Ex Officio Page 37

  Robert said, “Surveillance, I suppose.”

  Evelyn looked bewildered, but the instant Robert said the word Howard knew he was right. “Of course!” he said. “Robert, you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Evelyn said.

  Robert told her, “They’re keeping an eye on the house, that’s what it means, and you probably showed up for a change of shift.”

  Evelyn said, “But why? They know he’s there.”

  Howard said, “But they’ll want to know if anybody else is onto what’s going on, if Brad’s plans have been discovered by anybody who wants to stop them. So they keep an eye on the house and watch who comes and goes. You can bet they asked Brad today who I am and what I’m doing there.”

  “They’ve got a fish on the line,” Robert said, “and they don’t want to lose it.”

  “We can’t beat them,” Evelyn said. Howard looked at her in surprise, and her expression was stricken. “We just can’t,” she said. “They’re professionals at this, they know what they’re doing, they know things we can’t even guess at. But we’re just making it up as we go along, hoping for the best, not really knowing what we’re doing.”

  “That’s our only choice,” Howard said. “There’s nothing else for us to do, you know that.”

  “But we can’t win,” Evelyn said.

  Robert said, “It isn’t quite that bad. We do have some advantages, you know. They’re strangers here, and we aren’t, and that has to count for something. And your family has its own professionals, in a lot of different fields. We aren’t completely helpless.”

  “Plus,” Howard said, “we know about them, and they don’t know about us. That’s the big advantage.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” she asked, as though there wasn’t any possible answer.

  Robert told her, “The first thing we have to do is find their base. We’ve got to be able to keep an eye on them, just as they’re keeping an eye on us.”

  Howard said, “That means Robert and me in the woods for the next few days.”

  Evelyn frowned at both of them. “But what if they find you there?”

  “That’s not the way we want it to work,” Robert said.

  “But what if it does?”

  “If it does,” Howard told her, “we’re in trouble. If we just sit around and do nothing, we’re in worse trouble. Evelyn, don’t turn defeatist on us now.”

  “I’m sorry. It just sometimes seems like such an impossible thing to do.”

  “Then it will take a little longer,” Howard said. Seeing the waitress heading their way again, he reached for his menu and said, “Now let’s eat. I for one am starving.”

  iii

  HOWARD SQUATTED ON HIS heels, his back against a tree trunk, and gazed moodily through the trees to the empty dirt road out there in sunlight. Off to his right, he knew, Robert was also crouched, watching and waiting.

  It was two in the afternoon, Monday, two days after the dinner in the Blue Coachman. Yesterday he and Robert had spent practically all of the daylight hours out here, seeing no one, hearing nothing. Late last night Robert had come back from Chambersburg, Howard had met him out by route 992, and they had walked in the private road practically all the way to the gate, seeing no one, hearing nothing. And now today they had taken up their vigil again, they had been here three hours now, and they had seen no one, they had heard nothing.

  Where were they? Weren’t they ever going to show up again, the yellow bastards? If the Chinese had the house under surveillance, where were they? If they came along this road to meet with Brad, where were they?

  From time to time he thought about tomorrow, when Joe Holt would be coming to give Brad a check-up. That was their deadline, the end of the safe period. Brad had promised Evelyn he wouldn’t leave until after Joe had seen him, and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t keep that promise. Nor was there any reason to suppose he’d want to hang around very long after Joe’s visit. Any time after tomorrow he could make his move.

  And they had no counter-attack, no plan, no anything. They hadn’t even managed to make contact with the enemy. If they didn’t find the Chinese today, or tomorrow at the very latest—

  There was a faint crackling to his right. He turned his head and saw Robert coming this way, moving slowly from tree to tree. Howard pushed away from the trunk behind him and straightened to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his back. He stretched, arching his back, and waited for Robert to reach him.

  Robert walked over with an irritated expression on his face. “I just don’t know, Howard,” he said. “You’d think we’d have seen something by—”

  “Hush!” Howard held up a hand, and they both listened.

  “A car,” Robert whispered.

  Howard nodded, and moved quickly forward toward the road, Robert behind him. They stopped behind trees near the edge of the woods, hearing the car approach from their left, and after a few seconds a small black Renault went by, traveling at about twenty miles an hour. There were two men in the car, both Chinese, both facing front.

  “By God,” Howard said softly.

  Robert said, “Do we follow them, or do we go the other way to see where they came from?”

  “The other way,” Howard said. “They went down that way, they’ll be coming back. Somewhere they have to turn off this road.”

  “We’d better stick to the woods,” Robert said. “Just in case there’s more of them around.”

  “Right.”

  They started off to the left, staying within the darkness of the woods but keeping the sunlit road always visible to their right. On this side they were walking on Brad’s land, but the woods past the road was part of a large undeveloped tract belonging to the State of Pennsylvania.

  They had walked perhaps half a mile when Robert stopped and said, “What’s that?”

  Howard, seeing him gazing at the road, looked in that direction too and saw nothing. “What’s what?”

