Sara glanced at me sharply. "Where did you get that idea? Did the woman say anything-"
I kicked myself, mentally. I should have remembered that I was dealing with the intelligence mind, and kept my trap shut. To an intelligence agent, there's no such thing as somebody figuring something out for himself. The information must have been leaked to him by somebody else- preferably somebody who wasn't supposed to have talked and must be identified and punished. In this respect, the intelligence mind is indistinguishable from the security mind. When dealing with either intelligence or security peopie, there's only one motto to follow: don't be bright, they don't recognize the existence of brains.
"She didn't have to say anything," I said. "It's a fairly obvious gimmick, isn't it?"
Sara said, rather stiffly, "I don't know how obvious it is. We have considered the theory, of course, and it's very interesting that you should mention it right after having a long conversation with… You're sure Mrs. Taylor didn't suggest it to you in some way, maybe quite indirectly?"
"Quite sure," I said. "I dreamed it up all by myself."
"Well," she said, still dissatisfied, "well, we don't take it too seriously, but we are checking his movements over the past several years and seeing if there's any correlation with what we know of Caselius' operations. Taylor did move around a great deal, doing articles for various publications, and as a prominent American journalist he had contacts everywhere. There's a lot of hate-America propaganda these days, you know; but there are also a lot of government officials in a lot of countries who'll tell an American things they wouldn't tell anybody else. Generally they've got an ax of some kind to grind, and hope Uncle Sam will supply the whetstone, given the right kind of publicity. Taylor was a genius at sniffing out these people, apparently. And he was also, I gather, the kind of flamboyant character who'd get a big kick out of writing himself up as a master spy, complete with Cossack beard and rumbling laugh, and collecting money for the piece, just before he pretended to be killed and took refuge on the other side of the iron curtain. He had that kind of a sense of humor, they say."
Her voice was disapproving. Obviously she didn't like flamboyant humorists.
I said, "Of course, he doesn't have to be Caselius. He could just have been working for the man and decided that things were getting too hot for him and it was time to run to the boss for shelter. But could he have carried it off for years without his wife's knowing about it?"
Sara said, "It seems unlikely, doesn't it? However, she was shot, apparently. We don't really know how well the Taylor family got along. Men have been known to get tired of their wives, particularly if the wives happened to learn too much about them."
"She's under the impression he saved her life," I said. "Or says she is, which may only mean that one of them is a hell of a good actor. Well, let's sum it up. We can take the Taylor article two ways. One, it's the straight dope, and Taylor just learned too much for his own good, somehow, and made the mistake of publishing it. So he was lured into a deadfall and killed to keep him from spilling whatever else he might have found out that he hadn't put in this article and might put in the next. His wife happened to survive, and was released after they'd observed her long enough to be pretty sure she didn't know enough to do any damage."
"Yes," Sara said. "It could be that way. In which case you're wasting your time with her."
I said, "She's a bright girl; I've wasted more time in worse company." The woman beside me stirred; perhaps she took the remark personally. I went on crisply: "The other possibility is that Taylor is either Caselius or is working for him, and the article was just a kind of smokescreen he threw out when it was decided that the time had come for the character of Harold Taylor, American journalist, to be dramatically withdrawn from circulation. In this case, of course, the article isn't worth the paper it's written on. What about the wife? Did he try to kill her to shut her up, or was there perhaps a lot of shooting to make his socalled death look plausible to her, in the midst of which she took a bullet accidentally? In that case, she's still innocent, and we're still wasting time playing with her. Or is she in cahoots with him, an accomplice sent back to serve some sinister purpose, now that he no longer dares show himself in his old haunts? In that case, explain her wound."
"Plastic surgery," Sara said.
"She'd have to love the guy a lot to let herself in for spending the rest of her life with a scarred neck and a baritone voice."
"Maybe the surgeons promised to make her as good as new when the job is done, whatever it is," Sara said. "Anyway, women do strange things for men."
"And men for women," I said, "and so endeth our philosophy lesson for the day, inconclusively. Are there any final remarks you'd care to add before we adjourn the meeting?"
She shook her head. "No," she said, and hesitated. "No, but… Helm?"
"Yes?"
"If you find Caselius…" Her voice trailed off.
"Yes?"
She drew a deep breath and turned to face me. "Before you… before I help you any further, I must know what you intend to do. Are you going to try to smuggle him back to the States as a prisoner, or will you just turn him over to the Swedish authorities?"
I glanced at her, a little surprised. "Honey," I said, "that's none of your damn business. I have my orders. Let it go at that." Then I frowned. "What do you care? Do you have a yen for this mystery man?"
She drew herself up haughtily. "Don't be vulgar! But-"
"Quite apart from his value to the other side," I said, "which I've heard estimated at a couple of armored di-visions or the equivalent in fully equipped missile bases, you said yourself he's responsible for several deaths among your colleagues, in addition to what may or may not have happened to Harold Taylor."
She said coldly, "I'm not responsible for Caselius' conscience, Helm. I am responsible for my own."
I said, "Okay, honey. Spell it out."
"You've been sent to kill him, haven't you? That's your job, to hunt down a human being like an animal and destroy him! And I'm supposed to… to assist you in accomplishing your mission!"
"Go on," I said, as she hesitated.
She said, "I'm in intelligence, Mr. Helm. I'm a spy, if you like, and it's not a very respectable profession, I'll admit, but my job is to collect and evaluate information. It is not to act as a hound dog for a hunter of men! Not that you look to me like a very efficient hunter, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is…" The ash from her cigarette dropped into her lap, and she brushed at it quickly, annoyed by the distraction, and returned her attention to me. "There's a man called Mac, isn't there? And there's an organization that hasn't got a name, but they call it the wrecking crew, or sometimes the M-group. The M stands for murder, Helm!"
I hadn't heard that one. Some smart-alec must have come up with it since my time. "You're telling it, honey," I said. "Keep it coming."
Her head came up sharply. "Damn you, don't call me honey! Do you know where I got this information? Not from our side, from theirs! For years we've been hearing sly propaganda about an American Mordgruppe-hearing it and laughing at it and combating it as best we could, thinking it was nothing but their clumsy effort to justify their own dirty assassination teams. I can remember, when I was stationed in Paris, laughing myself silly when somebody asked me in all seriousness about this fellow called Mac, in Washington, who points a finger and someone dies. 'My dear man,' I said, giggling, 'you can't really believe we operate like that!' But we do, don't we?"