Free The Matlock Paper by Robert Ludlum

relaxation. He backed away toward the kitchen door, which was open. Once inside, Archie Beeson did a strange thing. Or so it appeared to James Matlock.
    He slowly closed the swing-hinged door and held it shut.
    Matlock quickly eased the drugged girl off his lap and she quietly stretched out on the floor. She smiled angelically and reached her arms up for him. He smiled down, stepping over her.
    “Be right back,” he whispered. “I want to ask Archie something.” The girl rolled over on her stomach as Matlock walked cautiously toward the kitchen door. He ruffled his hair and purposely, silently, lurched, holding onto the dining room table as he neared the entrance. If Beeson suddenly came out, he wanted to appear irrational, drugged. The stereo was a little louder now, but through it Matlock could hear the sound of Archie’s voice talking quietly, excitedly on the kitchen telephone.
    He leaned against the wall next to the kitchen door and tried to analyze the disjointed moments that caused Archie Beeson to panic, to find it so imperative to reach someone on the telephone.
    Why? What?
    Had the grand impersonation been so obvious? Had he blown his first encounter?
    If he had, the least he could do was try to find out who was on the other end of the line, who it was that Beeson ran to in his disjointed state of anxiety.
    One fact seemed clear: whoever it was had to be more important than Archer Beeson. A man—even a drug addict—did not panic and contact a lesser figure on his own particular totem.
    Perhaps the evening wasn’t a failure; or his failure—conversely—a necessity. In Beeson’s desperation, he might let slip information he never would have revealed if he
hadn’t
been desperate. It wasn’t preposterous to force it out of the frightened, drugged instructor. On the other hand, that was the least desirable method. If he failed in that, too, he was finished before he’d begun. Loring’s meticulous briefing would have been for nothing; his death a rather macabre joke, his terrible cover—so painful to his family, so inhuman somehow—made fruitless by a bumbling amateur.
    There was no other way, thought Matlock, but to try. Try to find out who Beeson had reached
and
try to put the pieces of the evening back where Beeson might accept him again. For some insane reason, he pictured Loring’s briefcase and the thin black chain dangling from the handle. For an even crazier reason, it gave him confidence; not much, but some.
    He assumed a stance as close to the appearance of collapse as he could imagine, then moved his head to the door frame and slowly, quarter inch by quarter inch, pushed it inward. He fully expected to be met by Beeson’s staring eyes. Instead, the instructor’s back was to him; he was hunched over like a small boytrying to control his bladder, the phone clutched to his thin scrunched neck, his head bent to the side. It was obvious that Beeson thought his voice was muffled, indistinguishable beneath the sporadic crescendos of the “Carmina Burana.” But the Seconal had played one of its tricks. Beeson’s ear and his speech were no longer synchronized. His words were not only clear. They were emphasized by being spaced out and repeated.
    “… You
do not
understand me. I want you to understand me.
Please
, understand. He keeps asking questions. He’s not
with
it. He
is not with it
. I swear to Christ he’s a plant. Get hold of Herron. Tell Herron to reach him for
God’s
sake. Reach him,
please!
I could lose everything!… No. No, I can tell! I
see
what I
see, man!
When that bitch turns horny I have
problems
. I mean there are appearances, old man.… Get Lucas.… For Christ’s sake
get
to him! I’m in
trouble
and I can’t.…”
    Matlock let the door swing slowly back into the frame. His shock was such that thought and feeling were suspended; he saw his hand still on the kitchen door, yet he felt no wood against his fingers. What he had just heard was no less horrible than the