynthia were still there, and I maintained a casual air until they left. It was Sherry who, with her native shrewdness, saw through my façade.

“I know better than to ask what, but something’s gone wrong,” she said. I grinned at her.

“Not here,” I said. “Let’s get lost.” She nodded and she was naked in my arms in moments and we got lost, the whole damned night, lost in the pleasures of feeling and not thinking, of the body over the mind, of the present over the future. It was a nice way and a nice place in which to get lost, and Sherry was as eager as I was.

II

I left Sherry half-awake in bed, murmuring for me to stay. “Can’t, darling,” I said in her ear. Her soft breasts were outside the sheet and I covered her up. She pulled the sheet down again without opening her eyes. “Still no go, doll,” I chuckled. I brushed her body with my lips and left her grumbling. I’d checked out Wilhelmina, the 9mm Luger in the shoulder holster under my jacket, and I’d strapped Hugo, the pencil-thin stiletto, in its leather sheath on my forearm. Pressure at the right spot and the tempered steel blade dropped into my palm, silently, deadly.

I paused in the study downstairs and called Hawk. He was still harried, a man juggling more than he could safely handle. He told me they’d confiscated the only copy of the speech Carlsbad had sent to the symposium chairman to have read for him.

“It was rambling, threatening in vague ways,” the Chief said. “It had Dr. Cook, the chairman, thoroughly confused and he was happy to see us take it off his hands.”

“I’m on my way now to see the niece,” I said.

“She’s in scientific research herself, Nick,” Hawk told me. “The two men watching the front and back of the house are FBI, I’m in walkie-talkie contact with them. I’ll tell them you’re on your way.”

I was about to hang up when he spoke again. “And Nick, bear down. Time is short.”

I went outside to the little blue Cougar parked near the Nestor house. I drove to the edge of Washington proper and found the Carlsbad house in the run-down area, the last house on a long street. A thick wall of woods was about twenty yards behind the house and there was heavy shrubbery in a vacant lot across the street from it. The house itself was run-down and decrepit-looking. I was frankly surprised. After all, Carlsbad wasn’t drawing peanuts in his position as Director of the Cumberland Operation. Certainly he could afford something better than this.

I parked and walked to the weathered, cracked door and rang the bell. My next surprise was the girl who answered the door. I saw china-blue eyes, big and round, under a shock of short, brown hair set in a round, saucy face with a pert nose and full lips. A blue jersey blouse, almost the color of her eyes, tightened itself over full, upturned, thrusting breasts and a deep blue miniskirt revealed young, smoothly firm legs. Rita Kenmore was, to say the least, an eye-filling bit of fluff.

“Dr. Carlsbad, please,” I said. The china-blue eyes stayed the same, but in this business you learn to catch the little things, and I saw the tiny line of tension tighten in her pretty jaw. I also noted that her fist was clenched white around the doorknob.

“He’s not here,” she said flatly. I smiled pleasantly and moved into the house in one quick step. I flashed an identity card that she hardly had time to read. “Then I’ll wait,” I said. “Carter, Nick Carter.”

“Dr. Carlsbad won’t be back,” she said nervously.

“How do you know?” I asked quickly. “Have you heard from him?”

“No, no,” she said too quickly. “I don’t think he’ll be back, that’s all.”

Little Miss Blue-eyes was lying. Either that or she damned well knew what had happened and expected to hear from Carlsbad and didn’t want me around when she did. My eyes scanned the room and its worn furniture. I stepped to a doorway and peered into an adjoining room, a bedroom. A woman’s traveling bag was open on the bed.

“Going someplace, Miss Kenmore?” I asked. I saw her china-blue eyes flare and seem to grow smaller as she tried an indignant act.

“Get out of this house, whoever you represent,” she cried. “You’ve no right to come in here and question me. I’ll call the police.”

“Go ahead,” I told her, deciding to sail with it. “Your uncle’s got no right to steal vital government material.”

I saw some of the bluster go out of her eyes, and she moved away. From the side, her breasts turned up sharply in a saucy, piquant line. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped, not looking at me. I had to admit that there was absolute conviction in her voice. But then maybe she was merely a good actress, a natural feminine talent. She turned toward me, and the round, china-blue eyes were a mixture of defensive righteousness and worry.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said. “My uncle is a sincere, dedicated man. Whatever he does is done only to make the world listen. Somebody’s got to make it listen.”

“And Dr. Carlsbad is the one, eh?” I offered. She took a deep breath in an obvious effort to compose herself. It may have helped compose her but the way it thrust her breasts out against the blue blouse didn’t help my composure. It was damned hard to imagine her in some stuffy laboratory.

She glared at me. “I told you I don’t know anything about anything,” she said. When she looked at me again her eyes were misty. “I wish you’d tell me what’s happened,” she said.

Suddenly I had the distinct feeling that she was telling me a half-truth at least, that Carlsbad had not really taken her into his confidence. But she was waiting for someone or something and packing to go some place. I decided not to enlighten her. This way her anxiety would stay high. It might trip her up into revealing something. I merely smiled at her, and she turned away and began pacing up and down the room. I casually folded myself into an overstuffed chair and pretended not to catch her furtive glances out the windows. Good. She was expecting people, not phone calls. Maybe even Carlsbad himself. It would be nice to wrap this one up so quickly, I mused.

“Are you a bacteriologist, too?” I asked casually. “Or can’t you stop pacing long enough to answer.”

She glared at me and forced herself to sit down on the sofa across from me.

“I’m in the field of sexual research,” she said, keeping her voice frosted. My eyebrows shot upward. I could feel them go, and I grinned at her.

“Now that sounds like a fun topic.”

Her eyes were as icy as her voice. “I’ve been doing work on the effects of stress, strain and anxiety on human sexual response.”

I turned that one over in my mind as I grinned at her. It was a subject I could tell her a few things about.

“All interview stuff?” I asked.

“Interviews, detailed reports from selected subjects and observation, also of selected subjects.” She was trying to sound terribly detached and scientific.

“Oh?” My grin widened. “That’s a pretty large field — and an interesting one.”

Her eyes flashed and she started to answer, then thought better of it. But the proud lift of her chin as she turned away said it all — she was a scientist with ideals and high purpose, and I was a government agent with a dirty mind.

I had my doubts about the scientific detachment of anybody, no matter how idealistic, who stood around taking notes and “observing” while people made love, but I wasn’t about to argue the point She was too pretty to argue with. Besides, I was beginning to think that my presence was keeping her from making any moves. Maybe if I left, she would try to join Carlsbad, in which case I could tail her.

I turned and started for the door. Pausing, I took a piece of paper from my pocket and wrote on it before handing it to her. I wanted to make it look good.

“Don’t leave town, and if you see or hear from Dr. Carlsbad, call this number,” I said. She took the slip of paper without looking at it.

“I’ll be back,” I grinned at her, letting my eyes linger on the tips of her breasts. “For one reason or another.”

Her china-blue eyes registered nothing, but I saw the faint tightening of her lips and I knew she was watching me through the small hall window as I walked to the car, got in and drove away. I looked back at the house as I turned the corner and again wondered why in hell Carlsbad wanted to live in such a run-down old antique.

I drove around the block and then stopped. Moving quickly and silently, I crossed to the edge of the woods behind the house where Hawk said one of the FBI boys was watching the place. He’d said he was staying in constant touch with them via walkie-talkie; contacting them would be the fastest way for me to get hold of him.

Once at the edge of the woods I moved slowly. I didn’t want a bullet in my gut. Chances were the FBI boys would be cautious before shooting, but you couldn’t be sure. I crawled on my hands and knees through the underbrush and cast a look at the house. I was directly behind it now.

“N3... AXE,” I said in a hoarse whisper, pausing to wait. There was no answer. I moved forward and called out again in a half-whisper. I saw an arm raise from behind a cluster of brush. The arm beckoned to me. I went toward it and a man moved into view, young, even-featured, his eyes on me steady. He held a regulation .38 in one hand. I put Wilhelmina into my holster.

“Nick Carter, AXE,” I said. I gave him an identifying code and mentioned Hawk. He relaxed and I halted beside him. He nodded past me and I turned to see another agent, a carbine in his hands, move toward us from behind a tree. He had had me covered too.

“Got any more around?” I grinned at my man.

“Just us two,” he smiled. “That’s enough.” In most cases he would have been right. Nothing, as I was to learn, was enough in this one. “I need to contact Hawk on your electronic smoke-signal,” I said. He handed it to me. They were both staying low, and I followed their example. With the walkie-talkie in my hand, I turned abruptly and moved down on my right elbow.

I was lucky. The first shot hit the walkie-talkie where my head had just been, exploding it in a blast of metal. I whirled, turning my face away, but not before I caught some of the metal and felt small rivulets of blood erupt on my face. It seemed as though the whole damn wooded area exploded next in a hail of automatic weapon shots combined with rifle fire.

The agent with the carbine rose up, shuddered and fell dead. I’d landed behind a cluster of shrubs and saw figures — two, four, six of them — coming at us through the trees, all carrying weapons. I swore. Damn them, they’d figured the house would be watched and the woods behind it was the most likely spot. So they watched the watchers, surprising the surprisers.

The agent nearest to me was firing, and the figures darted from behind trees, spreading out fan-like. If he fired at one or two, the others stepped out to pour lead in his direction and he had to keep firing and rolling, firing and rolling. It was a technique marked for doom, and the slugs from the automatic weapons were tearing up the ground at his head. I lay silent, Wilhelmina in my hand. I saw the FBI agent getting close to the clear ground at the edge of the wooded area and realized what he was going to try to do.

“You haven’t a chance that way,” I whispered hoarsely at him. But he was out of earshot. He avoided two more bursts of automatic weapon fire, reached the clear ground and leaped to his feet to run. He took maybe five steps before the hail of bullets caught him and he went down.

I lay still and glanced toward the house. A black Chevy sedan was at the curb in front of the place. It had pulled up as the FBI men were being cut down. Men were entering the house to get the girl while the field men took care of things out back. I caught a glimpse of Rita Kenmore’s light blue blouse through the rear window of the house.

Looking back into the woods I saw the line of killers, not more than dark shapes, fanned out and moving carefully, slowly, searching for me. They’d seen me when they opened fire, and knew there had been three men. So far they’d only accounted for two. I had to be in there someplace, and they moved in wide-apart lanes to trap me. No matter how fast I fired, I couldn’t get more than half of them before the others would zero in on me. And running for it would only bring the same fate as had caught the FBI agent.

I estimated the distance to the house. One step into the clearing and I was a perfect target. But the distance wasn’t that great to the rear windows. Forty-five seconds might do it, running at top speed. It was time to call on Special Effects and I reached a hand into my jacket pocket.

I always made it a practice to have something of Stewart’s on me. One never knew when the products of his remarkable Advanced Weapons Lab could come in handy. The AXE Special Effects branch pioneered in esoteric weaponry, its devices always specialized, always effective, frequently lifesaving. For those that used them, that is. Others took it differently. Stewart, who ran the place, had the physician’s benign attitude toward the AXE agents he served, looking on his products like cold tablets or warm gloves, good to have around. “I always like the boys to keep something of mine on them, just in case,” he was fond of saying. I usually carried his stuff only when I intended using them for specific purposes on a mission. But he’d insisted one day not so long ago and now I was thanking him for it.

The line of killers with their automatic weapons was coming closer. I opened the small and very ordinary-looking box of aspirin, clearly marked as such on the metal cover. I took out two of the “aspirin” and couldn’t resist a smile. He had told me that if I had to take them for a headache they’d be of some effect and no harm. But now I was going to use them for a headache of a different land.

I squeezed hard with my fingernails on the center of each pill, holding the pressure tight for thirty seconds. I could feel the soft centers give under the pressure. Inside the innocuous little pills, a triggering mechanism was activated by the pressure and a chemical process exploded into action. I waited another fifteen seconds and then tossed the two pills into the air, one to the right and one to the left as the killers drew close.

Pressing myself flat to the ground, I waited, ticking off the seconds in my mind. In precisely ten seconds the pills exploded in a twin cascade of thick, gagging blue-black smoke-like substance. The cloud of choking smoky material mushroomed up and down but not out, forming a kind of curtain.

I leaped to my feet and streaked across the clear space toward the house, safely hidden from view by the thick curtain. The stuff was choking and delaying, but not lethal, a smoke-screen in the form of a thick curtain of a heavy chemical. Once they made their way through it they’d be all right in moments except for some tearing eyes, so I didn’t slow any. A rear window loomed ahead. Putting my arms across my face, I dived for it, smashing through the glass with a shattering impact, landing on the floor and somersaulting at once.

I came up on my feet with Wilhelmina in hand, but a smallish man was holding Rita Kenmore in front of him, and I pulled my finger from the trigger a fraction of a second before it would have been too late. He was backing toward the door of the living room, and I saw that I’d landed in a ground floor bedroom. I moved toward him, half-crouched, looking for a chance for a clear shot. He kept the girl well in front of him. I watched for him to come up with a gun and start blazing away from behind her, but he had both hands holding her shoulders.

Rita was wide-eyed, but more apprehensive than frightened and moving back with him without a struggle of any sort. It was clear she didn’t fear him, and I swore under my breath. She had probably expected company. She was getting help in disappearing. More help than I realized. I moved after them, stepping into the living room, and the blows came at me from two sides just as I moved past the doorway.

I caught the slight movement on my right and twisted away, but the guy on the left came down with a gun butt. It grazed my temple and I saw purple pinwheels for a moment. As I slid to the floor I yanked at his legs and he went over backwards. The other one leaped on me and I tossed him over my head. I’d managed to keep hold of Wilhelmina and I fired once, at point-blank range. The first man leaped convulsively and collapsed. The second one tried to scramble away and get his own gun up. My shot caught him in the chest, and the big 9mm slug bounced him against the wall.

I’d started to turn when the blow descended. I caught a glimpse of the huge leg coming at me and half-turned away, but the kick caught me in the back of the neck. It would have torn my neck muscles apart had I not been on my knees. I went flying across the room to land on top of the dead man against the wall. Wilhelmina skidded from my hand and under a table and through glazed eyes I saw a huge form, a mountain of a man, the giant Sumo wrestler who had figured in the theft from Cumberland. He was moving toward me, a house with legs, and my own legs were definitely unsteady.

I tensed my muscles, feeling them respond sluggishly as my head rang like a gong, my neck afire with pain. I came up from the floor at him, swinging out with a left, but my timing was way off as I still reeled dizzily. The blow landed high on his cheekbone, and he brushed it aside as though it were a gnat’s bite. Huge hands grabbed me and I stretched out to find his face, but I felt myself being lifted and flung into the wall. I hit it so hard the plaster cracked. I sank to the floor, shaking my head, clinging desperately to consciousness and expecting another blow that would tear my head off. Dimly I heard the girl’s voice calling.

“Ready,” I heard her say and the answering grunt from the wrestler. His footsteps receded, and I pushed myself from against the wall, rolled over and gazed with wavy focus across the floor. I spied Wilhelmina under the table, reached out and closed my hand around the Luger. Stumbling only once, my head still ringing and my neck fierce with pain, I lurched to the front door in time to see Rita Kenmore disappear into the back seat of the Chevy.

Sumo Sam on the other side of the car saw me stumble from the house and aim a shot at him. He ducked as the slug tore a line across the roof of the car where he’d towered over it. A shot answered mine, and I hit the ground, rolled over and came up to see the black Chevy roaring away from the curb. I pegged another shot at it but only hit the trunk.

Swearing, I was on my feet, running for the blue Cougar I’d parked around the block. As I reached the end of the house I remembered the killers in the woods and dived to the ground. Peering back to the woods, I saw the column of smoke still holding at the very edge. Three of the killers had come through it, but they were turning to go back into the woods. They’d seen the black Chevy take off, and their job was over. I hadn’t time to chase them. The black Chevy held all the important pieces.

I dove into the Cougar and sent it roaring in a tight circle. I caught a glimpse of the Chevy’s rear as they turned a corner ahead, and I put the gas pedal on the floor. Reaching the corner, I took it on two wheels, listening to the screech. I saw their tail careen around another corner and I took after them. I could see them ahead now; they were turning onto a paved service road that paralleled the more crowded expressway. Driving with one hand, I switched on the walkie-talkie and heard Hawk’s voice crackle through.

“It’s me, Nick,” I said. “No time to explain. Call alarm to stop black Chevy sedan, heading north on service road alongside expressway.” I pressed the “off” switch.

“Got it,” Hawk said. I switched on again. The Chevy had caromed around a sharp curve.

“Hold it,” I said, dropping the instrument onto the seat beside me to grab the wheel with both hands as I skidded the car around the corner. The rear end drifted wide but I managed to miss the street lamp.

“Norbert Road,” I yelled back into the walkie-talkie. “West on Norbert Road. Stay on the ready. Over and out.”

I pressed my foot on the accelerator and felt the car leap forward. The black Chevy was hitting ninety and Norbert Road was a succession of curves. Half the time I’d lose them and knew they were there only by the scream of their tires as they took a curve. Then I’d catch sight of them for a moment, until the next curve.

The Chevy had the giant Jap, old Sumo Sam, plus the two smaller men and Rita Kenmore — over seven hundred pounds of weight to hold it down against my one-ninety. They gained a little bit at each curve because of it. I roared around a sharp one and almost went into a spin, the wheel fighting me furiously. When I pulled out of it and onto the straightaway, they weren’t in sight and I frowned. But there was another curve, an easy one just ahead and I cut it beautifully hitting the straight section beyond without slowing down. The black Chevy was still nowhere in sight. I went on a few hundred yards more and hit the brakes, skidding to a halt. Reversing, I made a fast turnabout and headed back the way I’d come, cursing into the wind.

The opening was on my right, a small entranceway in a long, wooden fence which I’d shot past before without even seeing. It was the only possible spot. They must have gone in there. I turned into the entranceway and found myself going down a steep dirt grade. The car hit the bottom bouncing like a baby buggy and I burst out of the door with the walkie-talkie in my hand. I was inside a huge construction area, with big stacks of culvert pipe and steel beams, huge generators still on their wooden skids, the steel framework of a half-dozen structures and dirt roads and paths in all directions. But there was no black Chevy. They had plenty of places to hide in here.

I lifted the walkie-talkie to talk with control when the fusillade of shots rang out from three different directions. I felt the wind of the slugs tearing through the air and slamming into the metal of the Cougar. I half-slipped, half-dove for the ground just as one bullet struck the walkie-talkie in my hand. It shattered the instrument, and I closed my eyes and turned away as small slivers of metal flew into my face.

I felt the tiny trickles of blood running down my right cheek, but that wasn’t anything. It was my arm, numb and tingling as though I’d been sleeping on it for hours. The walkie-talkie slipped from my numbed fingers as the second cluster of shots echoed in the recessed area. I rolled under the car and felt a bullet crease my leg. I wanted to yank out Wilhelmina and return their fire but my hand and arm were still numb. I couldn’t have held a water pistol. From beneath the car I heard the sound of feet running on the earth and then I saw them, coming toward the car from both sides.

I rolled on my back and, twisting my arm, pulled at the Luger with my left hand. I’d just gotten it free when one pair of footsteps vaulted into the car and I heard the sound of the engine roar into life. Dropping the Luger, I rolled over on my stomach as the car backed up, the transmission scraping my temple. The driver twisted the wheel and I saw the frame move to the right and the rear tires dig into the earth and race at me.

I flung myself to the left and the right rear tire scraped my shoulder as it hurtled past, and then the car was no longer on top of me, but I heard the screech of brakes and the clash of gears as the driver shot it into reverse. I’d half-lifted myself from the ground as the Cougar shot at me. I dived again, flattening myself, pressing into the earth, and I cried out in pain as the transmission shaft scraped over my shoulder blades. The driver stopped before he’d gone all the way past me, shot the gears into forward again and spurted ahead. I stayed flattened and once more the car shot out from above me. This time I gathered myself and dove forward, rolling in a somersault. I’d just reached the end of it when I felt the huge hands grab my shoulders and lift me up.

