The Mercenaries | Page 6

fleeting
appearance of an ancient samurai war mask.
"That wasn't included in any report we ever made," he said. "You're right: the leak comes
from inside the Team. It must be Sir Neville, or Suzanne, or Heym ben-Hillel, or Adam
Lowiewski, or Rudolf von Heldenfeld, or--No! No, I can't believe it could be Farida!" He

looked at MacLeod pleadingly. "You don't think she could have--?"
"No, Kato. The Team's her whole life, even more than it is mine. She came with us when
she was only twelve, and grew up with us. She doesn't know any other life than this, and
wouldn't want any other. It has to be one of the other five."
"Well, there's Suzanne," Kato began. "She had to clear out of France because of political
activities, after the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of the Rightist
Directoire in '57. And she worked with Joliot-Curie, and she was at the University of
Louvain in the early '50s, when that place was crawling with Commies."
"And that brings us to Sir Neville," MacLeod added. "He dabbles in spiritualism; he and
Suzanne do planchette-seances. A planchette can be manipulated. Maybe Suzanne
produced a communication advising Sir Neville to help the Komintern."
"Could be. Then, how about Lowiewski? He's a Pole who can't go back to Poland, and
Poland's a Komintern country." Kato pointed out. "Maybe he'd sell us out for amnesty,
though why he'd want to go back there, the way things are now--?"
"His vanity. You know, missionary-school native going back to the village wearing real
pants, to show off to the savages. Used to be a standing joke, down where I came from."
MacLeod thought for a moment. "And Rudolf: he's always had a poor view of the
democratic system of government. He might feel more at home with the Komintern. Of
course, the Ruskis killed his parents in 1945--"
"So what?" Kato retorted. "The Americans killed my father in 1942, but I'm not making
an issue out of it. That was another war; Japan's a Western Union country, now. So's
Germany----How about Heym, by the way? Remember when the Komintern wanted us to
come to Russia and do the same work we're doing here?"
"I remember that after we turned them down, somebody tried to kidnap Karen," MacLeod
said grimly. "I remember a couple of Russians got rather suddenly dead trying it, too."
"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of our round-table argument when the
proposition was considered. Heym was in favor of accepting. Now that, I would say,
indicates either Communist sympathies or an overtrusting nature," Kato submitted. "And
a lot of grade-A traitors have been made out of people with trusting natures."
MacLeod got out his pipe and lit it. For a long time, he stared out across the
mountain-ringed vista of sagebrush, dotted at wide intervals with the bulks of
research-centers and the red roofs of the villages.
"Kato, I think I know how we're going to find out which one it is," he said. "First of all,
you write up your data, and falsify it so that it won't do any damage if it gets into
Komintern hands. And then--"
* * * * *

The next day started in an atmosphere of suppressed excitement and anxiety, which,
beginning with MacLeod and Karen and Kato Sugihara, seemed to communicate itself by
contagion to everybody in the MacLeod Team's laboratories. The top researchers and
their immediate assistants and students were the first to catch it; they ascribed the tension
under which their leader and his wife and the Japanese labored to the recent
developments in the collapsed-matter problem. Then, there were about a dozen
implicitly-trusted technicians and guards, who had been secretly gathered in MacLeod's
office the night before and informed of the crisis that had arisen. Their associates could
not miss the fact that they were preoccupied with something unusual.
They were a variegated crew; men who had been added to the Team in every corner of
the world. There was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman, the Arab jeep-driver who had joined them
in Basra. There was the wiry little Greek whom everybody called Alex Unpronounceable.
There was an Italian, and two Chinese, and a cashiered French Air Force officer, and a
Malay, and the son of an English earl who insisted that his name was Bertie Wooster.
They had sworn themselves to secrecy, had heard MacLeod's story with a polylingual
burst of pious or blasphemous exclamations, and then they had scattered, each to the
work assigned him.
MacLeod had risen early and submitted to the ordeal of the search to leave the
reservation and go to town again, this time for a conference at the shabby back-street
cigar store that concealed a Counter Espionage center. He had returned just as Farida