Soon he reached a crossroad with a marker dimly visible on each corner. Braking violently, he jumped out, peered at the nearest one in the poor light of night. It said Radine-27 den. The opposite marker said Valapan-92 den. So that’s where he’d been heading-to Valapan. Doubtless the police there were out in full strength, a reception committee too well prepared to permit another crash-through.
The marker on the left-hand road read Pertane-51 den. He clambered back into the car, turned left. Still no signs of close pursuit were visible but that meant nothing. Somebody with radio contact and a big map would be moving cars around to head him off as reports of his position filtered in. At the marker indicating 9 den he found another crossroad which he recognised. The sky-glow of Pertane now shone straight ahead while on his right was the road leading to the cave in the forest. He took an added risk of interception by driving the car a couple of miles nearer Pertane before abandoning it. When they found it there they’d probably jump to the conclusion that he’d sought refuge somewhere in the big city. It would be all to the good if they wasted time and manpower scouring Pertane from end to end.
Walking back, he reached the forest and continued along its fringe. It took him two hours to arrive at the tree and the tombstone. During that period he dived into the woods eleven times and watched carloads of hunters whine past. Looked like he’d got a veritable army to chasing around in the night and that was a worthwhile result if Wolf was to be believed.
Entering the forest, he made for the cave.
At the cave he found everything intact, undisturbed. He arrived thankfully, feeling that he was as safe here as he could be anywhere upon a hostile world. It was hardly likely that the hunt would succeed in tracking him through twenty miles of virgin forest even if it occurred to them to try.
For a short time he sat on a container and let his mind indulge a wrestling match between duty and desire, Orders were that on each visit to the cave he must use the transmitter and send an up-to-the-minute report. There was no need to guess what might happen if he were to do so this time. They’d order him to stay put and indulge no further activities. Later they’d send a ship, pick him up and dump him on some other Sirian planet where he could start all over again. On Jaimec they’d leave his successor.
The idea of it riled him. All very well them talking about the tactical advantages of replacing a known operator with an unknown one. To the man who suffered replacement it smacked of incompetence and defeat. He flatly refused to consider himself either inefficient or beaten. Hell with ’em! Maybe the Kaitempi had gained a smell at his whiskers but that didn’t make him as good as theirs.
Besides, he had carried out phase one and part of phase two. There was yet phase three, the build-up of pressure to the point where the foe would be so busy defending the back door that he’d be in no condition to hold the front one.
Phase three involved strategic bombing both by himself and by anyone he could pay to do it. He had the necessary material for the former and the money for the latter. In yet unopened containers lay enough money to buy a dozen battleships and give every man of their crews a large box of cigars. Also forty different kinds of infernal machines, not one of them recognisable for what it was, and all guaranteed to go whump in the right place, at the right moment.
He was not supposed to start offensive action of the phase three type until ordered to do so because usually it preceded full-scale attack by Terran space-forces. But in the meantime he could work his way up to it by keeping Dirac Angestun Gesept in the public eye, arranging a few more executions and in general performing his proper function of being a pain in the neck.
No, he would not signal them just yet. He would play around a bit longer, long enough to establish his right to re-main to the bitter end regardless of whether or not the Kaitempi had him taped. He’d been run out of Radine but he wasn’t going to be chased right off the planet. That would be too much for his self-esteem.
Opening a couple of containers, he undressed, put on a wide belly-belt that made him corpulent with guilders. Then he donned ill-cut, heavy clothes typical of the Sirian farmer. A couple of cheek-pads widened and rounded his face. He plucked his eyebrows into slight raggedness, trimmed his hair to comply with the current agricultural fashion.
With purple dye he gave his face the peculiar mottling of a bad complexion. The final touch was to give himself an injection alongside his right nostril; within two hours it would create that faint orange-coloured blemish occasionally seen on Sirian features.
He was now a middle-aged, coarse looking and somewhat overfed Sirian farmer and again he had documents to match. This time he was Rathan Gusulkin, a grain-grower. His papers showed that he had emigrated from Diracta five years ago. This served to explain his Mashambi accent which was the only thing he could not successfully conceal.
Before setting out in his new role he enjoyed another real Earth-meal and four hours of much-needed sleep. When two miles from the outskirts of Pertane he buried a package holding fifty thousand guilders at the base of the southernmost left-hand buttress of the bridge across the river. Not far from that point, beneath deep water, a typewriter lay in the mud.
From the first booth in Pertane he called the Cafe Susun. The answer was prompt, the voice strange and curt, the distant scanner not operating.
“That the Cafe Susun?” Mowry asked.
“Yar.”
“Skriva there?”
A brief silence followed by, “He’s somewhere around. Upstairs or out back. Who wants him?”
“His mother.”
“Don’t give me that!” rasped the voice. “I can tell by your—”
“What’s it got to do with you?” Mowry shouted. “Is Skriva there or not?”
The voice became suddenly subdued and sounded completely out of character as it cajoled. “Hold on a piece. I’ll go find him for you.”
“You needn’t bother. Is Gurd there?”
“No, he hasn’t been in today. Hold on, I tell you. I’ll go find Skriva. He’s upstairs or—”
“Listen!” ordered Mowry. He stuck his tongue between his lips and blew hard.
Then he dropped the phone, scrambled out the booth and beat it at the fastest pace that would not attract attention. Nearby a bored shopkeeper lounged in his doorway and idly watched him go. So also did four people gossiping outside the shop. That meant five witnesses, five descriptions of the fellow who had just used the booth.
“Hold on!’ the strange voice had urged, striving but failing to conceal its normal note of arrogant authority. It wasn’t the voice of the barkeep nor the careless, slangy tones of any frequenter of the Cafe Susun. It had the characteristic bossiness of a plainclothes cop or a Kaitempi agent. Yar, hold on, Stupid, while we trace the call and pick you up.
Three hundred yards along the road he jumped a bus, looked backward, could not discern whether the shopkeeper and the gossips had noticed what he had done. The bus lumbered forward. A police car rocked past it and braked by the booth. The bus turned a corner. Mowry wondered just how close a close shave can be.
The Cafe Susun was staked, no doubt of that. The cops’ prompt arrival at the booth proved it. How they had got a line on the place and what had induced them to raid it was a matter of sheer speculation. Perhaps they’d been led to it by their investigations of the bloody head in a sack.