  “There’s some sort of turnoff on the other side. Come on, let’s take a look,”

  They went over to the edge of the woods, listened, looked all around, and stepped cautiously out into the sunlight. So far as they could tell, they were alone.

  Now Howard could see it, too, an even skimpier road that turned off this one and disappeared in among the trees on the far side, away from Brad’s land. As the perimeter road was mostly dirt, with a low line of weeds and grass down along the mound of the middle, this turn-off was mostly weeds and grass, with two dirt ruts to mark where occasional automobiles had passed.

  Robert went to one knee beside the turnoff and said, “Howard, look at this.”

  Howard went over and looked, and saw nothing.

  “Don’t you see?” Robert traced a curve along the ground with one finger. “Here’s a tire track. That Renault has a narrower wheelbase than most of the cars that’ve used this road. You can see its tracks.”

  “Maybe you can,” Howard said.

  “Yeah, I can.” Robert got to his feet again and peered down the secondary road. “That’s where they came from.”

  “Then let’s go look,” Howard said.

  “Right.”

  They walked side by side along the twin ruts, looking all around, listening. It occurred to Howard that neither of them was armed, and that perhaps they should have been. But all they wanted to do was find the Chinese agents’ base, not engage in a war with them. Still, walking deeper into the anonymous woods, he reflected that it would be a comfort to have a gun in his hand.

  The Chinese did. They appeared all at once, stepping out onto the road ahead of them from behind trees, both carrying what looked to Howard’s untrained eye to be some sort of thin machine gun made mostly of lengths of pipe. They were there silently, abruptly, and there was no time for Howard or Robert to think of anything to do. There was nothing to do. They stopped in their tracks.

  One of the gunmen motioned with the evil-looking barrel for them to come on, to keep walking forward.
Howard said, out of the corner of his mouth, “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Now the other one was also motioning, and both were looking slightly irritable and impatient.

  Howard said, still out of the corner of his mouth, though it made no real sense to talk that way, “If they wanted to shoot us, they’d have done it already. Maybe we should do what they say.”

  “I guess we don’t have any choice,” Robert said. He sounded bitter.

  Howard started forward, Robert beside him. They passed between the two agents, who stepped out of the way and gestured with their guns for them to keep moving. They continued to walk on down the road, and without turning around Howard could sense that the two gunmen were following.

  The land here sloped gradually downward, and the air was progressively cooler and more damp. This part of the forest was very old, with tall, heavy, thick-trunked trees, their interlaced branches forming a roof that kept out the sun so that there was little undergrowth, only the damp mulch of last year’s leaves and here and there a slender sapling struggling up despite the lack of sunlight. The double-rutted road twisted and curved around tree trunks and odd jutting corners of boulders emerging from the ground.

  There was something ahead of them. They walked on, and it was a truck, a huge tractor-trailer, the cab painted green and yellow, the trailer silver with green and yellow lettering, EAST-WEST MOVERS Coast-to-Coast Service. It seemed incredible that anyone had managed to drive that truck in here, but there it was, facing the other way, the rear doors standing open but the space covered by a black cloth hanging from the top. A set of metal steps leaned against the tailgate.

  They approached the truck, and now one of the gunmen trotted past them and turned to face them and direct them toward the rear of the truck. They obediently angled that way, and Howard said, “I guess we’re supposed to go inside.”

  “I guess so.”

  Robert went up the metal steps first, and through a central slit in the black cloth. Howard went up after him, stepped through, and inside Wellington was standing there holding his finger to his lips and motioning to Howard to move in from the entrance. Robert was staring at Wellington with blank-faced astonishment, and two more Orientals were there, both holding long-barreled pistols. As Howard gaped, completely bewildered, the Orientals pushed by him, moving toward the entrance. One of them was silent, but the other murmured, on the way by, “Xin lôi ông.” His voice was nasal, the inflection sing-song.

  Wellington gestured urgently for Howard to come closer to him and farther away from the entrance. Howard obeyed, looking back, and saw the two men, both dressed in black, step through the curtain, pushing their long-barreled guns ahead of them. As they went out, there were strange coughing sounds—phut, phut—four or five of them, and then silence.

  One of the men stuck his head back in and said to Wellington, “Môt phút.” The word sounded so much like the noises he’d just heard that Howard looked at the man to see if he was smiling, if some sort of joke was under way, but the man looked serious.

  Wellington said, “Có.”

  Howard, unable to restrain himself anymore, started to say to Wellington, “What the hell is—”

  The man in the entrance said, in an angry undertone, “Yên lăng!”

  “Yes,” Wellington said softly. “Be quiet, Howard. Wait.”

  So Howard was quiet and waited. The man in the entrance disappeared again, and Howard took the time to look around at the interior of the trailer.

  It reminded him mostly of a Marine radio shack he’d seen on Oahu sixteen years ago, when he’d been a PI officer in the Navy. Illumination was furnished by three bare light bulbs hanging from wire strung along the top of the trailer, the light gleaming on a card table, half a dozen metal folding chairs, and a bank of what looked like fairly complex electronic equipment. Rolled up in a far corner was what looked like several sleeping bags.

