"Not very far. Particularly not if she was supposed to have been selected and trained for our line of work." Lorna had got the point, all right. Her voice was cold. "But we'd better discuss it later. Get your binoculars ready. Here comes the caravan now."
We saw the loom of the lights back in the hills; then the cars appeared at the head of the open valley, raising clouds of dust that caught the headlight beams. There were two sedans, followed by a jeep.
"Check the lead car," Lorna's voice said. "The lady senator's homey image won't let her ride in a brand-new Cadillac, but she seems to figure she can get away with one five years old."
Watching the car through the seven-power glasses with the big lenses, I said, "You don't like her much, do you, Lorna?"
"I don't like suckers and I don't like phonies. She's either one or the other. Either she's putting one over on the American people or somebody's putting one over on her – somebody like, for instance, Herbert Leonard. Isn't that his slick white hair in the rear of the old Cadillac? Who's beside him?"
"I can't tell yet."
The first car stopped at the gate. A man opened the front door and hurried forward to deal with the padlock. Then the rear door of the big old sedan opened. Herbert Leonard stepped out. The headlights of the car behind him illuminated him clearly. He'd gained a little weight in the years since I'd seen him last, but he'd never been exactly slender: a chunky, solid man with a rather handsome red face and that dramatic, carefully combed white hair.
He turned to speak to someone remaining in the car, who leaned forward to answer. The interior lights showed me the face of a woman in her sixties, round and a little wrinkled like an autumn apple, framed by carefully waved blue-gray hair. I got an impression of sharp bright eyes behind the round, metal-rimmed glasses, but my binoculars weren't powerful enough to tell me the color. The body seemed plump and matronly, wrapped in a dark coat against the chill of the desert night.
"Do you see her, Eric? Do you recognize her?" I said, "I recognize her."
"Then let's get the hell out of here. I need a bath and ten hours' sleep."
"Wait till they're gone."
Herbert Leonard bowed over the distant woman's outstretched hand. He turned away and walked to the next car, a newer Cadillac, and got in. The car began to turn around. Obviously, he was returning to the ranch, having done his duty as host by escorting his eminent female guest off the premises. The older sedan started up and drove through the gate and on down the valley out of sight. A lone man, after locking the gate, ran to the waiting jeep and was taken aboard. The two remaining vehicles headed back into the hills, and the valley was empty once more…
Some three hours later, towards dawn, we pulled into a motel with an all-night office, on the outskirts of Phoenix, a hundred and twenty-odd miles to the north. I registered as Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Helm and daughter, took the key, and drove to the unit that had been assigned to us.
"Go on in," I said, passing the key to Lorna. "I'll bring the luggage after I've parked the boat."
There was no space large enough for both car and trailer, so I backed the boat into a stall, disconnected it, and put the station wagon into the space beside it. Then I got my suitcase and Martha's rucksack and locked up. The door of the room had been left ajar for me. I nudged it open with my foot, since my hands were full, and stepped inside and stopped, looking at the tableau presented by the two women: the younger backed against one of the big beds, the older holding a short-barreled revolver.
"Take it easy, Lorna," I said.
"I had to make sure she wasn't armed. Anyway, I don't work with people I can't trust."
"You must lead a hell of a lonely life," I said. "Anyway, nobody's asking you to work with her. That's my chore. Now put that damn gun away before it goes off and lands us all in trouble."
"My gun doesn't go off until I want it to go off. And nobody, particularly no man, tells me-"
"Oh, shut up and have a drink," I said, bending over my suitcase to open it. "Leave the kid alone. If you'd just use your eyes instead of waving that pistol around, all your questions would be answered." I straightened up with a bottle in my hand, and winked encouragingly at Martha, who'd sunk down onto the bed, sitting very still, watching the revolver. I set the bottle on the dresser, started stripping some glasses of their paper nighties, and said, "For Christ's sake, Lorna, take a look at the girl before you blow your stack. Obviously she's no trained agent, ours or anybody else's. I had to let you know that out there, in my oblique fashion, so you wouldn't be counting on her if we got into a bind."
"Then who is she and what's she doing here?"
I said, "She's playing with code names and passwords, but she can't control her high-principled indignation when reality doesn't match the pretty dream she's conned herself into believing: of a world in which everything lives and nothing dies. Yet, naпve though she is, the old gray fox in Washington trusts her enough to send her to me with vital information. Why? Can't you figure it out, Lorna? Where have you seen those bushy dark eyebrows before? Of course, they show up better against gray hair." I drew a long breath. "In case you need another clue, she says her real name is Martha Borden. Does that mean anything to you, or aren't you as nosy as I am?"
Lorna stared at me for a long moment, and threw a sharp glance towards the girl. Then the snub-nosed weapon disappeared inside the khaki shirt.
"Borden! You mean he sent his daughter?
x.
At this hour of the morning, there wasn't much traffic to be heard outside, and no one inside the room broke the silence for several seconds. It was the first opportunity I'd had to examine in good light the female agent I'd just rescued. I was a little disappointed. Martha had described her as handsome, but while striking in an intense, hawk-like way, she didn't attract me much: a lean and leathery lady with a rather thin and bony face turned reddish brown by recent sunburn. Her khaki pants were grimy and torn at one knee, and her khaki shirt was grimy and lacked a button-not the strategic top button that seductive movie females always manage to misplace in times of stress, but one lower down.
I reminded myself that after hiding out two days and nights on the Arizona desert, she could hardly be expected to be a flower of fashion, and in fairness I should reserve judgment. However, my initial reaction wasn't favorable. Of course, I may have been prejudiced by her domineering manner.
"Mr. Helm? Matt?" It was the girl sitting on the bed. Lorna and I turned to look at her sharply. She flushed, disconcerted by our sudden attention. "I… I don't understand."
"What don't you understand?"
"Daddy said that you didn't know… that nobody knew…
It seemed odd to hear Mac referred to in that casually familiar way. I said, "Your dad isn't that stupid. What he probably told you was that nobody was supposed to know his real name. But I doubt that a man smart enough to manage a menagerie of snoops like us would ever kid himself that he could prevent them from doing a little snooping on their own time, As a matter of fact, I learned his name kind of by accident. One day, several years ago, I saw a car I had reason to believe was his personal transportation, parked in downtown Washington. He'd used it a few months earlier to send me help when I needed it in a hurry. it was a Jaguar sedan with a radiotelephone installation, a little too expensive and conspicuous a vehicle to be kept around for the use of ordinary agents, but fast, which 1 guess was why he'd risked lending it out in this particular emergency. Anyway, I couldn't resist waiting around to see if I'd guessed right. After a while, Mac walked up, got into the Jag, and drove off. I tailed him to a house in Chevy Chase. The rest was just a matter of basic research: Arthur M. Borden, respectable civil servant, exact field of employment unspecified, with a wife and one child, female."