Such Men Are Dangerous Read online

  We were on the road ourselves not long after the truck convoy pulled out. The few things that had to be done beforehand were worth the time they took. Sooner or later someone was going to know something was wrong, and sooner or later a team from Fort Tree would check the route and find out what had happened and where. The idea was to make all this occur later instead of sooner.

  We brought the stolen Chrysler back into the intercept area. It was clean, so we didn’t mind abandoning it, but it was an attention-getter, and this way it would be out of sight until the team from Fort Tree came down. We left all our road signs in place to insure that. Accidental discovery by some citizen would cut our lead time to the bone, and the road signs would keep most citizens off that stretch of road and might coax any others into interpreting anything they saw as an accident the authorities already knew about.

  The bodies were easy. We had the snow to thank for that. George had already tucked our two majors into a drift, and when I went back to check out their pockets it was hard to find them, the snow had erased all traces. I decided it wasn’t worth digging them up and left them there.

  We gave the other twelve the same treatment. We hauled them far enough from the road so that they would have been tough enough to spot even without the snow, and then piled white stuff on them. We left tracks in the snow, of course, but the wind figured to wipe them out within half an hour.

  There were a lot of extra guns around—handguns returned to us by Sprague’s men, the M-14s, the Thompson, a few stray rifles. They went in the back of the van—“A dividend for our compañeros,” George called them. I figured it was quicker than burying them.

  The van also got all of the garbage from the army Ford, plus my own luggage. Some of it would have to be destroyed, but we could paw through it at our leisure.

  We left the crippled convertible at the side of the road. It was clean, like the Chrysler. My own rental car bothered me a little. I had cleaned it out, but it would trace to John NMI Walker, who in turn would trace to Lynch. They were going to guess Lynch anyway, so it didn’t really make a hell of a difference. Still, it bothered me; I told George we should have put it on one side of the empty trucks and he told me I was building a case out of nothing.

  “Slam it into the convertible,” he suggested. “Make it look good.”

  “Make what look good?”

  “The accident, the reason why the road is closed. Hell, I don’t care. Dig a hole and bury it. Fold it up and put it in your pocket. Take it and shove—”

  I got in the Chevy and drove it a nice steady twelve miles an hour into the upset convertible. Thinking back, I suppose the main reason I did this was because it’s the sort of thing everybody secretly wants to do. I was braced for the impact, of course, and I stopped accelerating instinctively a few instants before the collision, and twelve miles an hour is not all that fast, but it was still a hell of a sensation. And it did more damage to both cars than I had expected.

  When I got out of the car George told me it looked like fun.

  “It was,” I admitted. “If you want to try it, the Chrysler’s just down the road. You can make it a spectacular three-car smashup.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to try it. Then he said, “Oh, the hell with it, it’s a waste of time. What did we forget?”

  “Sprague’s jackets.”

  They went in the van. So did the wallets we had taken from the five men. If there was anything else, we didn’t have the time to stand around figuring it out. We got in the cab, and George started it up and stalled it twice figuring out where the gears were. Once he got the hang of it, though, he wasn’t bad at all.

  The radio announcer said we were listening to the Twin Cities’ home of countrypolitan music. He said this right after a newscast during which he had said nothing at all concerning our operation. This didn’t mean anything one way or the other. Whatever happened, it didn’t figure to make the papers. “Three months from now there might be a paragraph in Drew Pearson’s column,” George had said, “and then someone important will tell him please to write about something else, and he’ll expose a highway construction scandal. That’s all.”

  The radio played something with too many guitars. George slowed the truck, killed the radio, and said we were here. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I saw that there was a space ten yards wide between two fences and that there were no trees in the space. That was the only indication that it was a road.

  “There’s two feet of snow there,” I said.

  “We’ll make it. I’ll back it in.”

  We kept getting stuck and he kept rocking us loose and we were in the barn sooner than I’d have guessed possible. Partly in the barn, anyway; the cab and half of the rest remained uncovered. I was going to point this out to George, but he answered ahead of time. “No neighbors anywhere near here, and we can’t be seen from the road. C’mon.”

  “What now?”

  “Grab a broom. We’ve got a hundred yards of tracks to cover.”

  There were brooms in the bam. We each took one and waded out to the road, walking in our own tire tracks. Then we backtracked all the way, using the brooms to fill the tracks with snow. The top ten inches of snow were loose and powdery, which made it easier. A wind would have been extra help. For the time being, though, we had to live without one.

  It took a lot of time. Walking backwards, filling in tire tracks with a broom. A hundred yards, after all, was a substantial distance. It was approximately the length of my island, but it was a lot easier to walk the length of my island than to trudge backwards through snow, and—

  I reminded myself not think about my island.

  We quit before we’d done the whole hundred yards. It was fundamentally absurd to eliminate tracks all the way to the foot of the truck itself. Anyone close enough to see them would see the truck, too. We gave up twenty yards from it and went into the barn and set our brooms against the wall.

  “Now we pray for snow,” George said.

  “But not too much. Or we won’t get out.”

  “We’ll get out,” he said. “Think of all the revolucionistas who are counting on us. Pardon me. Counterrevolucionistas. Pardon me again, contrarevolucionistas.”