I managed to plant one foot firmly enough, and half-spun around to see the giant Japanese and beyond him, my Cougar with the man getting out of it. I tried a backward blow at the huge man but he flung me down like a sack of potatoes and I landed half over a wooden crate. For all his size, the Japanese was quick as a cat, and he was on me as I hit the crate. I swung but he brushed the blow aside with an oak-like arm, and his counter-punch sent me sailing through the air.

I landed on the back of my neck, did a reverse flip and saw pretty lights of pink and yellow and red. I shook my head and pulled myself upright to find that, in reflex action, Hugo was in my hand and I was lashing out in short, vicious arcs. But I was slicing only thin air, and I heard the sound of a car engine starting up, a familiar sound.

Shaking my head to clear it further, I saw my blue Cougar starting up the dirt ramp. I ran around the edge of the crate and fell to the ground where Wilhelmina lay. I got one shot off at them, more in frustration than anything else, as they disappeared out the exit ramp. I heard the sound of the car receding, and I put the Luger back in its holster.

They were off and running, and Hawk had the cops out looking for a black Chevy. I decided to do the same and found their car behind a long generator. They’d left the keys in it. I drove it out of the construction site and down Norbert Road. A police helicopter appeared overhead and I waved at it. Minutes later I was surrounded by flashing yellow and red lights and a cordon of police cruisers. I climbed out, talked fast, and they let me contact Hawk via their radio. I straightened things out and gave them the new description of the blue Cougar.

“Hell, friend,” one cop grimaced. “They could have taken off in any damn direction by now.”

“Seek and ye shall find,” I said. He gave me a disgusted look as he closed the door of his patrol car. I got back in the black Chevy and headed for the Carlsbad house. I’d go over every damn inch of it and see if it yielded anything. So far Rita Kenmore’s idealistic, sincere, dedicated uncle, out to make the world listen, had been responsible for four deaths — the two guards at the Cumberland operation and now the two FBI agents. But that figured, too. I’d long since learned that there was nothing so calloused as the idealist who thinks he’s got his hand on the true light. Nothing matters except his quest.

I was thinking about the girl as I approached the Carlsbad house, fairly certain she didn’t know how deeply her uncle had dug himself in. Maybe she wouldn’t really find out until it was too late. Or maybe she’d find out and look the other way.

I pulled up in front of the house and got out slowly. My body cried out in protest, every muscle of it. It made me remember that I not only had a deadly virus to find but a score to settle. The front door was open and I started with the girl’s bedroom where I’d seen the open traveling bag on the bed. She’d obviously just tossed a few things into it because most of her clothes were still in the closet with a few pieces lying on the floor. I was about to leave the room when my eye caught a glitter of silver, and I reached down to pick up a small object, not unlike something from a locket or a key chain. A few links hung loosely from the circular piece of silver. Set into the metal was a piece of something that looked like either ivory or bone. Someone had torn it loose and dropped it in the haste to get Rita Kenmore’s stuff together. I put it in my pocket and started through the rest of the house.

It revealed absolutely nothing until I reached a little room, hardly more than a cubbyhole, with a tiny, desk in it and a few shelves. On the shelves were large, fastened-together bundles of check stubs; in the desk drawer I found a checkbook of the three-hole business variety. As I pored over the check stubs, it suddenly became clear why Carlsbad had been living in this ramshackle old house.

His monthly pay was carefully entered each time and following the entry came a random assortment of checks in varying amounts all made out to an account in a bank in Hokkaido, Japan. Some of the stubs bore cryptic notes: payment; cars; food. Most of them bore no explanation whatever. But as I did a rapid count, I saw that over the past few years it had involved a helluva lot of money. To say he’d merely been salting it away was too simple an explanation. The whole thing smelled of preparation, funds sent to someone or someplace to be used for a certain event or time.

I’d just gathered all the stubs under my arm to take them and dump them in Hawk’s lap when it happened. The whole goddamned house blew up under me. It’s funny, when things like that happen, what you remember and note first I heard the roar of the explosion, like a volcano erupting, and I heard myself swearing as I was catapulted upwards and out of the little room.

“The bastards!” I yelled as I hit the side of the doorjamb and went sailing across the hallway. “They left a time bomb.” I was conscious enough to recognize that one thing for a brief, flashing moment, and then the stairs rose up to meet me as I landed on them. There was a second explosion as the furnace blew. I felt my lungs closing down as the rush of turbulent, poisoned air hit me. I half-recall large chunks of plaster and wood descending on me and trying to cover my head with my arms, and then the blackness closed in on me as a sharp pain flashed through my head.

I came to, probably not more than a few minutes later, and my blurred eyes finally focused on a scene of wreckage and debris. But worse than that, as I lay there, my mind slowly orienting itself as to who I was and why I was lying amid all this rubble, I felt the hot air and saw the orange flaring of the flames. It was very hot, terribly hot, and as I pulled myself up to my hands and knees I saw that the place was a sheet of flame. I’d fallen down to the first floor as the second floor collapsed, which had saved my life. The roof was now the second floor with tongues of fire licking out through openings in the debris. I was surrounded by towering flames, which were working their way toward the middle of the rubble and me.

I tied my handkerchief around my face as I started to cough. It was a small, almost useless gesture, but seconds become terribly precious when life seems to be slipping away. A wind from somewhere, probably created by the vacuum of the fire itself, shot a long tongue of flame across the rubble directly at me. I scrambled backward and felt myself crashing through the shattered floorboards. I grabbed at them, caught one splintered edge for a moment and then it gave way, too. But it had held long enough to break my fall and I landed unhurt on the cellar floor.

The place was choking with smoke and dust from the exploded furnace, but I managed to glimpse light in a far corner. I climbed over twisted pipes and blocks of concrete toward it and felt a movement in the air. It was like the sight of water to a parched man and I pressed on, tearing my leg on a piece of jagged metal. It was suddenly before me, sunlight and air, still filled with the choking dust, but nonetheless air from a back cellar entrance, and I stumbled out into the open, still feeling the heat of the flames behind me. I fell down on the grass and lay there, gasping in great gobs of air as I heard the fire truck sirens approaching. I was getting to my feet with the handkerchief still hanging from my face when they rolled up to the front of the house, now nothing but a roaring tower of flames.

“There’s nobody inside,” I told the men, erasing the fear in their eyes. As they started to hose water on the inferno I climbed into the Chevy, torn and aching and bleeding from dozens of cuts and bruises and mad as all hell.

I stopped to phone Hawk from a roadside phone booth. He told me to go to my place, get feed up and then come to the office.

“I’ll be here,” he said. “I’ve had a cot brought in and I’m staying here until everything is over and done with, this World Leadership Conference and now this blasted business.”

I hung up and drove slowly back to my apartment A long, hot bath followed by a long, cold martini did wonders for the body and the soul. It was just after dinner time when I reached Hawk’s office at AXE headquarters. He was standing by the bay window, looking down on the circling lines of traffic below and he gestured to me as I entered. I went over to stand beside him, glancing at the deep, tired lines etched in his face.

“We’re like that traffic down there, Nick,” he said. “Going around in circles, with no end, only more and more circles.” He turned and sat down. I took the chair across from him. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff we’ve been into involving the World Leadership Conference. We’ve uncovered plots against six different presidents and world figures to prevent their attending the Conference. The Conference has triggered every crackpot and professional group into action. And now this Carlsbad and his damned deadly strain. That’s the topper of them all, Nick, because it involves the whole world and it was our virus, from our stockpile”

“Anyone dig up anything on the checkstub information I gave you over the phone?” I asked.

“Our people in Tokyo got on it,” he said. “The account was closed out three days ago. It had been used by a Mr. Kiyishi — described as a huge man.”

“That figures,” I muttered.

“As Carlsbad has been planning this with international contacts and may be planning to strike anyone anywhere, the President has ordered me to make certain contacts. I’ve made them, but I can only keep my fingers crossed.”

“You’ve lost me, Chief,” I admitted.

“We’ve opened this up to the top people of every major intelligence service on the basis of international cooperation and enlightened self-interest” Hawk said. “I want you at a meeting scheduled for eight A.M. at the White House tomorrow morning. Ardsley of British Intelligence is coming. Nutashi of Japan will be there. Claude Mainon of the French Service des Renseignements, Manouchi of Italian Counter-intelligence, Adams of Canadian Security and, get this, the Russians are sending Ostrov of Soviet Special Intelligence.”

“Quite an imposing array,” I commented.

“I’ve saved the best of all,” Hawk said. “The Chinese Reds are sending Chung Li.”

I whistled through my teeth. “How the hell did you work that?”

“With Chairman Mao attending the World Conference at the United Nations, they can’t afford to have something go wrong,” Hawk said. “They don’t know, and neither do we, that Carlsbad might not try to loose X–V77 against the Chinese leadership. If his plan is to put America on a spot, that’d sure be the way to do it.”

“And so crafty old Mr. Big of the Chinese Reds is stepping out of his hole and into the daylight,” I mused aloud. “This must be some kind of first.” I’d met and beaten many of Chung Li’s specialists, but the grand master of Red Chinese intelligence was always a shadowy figure in the background, unreachable, almost invisible it seemed.

“Do you think it will work?” I asked Hawk. “Do you think we can all cooperate, with everybody suspicious and on guard about letting his own classified stuff slip out?”

“On this one thing, I think yes,” Hawk said. “Chung Li has already taken steps to protect himself. We’ve learned that our Consul in Hong Kong has been taken into protective custody at some hidden estate. Of course they’ve said nothing to us, but they know we got the message.”

I reached into my pocket and brought out the little object I’d found at Carlsbad house before the explosion. I tossed it to Hawk.

“Let’s see if any of them can help us with that,” I said.

Hawk examined it. “Looks like a fragment of bone to me,” he said of the material imbedded in the silver circle. “Well see if they can clue us in on it tomorrow.”

I stood up. “Eight a.m., the White House,” I said and the old fox nodded, his eyes weary.

“And no trace of Carlsbad and the others?” I asked, starting toward the door. “They’ve just up and vanished into thin air.”

“By God, it seems like it,” Hawk said crisply, angrily. “We’ve got every major highway watched, every train and bus depot, every major airport. Maybe they’re holed up somewhere. If not, they’ve slipped through. Either way, it spells trouble.”

III

All during the night and into the dawn they came winging toward the shores of the continental United States. Each one was monitored constantly by radio-radar contact and given clearance at pre-arranged check points. Each one was met by a U.S. Phantom jet and escorted to Andrews Field outside Washington.

The first to come was Ardsley, of Britain, in a Lightning F.MK-3, moving in low and fast but picked up by our boys about four hundred miles east of Nova Scotia. Mainon, the Frenchman, came in on a Dassault Mystere-4A and was met some three hundred miles over the Atlantic proper. The Japanese came into Hawaii on a Fuji Jet Trainer T1F2 and was transferred to a big Boeing Jet for the rest of the trip.

Ostrov, the Russian, made a series of short hops in an MIG-19, specially built for him and a pilot, and was escorted most of the way by Russian long-distance fighters. We picked him up after he’d been cleared for landing at Goose Bay, Newfoundland. The Chinese Red, Chung Li, was cleared through to land at Fairbanks, Alaska, in a big Russian Ilyushin transport. From there we escorted his big plane to Andrews.

Me, I took a cab and got stuck in traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. They were all there when I arrived, and the climate was something all its own, sort of polite distaste. Ostrov I’d seen before, burly, thick-necked with hard, blue-quartz eyes. He was known as a tough man in every respect and he looked the part. My glance swept over the others: Ardsley relaxed, casual as only the British can be and yet appear crisp; Claude Mainon, the Frenchman, foxy, with quick-moving eyes; our two men from Army Intelligence. I zeroed in on Chung Li.

The Chinese Red seemed to be waiting to meet my glance, and he nodded to me. He had a round, bland face, almost pudgy, very much like that of his boss, Mao Tse-tung. He didn’t look the part of a wily, clever espionage chief but then, as I thought about it, neither did Hawk, standing to one side with his New England Baptist minister’s countenance. Hawk had made a blanket introduction as I entered the room, but it was only Chung Li who spoke.

“My pleasure indeed, Carter,” he said, his voice soft, almost with a hiss in it. “I have often wondered what you looked like. One wonders about a man who has given one so much trouble.”

He smiled a Buddha-like smile, charming yet deadly.

“I hope you’re not disappointed,” I said, returning his charm. “Not in the slightest,” Chung Li answered and I saw his small, dark eyes take in every facet of my face. As he looked at me I had the feeling I was being visually computerized and catalogued. The soft roundness of his own face was, I knew, a natural mask for the brutal hardness behind it.

“Gentlemen,” Hawk said, “I’ll be brief. There is no point in pretending we all meet here as friends. We are here only because, in this instance, our interests happen to dovetail.”

“We are here because of the danger your apparently very poor security measures have put the world in,” Ostrov growled. Hawk didn’t bat an eye.

“I’m sure you have often wished they were poorer than they are,” he said blandly. Ostrov’s blue-quartz eyes grew even colder.

“The vial from our Bacteriological Warfare stockpile known as X–V77,” Hawk went on, “is a deadly strain derived from a series of botulisms. It will infect by air and grow in any kind of climatic conditions, needing only a host organism to attach itself to. Therefore merely preventive measures around your country’s top men will not suffice.

“Agent N3, here, has been given the task of finding Dr. Carlsbad and the virus. I think you’ll all agree there is no better field agent in the world. But time is all-important. Any help you can give will help us all. Until X–V77 is returned intact to us, we are all in this together. No one here expects anyone else to give away secrets, yet within that framework, we must cooperate. I will tell you all that we know up to now.”

As Hawk briefed the room I thought to myself what a concentration of high-powered espionage information was gathered here in this room in the White House. When Hawk finished, he picked up a sheet of notepaper.

“This was received by the President of the United States this morning,” he said. He glanced at me for a moment. “It was postmarked in a small town in Iowa.” I nodded and he returned to the letter.

“Mr. President,” he read, “by now I hope you have contacted the leaders of every major power and told them that together you must destroy all stocks of bacteriological warfare. If you have not done so, you only have a short time before I will demonstrate the full effect of the horror you would inflict upon the world. I will expect action and I will listen to the public communication systems and the press for your answer. Joseph Carlsbad.”

Hawk passed the letter around, handing it first to Manouchi, the Italian, standing nearest to him.

“Perhaps we ought to make a public show of doing what he says,” Ardsley of British Intelligence volunteered. “All our governments announce that we’re destroying our germ warfare branches and materials.”

“He is no fool, this Carlsbad,” Ostrov said. “He will want more than words.”

“I’m afraid I agree with General Ostrov on that,” Hawk said. “He’s obviously planned carefully and with help. He can probably stay wherever he’s holed up and wait for us to furnish proof.”

“And showing him proof would be impossible for you gentlemen, eh?” Claude Mainon said, a sly smile on his face. “That would mean actually doing away with your bacteriological warfare weapons.”

Nobody said anything, neither Hawk nor Ostrov. I couldn’t help smiling inwardly. The Frenchman had touched on one of the tender spots.

“For the moment let us concentrate on recovering X–V77,” Hawk said finally. He tossed the little round silver object with the ivory or bone set into it on the table.

“This is the one material lead Agent N3 has found,” he said. “Can any of you help us with it?”

I watched the men move closer to the table and look at the piece. Ardsley, Mainon, the Italian and Ostrov shook their heads. Nutashi, the Japanese, picked it up and studied it closely. I saw Chung Li watching him through mere slits of eyes, a patient, almost amused expression on his face.

“It is an identification piece,” Nutashi said. “Used by a small secret society, semireligious, practicing human sacrifices, we understand. The material in the center is human bone from a victim of the Hiroshima bombing, no doubt still slightly radioactive. The religious aspects of the society center around the Hiroshima catastrophe.”

“Certainly the land of a group Carlsbad could get material help from,” I said. “Such as a place to hide.”

Nutashi laid the silver piece back on the table and Chung Li reached out and picked it up, dangling it from the few remaining links attached to it. “Major Nutashi is generally correct about this group,” he said in his soft, sibilant voice. “We had contacted them once to evaluate their possible use for our own purposes.”

I saw Nutashi’s jaw muscles flex, but he maintained his outer calm. Chung Li went on, his soft, gentle tones clear in the silence of the room. “However we found them too few in number and badly disorganized. But during the past year we have heard that their numbers have increased and that they seem to have taken on a new strength. Strangely enough, this has resulted in their going deeper underground.”

I saw all those check stubs of Carlsbad’s in my mind. If this group had got themselves new strength, at least part of it was due to Carlsbad’s funds.

“You say they’ve gone deeper underground?” I asked. “Do you mean you don’t know where they are anymore?”

“Only that they are somewhere in the Kurile Islands,” Chung Li answered. “In some ancient Buddhist temple”

“Then that’s our next move,” Hawk said. “Carter will go there and try to find them. Everything points to Carlsbad working with this group. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got and so well run with it.”

“We will make you into one of the Japanese fishermen who fish off the Kuriles every day,” Nutashi volunteered. “That will ensure your entry without suspicion.”

“And if I do get Carlsbad and need some backup muscle?” I asked.

Ostrov cleared his throat, and I could see it took some effort for him to say his piece. “We have a... er... number of undersea craft in that area,” he admitted. “We could have them standing by for action upon instruction from you.”

Hawk was actually beaming. “That sounds very good, gentlemen.” He smiled. “Of course, we agree that everyone shall be given immediate reports of any and all developments. We shall work out procedural operations. Meanwhile, Nick, you’d best get over to Special Effects. Stewart is waiting for you.”

I took them all in with a nod and paused for a moment to meet Chung Li’s eyes. Perhaps he was thinking of the number of times I’d wrecked his schemes and destroyed his top men. Perhaps he was thinking of how he’d like to get rid of me right then and there. In any case, his small, dark eyes held an air of deadly amusement, and I knew that to Chung Li, this cooperation was no more than a passing moment. His eyes seemed to say that he was looking forward to a speedy resumption of our running battle. Anytime you’re ready, I let my own eyes reply, and turned on my heel.

I looked back at the stately lines of the White House as I got outside. The venerable structure had seen many history-making meetings since 1800, but none more vital and unusual than the one I’d just left. At AXE offices, Stewart greeted me at the doorway of the cavernous laboratories of Special Effects. “Nothing terribly unusual for you this time, Nick” he said in his usual professorial monotone, “The Chief said that communications would be the problem.”

“One of the problems,” I corrected him. “Got anything in the line of germ repellants?”

Stewart ignored me, which is what he usually did. He was always like a mother hen, protectively fussing over his products of highly specialized destruction, and I knew he thought me irreverent I didn’t really deprecate his fantastically clever concoctions. Hell, they’d saved my life more than once. I just thought he ought to be less holy about them, especially since they were as unholy as hell.

Stewart halted at one of the white-topped tables where a belt and a pair of socks were set neatly side by side.

“Something new in men’s wear?” I asked and he permitted himself a fleeting smile. “I’d like to see a three-button jacket in a quiet check,” I joked.

“Put this belt on,” Stewart said. “Press the center of the buckle in the rear first.” The buckle was thick silver with a scroll design in the front. As I pressed the rear, the back portion slid sideways and I found myself holding a square panel with a tiny grill in the center.

“Microelectronics,” Stewart said. “It’s a tiny sending set. No reception. Transmission only. The Chief said to fit it into something they wouldn’t be apt to take away from you.”

