A shadow passed over my face. I opened my eyes and saw Mr. Soo leaning over me, whatever his real name might be. I probably couldn't have spelled it, or pronounced it correctly, even if I'd known it. Behind him stood Bobbie Prince, whatever her real name might be.
"You wake up now, Mr. Helm," said Mr. Soo, straightening up. As Jake had suggested, the unfamiliar moustache did make him look like Charlie Chan, or more accurately, like the movie actor-a non-Asiatic name as I recall-who used to play Charlie Chan. He said, "Very good. Now we talk."
My hands and feet were still tied. Nobody'd given me back my knife and gun. I managed to sit up awkwardly, feeling kind of doped and vague, which was no way to feel if I was going to match wits with the Chinaman.
Looking around, I saw that we were in a narrow canyon with sheer walls, the kind of abruptly eroded cleft that's fairly common in the dry southwest.
If I'd been a geologist, I could probably have made a fairly good guess at my location, using the exposed, colorful strata as a guide. If I'd been a botanist, I could have figured the approximate area by the cacti and stuff growing around us. As it was, I just had a feeling that I was somewhere in southern Arizona or New Mexico. My watch said that it was still early in the day; we hadn't had time enough to get to Texas. In any case, I was reasonably certain we weren't heading there, or back to California, either.
Willy's white Jeepster was parked nearby, along with Charlotte Devlin's big blue station wagon. The vehicle, and its trailer hitch, reminded me of the tall, tailored girl with the clipped chestnut hair who'd said she liked horses and riding. She'd also warned me not to louse up her operation for her, but apparently it had got loused up anyway, if Bobbie's information was correct. Well, we were sorry about that.
There was no sign of the six-wheeled van that had brought me here-me, and the science-fiction gadget dreamed up by Dr. Osbert Sorenson, deceased. I wondered what had happened to the crazy catalytic generator. Then, glancing in the direction from which the hammering noise was coming, I realized that I was looking straight at it.
It was another truck, a gleaming white job. A couple of men were working under it. Another man was waiting for them to stop pounding so he could continue lettering a name on the door. He'd already got it on the cylindrical, white-painted, horizontal tank that formed the afterbody of the vehicle: ARDOX BUTANE. Somehow the cylinder looked smaller like that, in daylight, than it had looked being wrestled ashore in the dark.
"Clever," I said.
Mr. Soo followed the direction of my glance. "You approve, Mr. Helm?"
I said, "Very slick. Anywhere it goes, out in the boon-docks, it'll just be another gas truck chasing out to fill some rancher's tank. It'll be practically invisible. Nobody'll look at it twice."
"That is my hope," the Chinaman said. "I am glad you agree. Mobility is essential, you understand."
"Sure," I said. "Because of the wind. A ship was ideal, you could move it anywhere there was water, but on land you've got to have wheels, and hope there's a lonely road somewhere upwind of the place you want to cover with your poison."
"Catalyst, please, Mr. Helm. You supply your own poison, we merely activate it. You'll be happy to know that the Los Angeles experiment was a great success, considering that this is merely a small pilot model of the generator."
"Sure," I said. "But just like a gas attack, you're at the mercy of the weather."
"That is true, of course. Even though we know generally prevailing wind direction, the most favorable location changes from day to day, so permanent installation is impossible. Of course, this also makes it less easy for your people to find us, even when they realize what they are looking for. But we do have permanent headquarters in general area to store necessary chemicals and fuels-but you know that, Mr. Helm."
"Do I?"
Mr. Soo shook his head impatiently. "To pretend ignorance is stupid. Refuse to speak, if you wish, but do not pretend, please! That is an insult to my intelligence."
I looked at him for a moment, and then I glanced at Bobbie Prince, now sitting on a nearby rock with her sneakered feet dangling. She'd combed the snarls out of her hair, but she still looked like a tall skinny blond kid after a dusty game of sandlot football. Well, it had been a rough night for everybody, and I fell somewhat short of sartorial perfection myself.
I said to Soo, "Just what makes your damn. intelligence think I know anything about your headquarters?"
He laughed. "Please, Mr. Helm, give us credit. When you made sudden appearance in Los Angeles… Well, sir, you have given trouble in the past. I have respect for your capabilities; once they saved my life. Naturally, I made investigation to learn what activities had preceded your visit to the Coast. It seemed at first as if your presence was coincidental, caused merely by stupid and unnecessary killing of one of your people…"
"What was stupid and unnecessary about it?" That was Willy's voice; the man seemed to make a habit of barging in on conversations. I heard his footsteps behind me. "That redheaded agent of his had us pegged, Beverly and me. She had to be silenced, didn't she?"
He came forward into my field of vision and stopped beside Bobbie. He was wearing the same gray work-shirt-and-pants outfit in which I'd first seen him; at least it was creased and grimy enough to be the same one. Except for Mr. Soo, who seemed to shed dust and wrinkles, we were not a prepossessing outfit. Willy needed a shave, and his small blue eyes were bloodshot in his lumpy, coarse-skinned face. He didn't look like a man who was a top agent, but then top agents aren't supposed to.
"Didn't she?" he repeated angrily. "What were we supposed to do with her, keep her for a pet?"
"Something could have been worked out, with a little thought," the Chinaman said smoothly. "When hunting the antelope, does one throw rocks at the tiger? We had simple scientific test to perform. Unfortunately, Mr. Warfel's connections involved us in syndicate displeasure, and Mr. Warfel was essential to the operation, so that could not be helped. But it was not essential to attract attention of government bureau specializing in violence by shooting personnel thereof. That could have been avoided."
"Tell me how. Anyway, I didn't shoot the girl; Beverly did."
"So you say, Mr. Hansen." Apparently the Chinaman was willing to use the cover name under which Nicholas had established himself locally; but I had not heard him refer to the code name assigned to the man by an agency of another country. I had a hunch that we'd have no more trouble with Santa Claus, which didn't mean that Willy wouldn't be a menace under other aliases, with Mr. Soo to guide him. "So you say," the Chinaman repeated. "But does Mr. Helm believe you?"
I said, "Oh, I believe him, all right. It took somebody two shots to put down Annette O'Leary-two shots at pointblank range with a.44 Magnum, for God's sake! Even then our girl almost survived. Obviously, neither bullet went where it should have. I give Willy credit for being a better marksman than that. That's the kind of nervous, flinchy shooting you'd expect of a little girl using a big pistol that scares hell out of her although she'd never admit it; a pistol she's carrying only because it's part of her cover as Nicholas. That's why Beverly took poison, because she had committed the murder; and that's why I let her. But I'm still under orders to find the man who set her up to take the rap, the man who gave her the murder orders so he could keep his own hands clean, technically speaking."
"Well, you've found him," Willy said harshly. "What are you going to do about it?"
Usually, there's nothing sillier than, when you're a prisoner, provoking your captors by telling them all the terrible things you're going to do to them, by way of retaliation, at some future date. That's the sort of gaudy rhetoric in which movie stars are made to indulge in order to show the audience what brave Hollywood heroes they are. In real life you generally try not to make your jailers any madder at you than they already are.