Being a spook might not qualify as dignified, but it was guaranteed to be inconspicuous. There was, of course, the question of right and wrong. That was hard to handle. Hake dealt with it by postponing it. He saw no way out of doing what he was told, so he would do it—trusting that anyone who charged him with evil-doing later, even his own conscience, would forgive it as a temporary aberration in a life otherwise not too bad.
And viewed as madness—i.e., as a sort of penalty-free vacation from the irritating world of objective reality—it was certainly exciting enough! Almost pleasurable, in fact. Anything might happen. He told himself, with a little thrill of excitement, that he had to expect the unexpected… and so he was not even surprised when, instead of the bus, a three-wheeled telephone company repair truck whined to a halt in front of him. Not even when the double doors opened to reveal four people in masks, two of whom pointed guns at him while the others jumped out, grabbed him and threw him inside.
There were no windows in the van, but Hake couldn’t have seen out of them anyway. He was made to lie down on a collection of only approximately level toolboxes and cases of repair parts. He was not allowed to get up until the truck stopped and, now polite and unviolent, the men led him into a normal-looking split-level ranch home in the timeworn style of sixty years earlier. It did not astonish him that he recognized the girl in the doorway. She was tall, slim and really quite pretty, if you didn’t mind some strange behavioral quirks; she was, in fact, the one who had tried to pick him up in the bus.
They moved him like a puppet, talked about him as if he weren’t there. “Search him,” said the girl, and one man held him while another expertly turned out his pockets. The holding wasn’t necessary. Horny had no intention of resisting while the two other men still had their guns pointed in his direction. “Give me his stuff,” she said.
“Bunch of junk, Lee.”
“Give it to me anyway.” She filled her cupped hands with the litter from his pockets. It was not very impressive. Wallet, return ticket on the Metroliner, keys with a rabbit’s-foot chain, summons for power-piggery, the folded sheets that were supposed to be his sermon—
“Hey,” he said. “Where’s my typewriter?”
The girl looked furiously at one of the men, who ventured, “I guess we left it in the truck.”
“Get it! Bring it in the kitchen. You keep an eye on him, Richy.” And the man with the bigger gun pushed him face down on a lumpy couch, while the girl and the other two retired from the room. The couch smelled of generations of use, and when Hake tried to move his face away from it the man called Richy warned, “Don’t try it, pal.”
“I’m not trying anything.” Stubbornly Hake kept his face averted. Now he could study the room, though there was not much to study. It was dark because the picture window had been covered long since with translucent, then opaque, plastic to conserve heat Which he could have wished they had conserved better because, now that he was not moving, he was cold. In the feeble light from two candles Hake worked at trying to memorize Richy’s face. A perfectly ordinary face, youngish, with a red-brown beard. He wondered if he would be able to identify it in a police lineup, and then wondered if he would live to try. Although he was past being surprised he was not past being scared, and this was beginning to scare him.
“Bring him in,” called the girl.
“Right, Lee. Get up, you.” Horny let himself be shoved into the kitchen. It was brighter than the other room, but smelled, if anything, even worse, as though the ghost of long-dead garbage-disposal units had left their greasy deposits to sour in the drain.
The girl was sitting on the edge of a chrome and plastic kitchen table, older than she was. “Well, Reverend H. Hornswell Hake,” she said, “do you want to tell us who you really are?”
It caught him by surprise. “That’s who I am,” he protested.
She shook her head reproachfully. “You a minister? Cripes. Worst cover I ever saw.” She poked through the litter on the table: his papers and his typewriter, opened, with the roller lifted out and inches of the ribbon unrolled—to look for microfilms, maybe? “Look at this driver’s license! It’s dated three days ago. Real amateurish. Anybody would have known to backdate it a year or two, so it wouldn’t look so phony.”
“But that’s when it had to be renewed. Honest, that’s me.
Horny Hake. I’m minister of the Unitarian Church in Long Branch, New Jersey. Have been for years.”
Richy nudged him with the gun, into an aluminum-tube chair. “I suppose you’ve never heard of yo-yos,” he sneered.
“Yo-yos?”
“Or hula hoops. Don’t even know what they are, do you?”
“Well, sure I do. Everybody does.”
“And you know about them better than other people because you’re a toy designer, right? Don’t crap us, Hake, or whatever your name is. What we want to know is, what kind of toys are you exporting these days?”
Hake sat and blinked up at them, silent because he could not think of any answer that he was sure he should make. Except, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lee sighed and took over. “Just start out by admitting you’re a toy designer, why don’t you? In fact,” she said helpfully, “that would be smart, don’t you see? If you don’t admit that much you’ll cause curiosity, which would lead people to suspect that some security matter is involved.”
“But I’m not! I’m a minister!”
“Oh, God, Hake, you’re such a pain.” She glanced morosely toward the bigger of the armed men, who was standing by the door with a .32 automatic hanging loosely from his hand in an ostentatious kind of way. It had a long tube attached to it that Hake supposed to be a silencer. That was also ostentatious, as well as highly unpleasant.
“Want me to try with him?” the.32-automatic man rumbled.
“Not yet. Not unless he keeps this up. Listen, Hake,” she said, “I can see you’re new at this game. Damn Team, they don’t give you proper briefing. Let me tell you the rules, all right?”
“Would you tell me the name of the game, too?”
“Don’t be a wise-ass. Here’s how it’s supposed to go. We’ve kidnapped you, so obviously we’re breaking the law. You’re okay as far as the law goes, but you don’t want to stay kidnapped. Got it so far? That’s the first level of meaning to what’s happening here. Now, on the second level, let’s say you’re really just an ordinary toy designer—”
“I’m not!”
“Oh, shut up, will you? Let me finish. Say you’re a toy designer, and you never heard of the Lo-Wate Bottling Company, alias the Team. Why do you think we kidnapped you? You might suspect we’re from Mattel, or say Sears Roebuck or somebody, maybe. Just plain old industrial espionage, you know, trying to get your new designs. A little rougher than most. But still just commercial, right? Well, in that case there’s a special way you should act. You should cooperate with us. Why? Because your boss wouldn’t expect you to for God’s sake risk your life just to protect a new yo-yo design, even if you were expecting to ship a hundred million of them to the Soviet Union. Got it so far? There’s a limit to what you should put up with just to keep the new fall line from a competitor.”
“Well, that’s probably true, but—”
“No, Hake, no ‘but’ yet. That’s if you’re just a toy designer, really. But now let’s go to the third level. Let’s suppose you’re a toy designer who is actually working for the cloak-and-dagger boys. Let’s say you know these yo-yos carry a subsonic whistle that drives people crazy when their kids play with them. Not fatal. Just enough to make them tense and irritable. Let’s say you’ve figured out that the adult hula hoops are going to cause more slipped disks and sacroiliac disorders than the Soviet economy can put up with—just for instance, right? So what do you do in that case? Why, you act just the way you would on the second level, because you wouldn’t want us to know you weren’t just an ordinary toy designer. What you don’t do, on either level, is lie to us about what you do for a living, because, you see, we already know that; that’s why we brought you here,” she explained.