I glanced at the mink stole as he laid it on the foot of the bed. It was a clue, no doubt, but I didn't try to interpret it. It could have been taken off her body-alive or dead-or she could have dropped it as she made good her escape. And why had it been brought here and planted conspicuously on my bedclothes? That, too, would become clear in due time. It was nothing worth wasting cerebral energy on until I knew more about it.

I looked at Mac and said, "How many keys are there to this trap, anyway? I might as well have put up a cot in a public john."

Mac said, "I brought Mr. Denison to see you. Show him your credentials, Denison, to make it official."

The latter-day Lincoln showed me some credentials that had impressive words on them, although I suppose he could have got them with a box of Cracker-Jacks.

I said, "Fine. He's seen me and I've seen him. What do we do now?"

"He wants to ask you some questions," Mac said. "Answer to the best of your ability, Eric. There's full cooperation between Mr. Denison's organization and ours."

I liked that little word "ours." It meant I was back in the fold, at least for the time being.

"Full?" I asked.

''Full.''

"Okay," I said. "What do you want to know, Mr. Denison?"

As might have been expected, he wanted the whole story, and I gave it to him. He didn't believe a word of it. Oh, I don't mean he thought I was lying. But he didn't think I was telling the truth, either. He didn't think anything about it, one way or the other. He was just collecting spoken words from one M. Helm, as a doctor might have collected specimens of my blood and urine.

"Ah, well, it looks like we've got most of it," he said at last. "You say-" He referred to some notes he'd taken. "-you say this woman at one point showed you a membership card in a certain subversive organization?"

"Yes. She claimed to have found it among the dead girl's effects."

"It was probably her own. You don't happen to recall the number of the card?"

"No," I said. "The code name was Dolores."

"If you'd examined the physical description of the holder with reasonable care, Mr. Helm, I think you'd have discovered it couldn't very well have applied to Miss Herrera."

"Perhaps," I said. "They were both dark-haired girls of about the same height. The eyes were different, of course." I found myself wondering, quite irrelevantly, just how some hardboiled party official had gone about describing the color of Tina's eyes.

"And you say the body is hidden in the old Santander mine?"

"That's right. Check with Carlos Juhan in Cerrillos, he'll tell you how to get in there. You'll have an easier job if you take a jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup."

"It seems to me…" Denison hesitated.

"Yes?"

"It seems to me you lent yourself to this scheme without much thought. I can't quite understand how a reputable citizen, with a wife and three small children, could allow himself to be persuaded-"

Mac spoke up abruptly. "I'll take it from here, Denison. Thanks a lot for coming up."

"Yes," Denison said. "Ah, yes. Of course." He went out, rather stiffly. Mac followed him to the door, and locked it behind him; then strode to a picture on the nearby wall, took a microphone out from behind it, and pulled out the cord by the roots. He tossed the mike into the wastebasket, and turned to look at me.

"You don't know how lucky you are, Eric," he said. I glanced at the door through which Denison had gone. "I can guess. He'd love to see me in jail." Mac shook his head. "I wasn't referring to that, although it's a point." He came to the foot of the bed, and reached down to stroke the soft fur of Tina's mink stole, without embarrassment. "She got away," he said. "She hid in the hotel, trying to wait us out, but they caught her outside. They got her gun and made her clasp her hands at the back of her neck, but it seems there was a little throwing knife…"

"I didn't know she had that. She must have taken it off the body when I wasn't looking." I grimaced. "I bet she didn't hurt anybody much. She never was much good with a knife."

"Well, one of Denison's men is having some stitches taken in his face, but I suppose you could say he wasn't seriously hurt. The other one just got this fur wrapped around his head. By the time he could see again, she was gone. So I guess you could call it a draw, this time. She got away, but at least you're alive to tell us about it."

I looked at him for a little. He did not speak. I asked the question he was waiting for. "What do you mean," I said, "this time?"

"Oh," he said, "she's used the same technique before, pretending to be carrying out my orders. But the other suckers were dead when she left them." He looked at me for a moment. "She's been looking up all our old people, Eric, the ones she worked with during the war. It's surprising how many of them seem to be ripe for a little excitement, even the settled ones with families. When I recognized the pattern, I sent operatives to warn all her likely prospects-but Herrera didn't reach you quite in time." After a little silence, he said, "She must be found and stopped, Eric. She has done enough harm. I want you to find her and stop her. Permanently."

CHAPTER 24

WHEN I paid my hotel bill, the woman at the cashier's window smiled pleasantly and said, "You come back, Mr. Helm."

I didn't know why she'd want me back, after last night's ruckus, and she probably didn't know herself, but the phrase has become almost obligatory for employes of business institutions throughout the southwest. Whether you drop in five times a day or don't ever expect to see the place again, you're always told to come back.

Driving north from San Antonio, there's the usual freeway routine-at least, they called them freeways out in California when I was there. Maybe the lbxans have another name for them. Driving was a cinch, and I had plenty of time to think. My thinking revolved mainly around Mac's expression when I told him to go to hell. At that point, he'd stopped being his new, sociable, smiling, peacetime self. Well, I hadn't put much stock in that act, anyway.

There wasn't really much he could do about it, short of calling in Denison and having me arrested for something, which apparently didn't appeal to him. Instead, he'd told me how to get in touch with him, if I should change my mind, and stalked out, leaving the mink stole lying on the foot of my bed. It was in the back of the pickup now, as I drove north along the four-lane highway that, as near as I could figure out, more or less followed the route of the old Shawnee Trail to Kansas. So I wasn't rid of her entirely, and if you think that wasn't Mac's idea in leaving it, you don't know Mac. He'd saddled me with something of hers he was reasonably sure I wouldn't sell, burn, or give away. There was only one way for me to get rid of it; and while it was a long chance-after all, I had no idea where she'd gone, and he probably knew it-I was sure that if it should happen, he or some of his people wouldn't be very far away.

Well, that was his worry, or maybe it was Tina's. If she wanted her furs, she could come and get them. If he wanted her, he could come and get her. I wasn't going to play delivery boy or bird dog for either of them. I'd had my little fling at reviving my old, tough, wartime self, and the experiment hadn't been a howling success. I was going back to being a peaceful writer looking for material, a devoted father and a faithful husband-although the last might take some doing, after what had happened.

I got off the concrete and went down the little back roads from which I could see and feel the country, zigzagging northwards. I slept in the truck that night. It rained hard the next day. If anybody was following me in anything but a jeep, he had lots of fun. In places, it was all the truck could do to make it through the gluey gumbo, for all its cleated tires and four-speed transmission. I didn't mind. The nice thing about driving a truck is, you don't have to worry about the wheels falling off just because the road doesn't happen to be perfectly smooth and dry.