“Just what is your organization?”
Ping-tse Pong thought a moment and then shrugged. Evidently he’d decided there was no point to concealing his affiliation. “The People’s Republic of China,” he told me.
“He’s a Communist!” Phoebe realized. “How can you work for a Communist?” she demanded of Rifle.
“The recession,” he mumbled, looking ashamed.
“We are wasting time,” Mr. Pong decided. “You two”— he pointed at Rifle and Revolver—“take the body out and dispose of it.”
They pulled themselves through the window. Knife and Strangler handed the body up to them. And then they were gone.
“You and I will take the girl out to the car,” Mr. Pong told Knife. “And you,” he told Strangler, wrapping it all up in a neat package, “will kill him”— he pointed at me—“and dispose of his body.”
“You didn’t kill that Russian to save my life,” I realized, pouting at Mr. Pong. “You just did it to get rid of the opposition.”
“You make your point,” he replied, climbing out the window after Knife and Phoebe. “But, after all, it is my game,” he added, vanishing from sight.
“I been waiting a long time for this,” Strangler said, his voice filled with relish. “Turn around and face the wall. Up against it.” He motioned with the gun he was holding.
I did as he said. A second later he came up behind me, and I felt a cord looped expertly around my neck. The garrote tightened, and I saw stars. Then the stars whirled into blackness. . . .
The blackness cleared. I was on the floor. The garrote was still around my neck, but it wasn’t drawn tight anymore. Across from me, Strangler also sprawled on the floor. His eyes stared at me. The rest of his face had been blown away. He was even uglier dead than he had been alive.
Head spinning, I looked up. I focused on Phoebe in the process of crawling back through the window into the library. A smaller figure, holding a revolver, climbed after her. For some crazy reason, my mind bogged down on the window bit. Were doors becoming obsolete in modern society, or what? Even little old ladies were climbing in windows. . . .
That’s who it was with Phoebe, all right. The little old lady who’d been in the library earlier, the one who’d demanded that Phoebe take D. H. Lawrence off the shelves. And the gun she held was still smoking from the shot that had blown off half of Strangler’s head! The sight didn’t seem to bother her.
So much for “prurient interest”!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“You okay?” Phoebe Wanted to know. I nodded, not sure whether my strangulated throat was yet in shape to let my voice through or not. Then I nodded again, this time toward the old lady. My questions must have been written on my face, because Phoebe answered them.
“She killed all five of them,” Phoebe said.
Ma Barker12 lives! It was all I could think.
“She got the first two hoods when they came out with the Russian’s body,” Phoebe continued. “She was waiting when Pingtse Pong and the other hood brought me through the window. She shot the hood with the knife first. Right through the heart. We never even heard the shot. A silencer. That was what really got to Pong. She didn’t plug him quite as cleanly, and before he died, he told her how his silencer didn’t work and how impressed he was that hers did. He asked her where she got it, and she said it was a local product. Pong cursed the Japanese and said we should boycott them. His last words were ‘Buy American.’ Then he died, and she hopped right over to the window and drilled the last gangster while he was choking you.”
Wow! I was impressed. “Who is she?” I managed to get the words out hoarsely.
“All I know is she comes here to the library regularly. She and Pong and the Russian were just about the only people who did. I guess she must be some kind of agent like they were. Nobody comes to a library just to read anymore,” Phoebe sighed.
“Are you an agent?” I croaked the question directly at the old lady.
“I’m subbing,” she replied.
“Subbing?”
“Substituting. For my son. He’s with the CIA.” She sounded very proud of her boy.
“Oh.” Now I understood nothing.
“He has a cold. A very bad cold.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And the only way he’d stay home with the vaporizer was if I promised faithfully to look after things for him. She beamed. “When he was younger and he got colds, I used to deliver his papers for him,” she added.
“I see.”
“He’s very susceptible to colds.”
“Lots of boys are,” Phoebe sympathized.
“It’s because they don’t take simple precautions like wearing their rubbers and avoiding drafts. But when I tell him that, he says I’m nagging. You know how boys are.”
“Even in the CIA?” I couldn’t help wondering.
“CIA men are just little boys who got bigger,” the little old lady insisted. “And they get colds just like other boys do. And then their mothers have to deliver their papers-—or whatever.”
“ ‘Or whatever,’ ” I repeated, remembering the five corpses.
“You won’t tell them back in Washington, will you?” The old lady was anxious. “If you do, they might get angry with poor Henry, and then he’ll be angry with me, and I’ll never be able to get him to stay home and take care of himself when he gets the sniffles.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” I assured her.
“Thank you,” she said cheerily. “Because otherwise I might have to kill you, too.” She thought a moment. “Maybe I should kill you anyway,” she remarked. “The trouble is, I’m not sure -- Henry was sort of groggy from aspirin and all, and he didn’t tell me.”
“That’s an interesting silencer you’ve got on that gun,” I remarked. “Can I look at it a minute‘?”
She handed me the gun. I tucked it snugly in my pocket.
“You tricked me!” she realized. “That’s the thanks I get for saving your life.”
“I guess I just don’t trust people who go around saving my life anymore,” I said, remembering Mr. Pong. “They always seem to end up trying to kill me them- selves.”
“You took advantage of my trust.” She was indignant. “That’s how it is today. People are always taking advantage of old people.”
“It must be the youth culture,” I sympathized.
“Our time will come,” she grumbled. “ ‘Old Power’ will have its day.”
“Of course it will.” Phoebe tried to soothe her. “Senility is beautiful.”
“Right on, daughter!”
I herded Phoebe and the old lady back to the staff room. When we were settled there, I turned to Phoebe. “You were telling me about Tom Swift,” I prodded her.
“In front of her?” Phoebe indicated the old lady. “The CIA . . .” She left it hanging.
I saw what she meant. I stared at the old lady a moment. Then I noticed something. She was wearing a hearing aid. I reached over gently and disconnected it. Problem solved. “It’s okay to talk now,” I told Phoebe.
“I don’t know exactly what you’re after,” she said. She thought about it. “Well, let me start with how Tom introduced me into the phone-phreak in-group,” she suggested finally. “Actually, he made me a part of one of the biggest ripoffs ever pulled on Ma Bell. It was really fantastic, let me tell you. . . .”
“Fantastic” was the word, all right. What Phoebe described sounded like the ravings of a hyper-imaginative science-fiction writer. And yet, later, when it was checked out, it all turned out to be true.
What it added up to was that a group of phone phreaks around the country had “captured” a small exchange in a remote area of the Northwest and held it for six weeks. M.F.-ing via the Telex testing number, they’d “seized” all the tandems and held them open day and night to receive long-distance calls from the growing number of phreaks being clued into what was happening. In effect, it was an ongoing conference call which involved a couple of thousand phreaks over the time it lasted.