As I looked at the little device, he picked up a small package about the size of a pack of king-size cigarettes. “It goes with the belt,” he explained. “There isn’t enough power in the sending unit to carry any substantial distance. But this little pack carries plenty. Set it down anywhere within a mile of where you’re going, flip up the switch at the side, and the unit will receive your signals from the belt sender. It will then relay them up to two hundred miles. It’s waterproof, too.”

I’d switched belts after sliding the rear panel of the buckle back in place when he handed me the socks. “No need to put these on now,” he said. “Inside the decorative ribbing on the sides they contain explosive wire. Just put a match to the whole sock and you’ll get enough for one good blast out of each.”

I stuffed the socks in my pocket. “Send me a dozen in brown and a dozen in blue. I hope nobody gives me a hotfoot while I’m wearing them.” Stewart’s severe face remained expressionless, and I decided he’d never develop a sense of humor. I left and went upstairs to Hawk’s office. There was a message for me to wait and wait I did. The pretty little thing in the outer office had a name and a telephone and an address where she lived alone. I got all three before Hawk came back. I followed him into the inner office.

“You will join Major Nutashi at Andrews Field in two hours,” Hawk said, his tone crisp. “You will both be flown to Hokkaido. There his people will prepare you for scouting the Kurile Islands. A fleet of four Russian submarine chasers of the S.O.I. Class will be standing by off the Kuriles. We decided against the use of submarines because of their lack of deck guns, which you may need. Also, these sub chasers can move in fasten Ostrov said there would be three W Class patrol submarines standing by below the surface if needed. Chung Li gave us a special frequency on which to contact him directly. He agreed to have all Chinese coastal forces alerted for any unusual activity, such as Carlsbad trying to make it to the Chinese mainland by boat. In radio contact with anyone, use the code name Operation DS.”

Hawk paused and his lips tightened. “The rest is up to you, Nick,” he said. “All this background cooperation won’t be worth a damn unless you get to Carlsbad. Everyone’s agreed to stay quietly in the background and wait for word from you. But at least you know that no matter which way Carlsbad jumps, you can go after him fast, without worrying about being stopped. Just clear your moves through Operation DS.”

“Good enough,” I said. “All assuming that Carlsbad is not holed up right here.”

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Hawk said. “We’re pretty sure he’s left the country. We got a report on a series of six private planes, left abandoned from here to Portland. Each plane had been reserved from a different charter service over a month ago, all by a Mr. Kiyishi.” I grimaced. That name again. They’d set up a series of short hops and skips across the country, changing planes each time just to play safe. Neat, I had to admit.

“We think they slipped by our people in Portland and took a commercial airliner overseas,” Hawk concluded. He stood up and walked to the door with me.

“This isn’t just a matter of getting Carlsbad,” he said. “If X–V77 is let loose in the process, we will have lost everything.”

“What you’re saying is I’ve got to move fast and hard and slow and careful,” I grinned. “Tell me how I do that, O Wise One.”

I should know never to underestimate the old fox. “Make believe you’re after one of your top-heavy blondes,” he said. “It’ll come back to you.”

IV

The Kurile Islands were given to Russia by the Yalta Agreement and are still a sore point with the Japanese. The Japanese still fish their rich waters despite the control of the Russians, and the small, hardy, independent fishermen are a constant problem to the Soviets. Stretching from the very tip of Japan to the long Sredinny finger pointing downward from Russia, the islands are swept by cold currents from the Bering Sea and spend many of their days in bone-chilling fog.

In one small, single-sailed fishing dory, three Japanese fishermen hauled in full nets and put out new ones, moving their little craft close to the island shores. One of them was an old man, stooped but still strong and able, the other his son, young and the mainstay of the boat. The third man was big for Japanese. Actually he was not even Japanese — he was me, Nick Carter.

I stayed hunched over like the others, clothed in the same oilskin work clothes under which I wore the long Japanese shirt with short, knee-length trousers. My eyes had the oriental fold, my skin was tinted a faint amber, and I knew I would easily pass for just another fisherman to anyone watching from shore. Major Nutashi had explained to the two fishermen that they were to go about their work as usual but to do whatever I ordered them to do, no matter how strange it sounded.

What we’d done for the first day was to get in the fish during the morning fogbound hours and then sail around listlessly while the sun burned through. When that happened, they’d repair nets and I’d scrounge down in the bottom of the dory and survey the islands as we moved in and around them. I thanked God there wasn’t a helluva lot to survey on most of them or we’d still be surveying as time ran out.

It was late in the second afternoon and the sun’s rays were moving low across the water as we steered past a small island with a screen of trees rising a hundred yards inshore. I caught the sudden flash of sun reflecting off field glasses.

“Just keep on sailing past,” I said quietly from the bottom of the boat. The old man nodded as we moved on and then slowly circled as though heading back. As we passed the island again, I was sitting up piling one of the nets into the bow of the dory. Once more I caught the brief glint of the sunlight on the glasses. We moved on until night fell, and then I ordered the little dory to come around and head back. The two fishermen didn’t ask any questions. When we were off the little island again it was pitch black. The moon hadn’t come up high enough yet and I didn’t wait around for it.

“Go back to your homes now,” I said to the old man and his son as I lowered myself over the side of the dory, leaving the oilskins with them.

They nodded gravely and I heard the faint sound of the water hitting the sides of the dory as she swung around. I swam for the dark mound that was the island, my shoes tied onto my belt, my fancy socks stuck into a pocket. The tide was coming in and helped me along. Soon I felt the pebble bottom under my feet and I crawled out onto a stone beach. I waited a moment, moved further up from the beach and brushed my feet dry on the grass that rose up at the edge of the trees. Then I put on my socks and shoes. It wasn’t the best of manners to go calling barefooted. I moved carefully through the trees. I’d gone about a hundred yards inland when I saw the flicker of light.

I crept forward in a crouch, moving closer to what turned out to be a crumbled mass of rock that had once been some kind of temple. But the decay had been arrested by new stone blocks placed in strategic positions and wooden planks filling up holes. The remains of the temple stretched back into a cleared area and I saw the roof had been well repaired with gutters and drains running along the edges. A figure emerged from a narrow, arched doorless entranceway — an old man, crippled and deformed. He lit a torch stuck in a wall holder and then moved along the side of the temple to disappear around the back. He was Japanese, or at least oriental. I waited and saw two men in monk-like robes emerge, gather some firewood and go back inside.

Through cracks in the stones and boards and by the reflected light of an open square that had once been a window, I saw the flicker of torchlight from inside and heard the sounds of chanting. If Carlsbad was here, I had to admit he’d picked a helluva spot to hide in. If his pals hadn’t lost that identification locket we could have spent a decade searching for this place. If he was here, he had to feel pretty secure. Except for watching the fishing boat with glasses, they hadn’t a guard posted anywhere.

I crossed the short space to the temple wall as the chanting stopped. My back pressed against the wall, I slipped into the dark of the arched doorway and then moved inside, into an area of deep shadows. The floor was plain dirt at the entrance, but a stone floor began just inside the arched area. Before moving farther inside the temple I placed the little relay power pack in the deep shadows of the doorway and flipped on the switch. I heard voices inside, women’s voices, and I could hear the movement of people.

Instinctively my arm pressed against Wilhelmina, secure in her holster, the hard flatness of Hugo against my right forearm. Taking a deep breath, I started to move forward. I was doing fine until I stepped on the first stone past the arched doorway; it was a wide, flat stone and I found out why they didn’t post guards. The damn thing was on some land of swivel — it flipped over and I felt myself being sent half-skidding forward to make a grand entrance.

Wilhelmina was in my hand as my knee hit the floor and I fell into a large, central room where figures came at me from all sides. I glimpsed one huge figure, stripped to the waist, off to the side, but I hadn’t time to take inventory. Cursing the damn stone, I let go a fusillade of shots, scattering them, and I heard cries of pain and alarm as I saw three figures go down. The room was lighted by the flickering glow of wall torches and filled with moving shadows and nearly dark areas. As the others scattered, I whirled to head for the doorway, this time stepping over the stone. When I reached the outside, I saw that people had rum out of various side exits and were rushing at me. I fired again and saw two more go down. A shot pinged off the stone an inch from my head and I emptied Wilhelmina and ran back into the temple, again leaping over the moveable stone.

Men were coming toward me inside while I heard the rest rushing in through the doorway. I decided against using Hugo. There was a good chance that, as had often happened, he’d go unnoticed and be of more use later. Right now, he’d just remove a few and the remainder might still get me. Their people didn’t seem afraid of being killed — they were coming in from all sides.

I streaked for the far wall as two shots rang out, whizzing past my ear and sounding like cannons in the cavernous interior of the temple. I dived, hit the floor and came up running again. Three men came in to cut me off and I bowled into them, feeling my blows striking flesh and bone. Two of them went down. The third clasped arms around my left leg and I kicked out hard with my right I felt my foot smash into his face and the arms let go. I changed course and tried for the other side of the big room.

Another shot rang out This one creased my forehead, and I felt the sharp pain of it as it seared the skin just below the hairline. I ducked, stumbled and fell as another shot crossed over me. I rolled over to avoid the third shot I was sure would follow. It did and so did a huge Japanese. I saw his bulk fill the space above me. The sonofabitch had a positive talent for getting to me when I was off my feet.

I rolled over to get away from him but he brought both arms down, hands held together, like a sledgehammer. The blow caught me between the shoulder blades with tremendous force and I spread-eagled against the floor. His foot followed, catching me alongside the temple, and I felt myself skitter two feet sideways. More hands had come up to rain blows on me. A sharp blow from something metal, probably a gun barrel, caught me on the top of the head. I saw purple flashes and then blackness closed down.

It could have been an eternity, or only five minutes, but I began to slowly struggle out of the blackness. As I started to come around, I felt the soft touch of a wet rag on my face, patting my eyes, being drawn across my forehead, then my cheeks. That’s damn nice of them, I thought fuzzily. When I got my eyes to open I saw that they weren’t being gentle but merely wiping away my makeup. An old, one-armed woman was doing the rubbing with a wet cloth.

I felt my arms tied around behind my back at the wrists. My ankles were also tied together, and I was propped up against a wall. Behind the old woman I saw faces and shapes as I started to focus. The eye picks out the biggest things first; in this case the huge form of Carlsbad’s Japanese, his flesh in folds over his tremendous chest and stomach, truly a mountain of a man. Beside him, looking thinner than he actually was, stood a gray-haired man with intense blue eyes and next to him Rita Kenmore, now in black slacks and a yellow jersey top. I looked at Carlsbad. At least I knew he was really here.

One of the men standing behind Rita was holding Wilhelmina in his hand. I could feel Hugo still safely strapped to my forearm. The other people in the temple gathered in a semicircle to stare at me. Most of them were oriental but not all, and there was something strange about the whole lot of them. Mostly men, the group contained some women, and most had lined, old faces though there was a sprinkling of younger, well-built males. But all of them had a haunted expression in their eyes, an expression of inner pain. A number of them were crippled and deformed. The old woman finished wiping away my makeup and rose to step back.

Beyond the onlookers I saw corridors leading away from the main part of the temple. Against the far wall rows of candles burned at a kind of altar, a long, flat slab of rock with a peculiar sculpture hanging behind it — a sculpture of twisted, blackened metal and pieces of bone. Carlsbad’s voice brought my attention back to him.

“This is the man who almost prevented your getting away with Rita?” he was saying to the large Japanese. The wrestler nodded.

“I’m impressed by your discovery of our little nest,” Carlsbad said to me. “How did you manage that?”

“Clean living,” I said and the Japanese started to reach one huge hand down to me.

Carlsbad stopped him. “No, let him alone. He can do us no harm. In fact, we can keep him here. He may be of value eventually.”

The giant Japanese straightened up but his eyes, small in the folds of his huge head, glittered. He said nothing and I wondered if he was as subservient as Carlsbad seemed to think.

“Where is X–V77?” I asked Carlsbad.

“Here and quite safe, for the moment,” the bacteriologist answered. I glanced at Rita and tried to read what was behind those china-blue eyes. I thought I saw uncertainty and I turned back to Carlsbad.

“You’ve already killed four men over this,” I said and saw Rita quickly glance at him. Now I knew what I had seen in her eyes. Surprise, shock. Carlsbad directed his words to me, but he was answering her questioning look.

“A small price to pay to achieve what must be achieved.”

“And what’s that?” I questioned.

“To make the world’s leaders stop their misuse of science,” Carlsbad said.

He gestured to those standing by. “Everyone here is a victim of the immorality of present-day science and politics. Every individual here is a victim of one or another scientific advance which, by its use, is really injuring mankind.”

“For instance?” I asked. “That big oaf looks healthy.”

“Mr, Kiyishi, like many of the others, was a child in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing,” Carlsbad explained. “He is sterile, unable to produce a child. Some of my people here are workmen, crippled externally or internally by constant exposure to radioactivity in the plants in which they worked. Some were soldiers, permanently disabled by exposure to nerve gases. Others were fishermen whose stomachs are largely gone due to eating fish contaminated by insecticides.

“There are fifteen families here, fifteen out of two hundred killed in the mountains of the Caucasus when a Russian plane accidentally dropped a container of bacteriological viruses. The incident was kept completely silent. In America, thousands of sheep were killed in a similar accident, sheep which could easily have been people.”

As I listened to him, I realized with a chilling horror that Carlsbad had gone far beyond the role of a protesting man of science. He was setting up a kind of elite of the damned, with what sounded like political and moral overtones.

“I think we should kill him at once,” said the big Japanese, gesturing at me, little eyes hard as stones.

“No,” Carlsbad said sharply. “He is obviously a top agent. He may be able to help us in time, willingly or unwillingly.”

Rita was still there, but her eyes were on the floor. I knew that if I had a chance to get out of here, it would depend on one slim girl and one slim stiletto. Carlsbad bad turned to his niece and put a hand on her arm.

“We are going now,” he said. “You’ll be safe here till we return. Your room is not the Grand Hotel but it will suffice. Time has passed without anything having been done by the American government, or any of the others. We are beginning the most critical phase of our mission now, my dear. But it will be worth it one day.”

He kissed the girl tenderly on the cheek and turned to the giant by his side. The huge man’s impassive face showed nothing, yet I had the distinct feeling he was standing apart, making his own decisions. Perhaps it was the way his little eyes took in everything, glittering and vicious.

“Who are you leaving in charge?” Carlsbad asked, and the mountainous man gestured to a robed figure that stepped forward.

“Tumo,” the giant said, and Tumo bowed deferentially to Carlsbad then shifted his eyes quickly to the huge man. Something passed between the two men, unspoken, fleeting, but nonetheless there. Tumo was in his late twenties, well-built, with a hard line of a mouth and eyes that almost matched Carlsbad’s in their dark intensity. On his chest, bared by the loose-fitting robe, he wore a silver medallion with the human bone in the center. They all wore the piece, some as ankle bracelets, others had them suspended from their wrists.

“Tumo and I have carefully gone over exactly what he is to do,” Sumo Sam said. “If anything should happen to us, he will carry on.”

“Nothing will happen to us.” Carlsbad smiled. “So long as I have the strain in my possession, they must take extreme care in their moves. Come, let us go.”

Carlsbad kissed the girl again, this time on the forehead, and walked toward the doorway. The giant and the other two Japanese that had been with him right along followed. I had to give it a final try.

“The whole world’s alerted, Carlsbad,” I yelled after him. “You can’t win. Call it off.”

He paused in the shadows of the archway and smiled back at me. “You are wrong,” he said. “I can’t lose.”

I cursed inwardly, knowing the truth of what he’d answered. The minute he let that strain loose, he’d made his point. But he wasn’t content with just making a point any longer. He was going to use X–V77 to bring the world down around itself. I glanced up to see the man Tumo watching me. He abruptly turned and hurried away. The others had begun to drift off and disappear into the numerous corridors that led from the central portion of the crumbled old temple.

Rita Kenmore still stood there. She was about to say something when the sound of an engine made the walls of the temple reverberate. It was a helicopter. I knew that distinctive sound and I listened as the chopper took off and finally faded from hearing. Only the girl was left looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am, really.”

“Get me out of here,” I said to her quietly. “Now, while nobody’s around. Quick!”

The china blue eyes grew even rounder, mirroring her shock that I should even think such a thing. She didn’t move but I felt her draw back.

“I can’t,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I’m sorry but I just can’t.”

“Look, what if I said I think your uncle is right but I know he can’t win,” I suggested. “Let me out of here and I will help him.”

“I wouldn’t believe you,” she said, her eyes serious. “You don’t think anything like that. But he is right, you know. And what he’s trying to do is right.”

I gritted my teeth. I didn’t have time for philosophical abstractions, but I had to get through to her.

“All right, I’ll admit I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong. But I do know this. You can’t do the right thing in the wrong way. When you do that, you destroy whatever lightness there is, and that’s what your uncle’s doing. Unfortunately, he’s not only destroying concepts, he’s going to destroy people, flesh and blood people.”

She was looking at me, biting her lower lip with her teeth and I held my eyes steady on her. I knew I was finally getting to her. Suddenly Tumo reappeared and got to her first. He had two men and two women with him.

“Take her,” he said quietly, and I groaned. Rita looked up as the men moved quickly to her, seizing her arms. She was frowning, not really comprehending. But I knew damn well what was happening. Carlsbad’s idealistic movement had a few crosscurrents in it.

“What are you doing?” Rita gasped as they twisted her arms behind her back. “Let me go at once!”

Tumo’s answer was a resounding slap across her face that made her pretty head swivel. I saw the tears come into her eyes. “I... I don’t understand,” she choked.

“I’ll explain fast,” I answered. “Tumo, here, is your large Oriental friend’s man and has his own ideas about running things when your uncle is finished doing his bit.”

Tumo smiled, a deadly, evil smile, and kicked me in the chest. As I saw his foot coming and he wore only sandals it merely hurt like hell. He turned to Rita and ran his hands down over her breasts. She tried to twist away, but the other two men were holding her immobile. The woman stood by watching.

“Your uncle is interested only in making the world understand” Tumo said. “We who have suffered and been victimized by the world’s misuse of science are interested in making it pay.”

He turned to the women. “Prepare the altar first and then her,” he said. The men had already finished tying Rita’s hands behind her back and her ankles together, just as I was tied. They flung her down beside me and I heard her cry out in pain as she hit the wall. When she finally looked at me, Tumo and the others had padded silently away and her face was tear-streaked.

“What are they going to do with us?” she asked, fear in her voice.

“Kill us,” I said flatly. I didn’t say anything about doing it the hard way. She’d find out soon enough. In fact, she found out sooner than I’d figured when the two women returned. One went to the altar and began rearranging the candles, bringing them closer to the stone slab and putting them in a semi-circle behind it. The other woman came over to Rita with a small pen-knife and began cutting away the girl’s clothes until she was naked. Her eyes met mine, pained embarrassment and fear sharing room in them. The woman had gone over to the altar.

Embarrassment gave way to a gasp of terror as the two women returned, pulled her to her feet and dragged her to the stone slab of an altar. With a flood of sudden horror I saw what had been rigged over the altar slab. Rita’s lovely young body was strapped onto the altar, her ankles untied, her legs spread and then secured by ankle straps. Her arms were tied at her sides. Over the stone slab, the candles had been arranged to drip their hot wax into long metal strips suspended from balanced wires. The two women saw my eyes roving over the arrangement as they finished with Rita.

“That is right,” one said, turning to me. “The candles are made of a special wax — one that stays boiling hot for a long, long time. As the wax fills the metal strips they will tilt and pour down upon her. By morning, she will be coated with wax from head to foot.”

I knew she was telling the truth. The network of metal funnels and strips over the stone slab looked like a diabolical mobile.