  Howard glanced at Robert, who returned his look with a headshake and an exaggerated shrug. Howard nodded, agreeing that it was impossible to figure out what the hell was going on here.

  There was a faint sound, gradually increasing, and Howard and Robert exchanged another glance, both recognizing it as a Renault engine. The other agents were returning to their nest.

  Wellington seemed to be listening as intently as the others. Howard, looking at him, realized for the first time just how incongruously Wellington was dressed; dark-gray suit, white shirt, dark-figured tie, black topcoat. And black rubbers over black shoes. The topcoat buttons were open, but the suit coat was closed. Wellington looked like an insurance man who had somehow wandered onto a battlefield.

  Outside, the Renault engine grew very loud and then stopped, and for a few seconds there was silence. Then two car doors slammed, and then again the phut sounds, this time fainter because farther away. And then they too stopped.

  When the entrance curtain was shoved open, Howard jumped as though there’d been an explosion. But it was only the same man as before, who this time said to Wellington, “Tôt lam.”

  “Tôt,” Wellington said.

  “Chò dây.”

  Wellington said, “Bao lâu thì xong?”

  “Năm phút,” the other man said.

  “Tôt.”

  As the man disappeared again, Wellington turned to Howard and Robert and said, in a conversational tone, “We’ll have to stay in here for about five minutes.”

  Howard said, “Can we talk now?”

  “Yes, it’s all right now.”

  Robert said, “Are they Chinese?”

  “The men who were in here with me? No, Vietnamese.”

  Howard said, “You speak Vietnamese?”

  “Some. Not a great deal.”

  Shaking his head, Robert said, “I don’t get it. What are Vietnamese doing here?”

  “Toward the end over there,” Wellington said, “it was safest for some of our friends to leave Vietnam and come to the states. The useful ones.”

  But what are they doing here? And what are you doing here?”

  “The same as you, actually,” Wellington said. “Finding the Chinese base.”

  Howard said, “Is this it?”

  “Yes. That equipment there has been tapping Bradford’s phones.”

  “The two men who brought us here, were they more Vietnamese?”

  Wellington smiled with one side of his mouth. “No. They were Chinese.”

  “And the men in the Renault?”

  “Also Chinese.”

  “What happens to them now?”

  “They get buried, I believe,” Wellington said. “Sit down, both of you. I think we ought to talk.”

  All three sat down at the card table, and Robert said, “How many people do you have working around here?”

  “Just the two you saw. And they don’t know the situation. They don’t know any more than they absolutely have to know.”

  “But who do they work for?”

  “I have a high enough position, where I work,” Wellington said delicately, “that I can ask to have the two men assigned to me without having to explain what I want them for.”

  “What do you want them for?” Howard asked him.

  “To take over from the former tenants of this place,” Wellington said. “From this point on, whenever Bradford comes out to make contact with his Chinese friends, it will actually be our friends that he’ll talk to.”

  “But won’t he be able to tell they’re not Chinese?”

  “Would you?”

  Howard said, “I’m not as well-traveled as Brad.”

  “The fact is,” Wellington said, “the Vietnamese look quite similar to some Chinese types. Close enough for the purpose. An Oriental might not be fooled, but it isn’t an Oriental we’re trying to fool.”

  “All right,” Howard said.

  Robert said, “What’s the advantage of it, though?”

  “The advantage,” Wellington explained patiently, “is that there’s going to be one unavoidable delay
after another in the Chinese plan to help Bradford get out of the country. Every time he comes out to see if it’s time to leave yet, our men will regretfully explain that another problem has come up, another small delay.”

  “That’s good,” Robert said. “That’s really good.”

  Howard said, “But how long can it work? Won’t he get suspicious after a while, or at least impatient? How long can you keep him hanging that way?”

  Wellington shrugged. “Maybe a week, maybe a month. Depending how rapidly his mind is deteriorating, maybe forever.”

  “I don’t think it’s deteriorating,” Robert said. “I think there was a change, and now there’s a new stability.”

  “We’ll see what Joe Holt has to say. He’s coming out tomorrow, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Howard said, “All right. It gives us more time, and that’s good. But it isn’t a permanent solution.”

  “I didn’t say it was,” Wellington said calmly. “But it does give us time, a little more time.”

  Howard said, “What about the Chinese? Not these ones here, the ones behind them. Won’t they try to re-establish contact?”

  “I imagine they will. We’ll have to keep it from happening. Somebody will have to actually be with Bradford at all times from now on.”

  The man stuck his head in again, saying, “San sàng.”

  Getting to his feet, Wellington said, “Cam ón. All right, we can go now.”

  They went outside, and the two black-garbed Vietnamese were standing near the dusty black Renault. None of the Chinese were anywhere in sight.

  Wellington and the two men spoke together briefly, and then Wellington said, “I’ll walk with you as far as the perimeter road.”

  The three of them walked on up the twin ruts, going back the way they’d come. Looking back, Howard saw the two Vietnamese going up into the rear of the truck.

  Robert was saying, “Was it one of the Chinese or one of your men that Evelyn saw the other night?”