Free The Poisoners by Donald Hamilton

her resentment to persuade her to help with a fancy anti-U.S. plot they had going below the border in Mexico.”
    “I remember,” Mac said. “What is your point?”
    I said, “We broke up the conspiracy, all right, and got all the people immediately concerned, with the help of the Mexican authorities, but we didn’t get the ones who’d pulled the strings from up here, north of the border. At least, if we did, I was never told about it.”
    “We didn’t,” Mac said.
    “Afterwards, when I recruited Annette for that job working on our side—she was pretty disenchanted with the opposition by that time, and she had a Mexican prison staring her in the face—I didn’t ask her too many questions. I was too busy telling her things she needed to know for the mission coming up. I just kept an eye on her until I was sure she could be trusted. Actually, knowing her low boiling point, I was careful not to antagonize her by probing into her past. I needed her cheerful and cooperative, and to hell with ancient history. But I presume that after our joint assignment was finished, and she was being considered for permanent employment, she was questioned pretty thoroughly—particularly about the people she’d known during her brief career as a subversive.”
    “That is correct,” Mac said. “And you think she may have come across one of those people again?”
    “Well, it would have given her a special reason for lone-wolfing it, sir. This was information only she had. This was a person only she could recognize. Even if she hadn’t been mad at you, she’d have been reluctant to call in and let somebody else get the credit for nailing the guy. If you’d check her file—”
    “I am checking it,” Mac said. “I suppose I should have done it sooner, but I admit I was operating on a different theory… Here we are. She gave us two descriptions and a name. The name, she said, she’d heard only once, but she gathered it was that of the man in charge. You’ll recognize it, Eric. We’ve come up against the gentleman before. The name she heard was Nicholas.”
    I grimaced. “That’s nice. So we could be dealing with old man Santa Claus himself.”
    “Santa Claus?”
    I said, “Just a joke, sir. He doesn’t call himself that, as far as I know, but you know how some of our people tend to make up nicknames for members of the opposition, even those they haven’t seen. Wait a minute. Nicholas is a man who likes heavy artillery, if I remember the dossier correctly. That fancy new computer should have given him to us by now, just from that angle.”
    “Unfortunately,” Mac said dryly, “that fancy new computer has contracted some kind of electronic indigestion. I’m sending for Nicholas’ file but I think you’re quite right. As I recall, the lightest pistol he’s on record as having used is a Browning 9mm High Power, no Magnum but still something of a handful. In another instance he left a .45 Colt Automatic beside a victim, that’s no child’s toy, either. Yes, a .44 would suit Nicholas very well, from what we know of his shooting habits.”
    “But Annette said she never saw him?”
    “None of our people has seen him, or questioned anyone who has. So far, his cover has never been broken.”
    I said, “Then it couldn’t have been Nicholas she spotted here in L.A. and tried to follow.” I hesitated. “What about the two guys she actually met, the ones she described for you?”
    “One was shot and killed by the Mexican police while resisting arrest after that Mazatlán affair. From what she said, I gather he was the one who recruited her in the first place. The other was just a man who drove a car in which she was transported to a rendezvous. He disappeared, like Nicholas himself—we’ve had no reports on either of them since. The description Annette gave us fits a small-time European motorcycle racer named Willi Keim—Willi, with an ‘i’—who got into some trouble with the law and now specializes in driving