“She will die little by little,” the woman said. “She will be our sacrifice to the spirit of pain. Others may pray to the symbols of love and peace and goodness, but we who have been injured beyond repair, we pray to our guiding spirit pain. It is pain which has guided our lives, physical pain, emotional pain.”

The other woman was busy lighting the carefully arranged candles that were part of the whole mad contrivance. I saw Tumo enter at the head of a procession, walking slowly, murmuring chants. The two women joined the group as they all knelt in front of the stone slab. As the women kept up the chant, the men, led by Tumo, stood on both sides of the stone and rubbed their hands over the girl’s naked form. It was more fear than pain that made Rita cry out. The pain would be coming soon enough. Finally they withdrew from the girl and joined the women in further chants. The candles continued to burn steadily and I could see the metal strips starting to fill up with hot, liquid wax.

I’d long since tested the wrist ropes and found them too tough to break. Hugo was still strapped to my forearm but, for the moment, of no help at all. Unless I found some way to get loose, Rita Kenmore would die and I’d be next. The wax would splash down on her little by little, with burning, scalding pain, finally covering the lovely lips and face until suffocation finished it off.

Unexpectedly the chanting stopped and the whole troupe rose and silently filed out of the main room. Rita’s eyes were filled with tears as she turned her head and looked across at me.

I was busy figuring a way to get out of there. My eyes swept over the girl’s naked form without regard for the utter loveliness of it I — was looking at her hands. They were free to open and close, even though her wrists were strapped to the stone. She could hold something in them, like Hugo! I didn’t know how long we’d be alone, so it was now or never.

I started to propel myself across the floor, inch-worm fashion with ankles bound together. I was only halfway across when I realized my clothes were soaked with perspiration but I kept moving along, sometimes turning on my back and pushing myself forward, then scooting along on my side.

When I reached the edge of the stone slab, I had to stop for a moment to regain my breath. My chest was heaving and my mouth was dry, muscles strained and crying out for release. Sitting up, as straight as possible, I leaned my forehead against the edge of the stone slab and balanced myself as I managed to pull myself upright. It was precariously uncertain with ankles bound tightly together. But finally I was standing, hands still tight behind my back, leaning half across Rita’s naked body to keep my balance enough to stay upright. My head came to rest on her right breast. In any other circumstances I’d have enjoyed it immensely.

My lips rubbed across one small pink tip.

Pulling myself along the edge of the slab, I stopped where her hand lay against the stone. Still bent forward, my head now resting on her thighs, I glanced up over the rise of the belly and the dark mound just in front of my eyes.

“Listen carefully to me” I said. “I’m going to turn around and I’ll have a stiletto in my hand. I’m going to put it into your hand. You hold it tight, point up, and I’ll shred these wrist ropes against it. Understand?”

“Yes,” I heard her say, her voice strained, hoarse. I turned, carefully, fighting to stay upright and keep my balance. Pressing my forearm against the edge of the slab, I released Hugo and felt the stiletto drop from its sheath into my hand. Maneuvering cautiously, I felt Rita’s open hand and put the stiletto into it. I held on until I felt her hand close around the hilt of the blade.

“Good girl,” I said. “Now hold it tight.” Slowly, taking care not to dislodge Hugo from her grip, I pressed the wrist ropes against the blade, moving them up and down against it, sometimes bringing them down onto the point. I had just gotten started when it happened, all at once. I knew rather than saw what had occurred. The first thing was Rita’s scream of pure pain. Her hand opened involuntarily and I felt the stiletto fall from it and heard it land on the floor.

I lost my balance and fell forward, twisting my body to avoid a bashed face. As I did so I saw that the first funnel of molten hot wax had let go and the substance lay over the girl’s abdomen, still emitting little wisps of steam.

Rita’s scream of pain had turned into choking sobs now. As I lay on the floor beside the stone slab, looking up, I saw a second short length of metal reach its limit, tilt and send another stream of liquid wax down on the girl. This one landed just beside the first, a little above it at the edge of her ribs and once again she screamed in anguish.

I thought of picking Hugo up with my teeth as the stiletto lay within reach, pulling myself up again and placing it back into her hands. But I knew that was no good. I’d be painfully slow and her screams would shortly be bringing the others to enjoy her anguish from ringside. And then, even if I did get the blade in her hand again, another deluge of wax would bring the same results. I was running out of time and it galvanized me in angry desperation.

I rolled this time along the length of the stone slab to where a thick candle burned in a tall holder at the far end of the altar. Pulling myself up on my knees, I threw myself forward, hitting the tall, wrought-iron holder hard. It toppled, the candle still in place, and lay on the stone floor. Ignoring the bruised pain of my knees and my aching muscles, I inched forward to the candle on the floor. Gritting my teeth against the searing pain, I thrust my wrists into the flame, holding them as long as I could stand the pain, and then pulling away. But only for an instant. Taking another deep breath, I plunged the wrist-ropes into the flame of the candle again. The skin of my wrists grew raw and started to blister, and my stomach was nauseous from the pain. Then I felt the ropes burn through enough. I rolled away and pulled and my hands came free. I gave myself ten seconds to lie there and then I was sitting up, reaching over for Hugo and slicing through the ropes binding my ankles.

I got up, started to slide out the panel of my belt buckle when I saw another of the metal funnels starting to tip. I cut through Rita’s ankle and wrist straps and yanked the girl from the stone slab just as another deluge of the hot wax splattered down. She was in my arms, clinging to me, shivering, her body wet with perspiration. I pushed her away and slid out the small sending unit at the back of my belt buckle.

“Operation DS,” I called out. “Operation DS.” I gave the call letters three times more, and then asked for gunfire. I gave them the description and position of the island and told them to destroy the temple on it. Ostrov had said that four of the S.O.I. Class sub chasers would be standing by. They each carried four 50mm guns in twin mountings, plus four five-barrel rocket launchers. All together, they could bring more than enough fire power to bear. If the power pack had done its job, they should have heard my call.

I’d just finished when Tumo appeared with three other men. Seeing Rita’s naked form beside me, he knew at once something had gone wrong. He reached into his robe and pulled out a gun. The sound of the shot told me it was Wilhelmina. I pushed Rita to one side and hit the floor just as Tumo got off another shot. He was running toward me, and I rolled behind the stone slab of the altar just as the temple resounded to the reverberating clang of an ancient gong.

Tumo, joined by one of the other men, was approaching the stone slab. Crouched down on the other side of it, I heard their footsteps moving cautiously. The candle I’d used to burn off my wrist ropes still burned in its tall holder only a few inches from me. I reached out and pulled it toward me slowly, making no noise. I could hear the sound of others coming on the run. As I expected, Tumo waited, hanging back on one side of the stone slab while other men moved around the end.

Holding the bottom of the tall holder, I shoved the burning candle in one of my attackers’ eyes as he rounded the end of the altar stone. He screamed and fell backwards. Tumo would be scrambling up over the top of the altar stone now for a clear shot at me. I lifted the long iron holder and flung it up into the delicately balanced candles and funnels over the stone. I rolled to one side as I heard Tumo scream. The hot wax came down on him from half-a-dozen of the metal strips. He was atop the altar stone, grabbing in pain at the back of his neck, when I let Hugo fly. It went into his right temple, just above the eye, with full force, penetrating all the way to the hilt I saw the man shudder and fall forward to lay limp across the altar stone, insensible to the hot wax still splattering down upon him.

I crossed the few steps in one quick bound, pulled Hugo free, wiped the blade on Tumo’s shirt and scooped Wilhelmina up. At Rita’s scream, I whirled and got off two shots. The two men holding her were flung backwards by the force of the big 9mm slugs at close range. Rita ran toward me and I met her halfway, firing at the others as they came rushing into the area from the surrounding corridors.

I fired at whatever moved across my line of vision, and I fired in short bursts, scattering them like so many leaves in the wind. I was moving backwards, pulling Rita along with me, when the first shot from the patrol boats exploded and the ancient temple trembled. More shots followed quickly, some landing outside in the trees, others direct hits. I knew that the Russian gunners were zeroing in on their target. Some of the men and women were trying to flee, others were gathering together to huddle in small groups, waiting for death to come. A full round of shots hit, and the walls of the old temple seemed to fall away like a child’s cardboard house.

I clambered over the rubble and headed for daylight, pulling Rita along, pausing only to strip the robe from an inert form and give it to her.

She wrapped it around herself. We hit the ground, tumbling over a mound of rubble, as two shells whistled over our heads. Yanking her along, I got up and ran for the trees, falling again as another pair of shells whistled past to land amid the remains of the temple. They had really sighted their target now and almost every shell was hitting the mark. Rita and I stumbled from the thin line of trees onto the beach and I lay there, pulling out the sending set from my belt buckle.

“Operation DS,” I called, hoping the shots hadn’t killed the little power pack. “Operation DS. Hold fire. Pick me up on beach. Repeat. Pick me up on beach. Imperative.”

We flattened ourselves on the beach as a trio of shells looped overhead. The little island was shaking from the fury of the barrage the four patrol cruisers were laying down, and I knew they were using their rocket launchers, too. Then, abruptly, the firing halted, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The power pack had still worked. I put my head up and saw, across the water, the white flash of spray from the prow of a fast-moving vessel heading directly toward us. Then the low lines of the patrol craft came into view, moving in as close as she dared.

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling Rita with me into the surf, “We’ve got to catch the bus.”

The patrol craft slowed, turned and cut her engines not more than a few hundred yards off shore. Rita and I were swimming already, Rita having a rough time of it with the voluminous robe that soaked up water and lay on her like a dead weight I helped her until strong hands pulled us up onto the patrol cruiser. My mind had already left behind what had happened and was racing on, thinking about Carlsbad.

“Get the girl below decks, please,” I said to the captain of the cruiser, a tall, square-faced Russian with short blond hair. “Some hot tea would help, too.”

“Da,” he nodded.

“And get me to your radio,” I said. Once more he nodded and I followed him below decks. While they got a pair of dungarees and an old shirt for Rita, I was on the radio, making relay contact first with a big W Class Russian sub and then with the special frequency set up for this operation. I reported the bad news that Carlsbad had flown the coop and was moving forward with his plans elsewhere.

I heard Ostrov’s voice, and then radio contact was temporarily broken off. When it came back, the Soviet intelligence commandant was giving me instructions which had been quickly cleared and agreed upon by himself, Hawk, Chung Li and Colonel Nutashi. We were going to be picked up by a big Soviet plane and flown to one of the United States carriers off Japan. Meanwhile, I was to prepare a full report to be given via the powerful carrier transmitter, Ostrov’s rough, growling delivery was more pronounced than usual, and his final parting message sent my own hackles up.

“I’d expected something better, Carter. You had the man in your hands.”

“Want to change places?” I asked, and he clicked off. I turned from the transmitter and went over to where Rita sat, clothed in a loose gray seaman’s shirt and dungarees. Her hands found mine as I sat down beside her, close in the cramped quarters inside the patrol cruiser.

“I’ll never be able to thank you,” she said quietly.

“I’ll let you try,” I said. “In fact, you can start now. Think hard. Try to remember anything you may have heard your uncle or that large Japanese buddy of his say about where they were going. They left by chopper, which means that wherever it was, it wasn’t too far away.”

I watched a small furrow cut into her smooth forehead as she thought. “Uncle’s visit to the temple was just to bring me there,” she said. “The virus strain was never there. He said that if anything got out of hand, the temple would be the safest place to be, isolated by water and with a controlled population.”

“So they stashed the strain somewhere else,” I said. “Think hard — give me anything you can remember.”

“Mostly they talked so low I couldn’t hear them as we flew to the Kuriles,” Rita answered. “But I heard enough to gather that the final phase of the plan would include a jet pilot who was to meet them, a man whose wife had been killed by a radioactive explosion.”

I turned her words over in my mind. I knew they’d mean a helluva lot more if we could only fit them in with the missing parts. A jet pilot could mean they needed the use of a high-speed plane with a long range. And that even narrowed things down a little. A jet pilot with a wife killed in a radioactive explosion. I was starting to itch for that flying boat to get here. I had to get on that radio with Hawk. Rita’s words brought me back.

“And there was something else,” she said. “I heard Kiyishi use the phrase ‘the tip of the three’. He said the pilot knew to meet them at the tip of the three.”

Rita sat back and moved her hands helplessly. “That’s all I can remember, Nick. There was nothing else.”

The tip of the three. I let the phrase roll around in my mind but it didn’t trigger a damn thing, and then I heard the sound of the heavy engines of the flying boat approaching.

“Let’s get topside,” I said. “Every second counts.” A week, Hawk had said. Now only a few days remained. I watched the big airplane taxi to a halt, and the patrol boat came up alongside the opened doorway. We transferred to the giant plane and within a few hours we were aboard the United States carrier in the misty coastal waters off northern Japan. The ship’s nurses took Rita in hand and she was assigned one of the staterooms kept aside for visiting dignitaries. I got on the radio with Hawk and as always, he listened first. He didn’t say anything till I’d completed a full report and then, his voice weary, he cut in.

“It’s ironic, Carlsbad, calling us puppets. He isn’t even master of his own plan. Maybe we’re all mad, Nick, every last one of us.”

He’d taken down the few things Rita had reported to me. I heard him put some crispness into his voice but it took effort. “I’ll get everyone on this at once. You’ll have to just stand by. It may take time, hours, if we come up with anything at all. Where’s the girl now?”

“Resting in a stateroom,” I answered.

“Get someone to stay with her constantly,” he said. “Maybe she talks in her sleep. Maybe she’s got something in her subconscious that’ll come out when she’s asleep.”

“Roger,” I said, and Hawk clicked off. I found myself smiling. After all, this was certainly nothing to entrust to just anyone. I went to the captain, told him that Rita Kenmore and I were to be disturbed only if Hawk radioed. We had vital plans to go over, I said. I think the captain may even have believed me. The boys in crew’s quarters wouldn’t have, showing the disadvantages of too much education.

I hurried to the stateroom, knocked and Rita opened the door. Her smile, the first real one I’d ever seen from her, lighted up the room.

“Oh, Nick, please come in,” she said. She was wearing a deep red sweater and a cream skirt. She saw my eyes flick over the soft roundness of her breasts. “Thanks to the nursing staff aboard,” she said, gesturing at her clothes.

“Do you talk in your sleep?” I grinned at her. “Because I’m supposed to find out.”

“I don’t know, I do know you’ve little chance of finding out. I’m exhausted but I’m too keyed-up to sleep.”

“Maybe I can relax you,” I said. Her eyes were dark and serious.

I moved close to her and my lips pressed on hers, opening her mouth and I found her tongue with mine. She quivered and clung to me, welcoming me with an eagerness that permeated every movement of her body. I thrust my hand up beneath the sweater and found that the nurses hadn’t given her a bra. My hand closed around soft firmness and she gasped. I grasped the sweater and pulled it over her head. She was against me instantly, clinging, and I pressed her back upon the bed. Her breasts pointed up at me and I kissed them, tenderly first, then gently nibbling at each protruding tip. Her head strained backwards and she gasped again and again, her hands clutching at my back. Slowly, the nipples began to rise and harden. I pulled gently on them with my lips and Rita half-screamed. I was grateful for the soundproof walls of fleet ships.

“O-o-oooh!” she cried out and arched her back, thrusting her breasts upward deeper into my mouth. When I let them go she fell back on the bed. My lips moved down across her body, and she moaned passionately as I neared the place of all places.

Her lovely legs moved up and apart invitingly. I bore down upon her, into her moistness, feeling the welcome warmth of her closing around me, and now her body moved with a will of its own, apart from the moaning protestations of her lips. I knew she was protesting only the ecstasy that was beyond her reach at the moment. But she was trying for it with every thrusting muscle, with the warm moistness that flowed from her, with the wanting that wracked her magnificent body.

And then, as she reached passion’s summit, she flung her legs out straight and her head reached up and backwards. Her hands were against my chest, pushing me from her while her legs clasped tighter around me, and then she was clinging to me, moving convulsively, a creature of pure passion. Finally she fell back, drained of everything but the shallow harshness of her breath. I lay beside her, my head cradled against her breast, lips touching her nipples.

In a while I felt her hands stroking my head. She snuggled against me, her soft breasts sweet cushions against my chest. “You know, I surprise myself,” she said. “I never would have guessed that I could, well, function, in the tense atmosphere we’re under. I think it must be you.”

She rose on one elbow and traced imaginary little lines on my chest. “Are you sexually stimulated by stress?” she asked.

“Research or personal curiosity?” I grinned at her.

She chuckled softly. “A little of both, I guess.”

“Frankly, it doesn’t make any difference,” I told her honestly. “Stress, no stress, I keep a fire going.”

A few minutes later she was fast asleep against my chest, her breath soft and even.

I put my head back and dozed off myself. I got in somewhat more than an hour and a half when I heard the polite but firm knock on the door. Moving out from under Rita, who only gave a murmured, sleepy protest, I put on clothes and answered the door.

“AXE Headquarters calling you, sir,” a sailor said, saluting. I closed the door softly behind me and followed him to the radio room. Hawk’s voice crackled out at me as I put on the head phones.

“Has the girl said anything?” he asked.

“Nothing you’d be interested in, sir,” I answered.

“That figures,” the old fox replied. “But we’ve pieced together a few things for you that may help. Chung Li thinks that the jet pilot may be one of their men. He had to make a few admissions that must have hurt, but they confirmed past reports from our own sources. First, the Chinese had a bad explosion some while back testing their A-bomb warheads. A woman was killed. Her husband was a jet pilot by the name of Chan Hwa. Chung Li also had to admit that one of their special long-range jets has been missing for a week, along with pilot Chan Hwa.”

“All right, a Chinese pilot with a stolen jet and his own set of gripes is going to help Carlsbad put his plan into effect,” I said. “That doesn’t tell us where to find him.”

“I might have that, too,” Hawk said. “That statement about the ‘tip of the three’, Nick, I gave it to our cryptanalysts. It’s not code and not truly cryptography, but they’ve so much specialized training in solving riddles that I figured they’d be best and fastest. They came up with a possible answer. There’s a spot, not too far from the Kuriles, where Soviet Russia, China and Korea meet. It could be reached by helicopter. All three countries touch only at the very tip of the area at Changkufeng.”

“I’ll get there right away,” I said. “If we’re not too late already.”

“Do your best, Nick,” Hawk said. “Chung Li is on his way with two hand-picked men. So is Ostrov. Chung Li is very worried. I think that’s what made him so cooperative. He’s afraid Carlsbad is going to set X–V77 loose on Chairman Mao and the Supreme Council. He wants Mao to leave for the United Nations World Leadership Conference ahead of schedule. Frankly, I’m afraid that might be Carlsbad’s plan, too, and you know what that would trigger.”

“I can get a Vigilante A-5A from the carrier here,” I said. “That’d be the fastest way for me to make it.”

“I’ll certify clearance for you,” Hawk said. “Take the girl. Maybe hell listen to her if you get to him.”

“Will do,” I said. “Over and out.”

The carrier commander took over as I raced back to the stateroom. I woke Rita and her arms slid around my neck. Her half-opened eyes said only one thing.

“Not now, honey,” I said. “There is too much to do.”

She sat up, the sheet dropping from her breasts. She was into her clothes in moments. “Better say your prayers that well be in time,” I said. “This could be our last chance.”

V

Rita and I jammed into one of the Vigilante’s two seats, our pilot in the other. They’d come up with a pair of jeans and a zippered jacket that fit Rita. It would have been cozy except for the bulk of our chute packs made it uncomfortable. The two J79 turbojets had the plane up to near its 1400 mph speed in not much more than a long minute. In a little over an hour we were winging over Sosura on the Korean coast and then, at the tip of the land where the three countries came together, we saw the village of Changkufeng inside the Manchurian border. Just beyond it lay the Russian border and the village of Podgornaya. We flew a tight circle around Changkufeng and then across thatched-roof-and-clay farmhouses and hilly land dotted with scrub brush and stunted trees. I saw no sign of a field large enough to land a jet.

