"That you'd tangled with the kid and come off second best. That's assuming they don't know you very well."

She laughed. "It is sweet of you to flatter me. But we hope you are right. They probably already know who I am, who Loris is. If they don't, they will be permitted to find out. They will assume that Herrera met me in the line of business and was forced to dispose of me. They will guess that she went into hiding to see if there would be trouble or if it was safe for her to proceed with her job. They will wait to hear from her, for a reasonable period, at least. Meanwhile, we have gained time. In a week, Amos Darrel will have his report ready and delivered in Washington. He will have adequate protection there."

"Amos?" I said. I wasn't as surprised as I might have been. Instinct had already warned me, I recalled, that Amos might be in danger.

"Who else? Are you important enough to be selected for removal, my dear? It may be true that the pen is mightier than the sword, but these people are not known for their devotion to literature. I doubt that they would risk a good operative on you, not even to keep you from perpetrating another book like-what was it?-The Sheriff of Hangman 's Gulch."

I said quickly "I never wrote-"

She shrugged her shoulders prettily. "You can't expect me to recall the exact title, chйrL"

I grinned. "Okay, okay. But I didn't realize Amos was quite that important."

"He is important enough. Who are the generals of today, where are the battles being fought, Eric? Oh, people like Loris and I and Herrera, we have our little skirmishes, but the real front lines are located in the laboratories, are they not? And if a key man here and there should meet with death, how better to disrupt a research program? They have learned their lesson as we learned it; they do not strike at the big public figures. But an obscure little man in Washington was run over by a truck six months ago, and, as a result, a million dollar project had to retrace its steps quite expensively. A certain rocket specialist was shot to death on the West Coast, apparently by a drunken workman he had offended; a great deal of valuable information died with him. You have never heard of these men, very few people have. You have only heard of Amos Darrel because you happen to live in the same city, and the city happens to be close to Los Alamos, and his wife happens to collect literary and artistic figures as some women collect antiques. Yet Dr. Darrel is an important man in his line, and his death would mean a serious setback for the research he is directing. Do you wonder that, in desperation, certain people in Washington, remembering Mac's wartime work, summoned him and gave him authority to meet this threat ruthlessly, in his own way?" She wrinkled her nose. "It took them very long to reach this decision, of course. Washington is the city of the soft heads and the chicken hearts."

"And Amos?" I said.

"He would be dead now, quite possibly, if we had not reached him in time. She came well prepared, with a letter of introduction and a background of college journalism. What eminent man is going to deny a pretty girl with writing ambitions a few minutes of his time? They would have retired to a private room for the interview. There would have been a shot. Perhaps she would have fled through the window, or perhaps she would have been found standing over the body, dazed, gun in hand, with her hair disheveled and her dress torn." Tina shrugged. "There are many ways of doing it, as we know; or have you forgotten a certain General von Lausche? And operatives, even pretty female operatives, are always expendable. But we were there. And the girl recognized us and knew why we were there, and knew that she did not have long to live if she did not find a safe place to hide." Tina smiled. "Her manuscript would be her excuse, if you should come to the studio and find her. It is too bad that we deprived you of the scene she planned to perform for you. It would undoubtedly have been most interesting."

"Undoubtedly," I said. "So Mac is now running a kind of government bodyguard service?"

"Not exactly," Tina said. "There are two ways of giving protection, are there not? You can watch your subject day and night and hope to be alert enough to intercept or deflect the knife or bullet when it comes. Or you can identify and remove the would-be assassin. The police, the F.B.I., operate under a handicap. They cannot convict and execute a man for murder until he has murdered someone. Or a woman. We do not have this trouble. We hunt out the hunters. We execute the murderers before they commit their crimes."

"Yes," I said, turning the key in the ignition and putting my foot on the starter pedal. "Just one more thing. You're going to have to stay under cover for a while. Did you and Mac have a place in mind?"

Tina laughed softly, and leaned forward to place a hand on my knee. "But of course, my sweet," she said. "With you."

CHAPTER 15

THEY build roads in New Mexico the normal way, except for one small aberration. After they've got the surface on, while it's still nice and soft, they give the signal to a drunk with a big disc harrow, who sets off at top speed along the fresh pavement, weaving artistically from side to side..

Well, maybe it doesn't happen that way, but I can think of no better explanation for the long, parallel, crooked furrows that decorate our southwestern blacktop roads. They aren't conspicuous. You probably don't even notice them in your softly sprung, balloon-tired Cadillac or Imperial, but in a truck with 6.00 x 16 tires inflated to thirty-five pounds it's like driving along a set of insane streetcar tracks laid by a madman for the sole purpose of throwing your heap into the ditch.

Along about dawn, I got tired of fighting the steering wheel and turned off onto a dirt road leading west across somebody's ranch. I followed this fc~r a mile or two, until the growing light showed me a kind of hollow to the left where the desert cedars grew more thickly than elsewhere. I headed down there without benefit of road.

Parking in a little clearing among the low, twisted evergreens, I climbed out stiffly and eased the door closed without latching it, so as not to wake Tina, who was curled up asleep under her furs at the far end of the seat. Then I walked to the top of the nearest rise and stood looking at the brightening yellow-pink sky to the east. It was going to be another clear day. Most of them are, in our part of the country.

Little weak lights crawled across the dark plain under the beautiful sky, over where the highway was. I had that curious feeling of unreality you sometimes get after a sleepless night. It~didn't seem likely that, some hundred-odd miles to the north, there was an abandoned mine containing a pretty girl with a sheathed throwing knife at the back of her neck and a bullet in her head-laid out neatly at the side of the black tunnel with a -raincoat over her and her luggage beside her, and covered with as much protection in the way of rocks and earth as we'd been able to scrape together with the tools at our disposal. Tina had considered this a sentimental waste of time, and she'd been perfectly right, but I felt better for having done it. As she kept pointing out, I was soft, these days. I couldn't help thinking of things like rats and coyotes.

Nor did it seem very plausible that, only a few score yards from where I stood, there was sleeping a beautiful dark female in mink, who was not my wife..

I'm not a wood-fire enthusiast where cooking is concerned, preferring just about any kind of stove if I can get it, but I hadn't got around to filling the can of white gas for the Coleman, and there was an autumn chill in the air and several dead trees around. We've got some kind of a bug that's been killing off the nice old evergreens at a fearful rate the last few years. I got out the axe, and presently I had a pleasant blaze going under the coffee pot and frying pan. I heard the cab door open. When I looked up, Tina was standing there, pushing the hair back from her face with both hands, stretching and yawning like a waking cat. I couldn't help laughing. She cut her yawn off short.