She started to speak, then was silent. Mac took the film and began to roll it up carefully.
"Well, Mrs. Hendricks, what do you think? If you were on a jury, shown this evidence, and told where it was found, and if you heard how extremely reluctant the bearer was to part with it, what would your verdict be?"
She hesitated. "All right," she whispered. "All right, damn you! It's blackmail, isn't it? You want something, don't you? What do you want me to do?"
X
In the morning, it was snowing. To hear the Texans in the hotel lobby, this was a big thing in El Paso history. It snows every so often in El Paso, but they always act as if each time was the first in the memory of man. The clerk at the desk considered me foolish even to think of venturing out into the dangerous stuff. The very idea of driving north into the white wilderness of New Mexico, he said, was suicidal. The little town of Carrizozo, to hear him tell it, was as inaccessible, for the moment, as Point Barrow, Alaska.
When I came outside, after that build-up, expecting snowdrifts to the second story, I found the streets merely wet and black with big soft white flakes drifting out of the gray sky and a little slush building up where the traffic left it alone. I asked the doorman to retrieve my truck from the parking garage across the street and went back inside just in time to see Gail Hendricks emerging from the elevator, followed by a bellboy loaded with my luggage and hers which had been brought over from a motel, earlier.
She was certainly decorative, I reflected, watching her approach. The arrangement of her light-brown hair was still kind of elaborately loose and fluffy, but this morning she was quite simply dressed in a pleated skirt and a cashmere sweater that was neither sexy tight nor sloppy loose. It was blue and matched the subdued plaid of the skirt. A single strand of pearls dressed things up a bit. She was carrying a kind of twill greatcoat with a luxurious fur lining. I guess the height of snobbishness is wearing your mink so it doesn't show.
I said, "Good morning," in a neutral way as she came up. I had no idea what her attitude was going to be, except that it would probably be very hostile.
She surprised me by speaking quite reasonably. "You're exaggerating, aren't you, Mr. Helm? It doesn't look like a very good morning to me." She frowned at the snowflakes drifting past the door to melt on the sidewalk. "Do you think it's safe to start out? What if it keeps up all day?"
"That's my brave tejano partner, Gail the fearless and intrepid," I said. "I keep forgetting that all Texas comes to a shivering standstill when it snows."
She made a face at me. "You can't blame me for not being anxious to make this trip. It wasn't my idea, remember?"
"I remember," I said. "But you seem more resigned to the idea than you were last night."
She laughed and shrugged. "What's the saying? You can't buck city hall, isn't that right?"
She held out the big coat. I helped her on with it. We walked out, followed by the bellboy. I had him put the luggage into the bed of the pickup, which was protected by an aluminum canopy-not one of those fancy, trailer-like jobs, with stove, sink, and refrigerator, just a weatherproof shelter back there with windows and a door. There was space enough to sleep on an old cot mattress, even with all my camping gear aboard and generous headroom for sitting but not for standing. At the moment, it was the nearest thing to a home I owned.
I paid the storage charges, distributed tips all around, helped Gail inside, and we were off-blast-off time, approximately eight-forty-five. After a while, my companion, relaxing beside me, lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the windshield. Her resigned attitude bothered me a little. I hadn't thought she was a woman to take coercion in such a docile fashion, and neither had Mac.
We have three things to work with, he'd said late last night when we were planning the operation, a place in Carrizozo, a film capsule and a 1a~y who hates us but knows Gunther, perhaps better than we think. Put them all together and we may have a productive combination. It's the best we can do with the limited tune at our disposal.
Men were working in Mexico, of course, following the trail. There was an agent on his way to Midland, Gunther's home town, and the motel where Gunther had stayed with Gail was being watched, but that was none of my concern. My job was to deal with him if he came to Carrizozo, one possibility out of many, but we thought a good one.
"Matt," Gail said abruptly. "I'd better start calling you Matt, hadn't I?"
"Permission granted."
"I just don't get it, Matt," she went on. "Do we just walk up to this Wigwam place and march in the front door, or what? And those films, how are we supposed to use them? I suppose they're still valuable to somebody."
They were, of course, so valuable that they were on their way to Washington right now. Even Mac didn't swing enough weight to authorize one of his men to walk around with national secrets in his shoes, not without consulting a lot of important people first, so we had decided that, for bait, if I got a chance to use it, the capsule itself would have to do. But there was no need for her to know that.
"We don't know exactly how valuable they are," I said. "We can only hope the other side still wants them badly.
It's a pretty scrambled mess of an operation, Gail. Normally, two agents on a job like this would have rehearsed their cover stories for weeks in advance. As it is, we're going to have to size up the situation when we get there, and improvise like hell."
"And it's really Sam Gunther you're after? It's absolutely crazy! Why, I've known him for years!"
"People had known Klaus Fuchs for years. They thought him a nice, harmless sort of guy, I've heard."
"If you catch him…" She hesitated. "When you catch him, what happens then?"
She had a knack of bringing up awkward subjects. I said, "Well, that kind of depends on Sam." Well, it did, to a certain extent.
She said, "I'd hate to be the one responsible for… for getting him killed, or anything."
I glanced at her. "The man is a murderer and a traitor, Gail. Both crimes carry the death penalty." It didn't seem necessary or diplomatic to point out that somewhere in the hierarchy above Mac sentence had already been passed on Sam Gunther, who was known as the Cowboy. People outside the business don't like to think things are done that way, and it's best to leave them their illusions whenever possible, but I told Gail as much of the truth as I thought she could stand. "Whatever happens, if we're successful in our mission, Sam isn't likely to survive it very long. You might as well face that now."
We drove for a while in silence. She was looking straight ahead through the wet windshield. At last she said, "It's not… a very nice thing to face. It won't be a very nice thing to live with."
I said, "Well, you can look at it one of two ways. Either you're a brave lady patriot helping to dispose of your country's enemy at the risk of your life, or you're a cheap female Judas sending a man you know to his death to save your own skin. Take your choice."