As we flew along the narrow pointed finger of land where the three countries touched at the tip, moving into Manchurian territory, the pilot dipped low over the fields and houses. I saw his arm point down and he banked. Below, outside a clay-walled house, a figure waved and I recognized the portly shape of Chung Li. The Red Chinese espionage chief was holding a rifle in one hand and waving with it. He had reached here first, as Hawk suspected he might. As the pilot sent the Vigilante A5-A up in a steep climb I wondered what Chung Li had found.

When we got enough altitude, the pilot pressed the ejector button and I felt myself flung out and upward, hurtling through the sky to stop suddenly as the chute billowed open. I caught a glimpse of Rita’s chute, a round shape against the sky, mushrooming up behind me and then I was drifting down, guiding myself as best I could by pulling on the chute lines. I hit the ground a few hundred yards from the farmhouse, unsnapped my chute and ran over to where Rita was struggling with hers. I had just unsnapped her chute when I heard the roar of the MIG-19s coming in, three of them, out of the north. They wheeled and banked and shot up for altitude. That would be Ostrov, coming in from Yakutsk.

With Rita beside me, I started for the farmhouse. Chung Li had gone back inside, and as I entered my eyes swept the room in a glance, passed the two uniformed Chinese on the floor to the narrow bed where Carlsbad lay, a deep, red-stained hole creasing his temple. I heard Rita gasp beside me and she pushed past and ran to the bed. The room itself, simple clay walls with a wooden roof, branched off to two other rooms I could only glimpse. I nodded toward Carlsbad.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

Chung Li shook his head slowly. “Not yet anyway. But a bullet passed through his temple. He’s in a coma. There was a battle, as you can see. We found the house and were attacked.”

He gestured to the two dead soldiers on the floor, one with a field transmitter beside him. “My two men were killed,” he said. “I fought back from the adjoining room. When a bullet struck Carlsbad, the others fled.”

“The others? You mean the huge Japanese and the jet pilot?” I questioned.

Chung Li nodded. “And two other men,” he said. “In a Land-rover. The jet must have been hidden a few miles inland at one of the larger meadows. But our immediate problems are over at least”

I saw something in Chung Li’s eyes that I couldn’t read. But it had triumph in it, a Cheshire cat feel. I didn’t like it but I put it down as satisfaction at having gotten to Carlsbad first.

“How do you mean, our immediate problems are over?” I asked slowly. The Chinese espionage chief gestured to the inert form of the bacteriologist. “He is finished,” he said. “I’ve seen men with that kind of wound live for months, paralyzed and in a coma as he is now. Whatever his plan, it’s ended. All we need now is to have a platoon make an inch-by-inch search of the area to recover the X–V77.”

I watched Chung Li lean back against the rough clay wall, very much at ease, bland satisfaction on his face. That wasn’t the way I was feeling, and I turned as Ostrov and three men burst in through the open doorway. The Russian chief’s eyes took in the situation at a glance and focused their ice-blue hardness on Chung Li. The Chinese again told him what had happened, and when he was finished I saw Ostrov’s tensed face lose a little of its grimness.

“I agree with the general,” he said. “Carlsbad’s men can run but they’ll be found. Meanwhile, the greatest danger is over. Carlsbad is in no condition to carry out whatever he planned or even to direct others in carrying it out.”

“I can’t call it over until the X–V77 is found and in our hands,” I said. “What if that big Japanese knows where it is and tries to come back for it?”

“Without their brains, their leader, they will do nothing. Except hide in terror.” Chung Li smiled at me.

“I agree again,” Ostrov said gruffly. “The jackals run. That is always the way.” I didn’t answer, but I was thinking of those people back in the old temple in the Kuriles. They were all dedicated zealots in their own way and Carlsbad’s missing helpers were part of that. Chung Li smiled at me again, a deprecating, condescending smile.

“Your concern is understandable, seeing as the entire problem was caused by your government’s stockpiling of inhuman methods of warfare,” he said. “But a careful search of the area is certain to uncover the virus.”

I felt Rita move to my side and I glanced from the Chinese espionage chief to the Russian and back again. Chung Li’s position was logical enough. With Carlsbad captive, nearly dead, and the others fleeing, it seemed the primary danger was over. Carlsbad was certainly in no state to carry out anything further. So why was I so damned uneasy? Ostrov’s gruff, unfriendly voice gave words to something else in the back of all our minds.

“There is no need for me to stay any longer,” he said. “My men and I will cross the border into Kraskino. It is safe to say that this period of cooperation is at an end. We shall not meet again under these circumstances, gentlemen.”

I knew he was damned right about that but I was still thinking about the missing bacteria strain. I never liked things unfinished. Loose ends caused trouble.

“I want to get Dr. Carlsbad to America and have our doctors work on him,” I said. “He’s still alive. Maybe he can be brought around enough to tell us where the X–V77 is hidden.”

“It is pointless,” Chung Li said through the mask of his bland smile. “My men will find it, given time for a thorough search, I assure you.”

I looked at Ostrov and waited for him to offer to help me get Carlsbad the short distance to Kraskino across the border. He merely shrugged, saluted smartly and turned on his heel. “It is over,” he flung back. “I have important things to get back to.” He stalked out with his three aides. I followed his broad back with my eyes, but he kept going until he was out of my sight. Cooperation was shattering so fast, I could hear the pieces falling.

I turned to Chung Li whose quick little eyes were watching me narrowly. Gesturing to the radio transmitter beside one of his slain soldiers, I said, “I should like to contact my people.” Chung Li hesitated for a brief moment and then smiled again.

“Of course. I wish to speak to your Hawk myself.” He disentangled the straps of the transmitter from the dead man’s shoulders and handed the set to me. I called the carrier, using the agreed-upon code name. When I heard them answer, I asked for a relay hook-up to Hawk in Washington and told my boss what had happened. When Chung Li gestured, I turned the set over to him. He spelled out his thinking persuasively, and it almost convinced me as I listened to him. Almost. But I still had that gnawing inside me. Chung Li handed the set back to me, and I heard Hawk’s faint voice.

“I’ll take this up with the others who were at the meeting,” he said. “But I’m afraid they’ll see it Chung Li’s way, too. And frankly, Nick, I can’t see where his analysis is wrong. Without the brains, without Carlsbad, the others will just keep running.”

I couldn’t say what I was thinking with the Red Chinese chief standing within arm’s length of me but, as I’d learned long ago, even silences spoke to Hawk.

“I know what’s bothering you,” I heard him say. “You don’t trust the sonofabitch, to phrase it in your inimitable way.”

“I guess that’s about it,” I admitted.

“I don’t trust him any more than you do,” Hawk said. “But look at it this way. If, as is in the back of your mind, Carlsbad’s friends left with the X–V77, Chung Li would be anxious as all hell to get it back. It’d mean the same kind of big trouble for him as it originally meant. The only reason he cooperated at all was because he feared Carlsbad might strike at his boss. I can’t see Chung Li being casual about this if he wasn’t sure that the danger was past.”

“I still want to bring Carlsbad back,” I said. “I’d feel a lot better if he could be made to talk.”

“By all means bring him back,” Hawk agreed. “Let’s let the medics have a crack at him.”

I looked at Chung Li as I put down the set. “I’m to bring Dr. Carlsbad back with me.” His fixed smile stayed in place. Only the glitter of his eyes brightened. “May I assume your cooperation in this?” I asked. I knew that under any other circumstances he’d have told me to go to hell. Or more likely, he’d have had me killed. But the World Leadership Conference was still waiting in the wings with his boss taking part. He didn’t want to risk a wrong move at this time.

“Of course.” He smiled, picking up the transmitter. “The nearest airport capable of handling a large plane is Yenki. I shall arrange to have a plane waiting there to fly you to Japan. I’ll clear arrangements with Major Nutashi.”

He spoke crisply and sharply into the set and the mask dropped away for a few seconds. I glimpsed the harsh, driving man I knew was under the bland exterior. Finally he turned to me.

“A car is coming for me,” he said, the fixed smile in place again. “A medical lorry will also arrive for you and Carlsbad. All you need do is wait here. Of course, I believe all this completely unnecessary. The man will never recover and his plans are destroyed. Why all this undue concern over his life? It is foolish.”

“Undue concern for human life is a hallmark of our culture, decadent as it may be,” I said. Chung Li’s smile remained but it took more effort. Rita had found a chair and had dragged it beside the cot. Chung Li made no move to help me as I pulled the two dead Chinese soldiers out of the house. In a little while a Chinese staff car came down the road. Four rifle-carrying Chinese Army regulars got out and Chung Li went to meet them.

“Your plane will be waiting at Yenki airport, Carter,” he said. “This period of cooperation between our forces has been most enjoyable. Indeed, much more so than I had expected.”

What the hell did that mean, I asked myself as Chung Li started to get into the car. He sounded like he’d won some sort of victory and that bothered me. Maybe he figured that beating me to Carlsbad was a prize of sorts. Or maybe he felt good about having destroyed the scientist’s plans, whatever they might have been. All my logical explanations didn’t do a damn thing for the way I felt. He closed the car door and they drove off. He never looked back.

Rita came outside, and we sat on a crumbled wall and waited.

“Do you think he’ll live?” she asked me. “Or don’t you really care beyond getting your questions answered?”

“I won’t lie to you,” I said. “I don’t really care that much. I just want the doctors to bring him around enough to talk.”

An hour passed, then another and I was beginning to grow more edgy. I walked up and down, my eyes riveted on the curving road that stretched away from the abandoned farmhouse. Rita came to me and pulled me down on the grass beside her and let her warmth, the soft cushions of her breasts, try to relax me. She wasn’t doing at all badly when I heard the sound of an engine and saw the dust cloud advancing along the road. We got up and watched the canvas-topped lorry come near and halt before the farmhouse. A Chinese noncom and a soldier got out. The noncom spoke halting English and produced a stretcher from the rear of the van.

I went with them inside as they moved the comatose Carlsbad from the cot onto the stretcher and carried him to a bed bolted to the floor of the lorry. I glimpsed a small cabinet at the front end of the lorry with bandages and bottles — it obviously was used as a field ambulance of some kind. The soldier took up a position on a bench opposite the bed after strapping Carlsbad down. Rita was standing at the rear of the truck, watching, anxiety in her eyes.

“You ride up front,” I said to her. “I’m staying back here with him.”

“You don’t think that they would...” she began, but I cut her off.

“I don’t think anything. I don’t take chances I don’t have to, either.”

Darkness was starting to fall as we started off. The road was winding, rutted and muddy. I saw why the soldier had strapped Carlsbad onto the bed. We kept nudging a small river that paralleled us, disappearing for a few moments only to return again. I stuck my head out the rear of the vehicle to see that a full moon lighted the night. The river was a placid dark ribbon glittering in the moonlight and there were trees and hills at the other side of the road.

I checked Carlsbad every little while. His breathing was regular and his heartbeat steady. Grimly I watched his unchanging face and thought of servicemen I’d seen with similar injuries of the brain. They lasted for months and months, alive but dead. I sat back and closed my eyes as the lorry bounced along. We had gone perhaps fifty miles, maybe sixty, when the night exploded, lighting up with a pink glow as the flare burst directly overhead. The lorry braked to a shuddering halt as a barrage of rifle fire followed the burst of the flare. I glanced at the soldier. His alarm was genuine as he grabbed his rifle and leaped from the back of the truck.

I saw him hit the ground, start to turn and then twist in a grotesque arabesque as three shots hit him. I grabbed the tailboard and swung down, staying close to the lorry, dropping under the rear overhang. The dead soldier’s rifle was near enough to reach and I pulled it to me. I looked across the ground underneath the chassis of the truck and saw Rita with the Chinese noncom beside her.

“Mountain bandits,” he said, and I gazed out at the rolling hills to see shadowy forms moving in short bursts from bush to bush. The noncom moved out around the front of the truck, fired twice at the figures heading toward us and tried to run for a large bush. He didn’t make it.

A flare arched up from behind a bush off to the left. We’d never have a chance as long as they could keep the scene brightly lighted. I counted eight, perhaps ten, figures moving forward.

“Stay under the truck,” I said to Rita as I crawled backwards and around the lorry, staying on my belly. The brush was only a few yards away and I crawled into it. Once inside it, I moved upwards at a crouch. I paused to see three of the figures detach themselves and head after me. I shifted direction and stayed quiet as they moved into the bushes, heading for the river, figuring that’s where I’d fled. But I continued crawling upwards toward the bastard behind the bush with the flare gun. As I got near enough I saw him, waiting, watching, starting to load another flare into his gun. Hugo dropped into my palm. I took aim, threw and saw the tempered steel of the stiletto go right through his ribs up to the hilt. He fell forward, and I broke for the bush, retrieved Hugo and stuck the flare gun into my belt.

I had the rifle, Wilhelmina and the flare gun. It was as good a spot for a surprise flank attack as I could hope to find. I started with the rifle, firing first and taking them by surprise as they advanced toward the lorry. I cut down four, five, six of them. The others took cover and turned their fire on me. Shots zinged into the bush, one cutting a crease across my shoulder. The three who had taken off toward the river had come back at the first round of shots. They were running from below and to the right of me, about to get a cross fire going with me in the middle.

I moved onto my back, lying flat on the ground, pointed the rifle to the left and fired with my left hand, not trying to aim, just keeping some lead in the air. As the three others reached me and raised their rifles, I fired Wilhelmina from a prone position. The big Luger barked three times and the three figures fell.

The pink glow from the flares had completely gone, and only the moonlight played over the dark shadows of the hills. They had been pretty well decimated but there were still some left. I had to find out how many. I took the flare gun and lit the night once again with a pink, unreal glow. I saw two figures midway up the hill and then picked out a third man, crouched in the clear against the side of the hill, talking rapidly into a field radio.

I frowned. Hill bandits with a field radio? Banditry in the Chinese back country had apparently become very modern. I aimed carefully and the man’s body seemed to leap into the air as he half-turned and fell back onto the ground. I swung Wilhelmina to the left and poured a series of shots into a bush. A figure rose and pitched forward to lay across the small bush. Two more figures broke cover and headed back into the hills. It was a mistake for one of them. The other one made it as the flare died out.

I lay quietly and waited. This was no time for foolish moves. To play extra safe, I edged back to where one of the bandits lay face down. Propping him up in front of me, I got up and walked from the bushes. There were no shots, I kept the Chinese in front of me for a few more feet and then dropped the lifeless body. I called to Rita and saw her in the moonlight as she emerged from beneath the lorry.

“What are you looking for?” she asked when she saw me going through the clothes of the dead Chinese.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Bandits with flare guns I can understand. A flare gun could be obtained easily enough. A field radio is something else.”

Inside the man’s clothes I found a small billfold and inside the billfold an identification card.

“Major Su Han Kow of the Chinese Army,” I read aloud to Rita. “I’ll bet the rest are Chinese Army too, tricked out to look like bandits.”

“But why?” Rita asked. “Why attack the lorry?”

“I don’t know why,” I answered. “But I do know he was radioing somebody for help and we’d better get the hell out of here.”

“Didn’t Chung Li guarantee our safety to Yenki?” Rita asked. “Maybe they really are bandits. Maybe they attacked a small group or a staff car and stole that identification card and the field radio.”

“Maybe,” I had to admit. But bandits don’t usually go around attacking military units. Most of them wouldn’t even know how to work a field radio. I had no answers once again, only suspicions. We’d reached the lorry and I rummaged around in the dash compartment. I found what I’d hoped was there, a map of the area. The little river with which we’d been playing tag wound its way right into Yenki.

“That settles it,” I said. “We leave the truck and go by river.” Carlsbad’s stretcher, built of heavy canvas with a wood frame made a compact little raft of its own and Rita and I carried it into the water. The river was warm and not terribly deep near shore. Guiding the stretcher with Carlsbad on it, we stayed near land, walking most of the time, swimming some. As the river moved close along the road for almost a mile we swam out to midstream, holding each side of the stretcher and guiding our patient along the watery path.

I saw army trucks and motorcycle troops moving along the road. And then I saw a band of men, roughly dressed as the hill bandits had been. But they moved like soldiers with snap and precision. I was glad we hadn’t tried to go on in the lorry.

We swam toward the shore again as the river left the roadside and rested for a while. Then we moved on till the sky began to lighten. I found a large clump of trees overhanging the river and screened from the road. We pulled Carlsbad and the stretcher to one of the low-hanging trees. He was breathing steadily but was otherwise unchanged. Rita and I lay down on the soft marsh grass under the,thick leaves of the tree as the sun came up.

“We’ll stay here till dark and then move on” I said. “I think well make Yenki before morning.”

“I’m going to let my clothes dry out, even if they get wet again,” Rita said and I watched as she stripped and put her things on the grass. Her body was full-breasted, with long graceful legs and softly rounded hips. She lay back against the green of the grass and as she looked at me her blue eyes darkened.

“Come here beside me” she said. I put my clothes on the grass beside her and lay down with her. She moved into my arms, pressing her body against mine. She fell asleep that way almost instantly. I lay awake a while longer and tried to reconstruct what had taken place.

The attack on the lorry had been deliberate and planned. I had to admit that Rita’s explanation was a possibility. They could have been bandits with stolen identity cards and stolen equipment. But they also could have been a Chinese Army Intelligence unit operating in disguise. I smelled Chung Li’s fine oriental hand in it someplace. I looked down at the lovely girl in my arms, breathing softly against my chest, and closed my eyes. The sun filtering through the thick leaves and the heat became a lulling blanket. I fell asleep thinking what a helluva strange world this was to be naked with a gorgeous girl in your arms, under a tree in Manchuria, with somebody out to kill you.

I slept, more tired than I’d realized, and woke only when I felt Rita stir and move from my side. I looked up to see her at the river’s edge, washing her face in the clear, warm water, looking like something out of a seventeenth century painting. It was late afternoon and I heard the sounds of crickets. We could have been lolling around a country river in Ohio. I sat up on one elbow and Rita turned at the sound. She got up and walked toward me and as I watched her approach I felt desire stirring, rising. Her eyes looked down at me, moving up and down my body, lingering, and suddenly she dropped to her knees. Her hands pressed into my flesh and she buried her face against my abdomen.

She looked up at me for a moment, then lowered her head once again. Her lips nibbled across my body, inflaming, arousing, and she seemed moved by an inner urgency. She toyed and caressed me and as she did her own excitement grew until she was quivering, her lovely body moist and wanting. I pulled her roughly up but she fought away from me to continue what was giving her so much pleasure. Suddenly she flung herself atop me, her hips heaving and thrusting and I turned over with her as she buried her head against my shoulder, stifling the cries that were rising from her.

I moved in her slowly, then faster, feeling the surges of her wild ecstasy that my every motion brought. Then she rose up and her teeth bit into my flesh as she cried out with abandon. I held her there, flesh into flesh. Life’s physical symbol of being, welded into moments of passion. Finally she fell back onto the grass and her eyes found mine.

We lay there together a long time, watching darkness come over the land like a slowly descending curtain. Then we rolled our clothes up in a tight pack together and put them atop Carlsbad on the stretcher. Rita’s eyes were haunted with sadness every time she looked at him. It was harder for her than for me. All she had was the pain and sorrow for him. I was comforted by my angry determination.

When the night finally came, we slipped into the river again and made our way forward. The trip was free of problems until we reached Yenki. I saw the runway lights of the airfield outside the village. The river bordered one side of the field, and it was now less than an hour before dawn. The field itself was unguarded, I saw, as we pulled the stretcher up onto the bank and got into our clothes.

