I headed for the warehouse and was halfway there when Larry O’Gara emerged from it and waved at me. He trotted over to me. “Nothing to see,” he told me. “Phil’s inside watching them load. They’re on truck number three, and when you’ve seen one, etc. Christ, it’s cold. Is it like this all winter long?”
“I’m a stranger here myself.”
“A few more days and we can all add this to our list of happy memories. Let’s get inside.”
We went to my office. It was still smoky from the telegram I had incinerated, but if O’Gara noticed he kept it to himself. “They’ll keep the loaded trucks inside until they take off,” he said. “We’ll go over later and have a look.”
“Fine with me.”
He lit a cigarette, then leaned back and put his feet on my desk. “We got some messages from home this morning,” he said.
“Word from on high?”
“Uh-huh. Phil will brief you when he gets here. Right now he’s making himself dispensable. The right crates have to go on the right trucks, and the labels with “This Side Up’ have to face up, and he seems to think none of this will come about unless he hangs in there. Funny guy—”
“With Baldy in command, I can understand his logic.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The apes who haul things around seem competent, no matter who’s in command.” He flicked ashes on my floor. “The Texas truck was loaded first, and that was the important one, so I don’t see why he’s still there. He’ll be along any minute. Looked for you yesterday, incidentally.”
“Oh?”
“At your motel. We found a fellow named Carr, a light colonel who talks a fair game of bridge. Thought you might make a fourth. I think you said the other day that you play?”
“I’m rusty. I’ve been away from it five years.”
“You didn’t get a bridge game in Brazil?”
“The only bridge I ever saw was one we kept building and somebody kept blowing up. I wore out a deck of cards playing solitaire, but that was about the extent of it.”
“It would all come back to you.”
“I suppose so.”
“But you weren’t at your room, so the point never came up. What did you do, have yourself a sightseeing tour of beautiful South Dakota?”
“Something like that.” I wondered if this was maybe a little too casual to be true. “Practiced my snow driving,” I said.
“Oh?”
Far too casual. “And did a little homework in the process,” I admitted. “I thought it might not be a bad idea to check the roads south of here. I still don’t know how I fit into the picture on this operation, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get some idea of the terrain. Just in case the office decides to put me on active duty.”
His face changed ever so slightly, just enough to tell me I’d made the right answer. Then he started to tell me something about Carr and his crazy wife, and told me just enough so that I had the feeling it was Col. Carr’s wife who had helped me break Rule #4. That was fine, it would give me an excuse to avoid future bridge games.
“A really strange gal,” he was saying. “I got the impression...” But I didn’t find out what impression he had gotten, because then the door opened and Bourke came in. He looked at O’Gara, and O’Gara nodded, and Bourke closed the door and found his way into a chair. The three of us talked about how cold it was, and they did a routine on the practice of locating army posts in uninhabitable areas. Their timing was good enough for me to suspect this was a bit they had refined over the years.
“All loaded,” Bourke said eventually. “Larry tell you about it, Dick?”
“Just that the bucks will stay there until they’re ready to roll them.”
“Uh-huh. Your truck is number two, incidentally.”
“I already told him,” Larry said.
“Told me what?”
“That the Texas truck is second. Come off it. Don’t be cute, or haven’t they told you? My spies say you got a telegram today.”
“I did, but this is the first I’ve heard of Texas.”
He looked at me appraisingly. “What are your orders, exactly?”
“Hardly anything specific so far. Just stay on the scene and keep an eye on the departure of the shipment.”
“You weren’t told to take an interest in any particular truck?”
“No. Not yet, at least. Why?”
They looked at each other. Then Larry said, “I don’t see why you’d be cagy, so all I can guess is that our team’s a day ahead of you on this one. It’s about time. I think I’ll declare a military victory.”
“I don’t—”
“On the other hand, maybe they don’t want to tell you until the last minute, or you’ll be mad at getting sent here.”
“I’m that already. They say you get used to the cold, but they say that about hanging, too. What the hell are you talking about, Larry?”
He lit another cigarette. “There’s supposed to be a play made for one of the trucks,” he said finally. “The usual sort of scuttlebutt. According to what we’ve got, a group of super-patriots want to take possession of the armaments so that they’ll be able to prevent the Russians from sending a gunboat up the Rio Grande. You know the drift. Some of those Texas left-wingers—”
“Right-wingers,” Bourke said.
“Did I say left? I meant right. The Sons of ’76 or ’69 or some such number. A paramilitary group. Listen, you can save me a lot of excess words if you already know all this.”
“I’ve heard of the group but I don’t know anything about them fitting into this operation.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Good enough. The word is that they’re based in Texas, and they plan to make an ambush attempt on the truck heading for Amarillo. You know one of the trucks is going to Amarillo?”
“To be honest, all I knew was Texas.”
“Well, the precise destination is Amarillo. These jokers are supposed to have an intercept scheduled somewhere between the moment we ship the goods and the moment they arrive there. Which means, of course, that they’ll hit it somewhere in Texas. Amarillo’s less than a hundred miles from the Oklahoma line, so they won’t have much room to work in.”
“Unless they hit it in Oklahoma,” Bourke said.
“Which wouldn’t make sense. They don’t want to cross a state line.”
“If they’re crazy enough to do it, what difference does a state line make?” O’Gara laughed. “Either way it sounds like a load of shit, but nowadays any load of shit with Texas in it seems to inspire belief. Anyway, Dick, that’s where you come into the picture.”
“In Texas?” I didn’t honestly have to pretend to be confused. I was confused.
“Texas is where the rest of your buddies are. You, lucky man, got sent here to guard the North Pole.”
“What Larry’s getting at,” Phil said, “is that evidently the Sons of ’69—”
“I think it’s ’76, actually—”
“Whatever they are, these Sons of Something must be one of the groups of clowns on your list. Though usually the Bureau gets them, don’t they?”
It seemed time for me to say something. “We keep an eye on certain crackpot groups,” I said. “Insofar as they have foreign contacts or impinge on foreign policy—”
“Uh-huh. Well, that’s the drift, then. Getting the goods to Amarillo is a military job, and we’re handling it. But making sure that the Sons don’t get their hands on them is evidently an Agency job as well, and a team of your gang is supposed to be on the spot in Texas already. We’re arranging the route to minimize the danger of an ambush once the Texas border is crossed. And you’re here to keep your eyes open and freeze your balls off, and if we weren’t stuck here too, Dick, I might go so far as to feel sorry for you.”
It wasn’t hard to give them the right reaction. By the time he finished his speech, I was really angry. I must have gotten a wire crossed mentally, to the point where I believed for a moment or two that we were really going to ambush the truck in Texas, and that George had shafted me by sending me to Sprayhorn. That’s a recognized hazard in any sort of role-playing. Anyone good enough to operate under cover has a certain amount of trouble keeping the cover separated from the reality in his own mind. In this case it worked out for the better. I showed the right degree of annoyance at the way I was being called upon to waste my time and comfort, and Bourke and O’Gara had a laugh at my expense, and I joined in.