  There was enough food for a week, but he assured me we’d be on our way within twenty-four hours. I said, “Veinte y cuatro horas,’ and he winked. He asked me if anyone had thrown any Portuguese at me. No one had. He said I would have covered it anyway. I said we’d never know, and I for one would never care, and I was hungry.

  There was bread, butter, four different kinds of luncheon meat some cold chicken, twelve cans of beer (and a can opener; this impressed me). There was milk, scotch whiskey, chocolate bars. Other things too that I don’t remember.

  I asked what was poisoned. He threw back his head and roared. “The scotch,” he said. “Whatever you do, stay away from the scotch.”

  The son of a gun even had glasses. I poured each one half full of scotch. He took his and asked what we should drink to.

  I suggested brotherhood.

  “The Brotherhood of Man?”

  “Keep it simple,” I said. “Just brotherhood.”

  “Fine. To brotherhood. How do you say that in Español?”

  “You don’t. To brotherhood.”

  I think he was waiting to see if I would drink mine before he drank his. I might have played the game, but by now I really did want that drink. I tossed it off, and he thought about playing games and decided it wasn’t worth it, and drained his own glass.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN WE FINISHED eating he lit a propane stove and rolled out a pair of army surplus sleeping bags. “All the comforts of home,” he said. “I don’t think you can see the stove from outside.” I went outside, and he was right.

  He thought we ought to sleep in shifts. I didn’t, and said so. If they found us we couldn’t possibly shoot our way out. He suggested that some tramp might stumble in.

  “And murder us in our sleep? If you tried that on
your computer it would laugh at you.”

  He thought it over. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not worth the aggravation. The hell with it.”

  He took a sleeping pill. I didn’t want one. I told him someday he would take a black pill by mistake. He told me, pleasantly, to go screw myself. I stripped to my underwear and got into the sleeping bag. There were a few dozen things I had to do, and I thought of about half of them before I fell asleep.

  It must have been around five-thirty when we sacked out. I put in an honest eight hours. If I dreamed, I wasn’t aware of it. I woke with the sudden thought that I had to go through Bourke and O’Gara’s luggage. There was that thought, instantaneous and undeniable, and then I was awake, and my watch said 3:42.

  George was snoring gently. I let him sleep. I opened the back of the van, but it was too dark inside to see anything. I remembered seeing a flashlight hanging on the wall of the barn, and I walked to where I thought it might have been, and it was there. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself if I had just walked on water.

  I climbed up into the truck. It wasn’t snowing and didn’t look as though it had snowed while I was asleep, but somewhere along the line we got the wind we’d hoped for. The driveway looked as though it hadn’t seen a car or truck since the last Indian uprising.

  I went through everything we’d thrown in the truck. The wallets, the suitcases, everything. For the most part, I didn’t do more than establish that we had a lot of crud in the truck that deserved burning and/or burial. But I did find a baby camera in O’Gara’s luggage, plus a roll of exposed film. He’d taken one shot of my ID that I knew of, and it was possible that it hadn’t been processed yet. If that was so, then my prints never got to Washington.

  As far as I knew, those prints were the only solid link between Richard John Lynch and me.

  I don’t know how long George might have slept. When it got to be six in the morning I decided that anything over twelve hours amounted to criminal self-indulgence. I shook him awake. “Get up,” I said. “It’s morning, I’ve got a dozen questions for you.”

  “In a while. Oh, God, I think I’ve got a barbiturate hangover. Let me eat something. I feel like hell.”

  We ate ham sandwiches and drank milk. He came slowly back to life. While he was doing this I took the garbage that had to be burned outside. I set a garbage can lid on top of the snow and built a little fire in it, feeding the stuff in a little at a time. It was mostly paper. After a few minutes he joined me and contributed a handful of paper. I fed it to the fire without looking at it.

  “There’s a well out in back,” he said. “For the clothes and stuff. Get rid of that uniform. I’ve got trucker clothes in back, and keep a suit for afterward. Everything else goes.”

  “They’ll look in the well.”

  “If they get here. The hell, let ’em. There’s nothing traceable, is there?”

  There wasn’t, and it was impossible to dig in the frozen ground. We uncovered the well, threw a lot of clothing into it, and piled snow on top. Back in the barn, I started in on my questions.

  “First of all, the route. Do we take the Mississippi Valley south or cut east first?”

  “East. It’s longer, but I feel better about it.”

  “All right. What kind of roads? Not turnpikes or main roads, obviously, but won’t we be conspicuous on back roads?”

  “We would. That’s why we take the pikes.” He unfolded a Shell map of the country that just showed major highways. “Straight east through Wisconsin, pick up the Wisconsin freeway south of Milwaukee. South on that, onto the Belt around Chicago. Then there’s one stretch of turnpike through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio and on across Pennsylvania all the way to the coast. We don’t go all the way, we pick up the Penn-Can and head south. It takes us—”

  “How can we do that?”

  “Easy. We take turns driving and—”

  “There’s a weighing station at every turnpike entrance. We have to show papers, we need all sorts of invoices and crud—”

  “We’ve got them.”

