She licked her lips. "I… I'm sorry, Ramуn."
"May one ask why?"
She hesitated. "I… I don't really know if I should… Well, all right. You remember the motel room in Puerto Pefiasco, the one we watched from out on the beach that night? You let that poor man stay in that room, even though you knew he was going to be killed. All you cared about was learning which one of two people was going to shoot him. The fact that he was to die didn't concern you at all!"
After the silence had gone on for a while, I said, "I remember that poor man. That was the poor man who fed his wife a Mickey and burned her like a torch, wasn't it?"
Carol turned on me angrily and started to speak, but checked herself. There was still another awkward silence. Solana tapped me on the arm and jerked his head towards the door or hatch. I followed him out.
"Tell me one thing, friend," he said, outside. "You knew the little girl with the tight trousers was the one. How did you know?"
I grinned, trying to dismiss Carol's white face from my mind. Perhaps my heart had been broken a little, after all, just enough to make me want to hurt her slightly.
"How did you?" I asked.
Solana shrugged. "A man of experience learns to distinguish between passion and what is only a pale imitation of passion, amigo. That young lady was only an imitation sexpot, to use your ' Yankee term. She was not really interested in men. Her true interests obviously lay elsewhere. And perversion is a subject upon which your government is very sensitive. If the security of her department was so lax as to overlook her homosexual tendencies, what else had been overlooked?" He smiled faintly. "Besides, I was not impressed by her chief, when I met him. I do not trust stupid people, or people who work for stupid people. And then you did not shoot that murderer; she did. That confirmed it for me. Now tell me how you spotted her."
I said slowly, "There was a woman named Vadya, a communist agent, who walked into a room knowing that death was waiting inside. She was not a woman to give up easily. If the trap had been set by me, she'd have done her best to elude it or fight it. But there's a funny fatalistic streak in those people. Remember all those strange confessions in court many years ago? When I'd had time to think it over, I knew there could be only one reason why Vadya had walked into that room deliberately: because she knew her own side had pronounced the death sentence on her, and right or wrong she couldn't fight it. Which meant that the people who killed her had to be something other than the fine upstanding U.S. agents they seemed to be."
Solana nodded. "Well, it was a far-fetched plot, but it might have worked. I am not too fond of americanos, to be quite honest, but I do not want to waste my country's time and effort fighting them unnecessarily. Particularly if they are all as unpleasantly competent as you." He smiled. "But you really should learn how to fly an airplane, my friend. Watching you trying to bring that machine down was the most harrowing part of the whole assignment: I could not be sure you were not going to drop it right on my head. Now, is there anything I can do for you by way of showing gratitude."
I said, "Well, you could save my life, but you've already done that. Do I still have some credit on the books?"
"Anything you like. What is mine is yours, as we say here in Mexico."
I said, "There was a girl with red hair who disappeared."
"We have her. She was in hiding aboard this ship, with several others. Or a prisoner. Apparently she was, herself, not quite sure which. She is guilty of the murders of three U.S. tourists and two Mexican nationals- the captain and the mate-who died when a fishing boat burned and sank, fired by a device planted by her. Afterwards she told a rather elaborate and convincing flying saucer story to explain the disaster. Do you want her?"
"Yes. I'll have to call Washington first, but I think we want her."
He shrugged. "I will not ask why. She is yours. As far as we are concerned, she will cease to exist. We have enough awkward cases to deal with, without hers."
I called Mac from the docks on a phone that Solana made available to me, and brought him up to date, I thought, only to find that he'd already got most of the information from other sources. He had some interesting news from the home front: the shining new agency that had been going to revolutionize the nation's intelligence systems was in the throes of a security shakeup it was not expected to survive, and Herbert Leonard had been kicked upstairs to a fancy-sounding position with "coordinator" in the title. In Washington, whenever they start coordinating, they're pretty well through.
I said, "Well, I hope they don't start investigating us, sir, because I'm afraid I've been a little lax, security-wise."
"I gave you strict orders-"
"Yes, sir," I said. "But death was staring us in the face, and I needed the lady's understanding, and I figured that under the circumstances Leonard wasn't going to be worrying about anybody's security but his own."
"That is absolutely no excuse, Eric."
"No, sir. But after a couple of days of making a damn fool of myself playing the perfect clam, while everybody else was telling everything to everybody, my resistance just went down the drain, so to speak. Shall I send in my resignation, sir?" He didn't answer, and I went on: "If not, I have a suggestion to make…"
24
ANNETTE O'LEARY was waiting in my room at the hotel when I got there. She didn't look like a fugitive who'd been hiding out, or imprisoned, aboard a rusty freighter. Her long red hair was smooth and glossy, held by a black velvet band. She was wearing a short, slender, sleeveless black dress over which floated a sheer black garment known, I believe, as a cage-I sometimes wonder who dreams up these fashionable terms.
The filmy overdress, and her slim, high heels, gave her a fragile, ethereal look. Her suitcase lay open on the bed. There were wet towels strewn around the bathroom. Obviously she'd made good use of the facilities as soon as the police had brought her here. Well, she could have tried running away, instead. TI would have been disappointed in her if she had.
"Ah," she said lightly, "the man with the ever-ready shower. And, I suppose, the handcuffs." She held out her wrists. "Take me away, officer. I'm guilty as hell."
I said, "That's no joke, O'Leary. They don't come any guiltier."
She sighed. "1 might have known it was just a beautiful dream. Well, at least I got a bath out of it. Okay, which way is the jail?"
"Is that why you picked that dress, to go to jail in?"
"No, dad, I picked it to stay out of jail in, if I could. But I can see that you're not a bit impressed." She drew a long breath. "That's enough kidding, Mr. Helm. I'm not really in the mood. Why don't you just break down and tell me why you had me brought here."
I said, "You're a mass murderess, O'Leary. You killed five people-count them, five-just like snapping your fingers. Justice demands that you pay the supreme penalty, or spend the rest of your days in prison, regretting your crime."
She looked at me for a moment. Her greenish eyes were hard and bright in her small, freckled face. "And what am I supposed to do now, get on my knees and make with the remorse? Sure, I blew up the damn boat, and told a lot of far-out lies about what had happened out there. It was a stupid thing to do, and I did it for a stupid reason, but I was mad, and I don't think too clearly when I'm mad."
"What were you mad about?"
She said irritably, "You haven't done your homework, Mr. Secret Agent. My husband was killed, remember? They took him away and got him shot over in some crummy jungle or other. Was I supposed to keep loving the country that did that to him, and to me? So when some creep came up with some crazy plan for striking back I said, sure, I'll play. And I did. Like I say, I was mad."