Stew took a bit of soft pine out of his jacket pocket and a sharp bladed knife. He began to carve carefully. He lifted the piece of pine up and squinted at it. “Francie, if I’m clever enough, I can now carve myself something that a fish will snap at. A lure. A nice, sparkly, dancy little thing that looks edible.”
“With hooks in it,” Francie said.
He smiled down at her benignly. “Precisely. With hooks in it. You stop to think of it, an organization isn’t very much different from a fish. Now, I’m eventually going to catch a fish on this, because it will have precisely the appeal that fish is looking for. Now, you take an organization, you can always find one person in it, if you look hard enough, that can be attracted. But then, it’s always better to use real bait instead of an artificial lure.”
“Sounds cold-blooded,” Francie said sleepily.
“I suppose it is. Now, let’s take, for example, that super-secret organization you work for, Francie.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“That so-called weather research outfit. Suppose we had to find bait to make somebody bite on a hook?”
Francie sat up and tried to smile. “You know, I don’t like the way you’re talking, Stew.”
“You’re among friends, honey. Betty and I are very friendly people.”
Francie, confused, turned and looked at Betty. Her face had lost its usual animation. There was nothing there but a catlike watchfulness.
“What is this, anyway?” Francie said, laughing. But her laughter sounded false.
“We came over here,” Stew said, “because this is a nice, quiet place to settle down and make a deal. Now, don’t be alarmed, Francie. A lot of time and effort has gone into making exactly the right sort of contact with you. Of course, if it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else in Unit 30. So this is the stroke of midnight at the fancy-dress ball. Everybody takes off their masks.”
Slowly the incredible meaning behind his words penetrated to Francie’s mind. She looked at them. They had been friends — friends quickly made and yet dear to her. Now suddenly they had become strangers. Stew’s bland, open face seemed to hold all the guilelessness of the face of an evil child. And Betty’s features had sharpened, had become almost feral.
“Is this some sort of a stupid test?” Francie demanded.
“I’ll say it again. We are here to make a business deal. We give you something, you give us something. Everybody is satisfied.” Stewart Jackson smiled at her.
Panic struck Francie. She slipped as she scrambled to her feet. She ran as fast as she could toward the boat, heard the feet drumming behind her. As she bent to shove the boat off, Betty grabbed her, reached around her from behind, and, with astonishing strength, twisted both of Francie’s arms until her hands were pinned between her shoulder blades.
The pain doubled Francie over. “You’re hurting me!” she cried. There was an odd indignity in being hurt by another woman.
“Come on back,” Betty said, her voice flat-calm.
Stew hadn’t moved. He cut a long, paper-thin strip from the piece of pine. Betty shoved Francie toward him and released her.
“Sit down, honey,” Stew said calmly. “No need to get all upset. You read the papers and magazines. I know that you’re a well-informed and intelligent young woman. Please sit down. You make me nervous.”
Francie sat on the grass, hugged her knees. She felt cold all the way through. “I don’t know what you expect me to do, but you might as well know that I’ll never do it. You had better kill me or something, because just as fast as I can get to a phone I’m going to—”
“And please stop sounding like a suspense movie, Francie,” Stewart said patiently. “We don’t go around killing people. Just let me talk for a minute: Maybe you, as an intelligent young woman, have wondered why so many apparently loyal and responsible people have committed acts of treason against their country. To understand that, you have to have an appreciation of the painstaking care with which all trusted people are surveyed. Sooner or later, Mrs. Aintrell, we usually find an avenue of approach to at least one person in each secret setup in which we interest ourselves. And, in the case of Unit 30, the fates seem to have elected you to provide us with complete transcripts of all current progress reports dictated by Dr. Sherra, Dr. McKay, and Mr. Blajoviak.”
Shock made Francie feel dull. She merely stared at him unbelievingly.
Stewart Jackson smiled blandly. “I assure you our cover is perfect. And I believe you have helped us along by casually mentioning your nice neighbors, the Jacksons.”
“Yes, but—”
“We thought at first my boating accident might be too obvious, but then we remembered that there is nothing in your background to spoil your naïveté.”
“You’re very clever and I’ve been stupid, but I assure you that nothing you can say to me will make any difference.”
“Being hasty, isn’t she, Betty?” Stewart said.
With the warm, friendly manner of a man bestowing gifts, he reached into the inside pocket of his heavy tweed jacket and took out an envelope. He took a sheet of paper from the envelope, unfolded it, and handed it to her. It was coarse, pulpy paper. In the top right corner were Chinese ideographs, crudely printed. In the top left corner was a symbol of the hammer and sickle. But it was the scrawled pencil writing that tore her heart in two:
“Baby, they say you will get this. Maybe it’s like their other promises. Anyway, I hope you do get it. This is a crumb-bum outfit. I keep telling them I’m sick, but nobody seems to be interested. The holes healed pretty good, but now they don’t look so hot. Anything you can do to get me out of this, baby, do it. I can’t last too long here, for sure. I love you, baby, and I keep thinking of us in front of a fireplace — it gets cold here — and old Satchmo on the turntable, and you in the green housecoat, and Willy on the mantel.”
She read it again and instinctively held it to her lips, her eyes so misted that Stewart and the rock he leaned against were merged in a gray-brown blur.
Bob was alive! There could be no doubt of it. No one else would know about the green housecoat, about Bob’s delight in the zipper that went from throat to ankles. And they had all been wrong. All of them! Happiness made her feel dizzy, ill.
Jackson’s voice came from remote distances: “...find it pretty interesting, at that. That piece of paper crossed Siberia and Russia and came to Washington in a diplomatic pouch, one that we won’t identify. When we reported your assignment to Unit 30, our Central Intelligence ordered an immediate check of all captive officer personnel. In that first retreat after the Chinese came into it, they picked up quite a lot of wounded American personnel. It was quite a break to find your husband reported as killed in action instead of captured. If he’d been captured they’d never have transferred you to Unit 30, you know. So they told Lieutenant Aintrell the circumstances and he wrote that letter you’re holding. It got to you just as fast as it could be managed.”
“He says he’s sick!” Francie exclaimed indignantly. “Why isn’t he being taken care of?”
“Not many doctors and not much medicine on the Chinese mainland, Francie. They use what they have for their own troops.”
“They’ve got to help him!”
Betty came over, put her arm around Francie’s shoulders. “I guess, Francie, dear, that is going to be up to you.”
Francie twisted away from her. “What do you mean?”
“It’s out of our hands,” Stew said. “You can think of us as just messengers from the boys who make the decisions. They say that when, as an evidence of your good faith, they start to receive copies of Unit 30 progress reports, they will see to it that your husband is made more comfortable. I understand his wounds are not serious. You will get more letters from him, and he’ll tell you in those letters that things are better. When your services are no longer needed they will make arrangements to have him turned over to some impartial agency. Maybe to a Swedish hospital ship. He’ll come home to you, and that will be your reward for services rendered. Now, if you don’t want to play ball, I’m supposed to pass the word along, and they’ll see that he gets transferred from the military prison to a labor camp, where he may last a month or a year. Now, you better take time to think it all over.”