“Do you think the plane is still here?” Rita asked. “When we didn’t arrive yesterday it might have left.”

I grinned at her. “Maybe it was never here at all. Anyway, I’m not taking a chance on another „accident.“ You stay here. I’m going to find us an airplane.”

The hangars were directly in front of me, lined up along the rear of the field. I ran, crouched over, casting an eye at the first streaks of gray in the sky, to the nearest of the hangars. A side door was open and I slipped through. Three small planes were there. They’d be useless to us; I went to the second hangar. It was a repair shop with parts and pieces of planes scattered around.

The third hangar proved more fruitful. It held an old Russian TU-2 light bomber, piston-engined, a vintage plane. But it was plenty big enough and had the range we needed to make Japan, I climbed into the cockpit for a fast look. Everything seemed to be in order, but I couldn’t be sure till I turned her on and I couldn’t do that till the last moment.

I went back for Rita and Carlsbad, scouting the edge of the hangars, flattening myself against a wall as a small fuel truck chugged past with two Chinese in khaki jump suits. After it passed, I continued hugging the deep shadows at the walls of the hangars. It was definitely getting light, and fast. I ran the short distance to the edge of the field and Rita rose to meet me. She started to pick up one end of the stretcher when I stopped her.

“Leave it,” I said. “It’ll slow us down too much.” I picked up Carlsbad’s limp form and slung him over my shoulder. It wasn’t exactly prescribed treatment for patients with brain injury and in a coma but it was the best I could do. With Rita beside me, Wilhelmina in one hand and carrying Carlsbad, I started back for the hangar, once again skirting along the back edges of the big walls.

We made it to hangar three and the old TU-2, all right. I’d just carried Carlsbad into the stripped-down cabin and put him on the floor when I heard the hangar door being opened. Rita was still outside, at the bottom of the movable steps I’d placed alongside the plane. Through the nose window I saw three Chinese mechanics in white coveralls as the main garage door went up. They saw Rita at the same time and went for her. She tried to turn and run, slipped on a circle of grease and went skidding to the concrete floor. The three Chinese had her at once and were yanking her to her feet. I didn’t want noise, not yet, anyway. I saw a heavy wrench on the floor of the pilot’s cabin, grabbed it and jumped.

I landed atop one of the Chinese, and he went down. As he did, I brought the wrench around in a short arc and clipped the other one alongside, feeling the weight and force of the blow crack hard into his skull. He crumpled where he stood. I was on the floor, atop the first one who was still a little dazed, when the third man leaped at me. I got a knee up and helped him over my head. He landed on his back, started to roll over and got only halfway across when Hugo flashed in my palm and struck deeply into his chest.

But the last one, the one I’d landed on, had come around at least enough to run for it I saw Rita stick out a foot and he went flying. “Nice going,” I said as I threw Hugo hard and fast The blade skewered him through the back of the neck and Rita grimaced and turned away. I was retrieving the stiletto when two more men came around the corner of the hangar, stopped short for a second, and then turned and ran. They were off and across the airfield, shouting, and I swore under my breath.

“Get into the plane,” I yelled at the girl, and she scrambled. At the far end of the hangar, in one corner, I saw perhaps ten drums of fuel. I drew Wilhelmina. I needed some diversion, anything that would create excitement and cause confusion so all their attention wouldn’t be concentrated on us. We were far enough from the drums so that we wouldn’t go up with them, not right away, at least.

I climbed into the plane, hung out the door for a second and emptied Wilhelmina into the fuel drums. I slammed the door shut as they went up with a roar of flame and the old plane shook. As I sat behind the wheel and switched on the engines, I had the frightening thought that if the plane was in for engine repairs, the game was over. It grew more frightening as I pressed the starter switch again and nothing happened.

I pressed a third time and she caught, both engines coughing into a whirring roar. There was no time to wait for them to warm up. I sent the TU-2 moving out of the hangar as the heat of the flames started to peel the paint. A runway loomed directly ahead of me and I went for it. I saw men racing from the main building. Some of those running toward the hangar thought I was merely moving the plane to safety and directed their energies to the fire. Then I saw others move at top speed from the main building carrying rifles. I gunned the old plane, felt her creak and respond, wheels gathering speed on the concrete. The guards fell to their knees and shot. I heard two bullets strike the cabin and whip through.

“Stay low,” I yelled back to Rita. I held the old TU-2 steady and lifted up with her as she left the ground. I didn’t dare try a fast turn with the engines not even warmed up. I heard a half-dozen more shots slam into the underside of the plane, and then I tried a slow bank. Below, I saw the guards racing back into the main building of the field and I knew they’d be on the radio in seconds. I headed out to sea at once and Rita appeared in the pilot’s cabin.

“How’s your uncle?” I asked.

“No change,” she said. “But we made it.”

“Don’t count chickens,” I said gruffly. “Not yet.” I switched on the radio and called the carrier.

“Operation DS calling Carrier Yorkville,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Come in Yorkville. This is N3 calling. Come in Yorkville. Over.”

Bless their Navy hearts, they picked me up at once, and I heard a voice with a Dixie accent in it.

“We hear you, N3,” it said. “What do you want?”

“I’m flying a TU-2 with Chinese Air Force markings, heading south by southeast over the Sea of Japan. I may have unwelcome company. Need escort cover immediately. Repeat, immediately. Do you read me? Over.”

“We read you,” the voice answered. “One squadron Phantom II jets taking off. Stay on your course. We’ll pick you up. Over and out.”

“Roger,” I said and flipped the transmitter. The morning sun was streaking the sky with red smears and I had the old TU-2 up to her top speed of three hundred and forty-five. She was groaning and shaking and I let her down a little.

“Keep looking out the windows,” I said to Rita. “Yell if you see any other airplanes.”

“You think they’ll send planes after us?” Rita asked. “You still think Chung Li is behind what’s happened?”

“I can’t shake how I feel,” I answered. “I’m sure our grabbing this old bird hasn’t filtered up to Chung Li yet. Right now it’s only a plane theft.”

If Rita had another question, it was cut off by the starboard engine as it coughed once, then twice and died. I worked the choke button frantically and let out my breath as the engine roared back to life, sputtered and then caught again. My fingers were stiff and cramped and I stretched them. Suddenly I heard the roar of engines and Rita was pointing up into the sky. I gazed out the left window and saw them come out of the sun, Phantom IIs, and they wheeled and circled overhead in figure eights. They were a reassuring and comforting sight.

“Why the acrobatics?” Rita asked, and I smiled wryly.

“We go three-fifty an hour, maybe,” I said. “They do over fifteen hundred. They’re doing the figure eights so they can stay with us.”

And they did till we sighted the carrier. If the Chinese Reds had sent planes after us, they only came close enough to take a look and disappear. I set the old TU-2 down on the carrier deck as smoothly as possible which wasn’t smooth at all.

VI

The white corridors of Walter Reed Hospital were efficiently impersonal, like those of all hospitals everywhere, with their own kind of comforting reassurance. A Navy jet had flown us to the coast where we’d transferred to another plane which brought us to Washington. Hawk had them all primed for our arrival, and a team of doctors were waiting to whisk Carlsbad up into the vastness of the hospital. A Dr. Hobson gave me instructions.

“We’ll have a preliminary opinion for you in a few hours,” he said. “Call me if you haven’t heard from us by ten.”

I took Rita and steered her outside. Night had just descended on Washington. I walked toward a taxi at the curb.

“You’ll stay at my place,” I said. She gave me a narrowed-eyes look.

“You haven’t anywhere else to stay” I reminded her. “Your uncle’s house was blown up, remember? I almost went with it.”

She said nothing — and what could she say at this point? At my place I found her a pajama top to wear after she showered. It was an old one, dating back to when I still wore pajamas a long time ago, and it was almost long enough to be a dress. But when Rita curled up on the couch in it, her long, lovely legs stretched out, she was both beguiling and sensual. Ordinarily my mind would have been tuned in on the same wave length as hers, but I was still brooding and worried. I fixed us bourbon old fashioneds, and as she sipped hers she looked over the rim of the glass at me.

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” she commented.

“What does?” I asked.

“Not having all the answers.”

I looked at her lovely legs, half hidden under her, white smooth skin traveling up to the beginning roundness of her buttocks and I got up and started toward her. I’d taken three steps when the phone rang, the one I keep in the drawer of the desk, the one whose ring is a command. I turned and took it out of the drawer. Hawk’s voice was tired and strained, almost exhausted.

“Get over here to the office,” he said. “A call is coming from Chung Li in fifteen minutes. I want you here.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I exclaimed. “I don’t know if I can make that.”

The old boy may have been tired but he was never too tired to be sharp. “You can make it,” he said. “That gives you four to get dressed, one to kiss her goodbye and tell her you’ll be back, and ten to get here.”

The phone went dead and I followed orders. Rita never got a chance to protest or ask questions. Traffic was the thing that delayed me the most and was a few minutes late but I was lucky. The call had also been delayed. Hawk was chewing his cigar furiously as I entered. He shoved a typed message at me. “This came, coded. Our boys decoded it and gave it to me.”

I read it quickly. “Will radiophone at 10:15 your time,” it read. “Discuss unfortunate occurrence with your agent N3. General Chung Li, Chinese People’s Republic.”

I’d just shoved it back at Hawk when the phone with the row of little red buttons rang. Hawk took the cigar out of his mouth and tossed it into the wastebasket; his gesture of distaste was not all for the cigar. His voice, when he spoke, was tight, flat, masked; he nodded to me.

“Yes, General, Carter has reported in safely with Dr. Carlsbad. You’re relieved at that... Yes... thank you. In fact, he’s standing here with me. Perhaps you’d like to speak with him directly. I shall indeed... we are most appreciative.”

He handed me the phone, his steel-blue eyes impassive. I heard Chung Li’s quiet, controlled tones and could almost see his bland, round face in front of me as I listened.

“I hasten to offer my regrets at that bandit attack upon our lorry,” he said. “When your party did not arrive at Yenki later that night, we sent a force out to find out what had happened. When they came upon the lorry with our own two men killed and the remains of the bandits, they reported back to me at once. Naturally, we first assumed you had been taken captive. It was only the next day, after I’d learned about the theft of one of our aircraft at Yenki, that I realized what must have happened. May I ask why you did not go to the airport and ask the officials there to contact me?”

“I didn’t think they’d believe my story,” I lied.

“It would have been so much simpler,” he said. I’ll bet it would have been, I agreed silently. He went on, that faint air of deprecation in his smooth voice again. “No matter, you have reached your shores safely with Dr. Carlsbad. That was my main concern. Again, my apologies for not having considered the possibility of an attack. I have a large force making a meticulous search of the area. I shall inform your people as soon as they recover the virus.”

“Please do,” I said. “And thanks for your concern.” I could toss it back as well as he could hand it out. The phone went dead and I hung up. I looked up to see Hawk carefully replacing the receiver of the monitoring phone. His eyes met mine.

“The World Leadership Conference is just two days away,” he said. “I need you. I need every man I have. I’ll give you another day on Carlsbad. If you can come up with any new things or theories which make sense, I’ll listen. Fair enough?”

I grimaced but nodded. It was fair enough, especially at this time. But I knew he had given me damned little time to come up with anything new.

“Dr. Hobson called,” Hawk added. “There’s little hope Carlsbad can be brought around. Severe brain damage. But Hobson also said they never know when one of these cases has a moment’s flash of normality. Very often they do and then go under once more. Keep hoping and keep checking were his parting words.” I nodded and left with a last glance at Hawk. I don’t think I’d ever seen his face so tired.

When I got back to my place, Rita was asleep, but the sheet over her was more off than on. I contented myself with looking at the beauty of her sleeping body. She lay half on her stomach, one leg drawn up, her left breast a soft, pink-tipped invitation. I pulled the sheet over her and went into the living room where I poured a shot of bourbon. I sipped it, letting the warmth trickle slowly downward. Once again I tried putting the pieces together in a way that would stifle my damned uneasiness, but I couldn’t still my suspicions. I was convinced of certain things. One was the attack on the lorry — I was sure that Chung Li had engineered it. His phone call tonight had only reinforced that suspicion. The wily bastard had to find out if we’d really made it back.

“Goddammit to hell!” I said through gritted teeth. Why was I so suspicious of Chung Li, just because we’d been on opposite sides in the past? I had no proof he was acting in bad faith — no proof at all. I forced myself to stop wrestling with it and undressed. When I crawled into bed beside Rita’s warm, soft body, she put an arm over my chest and cuddled up to me. I lay there until I finally fell asleep, still unhappy with my own reasoned explanations, still on edge, still strangely afraid.

It was no better when I woke up. But there was Rita, and she proceeded to make me forget about everything for a little while as I woke to her lips, her mouth moving across my body. I felt myself stirring as the hungry eagerness of her desires made their own communication. Her lips, moving down my body, pausing to devour hungrily, were cool and hot at the same time, and it was as if she was trying to erase the troubled tenseness she knew was inside me. While it lasted, she did a helluva good job, and suddenly I found myself thrusting and tossing and forgetting all else but the wildly passionate creature making love to me.

I pulled her up and smothered my face in her breasts and she turned over to receive me at once, her legs a warm embrace. I moved inside her quickly, almost savagely, but she cried out for more and more and then still more. Finally there was that searing, hoarse scream, and then she lay exhausted beside me, but it was a sweet exhaustion, a tiredness that somehow also revived. We lay together, bodies touching, her arm across me in satisfied contentment. Then the phone rang — that special phone again.

“Chung Li has sent a cable I think will interest you, Nick.” Hawk’s voice came over the wire. “I’ll read it. ‘Am happy to cooperate further on the eve of the World Leadership Conference. Advise Agent N3 we are told Carlsbad’s men are in New York. Woman named Lin Wang, at 777 Doyer Street, has seen the big man.’”

Hawk paused. “I’ve checked the address out with the New York police,” he said. “It’s a brothel, a quiet, well-run one, catering mostly to the Chinese community and those with a taste for Chinese food, you might say.”

“This Lin Wang must be one of the girls,” I said. “Do you think she’s working for Chung Li?”

“I doubt that or he wouldn’t have given us her name,” Hawk replied. “She probably told somebody who told somebody else who told one of their people. Frankly, Nick, I’m surprised by all this. I didn’t really expect any further cooperation from Chung Li.”

“I’m surprised, too,” I answered. “And I’m going to follow through right away.”

“One more thing,” Hawk said. “I checked Dr. Hobson.-Carlsbad’s pulse rate is weakening. And he’s still in a coma.”

“Thanks,” I said grimly and put down the phone. If Chung Li had any fears about Carlsbad’s talking, it seemed they were unfounded. I turned to Rita, who had put on bra and panties and who looked too delicious to leave. But I was leaving.

“I have to go to New York,” I said. “Your uncle’s big Japanese friend’s there.”

“He’s in New York?” she said, incredulousness in her voice.

“Not a bad place to hide in,” I commented.

“Be careful, Nick.”

I kissed her again and cradled her breast in the palm of my hand. “Hurry back,” she choked out. I changed and left in time to catch the hourly shuttle flight from D.C. to New York. In a little more than two hours I was threading my way through the narrowed, crowded streets of New York’s Chinatown. People and old buildings jostled one another and there was a gray dinginess all the bright lights of restaurants and stores couldn’t hide.

Number 777 Doyer Street was a tall old building with a gift shop occupying the ground floor. The other gifts to be purchased were upstairs. I walked up one flight and rang a doorbell. The door was opened and the thick, cloying odor of incense was so strong it was almost a physical blow. The woman standing before me was Eurasian, a little blowsy with too much makeup, lips too red and black hair too lacquered in a tall upsweep. She wore a black hostess gown embroidered with a red dragon. My eyes went past her to the two men in the hallway, neither of them Chinese, lounging against the wall in shirtsleeves. Their narrowed, shifting eyes tabbed them for what they were — “protection.”

Her eyes asked me the unspoken question, sizing me up with years of experience. I slouched and returned her look with a truculence.

“A friend of mine told me to stop here,” I said. “He said to ask for Lin Wang.”

Her eyes moved just a fraction. “Lin Wang,” she repeated. “She happens not to be busy at the moment. You’re lucky.”

I shrugged. “I guess so,” I said. She closed the door behind me and beckoned. I followed her down the hallway and into a large reception room. Girls, mostly Chinese but some white and one black, lounged in overstuffed chairs. They wore either bras and bikini panties or diaphanous see-through gowns. Their eyes followed me as I walked behind their madam. The woman led me into another hallway to a back staircase.

“Next floor, first door on the right,” she said. I walked up the stairs and she watched for a moment and then went away on silent, gliding feet The damned incense was all over the place, as heavy as smoke at a campfire. I passed a door on the left and heard a girls hard, forced laughter. I saw three more closed doors down the hallway as I paused in front of the first one at the right. I knocked and turned the doorknob. I didn’t really want to make like a customer. Cheap whores had never been my dish. But I had to move carefully. I wanted information from this girl and I wouldn’t get it by scaring her off. Whores were always scared of involvements that might interfere with business. The door was opened by a small girl, black-haired.

I was struck by her prettiness, her small nose and flat cheekbones, almond eyes deep and liquid. She wore only a light kimono, and her breasts stood out high and proud. Suddenly I smelled a rat. Whatever Lin Wang might be, and it could be a lot of things, she was no common, everyday, run-of-the-mill prostitute found in a house like this. She had the body for it but not the eyes. They were deep, with a dark, shrewd brightness to them. They had none of the jaded, hard, cynical, permanently-wounded look of the whore.

“Come in,” she said, flashing a wide smile. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

Her voice surprised me. It was nasal, as though she had a cold. But it was a good opening line, I had to admit, one that a regular girl of the house might say.

“Yeah, I’m new here,” I said. “And anxious as hell, honey.” I gave her a slow grin. I was still going to move carefully but for different reasons. I wasn’t afraid of scaring a whore any longer, but if this was going to be an acting contest, I could hold my own. In fact, as my eyes roamed over Lin Wang’s pert little shape, I thought it might be an enjoyable contest. I turned to the dresser and put two tens and a five on top of it. Then I started to undress, taking off my necktie first.

I slipped off my jacket, with Wilhelmina in it in one motion and folded the Luger into the jacket as I laid it on a chair. A big double bed stood behind Lin Wang and I wondered how far she’d go with her role. I got my answer as she lifted her arms and whisked off the kimono. She stood before me naked, her breasts round and high with small nipples, piquantly exciting. She turned and took a pack of matches from the end table and lighted two incense urns, one at each side of the bed. Then she lay down on the bed, her legs up and moving out. I wondered if perhaps my evaluation had been wrong. Maybe she was just another little whore, after all.

“I thought you were anxious, big feller,” she said, and once again I was struck by the nasal tone of her voice. I decided she was much more attractive when she didn’t talk. I lowered myself down on her and felt her legs move up and down, rubbing along my hips. I tried to kiss her but her lips were a tight, closed line and she pushed my head down to her breasts, arching her back and lifting her nipples to my mouth. I inhaled a whiff of the damned incense as I put my lips on her breasts, a sickly-sweet odor I could have done without.

I pulled deeply on her breast and suddenly she had three, four, five breasts and there was a film over my eyes. I shook my head and raised myself on my elbows but the film didn’t go away. My chest was feeling tight, constricted, and I tried to breathe through my nose but it only made things worse. Another draft of the incense came up into my nostrils and I felt as though I were tumbling through space.

I reached out and felt myself sliding over the side of the bed, and I clutched at the sheets as I fell to the floor. Dimly I saw a blurred, naked form move past me and all I could do now was to try to breathe and smell the goddamned incense and suddenly I realized it and I shook my head hard, again and again. It cleared for a moment and I saw Lin Wang nearby, watching me, her naked form clearly revealed.

