The Terrorizers Read Free

been, could generally manage to find their way into a clinch more expertly than that.
    The telephone rang. It startled me; then I decided it had to be Kitty calling to straighten things out between us. I sighed and picked up the instrument.
    A man’s voice spoke in my ear: “Helm?”
    The voice meant nothing to me, and neither did the name. “What’s a Helm?” I asked.
    “You are,” said the voice, and the phone went dead.

2
    I replaced the instrument slowly. Then I sat there for a while, trying to put my small, safe, comfortable world back together. It had been a peaceful hospital existence with nothing to worry about except getting well. Okay, so I had a spot of amnesia; I could live with it. Sooner or later the past would return. Even if it didn’t, well, nobody dies from loss of memory. What I’d misplaced probably wasn’t priceless judging by what had emerged to date: some free-lance photography in the far-off boonies, a bit of non-combatant war experience—well, maybe my history was a little more colorful than some, but it still wasn’t anything I couldn’t afford to forget.
    What had mattered was that I was alive, I was being well looked after, I had a lovely fiancee willing to share my problems, and I had a home and business waiting for me down in the U.S. Some officials had asked me some searching questions, to be sure, but that had been just part of the normal post-airplane-crash routine. I was a fairly ordinary guy named Madden who’d had a narrow escape from death and whose job was simply to regain his strength and pick up his life where he’d left it.
    That was the way it had been. Now it was gone, wiped out by a kiss and a phone call. My lovely fiancee was a sweet little fraud. My name wasn’t Madden…
    I drew a long breath and told myself to relax. Maybe I was taking the whole thing too seriously. I was, after all, not exactly a picture of perfect health at the moment—either physical or mental health. I could be building a couple of minor incidents into a major crisis simply because my recent harrowing experiences had left me vulnerable. Maybe Kitty Davidson was, as she’d claimed, just a fastidious young lady who couldn’t bring herself to risk the embarrassment of being caught wrestling happily and sexily with a man, even a man she was going to marry, on a rumpled hospital bed behind an unlocked door. Maybe. And maybe the phone call had been a hoax or a joke perpetrated by a crank or a prankster—but up here in remote Prince Rupert, B.C., who’d bother?
    Instinct warned me that it was serious and that I’d damned well better take it seriously. I might be reading too much into Kitty’s reaction, but nobody would call up a hospital patient with a grave psychological problem and toss a strange name at him just for fun. Helm. It still didn’t mean anything to me. The steering control of a boat. An old-time military skull-protection device. A patronym of Nordic or German origin.
    Helm. If I was Helm, as the voice had indicated, who was Madden, if there was a Madden?
    But there had to be a Madden. With the probable death of the pilot to investigate, with the sole survivor of the crash claiming ignorance on the grounds of amnesia—amnesia, for God’s sake, the refuge of every impulse murderer whose mind suddenly went blank, your Honor, totally blank—the Canadian authorities would inevitably have checked me out at least as far back as the house at 2707 Brightwood Way, Bellevue, Washington. I’d be very much surprised if they hadn’t checked a lot farther. There simply had to be a Madden living at that address who took pictures for a living and had a convincing background, or the questioning to which I’d been subjected would have been a lot longer and tougher.
    I remembered the blocky, dark gent in plainclothes from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He’d been doing a lot of heavy thinking behind his deadpan expression. Even with Kitty making a positive identification, he would have