“Go right ahead,” she said.
He went right ahead, but without pleasure. All his thoughts were depressing.
Given what Vivian had told him, he could fill in most of the rest for himself. These bucket-shop plutocrats, Rahgos and Pozos and the other colonels and generals, not used to secrecy at the big time level, had left tracks in the sand and some of the bigger predators had come wandering by. The Americans had found out that something was going on, but not what, and had shipped Grofield in here real quick to get the details. And somebody else — Russia, maybe, or China, or maybe France, Egypt, Israel, Argentina, you name it — had also become aware of all the activity, and had tried more direct means of gaining its information, such as kidnapping Grofield and planning to inject him with truth serum.
He said, “Are you missing anybody from your party? Anybody lost, strayed, or stolen?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “Before tonight, you mean.”
“Before coming up here.”
“No.”
“Somebody did, I bet,” he said. “They got to somebody from one of the national groups, the way they tried to get to me, and they found out what was going on, and they came up here to get the goodies for themselves.”
“But who are they?”
“I don’t know. They speak a language I don’t recognize. One of them was with a Free Quebec organization, but this deal is on a higher order of insanity than that.”
“They’re the ones who killed your friend?”
“Hardly my friend. But they’re the ones, you’re right. They sure do believe in direct action. But I don’t know how they expect to get away with this stunt. Are they just going to bump off the presidents of nine different countries?”
“Why not?” she said. “There are men in every one of those capital cities just hoping and praying their leader doesn’t return from this trip. By Tuesday there will be nine bloodless revolutions, nine deposed presidents, whereabouts unknown, and most of it won’t even get into the world’s newspapers.”
“Better and better,” Grofield said.
“It’s up to us to get those canisters,” she said.
He tried to look at her, even though he couldn’t see a thing. “Are you out of your mind? That lodge is crawling with armed men. Do you know where the canisters are?”
“No. No one knows but the four Americans.”
“Fine. So we’d have to go over to the lodge and round up one of the Americans and get him to tell us where the canisters are. Then we’d have to go get them and take them away. All without being seen or stopped by the guys from the airplane. Frankly, Vivian, I have my doubts.”
Urgently she said, “But we don’t know who they are! We don’t know what they plan to do with the canisters. Maybe fly over New York City and Washington and London and Paris and drop them. None of us would have done anything like that, none of us would have had the reason or the desire to do it, or enough to do it even if we wanted to. We would have kept it as a defense, a warning, a kind of ultimatum. The same way the Americans keep it. But we don’t know who these other people are or what they want to do. And they seem to choose killing more often than not.”
“I’d rather not give them the chance,” Grofield said, “of choosing to kill me. If you don’t mind. I have no objection to playing the fool in order to save the world, but not if I don’t have the slightest chance of surviving or of doing anybody any good.”
“But we have to try! What else are you going to do?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, “and it seems to me the only sensible thing for me to do is get on my trusty skimobile and head south at first light. What that plane can do in one hour I should be able to do in four or five in my skimobile, and maybe even before then I’ll come to a settlement or something with a telephone. Or a radio, I’m not picky. Then I’ll call good old Ken in Quebec and tell him the story and tell him to send the Marines up to the snowy North Woods and put the arm on the baddies.”
“They’ll be gone long before that,” she said angrily, “and you know it. That isn’t any good, you know it isn’t any good.”
“I know,” Grofield agreed gloomily. “It isn’t any good. But boy, it’s what I want to do.”
“We have to think of something else.”
He sighed. “All right. How many people know where these canisters are?”
“Just the four Americans,” she said.
“And they’re somewhere around the lodge? Inside one of the buildings?”
“I don’t think so. The impression I got was that they were hidden somewhere not very far away, but not exactly at the lodge.”
“All right. Do you know what these four Americans look like?”
“Yes.”
“All four of them? You could point them out to me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay.” He got reluctantly to his feet. “Let’s have some light,” he said. “We have to reorganize our supplies.”
The flashlight clicked on, and in its pale light he saw her frowning at him in cautious hope. “You have an idea?”
“We can call it an idea,” he said, folding his blanket.
“What is it?”
“I’m not telling you.”
She was astonished. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure you’d approve,” he said.
Twenty-Four
“This is close enough,” Grofield said, and stopped the skimobile.
Sitting behind him, arms wrapped around him again, the girl said, “What do we do now?”
“Walk the rest of the way,” he said.
They had repacked the skimobile, leaving more room for Vivian in back, and then Grofield had driven back out onto the lake and traveled about halfway across toward the lodge before making a sharp left and heading toward the shore. They’d had to make brief intermittent use of the flashlight, there being no longer any star-shine at all to guide themselves by. The last few stars were winking out far above the lodge, apparently being covered by a cloud mass moving down from the north. The breeze had sharpened a bit, but was not yet a real wind. Grofield’s cheeks were numb, though, and his fingers were aching again despite the thicker gloves. He wasn’t sure if that meant it was getting colder out or if it was just the result of his continued exposure.
In any case, with sparing use of the flashlight they’d guided themselves to shore and had then traveled over the dunes in a great half circle around the lodge, until the buildings were between them and the lake. And now Grofield had stopped, a good distance from the buildings, but close enough to see their lights. From this side, the red smudge of embers could be seen where the burned-out dormitory had once stood.
Grofield and Vivian got up from the skimobile and Grofield said, “We won’t take anything but the guns and the flashlight. We’ll need that to follow our tracks back here again.”
“If we live,” she said.
“I intend to live,” he told her. “After all the things I’ve been involved in in my life, to be killed up here in the back of nowhere in the middle of somebody else’s stupid squabble would be too ridiculous to contemplate. I’m not going to get killed because I refuse to be made a fool of. Come on.”
It was slow work, walking through the soft snow, but warming. When Grofield heard Vivian panting beside him, he slowed his pace a little. Two minutes one way or the other wouldn’t make that much difference.
The slower pace helped her, and she got her breath back enough to say, “Shouldn’t you tell me your plan now? How will I know what to do when we get there?”
“Your job is to point,” Grofield told her. “We are going to snoop around over there until we find your four Americans.”