He stabbed with renewed determination and swung his body mightily as he felt the trapeze-like swaying motion begin. Stab and swing... stab and swing... stab and swing... It seemed to him that he was gathering momentum and gaining distance, like a child pushing himself higher and faster on a playground swing. He urged his body on to even greater efforts and thought he could feel the tendrils straining and sending out reinforcements to hold onto him. Laszlo was completely out of sight — as if he mattered any longer. Nick swung. Close. Closer, closer, damn you, Carter! His foot missed by inches. Stab, swing, kick. Stab, swing, kick.
The kick connected.
Nick felt rather than heard the slight click of the pushbutton as it snapped into the wall and snapped back out again. One-button dual switch, he thought, swinging back and stabbing still. Whatever it does, the one button can be switched both on and off.
It didn’t seem to do anything. No lights came on; no sounds either stopped or started. But there was an indefinable change in the atmosphere. Almost imperceptibly, the constricting clutch around his arm and waist seemed to be loosening. And then the thing that had been trying to twine itself around his neck drooped like a dying fern and lost all interest in him. The thick tendril around his waist flinched as usual as he slashed at it but its tossing reflex was listless and without strength. Slowly, all the tendrils opened. Nick dropped lightly to the ground. His eyes raked the courtyard and the house as he struggled to catch his breath. One door at the opposite end of the narrow pathway, flanked by two heavily barred windows. One door behind him. Two completely blank walls — no, not completely blank; hard to spot at first beyond this mass of murderous jungle plant, but there it was — a stairway to the roof. A dim light went on behind one of the barred windows. Nick raced for the stairway and had reached the last step when a brilliant floodlight filled the courtyard.
He threw himself down and peered cautiously over the edge of the roof and gasped at what he saw under the bright white light. The tall, dreadful plants were swaying feebly and their great leaves were opening and closing like hands clapping very, very slowly. Then they stayed open, and the writhing stopped. Laszlo hung suspended for a moment, cupped in one of them like an ugly baby in some nightmarish treetop cradle, his eyes wide and staring in a face that was even greener than ever. Then he slid very slowly from the unfolding leaf and thudded to the ground.
There was silence and stillness for a long moment. Then the great, brassbound door into the house opened slowly. Something moved very cautiously inside, and waited, and waited, and moved again.
A huge man stood in the doorway staring out into his floodlit horror garden; an immense, gargantuan obscenity, a mountain of bulging, rolling flesh that made Madame Sophia positively sylphlike by comparison. He held a long-barreled gun that Nick knew to be as powerful and lethal as they come, but it looked like a ridiculous matchstick toy against that vast bulk of wallowing fat.
The man stepped ponderously onto the path and looked across at the prone figure lying beneath the limp and listless plants.
“Laszlo!” he said, and his tone was all disgust and loathing. “You blundering fool!” The man-mountain moved closer to the fallen figure. “So you managed to turn it off, eh, you moron?” One shapeless leg swung at the body and landed with a thump. “Get up, you...” Suddenly the fat man became a monument in stone. Only his eyes moved. They stared down at Laszlo’s dead face and at the broken bits of plants left lying there by the lashing Hugo, and then he turned very slowly back toward the open door of his house.
Nick knew that once the fat man had closed that great brass-and-oak door behind him, his own chances of ever getting into the heavily barred house were very slim indeed. He raised Wilhelmina. But, slowly and carefully as the fat man was moving and as huge a target as he was, the angle was awkward and the thick growth — which he seemed to be hugging for cover as closely as he could — obscured him. Nick fired. But not at the fat man.
He fired at the single switch with the dual purpose, and even AXE’s F. B. I. Instructor would have grudgingly admitted that the shot was good. It slammed into the switch. Somewhere below him Nick heard a startled gasp and partly saw the immense body turn and search around for the marksman. He decided to be helpful, and sent two shots pounding into the open doorway. That should make him hesitate before he cuts and runs, Nick thought grimly. If he cart run.
This time he was aware of the plants beginning to react. There was still no change in light or sound, but the faintest of vibrations came to him from below. He still did not know what caused it, but it scarcely mattered. The tendrils started waving. Nick fired three slow-paced, well-placed shots at the front door to serve as a distraction, and saw the big leaves start to open and shut, again like vast hands slowly clapping. And then the fat man squealed: a rat caught in his own trap. The plants were suddenly very, very busy. There was no scream, but there was a series of grunts and strangled gargles and a vast threshing about. The strange garden went wild with darting, writhing, clasping, clapping movements, and the sounds grew more frantic — big sounds, heavy sounds, muted sounds, urgent sounds, like a couple of elephants copulating.
It seemed to take ages. But then the man was so obscenely huge. Slowly, the monstrous plants tugged and twined and choked... then the gurgling screams began. The sighing, rustling noises drowned them out.
At last, when it was all over, Nick crossed the roofs of the adjoining houses and lowered himself to the street. His part of the job was done. Now he just had to make sure that no innocent from the outside world wandered into that hell garden, and to have the place thoroughly searched. He locked the courtyard door from the outside with his own Lockpicker’s Special, and then fled through the eerie night to make contact with Our Man in Morocco. Then he would call Liz.
Casablanca Airport on a day of farewells can be as miserable a place as any in the world. Today its roaring, humming sounds were blue notes of departure, half-tones speaking of business that only seemed unfinished because it was all over, except for the last goodbyes.
The fat man’s frightful garden had succumbed — writhing horribly — to flame-throwers, and his house had yielded its secrets. Books, mostly; Laszlo had been almost right. Textbooks on the training of guerrillas and the use of superstitions; copies of the Koran, as rewritten by the Communists; plans for agricultural stations, to be staffed by Chinese instructors; manuals on the subversion of African teachers and leaders into Red Chinese propagandists; pamphlets on the use of drugs to blind the mind and buy support; and a wealth of leads that would keep AXE’s Moroccan Man, plus his newly arrived assistants, enthusiastically busy for weeks to come.
Nick and Liz stood hand in hand, like teenagers, hearing the planes roar in and out and gazing at each other. In a few minutes she would board her plane for Abimako, via Dakar. He would fly to Lisbon and then change for New York. She thought: I’ll never see him again. And a wave of quiet despair washed over her.
“It’s time,” Nick said gently. “Don’t forget me. There is a future, and... who knows?”