It was the incense, the goddamned incense. There was something in it and I tried to dive across the side of the bed to knock it to the floor. I managed to get my hand on it and send it crashing down but the other one on the opposite side of the bed continued to spew out its fumes. I could hardly breathe and I was coughing, leaning on one elbow, knowing that with every breath I was drawing in more of the fumes but unable to help myself. I rolled over on the floor and banged my head against the wood, hard as I could. It cleared again and I saw the girl nearby and I reached out for her but she just stepped away.

Why didn’t the damn incense affect her? And then, from the dim recesses of my mind I remembered the strong nasality of her voice and I had my answer. Nose plugs with filters. Small but efficient nose plugs, allowing only air to enter her lungs and not enough of the incense to have an effect.

I rolled over again and then it was as though I were floating, floating away into thin air and the terrible spinning in my head increased and increased until I was spun away into unconsciousness.

I’d passed out in darkness and I woke in darkness. How much time had passed I didn’t know. But this darkness had none of the spinning, soft, suffocating quality of the other. My chest hurt and my lungs were raw and I was twisted and tied up like a pig. I was inside something, cramped and tied, and as I began to focus and orient myself, I realized that my legs were drawn up behind me and tied at the ankles. My hands were tied behind my back, almost touching my ankles. I could feel the roughness of a heavy canvas sack against my skin and I knew I was inside a car as we swayed turning a corner.

My jacket and trousers were stuffed into the sack with me, I realized as I felt them against the bare skin of my legs. They were leaving no evidence behind in the house on Doyer Street. Hugo was still strapped in its sheath against my forearm. I felt the car stop and heard noises and then I was being lifted out and dropped onto the ground. It hurt like hell and it was hard not to make a noise. I was jounced and bounced along as the sack was dragged across what must have been cobblestones.

I felt myself being flung into the air. When I heard the splash and felt the shock as it hit the water, I knew what had happened. They’d tossed the sack into the river. But the heavy sack had been tied tight and the thick canvas was waterproof. I had a few precious seconds but only a few. As the bag sank, the water pressure would force open the top and pour in on me. A few drops were already finding their way through.

I dropped Hugo into the palm of my hand, gripping the hilt with my fingers. I had to work backwards but I could easily reach the ropes binding my ankles together. It was ordinary twine and I dug deeply into it, frantically slashing and gouging with the stiletto, feeling it shred quickly. But I was sinking even more quickly and the water pressure was starting to force the top open. Suddenly the drawstrings at the top gave way and the water cascaded into the sack. I took a deep breath, struck again and felt my ankles part It was all I had time for. I ripped at the sides of the sack with Hugo, kicked out with all my strength and I was free.

Hands still tied behind me, still gripping Hugo, I kicked out for the surface with my remaining breath. I burst into the air of the surface just as my lungs were about to give way. The sparkling lights of the New York skyline glittered down at me in the deep darkness of the night and the river. I kicked out again, turned on my back and floated while I worked Hugo around in my hands and cut against the ropes still binding my wrist. It was slow and hard from such an awkward angle and I had to kick out and turn to stay afloat. The current was carrying me out, and I saw they’d dumped me into the river about a block from the bay. If I didn’t get these damned wrist ropes off, a ferry boat might complete their job.

I saw the lights of a big one moving my way as I stabbed again and again at the slippery, wet ropes. Finally they gave way. I brought my arms around, held onto Hugo and swam back toward the place where I’d come up. The surface of the water was oil-slicked and dirty and I swam beneath it. I came up for air once, and then dived again. It was pitch black below but I got lucky. Because of some trapped air, the canvas bag had floated to the top of the water and I caught sight of it a dozen yards away. I struck out for it, grabbed it and found my jacket and trousers were still inside. More important, Wilhelmina was in the pocket of my jacket.

I held everything in one arm and swam for shore, finally catching onto the pilings of a rotted pier. Exhausted, I clung there against the powerful current of the river.

After a pause, I clambered up onto the wooden floor. Putting on my wet, dripping clothes, I carefully walked across the pitted, rotted pier. I’d fit the pieces together later. Right now I wanted to get back to one Lin Wang.

But my luck was running lousy. Or theirs was running good. I’d just come off the rotted old pier onto the cobbled stones of the waterfront when I saw the three men standing by the car a few feet back from the water’s edge. They saw me just as I did them and with that extra sense that comes from someplace or other, I knew they were the ones who’d dumped me into the Hudson river. I knew it even before I heard the one gasp, saw his eyes widen in disbelief and his body stiffen. They had gone up the street to an all-night coffee house and had just returned to the car, one still holding a piece of cruller he was munching.

“Jesus Christ! I don’t believe it!” one exclaimed, his voice hoarse. The other two swirled. All three stood transfixed for a moment and then started for me. These were not Sumo Sam’s boys, I saw. They were hired goons, paid to do a dirty job and ask no questions. I knew the type and it stuck out all over them. I put my hand in my jacket and closed it around Wilhelmina. The gun was soaking wet from the river. I couldn’t risk trying to use it. Better something else than a misfire at the crucial moment. The something else was to run, and I took off like a jackrabbit, a wet jackrabbit.

Their footsteps clattered behind me as I raced along the waterfront. A big, darkened closed cargo pier loomed ahead and I headed for it. The big main door was shut, a heavy overhead door of steel. But the little doorway to the side was loosely latched. I yanked hard on it and it flew open and I hurled myself into the cavernous darkness of the huge pier. Crates and barrels and boxes were piled high on both sides. I ran deeper and then turned, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the near-blackness of the place. I saw the three goons come in.

“You stay here,” I heard one order. “By the door. If he tries to get out you nail him.”

I faded back between a high stack of burlap bales. I saw something, a long-handled object leaning against the bales. I picked it up and smiled. It was a vicious-looking baling hook. The other two were beginning a careful row-by-row search among the crates and boxes. I reached up and felt along the sides of the burlap bales. Strong strips of galvanized tin were wrapped around each one, two strips to a bale. I wedged my fingers inside the first strip and pulled myself up along the side of the bales. Using the baling hook to hold on, I shifted my grip to the next bale and pulled myself up farther. When I was about seven feet from the ground, I hung there clinging to the side of the burlap-covered bale with one hand gripped around the tin strips, the other holding the baling hook imbedded into the bale. The contents were tightly packed soft goods of some kind.

I could hear the men below, working their way to the row where I clung. One of them came carefully around a corner of the bales, gun in hand, peering down the narrow corridor between the crates and bales. I could see the other one doing the same thing on the other side of the pier. The one on my side stepped a few feet farther into the passageway, within range. I took the baling hook out of the bale and swung down with it in a fast, clean sweep. The vicious hook caught him right under the chin. I heard the sound of tearing bone and cartilage and his head erupted with a red geyser. A guttural sound escaped him for a moment and then he hung limp, not unlike a side of skinned beef on a butcher’s hook. The gun fell from his hand and hit the floor with a harsh thump. I let go of the baling hook and dropped to the floor. The other one was coming on the run from the far side.

Scooping up the gun I knelt and fired twice. Both shots caught him full on as he raced into the passageway. He sprawled on the floor in front of me and I stepped over him and out into the main portion of the pier. Moving with my back to the Crates, I edged toward the door. I couldn’t see the third one in the deep blackness. He had moved against the steel door and it gave him perfect protection. Of course he’d heard the shots and with no sound from his friends he knew something had gone wrong. But he had the best position. If I wanted to get out of here I had to get to that little door and he’d see me as I tried for it I had to get a line on him and I paused at the last row of huge wooden crates. A fork-lift truck stood alongside them, and suddenly I had my way out.

Dropping to my hands and knees I crawled around to the side of the fork-lift truck, reached in and switched it on. I stomped on the gas pedal and yanked the wheel and it took off, rolling out at an angle. It worked perfectly. He figured I was in it and started blazing away as it rolled across the pier. It was simple to draw a line on the blue-silver flash of his gun as he fired. I placed three shots in a short line, about an inch and-a-half apart. He cried out in a gasping sound and collapsed on the ground. I’d heard that sound before and I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. I tossed the gun away. There was only one shot left in it anyway. Slipping out the little door, I took up where I’d left off, heading for the house of Lin Wang.

I hailed a taxi and the driver, like a good New York cabbie, noted my soaked clothes but said nothing. He dropped me off a block away from 777 Doyer Street, per my instructions. I stayed close to the building line and reached the outside door. I dashed up the one flight of stairs and tried the door. It was locked. I rang the bell, and once more the door was answered by the blowsy Eurasian woman. I slammed into her, knocking her out of the way, and was racing down the hall, through the girls in the reception room and up the back stairs. I heard her screaming for her two goons, but I was on the next floor already. I hit the first door on the right, knocking it half off its hinges. A blonde with big breasts and a small, bald-headed man looked up from the bed, the man with fright in his eyes, the blonde with anger.

“What the hell is this?” the blonde said.

I ran from the room.

“Is it a raid?” I heard the man say, and the blonde muttered something I didn’t catch. I hit the next door. A beefy naked man was on the bed with two Chinese girls. The girls fell off him as he sat bolt upright.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I dashed out. I saw the madam’s two goons coming up the head of the stairs as I slammed into the third room across the hall A Chinese girl was there with an old, bearded Chinese man. They both yelled something. I didn’t understand it but I didn’t have to. The meaning came through. I turned and the two goons were there. I ducked a blow from one and brought a right up into his belly. He doubled over, and I slammed him into the wall with a hard left and took him out of the picture with a karate chop against the side of his neck. He slid to the floor.

The other one had jumped onto my back, his arm tightening against my throat. I dropped to my knees and flipped him over my back. He was struggling to his feet when I clipped him a right. It caught him on the point of his jaw. He sailed backwards, six inches off the floor, and hit the next door. It crashed open as he fell into the room.

All the noise had taken its toll. The Chinese inside had his pants on already and was grabbing his shirt. The girl was still in bed, wide-eyed, scared. I ran down the stairs and met the madam halfway up. I grabbed her by her lacquered, upswept hair and yanked her down to the next landing and slammed her against the wall. She screamed in pain. The whole place was full of screams and shouts and running feet.

“Where is she, goddammit?” I yelled.

“You crazy sonofabitch,” she screamed at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I slapped her hard, and her head bounced off the wall.

“Lin Wang,” I said. “Tell me or I’ll knock your rotten head off.” I belted her again and she knew I meant business. She’d been around too long not to know the signs.

“I don’t know anything really,” she gasped. I kept hold of her hair and knocked her head against the wall just to help loosen her tongue. “They came here and paid me a lot of money to let her use that room. They said all I had to do was send whoever asked for her up there. It was good money.”

“Any money is good money to you, sister. Where is she now? Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know. She just left. Some men came and she went with them.”

“A big man, a huge man?” I questioned.

“No, two regular-sized men. One Chinese, one white,” she answered. “The same ones that came and hired the room from me.”

“What else?” I demanded. “Tell me if you know anything else?”

“There’s nothing else,” she said and I heard the truculence quickly returning to her voice. I had to stop her from getting over her fear. I yanked her forward and threw her into a room just off the second floor landing. I grabbed her and flung her against the wall. She bounced off it and the fear was back in her eyes. “I told you everything,” she screamed.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I’m going to beat you into a pulp just to help your memory along.” I grabbed her and she swallowed hard.

“Wait,” she said. “They gave me a phone number. They said I should call there if Miss Wang was ever in trouble at my place.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled slip of paper. I took it and shoved her hard into the wall. She was telling the truth, I knew. There wasn’t any more. The operation was such that they wouldn’t have told her anything else. I went out the door and took the steps in three long leaps. As I reached the ground floor I heard her screaming after me.

“What about all the trouble you’ve caused here, you big bastard?” she yelled. “You ought to pay for it!”

“Complain to the Better Business Bureau.” I grinned up at her.

VII

I had a phone number to convert into an address. I called the New York Police Department and after going through countless relays I got to the Commissioner. I gave him my identification number.

“You can check me out with AXE headquarters in Washington,” I said. “But I need the address that goes with the phone number I gave you and fast.”

“We’ll check you out, all right,” the Commissioner said. He gave me a special, direct-line number. “Call me here in fifteen minutes.” I hung up and waited in the shadows of doorways, my clothes still wet and bedraggled. It was a helluva long fifteen minutes but when I called again, the flat wariness was gone from his voice. He’d obviously checked with Hawk.

“That phone is in apartment 6-B at 159 Ninth Avenue. Do you want help?” he asked.

I thought that one over for a second. Ordinarily I’d have said yes, but this was a clever operation. I didn’t want to scare anyone off. “I’ll go it alone. It’s my best chance.”

“Good luck,” he said crisply. I hung up and hailed a taxi and gave the cabbie the address. When we neared it, I told him to slow down and just drive past. It was a dark and dilapidated tenement squeezed between two loft buildings. A shirtsleeved figure lounged on the front steps.

“Turn the corner and I’ll get out there,” I said. When the cab stopped, I moved quickly around the back of the loft on the left of the tenement. I found an alleyway with a rusted iron fence sealing it off. Scaling the fence, I dropped into the darkness of the narrow alley and sent two cats scurrying away. I moved to the rear of the tenement. Peeling, rusted fire escapes hung down the back. I jumped, caught the lowest rung of the bottom ladder and pulled myself up. Climbing like a cat burglar, I went to the second story. I paused at the windows there and heard a dog begin to bark. Feeling like a thief, I scurried up to the third floor. The window there was partially open, and grasping the splintered wooden sill with both hands, I lifted myself up carefully and slowly. I could hear breathing from inside and I stepped into a dark bedroom.

An old man was asleep in a bed alongside the wall. I moved quietly across the room, opened the door to the next room and then walked out into the hallway. Apartment 6B was on the floor below. I peered over the narrow, wooden stairway and looked down. There was no one standing guard in the hallway. I crept down the stairs and saw light from under the door of the apartment I wanted; it was at the head of the second floor landing.

Wilhelmina’s cold steel in my palm, I listened and heard the murmur of voices inside the room. I was just deciding whether to try the knob quietly or slam into the door when the shot rang out, one shot, a small, clear explosion. It sounded like a .22 caliber revolver, but it made my mind up for me fast.

I hit the door with all my strength and it flew open. I was on my knees crouched on the floor and I saw two figures just disappearing into an adjoining room, heading for the fire escape. Lin Wang was a still figure in a blue robe lying on the floor, a small, neat hole in the center of her forehead. The two men looked back as I burst in and I saw that one was Chinese, one white. The white man paused, tried to draw a gun and then leaped into the air backwards as the heavy 9mm slugs from Wilhelmina slammed into him.

I raced into the adjoining room, leaping over his twisted body. The Chinese had one leg over the windowsill and I saw the glint of the gun in his hand.

“Hold it or I’ll kill you,” I said, though that was the last thing I wanted to do. The gun in his hand was half raised and he froze where he stood, one leg out the window, one leg in. “Don’t move,” I said. “Just drop the gun.”

He looked at me for a long moment and then, with a sudden flick of his wrist, he twisted the gun and blew his head off, or a good part of it anyway. He’d been holding a .38 police revolver. The slug slammed right into his face at almost point-blank range, his head exploded in a gusher of red as he fell back into the room.

“Sonofabitch!” I swore, shoving Wilhelmina back into my jacket pocket. I went out into the living room where Lin Wang lay, looking peaceful A half-dozen fifty-dollar bills lay scattered beside her hand. I had three corpses and no answers, but even in death the two men had said one thing. They were professionals, dedicated, trained professionals with the kind of suicidal reaction that comes only from the Orient. The Chinese had taken no chances that he might be forced to divulge anything. And he’d gained a victory of sorts over me.

Lin Wang’s purse was on a small table beside a lamp. I emptied it and the usual melange of hairpins, lipstick, loose change and handkerchiefs fell out — along with two small, compact nose plugs. I turned them over in my hand for a moment and then dropped them back onto the table. There was nothing to learn here. I walked out and went down the stairs. I was moving down the street when I heard the whine of police-car sirens approaching the tenement behind me. The shirtsleeved stoop-lounger had taken off, I noticed. Seeing a little triangular park, not more than a block long, I sat down on one of the deserted benches. I still hadn’t the answers I wanted and the terrible uneasiness was still raging within me. But certain things were now beyond question and I began to put pieces together as I sat there alone. I would call Hawk but I wanted to put together as much as possible before I did.

The whole thing had been a setup, designed to draw me into it and kill me. The original call had come from our cooperative friend Chung Li. I grunted. Cooperative, my ass!

I spent about a half hour ruminating and then called Hawk. He was still at the office. When I gave him a brief run-down on what had happened he had to agree that I’d been marked for murder by Chinese Intelligence.

“But I’ll be damned if I know why, Nick,” he said to me. “Except that they’re sure a weird bunch. You know what they’ve just done? They’ve withdrawn from the World Leadership Conference! They’re not going to participate in it.”

“They’ve withdrawn?” I exclaimed. “With the conference scheduled to open tomorrow morning? That is a weird note, all right.”

“They suddenly claim that Mao and his staff haven’t had time to prepare for proper participation,” Hawk said. “Now that’s pure bull and the damnedest reason to pull out of a hat at the last minute.”

Hawk paused for a moment. “None of it makes much sense. Look, I’ll be in New York in a couple of hours. We’re using that old brownstone at East Forty-Fifth as a field base during the conference. Charlie Wilkerson’s there now. Go on over, get some rest, and I’ll see you soon.”

It was a welcome idea and as I started over to the address he’d mentioned, I wondered if there wasn’t some real connection between the Red Chinese withdrawal from the conference and Chung Li’s attempt to kill me. Once they withdrew, there was no need for cooperation, but he still had a golden opportunity. He’d dangle bait he knew I’d go for and have his revenge. That could explain the whole thing.

I quickened my pace, hailed a cab and went to the brownstone building at the edge of First Avenue, overlooking the lights of the East River. Wilkerson sent me into a room to get some sleep and got my clothes to an all-night tailor for pressing. I woke a few hours later when Hawk arrived. He still looked tired and drawn, and I slipped into my freshly pressed clothes to join him for coffee in a ground-floor anteroom.

“They’ve got to have a reason for suddenly acting as though the conference was...” I let the sentence hang there, unfinished, and I saw Hawk’s eyes darken as they met mine.

“You were going to say ‘contaminated’,” he said very slowly. “No.” He was trying unsuccessfully to put conviction into his words. “No, it couldn’t be.”

“It not only could be, it is,” I said, rising from the chair, cold excitement seizing me. All the missing little pieces were suddenly falling into place.

“You think the virus is intended for use against the World Leadership Conference,” Hawk said flatly.

“That’s got to be it,” I said. “It explains everything — Chung Li’s attempt to stop me from returning to Carlsbad. It wasn’t that he was afraid Carlsbad might reveal where he’d hidden the X–V77. He was afraid Carlsbad would tell what the plan was.”

“You think the Chinese Reds are working with Carlsbad’s large Japanese?” Hawk asked.

“No, I don’t think that,” I replied. “But they saw a golden opportunity unfold before their eyes and decided to take advantage of it. Somehow, before the fight at the farmhouse, they found out Carlsbad’s plan. Maybe they heard him and the others going over it when they sneaked up on them. Then in the fight, Carlsbad was shot in the head and the others escaped. Chung Li knew they’d carry on to fulfill the plan. He had his smooth little story all ready for me when I arrived. Ostrov swallowed it without blinking an eye.”

“I did too,” Hawk said quietly.

“It was reasonable,” I answered.

“They kill every important person in a position of leadership in the world,” Hawk said. “With one neat blow, as they’re all together at the Conference.”

