Free The Infiltrators by Donald Hamilton

how to behave. We need each other, apparently, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t get along.” She held out her hand, with a wry little smile. “I’m even going to allow you the tremendous privilege of calling me Madeleine, if you care to do so.”
    I took the hand and bowed over it. “Sir Matthew at your service, Lady Madeleine. Matt for short.”
    “I know. We went through all that twelve years ago, so I was being pretty silly yesterday, wasn’t I, getting on my high horse like that?” She drew a long breath. “Now that we’ve got
that
out of the way, you can take it out and feed it, Matt.”
    In the motel coffee shop, waiting for our breakfasts, we studied each other warily across the table, almost as if we were getting acquainted for the first time.
    “Well, let’s get this operation organized,” I said after a moment, and I took an envelope from my inside jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. “Some credit cards; any reasonable charge will be covered. Five hundred dollars in fifties; better break a couple of them as soon as you can and be sure you always have telephone change on you. You’ll find you can make a credit-card or collect call from most pay phones these days without a coin—I don’t think it was that way at the time of your involuntary withdrawal from society—but there are still a few that have to be fed.”
    She laughed softly. “‘Involuntary withdrawal from society.’ I’ll have to remember that. It sounds much better than being thrown into the can.”
    “Spare key for the Mazda,” I said. “A note stating that you have the owner’s permission to drive it, just in case you meet a busybody cop who decides that, with your record, you must have stolen it. And a current New Mexico driver’s license.”
    She reached for the envelope and hesitated. “Matt, I don’t understand.”
    I said, “We still don’t know how it will break. We could get separated, as I said before, or I could be disabled or killed. I want you to be able to jump into the little heap and blast out of there and take care of yourself alone until you’ve made that phone call and somebody comes to look after you. You can manage a stick shift; you had a sporty little Fiat or something, didn’t you? Watch out for that rotary mill, it’ll rev up to its seven-thousand red line before you know it. You can’t double-clutch it, there doesn’t seem to be enough flywheel to keep it spinning; they recommend the heel-and-toe technique if you want to get fancy.”
    She shook her head ruefully. “You’re way beyond me. I don’t know those racing tricks. I don’t even know if I remember how to shift gears normally.”
    “You’ll remember,” I said. “And if you do get in a bind, keep in mind that it’s a real sports car in spite of the air conditioning and the plushy seats. It’ll out-corner practically anything that comes after you. Slam it into a curve wide open and watch them go off into the bushes trying to stay with you. But we hope you won’t have to.”
    She drew a long breath and nodded. She picked up the envelope and tucked it into her purse, saying, “You could have given me this yesterday.” I said carefully, “I didn’t know you yesterday.”
    She looked at me for a long moment. “I see,” she said a bit coldly. “You had all the bases covered. Or to put it differently, this is Program A. If… if after studying my reactions so carefully—I wondered why you kept prodding me to talk so much about myself—if you’d come to another conclusion about me, you’d have had another approach.”
    I said, “Actually, this is Program B. You went and loused up our favorite Program A by… well, well get to that in a moment. Here comes the food; to hell with idle chatter.”
    We tackled our breakfasts in silence. At last she sat back with a little sigh. “God, I keep making a pig of myself; but it just tastes so damn
good
after what they fed me in… in there.” She glanced at me almost