The microfilm was gone.
Chapter Two
I stood up slowly, feeling every ache and pain and savoring it at my leisure. My head was killing me; my chest felt like somebody had dropped an anvil on it from the roof of the Grand-Bretagne. My back was full of a variety of exquisite little cricks and twitches. Even my hands hurt; slugging Walter Corbin — pardon me, the late Walter Corbin — had been a little like picking a fistfight with, oh, Mont Blanc or something.
But the real pain was knowing that little reel was gone. Because if it wasn’t on Walter Corbin, I didn’t have the slightest idea in the world where it was.
It had been an unusual assignment. I’d come in, fresh from a job, ready to have David Hawk rake me over the coals for not having done it exactly as planned, only to have him look up, scowl, and hand me a plane ticket in an envelope, muttering something through one of those evil cigars of his.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t catch that, sir.”
“Saigon,” he said. “I thought we’d have a little more time, but it looks like the city won’t last long now. You have—” He glanced down at his watch, then reversed his wrist to look at the calendar on the band. “Damn it, you don’t have any time at all. You’d better get moving.”
“But...” I said. I looked down at him; when he looked up at me there was more than annoyance in his eyes. He was under severe pressure today. “Okay. I go to Saigon. What do I do there?”
“Man named Walter Corbin. The tickets are for the Coast There’ll be a San Francisco contact waiting for you who can let you have a look at the file on Corbin between planes... or at least as much of the file as you’ll need. That won’t be much. All you have to do is identify him, eliminate him, and bring back what he’s carrying.”
“Which will be...” I began. Hawk rushed on in that gruff cigar-smoker’s voice.
“Roll of microfilm. Saigon’s falling. The only thing worse than having Corbin deliver the film to the people we suspect him of working for is for the Cong to intercept him and beat you to the reel.” He snorted. “Hell, Corbin’s quite capable of selling out the people he works for and making his own deal with the Cong.”
At least he’d told me something. Corbin was a double agent, and an independent, a man you had to deal with on a one-on-one basis. He wasn’t one of your dedicated agent types and he wasn’t one of your hire-’em-by-the-hour flunkies, either. Moderately big cheese. I wondered if I knew him, perhaps under some other name. “What’s on the film?”
He gave me another annoyed scowl. “Just get him. Bring it back. Don’t let it get away.” I rolled my eyes to heaven and sighed. Okay, it was going to be one of those days.
And here I was. Corbin was dead. The reel was gone. The Cong were right outside of town. I didn’t have a lead in the world. And, not knowing what information I was looking for, I was in one hell of a bind.
A little dizziness made me lean against the wall of the stairwell. Think, Carter, think. I straighted up. The girl. Grab the girl, Carter, before she gets away. She ought to be just coming out from under that little slug on the brows you gave her. It’ll take her a minute to get some clothes on, and then she’ll be hightailing it for the boulevards and you’ll never see her again. And God help you if she decides to change clothes and go native.
Ignoring the aches and pains, I made for the upper landing as fast as I could go and was doing forty by the time I hit the door to the stairway. Nevertheless, this time I stopped and took my time about opening that door and looking both ways before pounding down the hall. Once bitten, twice shy.
Look left. Now look right. And... but there she went, out the door and away from me. My hand automatically went to Wilhelmina, but I had a quick insight into how much lovely Phuong would be able to tell me with a 9mm slug in her back, and decided instead to put a dent in the Olympic 50-meter record.
She looked back, saw me, and broke into a run, very agile in those floppy rubber slides she wore now. Her legs were nice and loose in the black pajamas, and I didn’t nail her until she was on about the two-yard line, an ace away from the door of the other airshaft. Then my flying tackle brought her down in a heap.
She was the same sort of wildcat as before. There are a few things brute strength is good for and I got her under control the best way I could.
“W-Walter,” she said. “Is he...?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But somebody else got him, not me, and somebody else has what he was carrying. I want to know what you know that would help me find it.”
“No,” she said. “Please, Mr. Carter, let me go. I... I know nothing. I can’t help you. And if... if they find me...”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. I was kneeling on top of her. Straddling her waist, holding her hands — with those razor-sharp little nails — down with both of my own. “I’ll let you go in time... if you give me a hand.”
“B-but...” She tried struggling a little more. Then, when this didn’t seem to be working, she closed her eyes and tried to make herself cry. That didn’t work either. For one thing, she was too afraid to be able to work up much in the way of any other emotion.
“Goddamit,” I said, “I don’t have much time. You don’t have much time either. You’d better tell me.” Tell you what, Carter? I was thinking. When you don’t even know what questions to ask? “Where was Corbin going after he came to the room for you?”
“I... I don’t know,” she said. I looked her hard in the eye. I couldn’t tell if she was lying or not.
“I’ll let that pass,” I said. “For now, anyhow. Where was he coming from?”
That got a slightly different response. Her eyes flicked up — up, at the ceiling — and then went back to my face. “I... I don’t...”
“The hell you don’t,” I said. “Come on, goddamit.” She struggled again; I subdued her again. “He was somewhere up top, wasn’t he? Here in this hotel? What room?”
“You... you’re hurting me.”
“Damn right I am. And you haven’t seen anything yet. If you don’t...”
“Oh, stop!” she pleaded. “Room... room four-seventeen.”
“Okay,” I said. “So far so good. It’d better be the right answer, too, because you’re going there with me.”
“N-no...”
“Right you are, you’re going with me. And you’re going in the door first. And if anybody has an itchy trigger finger in there...”
“No, please, Mr. Carter. The information... I’m giving you is... is correct. He... Walter had an appointment there... with a man named Meyer, I think. A man who claimed to be an import-export merchant, but... well, Walter laughed at the cover identity...”
“Meyer, huh?” I said. “Go on. What was he going to do there?”
“He was... going to discuss a price for the merchandise... the material you are looking for. It was Meyer, I think, who alerted Walter about your being in Saigon...”
Meyer, I didn’t know anything about any Meyer. He wouldn’t have used his own name, though. “Go on.”
“Walter... was thinking of the various ways he could make money with the... the material, in a hurry. He was thinking of getting out of his present...” She stifled a sudden sob. “Of... of his business. He and I... we were going to Hong Kong, where Meyer had offered him... ah, some, work, in his business...”
Oh, great, I thought. Mr. Meyer, import-export man from! Hong Kong. That was a little like Mr. Johnson, coal dealer from Newcastle. Everybody in Hong Kong who can speak good English is in the import-export business. “Go on,” I said with a deep sigh. My ribs were hurting like hell.
“This would... have meant betraying the people for whom he was working,” she said. Her voice had a panicky edge on it; she had gotten the message that I wasn’t going to let her go until she’d spilled her guts, and she was in something of a hurry to get away. She wanted to say it all fast and disappear into the mess in Saigon. “He said it was very dangerous. It was... it was quite an important package, he said, and he’d be a marked man after he’d... ah, changed sides.”