“Except for the Red Chinese,” I reminded him. “They won’t be there. Their men will be safe and sound. When the X–V77 has finally killed off every other leader, there will be a world-wide vacuum of gargantuan proportions, a vacuum in which they could move any way they wanted to.”

“You’ve got to call off the conference before it opens tomorrow morning,” I said.

Hawk looked at me as though I’d taken leave of my senses. “Impossible!” he snapped. “It can’t be turned off now. Certainly not because we’ve got ourselves a theory, no matter how good it is. Can you see us convincing all those people of this fantastic thing? And can you see what it would bring down on America’s head? Besides, the sheer mechanics make calling it off impossible. It’s all gone too far to stop.”

He was right of course, and I got a sudden chill. As I listened to Hawk’s flat, monotone voice, I wondered if he really believed what he was saying. Was he trying to reassure me or himself?

“They can t pull it off, you know, even if they show up to try,” he said. “The United Nations grounds and the surrounding area is going to see the greatest concentration of security forces ever assembled in one spot.”

He opened his attaché case and drew out a map of the United Nations area. “The CIA is handling security clearance for everyone to be admitted and all inside protection. They are assisted by the United Nations internal security staff. They have been augmented by thoroughly screened private police agencies. The FBI and Treasury agents are handling security inside the Assembly Hall itself. At the seven entrances to the Assembly Hall we will have our men stationed, scanning every person who enters, watching for anyone who might try to get inside with forged clearance. Certainly they’d spot someone the size of Carlsbad’s Japanese. They’d get his two normal-size pals, too. You know how eagle-eyed our boys are, Nick.”

I nodded. That much was true enough, but the uneasy, edgy feeling I’d carried inside me for the last few days had returned again. Hawk drew a pencil line around the entire eighteen acres of the UN property.

“Outside, the New York Police have saturated the entire area,” he said. “They’ve drawn extra men from every borough. All leaves have been cancelled. First Avenue, Forty-Second Street and Forty-Eighth Street are all crawling with uniformed and plain clothes police. Along the East River, police boats will patrol, and they will be assisted by two Coast Guard patrol boats. It’s tight, Nick, covered at every possible spot. They couldn’t get close enough to open that vial in the Assembly Hall if they shot it out of a rocket.

“You still don’t like it, eh, Nick?” Hawk commented. “Frankly, I don’t think they’ll show and if they do, they’ll see they can’t possibly get through.”

“They’ll show,” I murmured. “They’ve got to, even if it’s only to fail. This is their chance, their only chance.”

“All right,” Hawk said, his lips grim. “It’s still your baby. I won’t assign you anywhere. You play it any way you like. Here are your inner security clearance papers. They’ll let you go anywhere in the United Nations area.”

“Any chance Carlsbad might talk?” I asked, taking the small card and badge.

Hawk shook his head. “He’s sinking. Pulse is weaker and his heartbeat has slowed.”

“Damn! What time does the conference begin tomorrow?”

“At exactly ten A.M. the Pope will open the conference with a short prayer,” he said. “The President of the United States will follow, welcoming the guests.”

Hawk walked away. I spied a phone in one of the rooms and put in a call to my place. It rang only once and Rita’s voice answered, excitement in her tone.

“Where are you?” she said instantly. “At the airport?”

“I’m still in New York,” I said. Even across the telephone wire I could feel her freeze.

“I didn’t know it took so long to conduct business,” she said.

I chuckled. “It doesn’t always, but this time I had a lot to do. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, her voice suddenly soft. “A lot longer if I have to. Be careful, Nick.”

I hung up and knew I hadn’t called just to tell her that. I’d needed to speak to her, a strange, sudden kind of need, almost a premonition that maybe I’d never have another chance. I went back to the little room and lay down on the narrow bed, hardly more than a cot. The time for thinking, for wondering, for worrying, was over. The time for action was at hand.

I forced my eyes to close and made myself sleep, putting aside all thoughts except the need for rest. I’d learned the technique many years ago. It worked for a few hours.

I woke when dawn beckoned the day and dressed quickly. The city was a sleeping giant still covered with a gray and grimy blanket. I walked slowly across First Avenue toward the United Nations buildings.

I hadn’t taken one step onto the avenue when six of New York’s finest converged on me. I had to show my clearance pass five more times before I finally got inside the main building. It was good security all right, I had to admit, and maybe Hawk was right. But I kept remembering what tight security they had at the Cumberland plant where it all started.

I glanced at my watch. Six o’clock. In four hours the world would take the first step in a march toward true international cooperation — or an enemy against which there was no defense would strike down its leaders. I began a slow walk of the entire United Nations area, starting inside its walls and moving up from floor to floor.

I was still looking, still checking, still trying to find some hole as the building came alive with more and more people — the regular UN delegates, the special delegates, the important special guests, hordes and hordes of newspaper and television men, all with clearances, all carefully screened. At the seven entrances to the Assembly Hall I saw our men intermingled with the police and the UN guards, their eyes flicking from face to face, boring into every person that approached them. I saw Hawk at one side, standing next to a police captain, and I went over.

“Who has clearance to come in here this morning?” I asked. The police captain looked at a long list in his hand.

“Besides the newspeople, guests and delegates, only the hand-picked and screened employees of the banquet outfit that supplies the UN with tablecloths, napkins and equipment for these huge dinners. One truck, with the men in it, will bring in the needed supplies for the affair.”

“And the men have been cleared and screened, you say,” I repeated.

“Thoroughly,” the captain said. “Their passes carry their photos on them, too.”

“Everyone’s pass at Cumberland carried a photo, too,” I muttered.

Hawk’s eves flickered. “And no outsider cracked Cumberland, Nick,” he said quietly. “It was Carlsbad, remember, a trusted inside person.”

I nodded and sauntered off. A trusted inside person. Could Carlsbad have someone here, on the inside, working with him? Could the strain have been transferred to that person? Then all the security in the world would make no difference. It was a possibility but one I had to discard. To accept it would have meant going home and forgetting about everything. There was no possible way to check out everyone who’d already been cleared.

I glanced at my watch. Nine o’clock. I saw an empty phone booth and slipped inside. I called Walter Reed Hospital and asked about Carlsbad. He was still in a coma and his heartbeat was continuing to weaken. I hung up the phone and walked down the staircase, away from the excited, humming noise of the throng. I should have felt reassured. I hadn’t come up with anything. Security was tremendous.

I paused on the main floor and watched as the President of the United States arrived, surrounded by Secret Service men, the New York police and UN guards. I glanced across the main entranceway and saw more uniforms than anything else. Some men were stationed at posts, others moved back and forth, circulating through the crowd. Her Majesty, the Queen of England, entered the building, a gracious, poised figure. The Russians were next, impassive, their smiles fixed. Once again I saw a huge detail of police and security guards with them.

Maybe Hawk had been right after all. What was it he had said, I asked myself. They couldn’t get close enough to open that vial in the Assembly Hall if they shot it out of a rocket. The remark hung in my mind, waiting for me to examine it again. And then, suddenly, I froze on the spot, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. Maybe they didn’t need to get into the hall itself, nor did they need a rocket. All they needed was something equally effective. I thought of what I’d been told about the properties of the X–V77. Unlike some strains which require personal contact, it was one hundred percent effective airborne. All Carlsbad’s men had to do was free it in the Assembly Hall.

My watch said nine thirty-five. I turned and raced down the stairs, past the first basement with its rows of files and offices, past the second one and down into the third where long rows of pipes lined the narrow corridors. I looked down the longest hallway and saw a maintenance man at the far end. I called to him and ran. He waited, watching me race toward him.

VIII

I didn’t know it then, of course, but at that moment the light turned red on the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-first Street. The closed panel truck of the Superior Banquet Supply Company came to a halt. The two men in the cab watched a parade of miniskirts cross the intersection. When the doors of their truck were yanked open, they didn’t have time to do more than open their mouths before they were killed.

One bullet each was fired from guns equipped with silencers. Two men, both Orientals, leaped into the truck, shoved the bodies aside and started off as the light became green. They made a fast turn into Third Avenue and then another at the next corner where they pulled up before a boarded-up building slated for demolition. A huge man, moving surprisingly quickly for his size, opened the rear of the truck and squeezed inside.

Meanwhile, the other two opened the door between the driver’s section and the rear of the vehicle. They pushed the two dead men into the back and took their identification cards from them. Slipping the photos out of the plastic cover, they replaced them with photos of themselves. It all took six minutes, including the waiting time at the light. The Superior Banquet Supply Company truck started off again for the United Nations.

They were halted at the first police line, showed their clearance cards and were passed through. They were stopped twice more and each time the police checked the photos against the occupants of the truck and passed them on.

They drove slowly to the side service entrance of the Assembly Building and got out. A small metal ramp was lowered at the back of the truck and they wheeled a huge, closed box down it. The box contained a full supply of fresh linens, tablecloths, dish towels and other banquet supplies. And one thing more. They left the truck and wheeled the huge box into the United Nations, taking the ramp that led down to the basement.

Just before all this happened I had reached the maintenance man and demanded to see his clearance card. He showed it to me and it was in order.

“Where is the ventilation system leading to the Assembly Hall?” I asked him. “It’s got to be down here someplace.”

“End of this corridor, turn right,” he said. “You’ll see the ducts. They’re screened, four of them, two over and two under. Why, something wrong up there?”

“Not yet,” I said, racing down the corridor. “Not yet.” I took the corner in a skid and raced down the next corridor. The ducts were there, the screens in place, and I peered at the small metal sign beneath them.

“Assembly Hall Vent System,” it read. “Blower Controls in Boiler Room 3.”

I put my ear to the screens and heard the sound of air being forced upwards. Two of the ducts carried fresh air up and two carried circulated air back down. It was the perfect place. All they had to do was open the vial into the duct and in seconds the deadly chemical would be blown into the Assembly Hall.

I walked to the end of the corridor. There was a small hallway that led to a fire exit. I tried it. The door was locked from the outside but opened from the hallway. I walked back, past rows of pipes level with my head, and turned the corner which led to the main corridor. I went back to where I’d met the maintenance man. There were no doorways or other corridors. Anyone reaching the ducts would have to pass this way. The maintenance man had gone and I took up a position at the corner.

I glanced at my watch. Nine fifty-five. In the green, gold and blue Assembly Hall, the World Leadership Conference was about to begin. Maybe it will go off without trouble, I muttered to myself.

I heard the sound just about that time. I looked up to see two men pushing a big closed wooden box on wheels. They moved down the corridor toward me and I read the stenciled letters on the side of the wheeled box: Superior Banquet Supplies.

“Hold it,” I said as they reached me. “Let’s see your clearance cards.” The two men handed me their cards. The photos matched them. I recalled what the police captain had said about the outfit that would bring the banquet supplies.

“Go ahead,” I said. They nodded and continued to push their huge, wheeled box down the hallway. I had turned away to keep my eye on the other end of the corridor when suddenly I realized something. There wasn’t a damn reason for banquet supplies to be down here. There wasn’t even a laundry room in this area.

I whirled just as one of the men fired, and I heard the dull, muffled sound of the silencer. I’d have been dead, shot through the back, it I hadn’t whirled. As it was, the shot hit Wilhelmina in her shoulder holster under my jacket. The force of it knocked me backwards and hurt like hell as it drove the heavy Luger into my ribs. He fired again as I was falling and the shot cut into my temple and I felt the sharp, burning pain. I lay there feeling the waves of darkness trying to close in on me and the warm trickle of blood running down my temple. They figured they’d done it and pushed on.

I lay there, squeezing my eyes shut, gritting my teeth, fighting the darkness again. It was the shot that’d creased my temple that was doing the damage. I rose up on one elbow, saw the gray-white corridor spin and shook my head. It stopped spinning and I got to my feet. I took out Wilhelmina. The slug had struck the trigger and the release latch and twisted and jammed both. Wilhelmina would do no shooting for now.

I moved forward quickly on the balls of my feet. There’d be damned little place to hide in these barren corridors and they’d already rounded the corner. I still had those fancy socks in my pocket that Stewart had given me. But if I lit them and blew the three of them up, the X–V77 would go with them, blown right into the vent system by the explosion. And so I had a fancy weapon I couldn’t use and a gun I couldn’t shoot And time had run out.

A towering rage swept over me. They wouldn’t empty that damned vial into the duct. Not now, not after all this. Chung Li wouldn’t sit back and enjoy the triumph of his deceitful cleverness. I turned on the speed and when I hit the corner and careened around it like a car on two wheels, one of them had just removed the screen from one of the intake ducts. Carlsbad’s huge Japanese buddy was emerging from inside the big wooden box, the vial in his hands; a third man was helping him out.

I had Wilhelmina in one hand and Hugo in the other. As I slammed into the side of the wall, I flung the stiletto at the one with the duct screen still in his hands. The blade imbedded itself in his temple. He stiffened and then crumpled and the screen fell on top of him. Wilhelmina flew through the air and caught the second bastard right in the middle of his forehead. He fell backwards as blood spewed out of a bad gash. The giant Japanese froze for an instant, one foot still in the wooden box. I started for him and he came to meet me. Just as I rushed, he threw the vial at the open vent duct. Remembering my football days in college, I twisted, reversed and leaped upwards and backwards at once.

I felt my fingers close around the vial as it flew through the air and I got a grip on it as I fell, holding it out from me. My head hit the concrete of the floor and I saw stars for an instant. The Japanese slammed a shoe into my chest. I felt my breath catch on fire from the pain but I rolled away, still clutching the vial over my head. I couldn’t let him get his huge hands on that. He was on top of me, all three hundred and twenty-five pounds of him, reaching out for the vial. My hand was still over my head. I opened it, let the vial roll onto the floor and with my fingers sent it skittering across the corridor.

The Japanese cursed and I felt his weight come off me as he started to dive after the vial. I wrapped both arms around one oak tree of a leg and twisted. He fell heavily to one knee as a grunt of pain escaped him. I hit him with my shoulder and he dropped to one side. He rolled away and reached out for the vial as it lay within reach against the other wall.

My foot got there first, coming down with all my might on his fingers. He screamed in pain and pulled his hand back automatically. I got one toe against the vial and sent it rolling farther down the corridor, hoping to hell it wouldn’t break. The giant was on his feet, rushing at me. I knew better than to try to meet this human locomotive head on. I twisted and got only part of his rush. It was enough to knock me into the wall so hard I felt my bones shudder. He had a split second to decide whether to go after me or the vial. True to his mission, he went for the vial. As he rushed past me, I stuck out a foot and he stumbled to the floor and the building shook. I slammed another foot into his jaw and he rolled over and blinked. He saw that he’d have to take me out before he got the vial. I let him get to one knee and swung, hitting him on the point of the jaw with a perfect blow. His eyes crossed and he fell backwards but only for a moment It would have killed some men and taken out most others. This guy, though, was getting to his feet once more.

But some of the starch had been taken out of him. I swung again and opened a two-inch gash over his right eye with a sharp, slicing blow. I followed with a right and he turned his head in time to avoid taking it on the jaw. It caught his wide, flat cheekbone and I felt it break. He put his head down and leaped forward. I tried to dodge but didn’t make it. His huge arms circled my body and I felt the grizzly-bear strength of the man at once. His head down, he pressed himself against my chest, pulling me forwards at the waist. I felt my ribs about to go. My arms were pinned to my sides and I couldn’t break his hold.

I brought my knee up hard and fast, slamming it up into his groin. I felt him gasp in pain and I was flung across the corridor into the wall. I bounced off it and hit the floor. The pain had taken its toll but it had also sent him into a wild fury. He dived and came down on me. A building falling on me couldn’t have felt much worse. My breath left me in one huge rush and pain shot up into every part of my body. He got up but I was seeing through a curtain of grayness, trying to find some breath. I felt his huge hands grab my neck and I was lifted like a child and slammed into the wall once again. This time the grayness turned black and I was only barely conscious as I hit the floor.

I shook my head, acting out of automatic reflexes and experience welling up from the past. I drew a deep breath and shook my head again. The curtain lifted. It had only been a second or two. But the big man had turned to the vial. As I focused, I saw him pick it up and run toward the open vent with it, coming toward me. I was within arm’s length of the dead man with Hugo sticking out of his temple. I reached out, grabbed the stiletto, pulled it free and hurled it from a prone position as the gigantic Oriental was less than a step from the duct.

It struck him on the left side and I saw it go deeply into the huge expanse of flesh. He gasped, stopped and staggered. His face contorted in pain, he reached his left hand up and pulled the stiletto free. It took but a second, but a second was all I needed. I was on my feet and diving for him, As he yanked the blade out of his body, I connected with a right. He staggered back and I grabbed the vial out of his hand. I ducked his arm as it swung around to seize me and brought up a sharp uppercut. Once again he staggered backwards.

I reached down and scooped up Hugo. He came forward and I crouched, the vial in one hand, Hugo in the other. He dove for the vial. I brought the stiletto up in a short arc and sliced it across his throat. A red line spurted. He got one hand up to his throat, half-turned toward me, reached up for me and fell to one knee. He started to get up, then fell sideways, and I stumbled back against the wall.

My whole body was shaking and throbbing and I was heaving in deep drafts of air. I looked at the slender vial in my hand, closed my fingers tighter around it and leaned against the wall for a long moment. Then, still using the wall for support, I slowly started back along the corridor. I walked up the stairs carefully.

I paused as I reached the main floor, and walked out into the lobby, bloodstained, bruised, battered. The cops converged on me but I held the vial aloft.

“Easy does it, fellas,” I said. I looked up at the big clock against the opposite wall. It said four minutes past ten. The Pope’s opening prayer had just ended. And Carlsbad had just died in Walter Reed Hospital. Except I didn’t know about Carlsbad then.

“Get me Hawk, AXE, outside the Assembly Hall,” I said with an effort, leaning back against the wall and suddenly feeling very tired. When Hawk came down he took one look at the vial in my hand and his lips tightened. I handed it to him.

“They almost got it into the air conditioning ducts. Tell them out in Cumberland not to lose it again,” I said.

“I’ll do that,” he said quietly. “You want to fill me in now?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to catch the plane back to Washington.”

“Wash up first,” he said. “Neatness is part of being an AXE agent.” I stared at him and saw a faint twinkle in his eyes. “I’m glad you don’t take my word for things,” he added. I grunted. It was his way of handing out a compliment.

I walked out of the building and looked back at the symbol of world cooperation. I was drained of all emotion, like a man who had looked over the edge of hell. Only two people knew how close world cooperation had been to world disaster. But now I permitted a glint of triumph to shine in my eyes. In Peking, Chung Li would know soon that somehow, someplace, his cleverness had failed and without actually being sure, he’d know I’d played a part in that failure. We’d meet again, he and I, in one way or another.

I washed up in the brownstone we were using during the conference and then caught the shuttle flight to Washington.

Rita was out when I got to my place and I’d fixed bourbons for us when she returned carrying groceries. She dropped the bags and flew into my arms. Her lips were sweet and warm and a reminder of all the good things. I told her what had happened and she told me about her uncle’s death. As we started on a second round of drinks, she gave me a deep, thoughtful glance.

“And what happens to X–V77 now?” she asked.

“It goes back to Cumberland.”

“And what happens to my uncle’s questions?” she said. “They’re still right, you know. They’re still unanswered. Do we keep on creating and stockpiling bacteria for which we have no defense? Do we continue to risk killing millions of people?”

“I don’t answer questions,” I said. “I just put out fires. I can’t answer whether or not we should make matches that start fires.”

“Does it have to be that way?” she asked.

“Yes,” I told her. “It does for me. Those answers you want aren’t for me to give.”

“I guess not,” she said. She leaned forward and her lips found mind. My thumb caressed the small, soft tips of her breasts. This was the kind of fire I looked forward to putting out.

Content

Nick Carter
The Death Strain

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VIII