The Threateners Read Free

thousand miles to the east of where I stood. “You may be right, sir. I still keep a couple of cameras around and snap them occasionally for show. Anyway, these people don’t seem to know I’ve spotted them, and they certainly aren’t taking any serious precautions; I could have had each of them half a dozen times. I’d say you’re right, and they don’t know what I really do for a living, or what a truly nasty person I am.”
    “Well, we do try to keep it a secret,” Mac said dryly. “Now tell me what you’ve done to deserve all this attention.”
    “I haven’t the slightest idea, sir.”
    "You have a lady living with you at the moment, I believe; a divorced lady. Ex-husbands have been known to do some strange things—”
    “Unlikely in this case. The guy is a young doctor and I shouldn’t think he’d have enough money yet, judging by what Jo told me about him, to mount this kind of an operation even if he’s mad with jealousy, which seems unlikely since he remarried a few months ago. Besides, Jo has gone back to Tucson.”
    “Permanently?”
    I said, “If you practice with a golf ball on the office rug, or whack a tennis ball against the backyard fence by the hour, you’re merely an enthusiastic sportsman. The gal may think you’re kind of childish; but boys, even grown-up boys, must be allowed to play their silly games, right? But if you buy a new gun, even just a lousy little .22, and spend a few afternoons a week at the rifle range learning how to put a bullet in the right place . . . After the way we met down in Mexico under fairly violent circumstances, Jo was already uncertain about me. Seeing me spending considerable amounts of time and money on my shooting made up her mind the wrong way; I guess to her it seemed like watching Jack the Ripper sharpening his knife. Maybe I should have taken up golf.”
    “My condolences,” Mac said. He’s not the most sympathetic man in the world; and he’s always uneasy about our amorous entanglements, although as far as I know he’s still got his own lady, a high-powered businesswoman he sees at odd intervals. “Tell me about this recreational shooting you’ve been doing. Whatever it is, I find it commendable, since I’m told that your latest scores at the Ranch, while acceptable, weren’t up to your usual standards. And we have found that just about any shooting practice carries over to all shooting.”
    “Yes, sir.” I explained the basics of the small-bore silhouette game. He seemed to find it amusing that one of his sinister senior operatives was spending his convalescent leave knocking over little metal animals and birds with a .22, like a kid in a shooting gallery. I finished with: “Hell, I can’t figure out what these weirdos are up to, following me around.”
    “Of course, over the years you have made a few enemies in the line of duty, but as a prelude to revenge this does seem a little overelaborate.” Mac was silent briefly. Standing by the filling-station pay phone while the attendant pumped gas into the Subaru—since I was being watched, it was highly possible that my home phone was tapped—I visualized him in his office in front of the bright window he likes to make us face, a lean, gray-haired man with black eyebrows, wearing a gray business suit, always. He went on: “In the absence of clear private motives, wed better investigate the possibility that you’ve become involved in a government operation of some kind. The questions are, what kind, and what government? Can you think of anything you’ve been doing that would bring you to official attention?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well, I’ll check here in Washington and try to find out if some other agency is operating in your area. Or if there’s a possible foreign interest. That close to Los Alamos it’s not inconceivable; they still do strange work up on that mountainside, don’t they?”
    “We call it the Hill, sir, and they like people to think they’re harmless