  I looked at him. “You do your homework, don’t you?”

  “You betchum. Hang on, I’ll show you.”

  He went to the back of the barn and returned with a manila envelope. He spilled it out on the ground, and he had everything but a sweepstakes ticket. There were invoices and bills of lading and chauffeurs’ licenses and membership cards in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

  “See?” he said. “Turnpikes. They’re fast and easy, and we are the Thornhill Hauling Corp. That’s what it says on the registration and that’s what it’ll say on the truck once we paint her. I’ve got paint, I’ve got stencils. I’ve worked for my million, Paul. We get on that road and we stop for fuel and that’s it. We stop for diesel fuel and change drivers. Period. We roll right on through, we swing along the coast to Orlando and cut west to Tampa and we’re home. There’s even a pretty good road from Orlando to Tampa. I checked, I know. See?”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Sometimes I even impress myself. What else?”

  “You,” I said. “What’s your cover?”

  “Me?”

  “You. The last they heard of you was Monday morning when they sent you to Amarillo. You never got there and they never heard from you. You must have something. What?”

  “I’m in Guatemala.”

  “Huh?”

  He grinned. “You heard right. I called the office from Chicago Monday and begged out of Amarillo. I told them something hot was breaking and I had to go to Miami. I called in again from Pierre when I went to collect street signs. I told them I was in Miami and had to leave the country.”

  “Suppose they kept a record of the call?”

  “No way to trace. They could have traced it at the time, but I know standard procedure and they wouldn’t. I called into a line that just records messages for playback later.”

  “How does Guatemala fit in?”

  “I go there when this is over. I have something to do there, as a matter of fact. It’ll take two days, but I can make it look as though it took that many weeks. Then I come back from Guatemala, and I say I’ve been to Guatemala, and by God I have. I’ll even have a souvenir for my secretary. Don’t teach Grandma to suck eggs, Paul.”

  We wiped the truck down and spray-painted the parts of the box with Sprague’s markings on them. He had a battery-operated compressor to simplify things, and his paint was a close enough match for the van’s body color so that we didn’t have to do the whole thing. While the body dried we changed the color of the cab from red to green. Then we laid stencils on the sides of the box and labeled it Thornhill. We altered the state markings and added weight information to fit the papers we carried. Finally, we took off the South Dakota plates and substituted Illinois ones. The old plates went in the cab to be dumped in the first deep water we crossed. The stencils were cardboard. We burned them. The paints and brushes and the compressor were the sort of a thing a man might keep in a barn, so they stayed there.

  We took the food along with us in the cab. He wanted to take along the Scotch and the beer, but I wouldn’t let him. I pointed out that it was against the law. We left them in the barn, and left the can opener so that whoever found the beer wouldn’t have to tear the tops off with his teeth. The sleeping bags we rolled up and left. George told me I ought to take the propane stove along, that it would come in handy on the island. I said I preferred fires in the open. He wanted to know what I did when it rained. I said I waited for it to stop, which it always did sooner or later, and I also said I didn’t want to talk about the island.

  We were on our way by early afternoon.

  The trip was boring. It was the kind of trip that was supposed to be boring, and the only way it would have been exciting was if something had gone wrong. Nothing did, which was the general idea, but after a few hundred miles I found myself almost wishing for a crisis.

  We started out with the radio going. Halfway through W
isconsin neither of us could stand it anymore. The news casts were worst of all, because of course we listened to them intently, and of course there was nothing about us on them. The absence of publicity worked to our advantage, but it also worked on our nerves.

  So I got edgy and kept changing stations, hoping to find one that would cease to irritate me, until George caught my mood and switched the thing off altogether. That left us alone with each other, which was worse, but I never even considered turning the damn thing on again, and I think if George had done so I would have shot him.

  We tried talking, but that didn’t work either, and by the time we hit the Illinois line the motif had been established. Silence, that was the word for the day.

  George drove as far as the Wisconsin pike. We picked it up a little ways south and west of Milwaukee. It occurred to me that Sharon lived in Milwaukee and that I wasn’t supposed to think about her. This might have been harder, but fortunately I took the wheel at that point and was able to think instead about driving. I had never driven anything that size before, and at first there was a lot of thinking involved.

  There was also some tension, for a while, at turnpike entrances. But by the time we left Illinois and entered Indiana with George driving again—I couldn’t worry much about our cover slipping. The papers were in order, the weight was right, the truck was clean, and there was just no reason on earth for anyone to suspect otherwise.

  We didn’t even have to worry about a speeding ticket, because the speed limit was seventy and everybody was doing eighty and our truck couldn’t make more than sixty-seven with a tail wind. It got so that it didn’t much matter which of us was driving. When I drove I had my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas pedal and my eyes on the road. When George drove I had both feet on the floor, my hands in my lap, and my eyes either closed or on the road, looking at the same view that was there in front of me ever since Chicago.

  There was nothing to do but think, and most of the thoughts that came to mind concerned subjects I had already determined not to think about. I didn’t want to review the past or muse about the future, and that left only the present, and the present was me and George and the truck. My mind couldn’t do very much with the truck, so that left me and George.