The Terrorizers Read Free Page A

found any obvious discrepancies in my record if there had been some to find. So Madden must exist—or must he? After all, I’d been told that he’d only made his appearance in the Seattle area some six months ago.
    Was there, perhaps, just a guy named Helm who’d rented a house, set up a darkroom, and handed out business cards with a name that wasn’t his? If so, why? And if so, why was Miss Catherine Davidson supporting the masquerade with outrageous hints about our beautiful sex life together, when she was actually, it seemed, a fairly inhibited kid who recoiled in near panic from a man’s hand on her fanny, not to mention on the zipper tab of her stylish slacks?
    Helm, I thought. A mysterious character named Helm, pretending to be a free-lance photographer named Madden. A detective tracking down a criminal or a criminal organization? A spy or counterspy? A robber or con man setting up a big caper? In any case, it seemed that this nebulous, weirdo had taken a hired plane north into the Canadian bush and wound up floating in the ocean a long way from his supposed destination minus his aircraft, his pilot, and his memory. An attractive female had then appeared, very conveniently, to claim this masquerader as her lover and intended husband, and confirm his false identity… Nuts! It was TV stuff, I told myself irritably. I was building a melodramatic soap opera out of a word spoken on the phone and the fact that a nice girl had behaved in a sensible and ladylike manner instead of succumbing wantonly to my crude advances.
    My head had begun to ache. I reached for the newspaper on the bed and forced myself to shove the wild speculations out of my mind. The attending psychiatrist had said I shouldn’t allow myself to get disturbed or excited, ha! I told myself that the news, as funneled through the Vancouver press, deserved my most careful attention. Reading resolutely, I learned that people were passing, or hoping to pass, or hoping to keep from passing, laws against cigarettes, dogs, guns, old age, and automobile accidents, to mention only a few of the subjects being considered for legislative remedies. The French-speaking citizens of Canada were demanding their linguistic rights, whatever those might be. The commercial fishermen were demanding protection against the depredations of foreign fishermen. The Canadian political parties were still calling each other names. So much for the overall picture.
    On the local level, the recent heavy rains—I was glad to see somebody around the place admitting it had actually been raining kind of hard—had flooded certain roads in the Vancouver area and washed out most of a small town over on Vancouver Island. Don’t get confused: that Captain Vancouver covered a lot of territory. The city of Vancouver is one thing: a metropolis of close to half a million inhabitants situated on the mainland. Vancouver Island is something else again: a rugged, offshore piece of real estate almost three hundred miles long. The capital of the province, Victoria, is out on this island. The two cities are connected by a system of ferries, one of which had just been bombed, providing the big news of the day:
    FERRY EXPLOSION KILLS THREE
    Reformo Leader Among Victims of Terrorist Bomb
    Grateful for something interesting enough to take my mind off my own troubles, I read the story carefully. Apparently, the explosives had been left in an old Ford van on the car deck, and timed to go off just as the ferry, having made its fifty-mile crossing of the Strait of Georgia, was docking at Tsawwassen—don’t ask me how to pronounce it—at the mainland end of the run. Fortunately, in loading, the van had got parked at the end of the vessel instead of in the more crowded and vulnerable middle. Fortunately, also, there had been some fog to delay the crossing; the explosion had therefore occurred while most passengers were still on the upper decks, instead of as they were returning to their cars, near the bomb, in