The Terminators Read Online Free Page B

me?"
    "The Skipper will tell you.”
    "The Skipper?"
    "Hank. Captain Henry Priest," she whispered, "and his pale, doting little shadow. . . . Madly in love with a man old enough to. . . . Stupid little girl, really. Oh, never mind. I'm wandering. But ask them. The money's in my suitcase, two envelopes. The thick one's for Svolvaer, of course, to pay for the plans of the Siphon. The other's for the contact in Trondheim. Trondheim? I think that's right. The binoculars, you'll need the binoculars. . . . No, dam it, it won't work. Not for you; not for a man. They're expecting a woman. Can't change; they'll know something's gone wrong, and panic. Very timid people. . . ."
    "Do they know you?" I asked.
    The painful, determined whisper continued as if I hadn't spoken: "Ivory's after it, too, hired by somebody; and that smug little hypocrite his daughter pretending she doesn't really approve—"
    I interrupted sharply: "The timid people in Trondheim and Svolvaer from whom we'll be buying all this stuff. Do they know you, doll?"
    It brought her back from wherever she'd gone for a moment. "Don't call me that!" she snapped. "It sounds so cheap. . . . No, they don't know me. . . . And you really should do something about your habit of pawing girls in public, Mr. Helm. It's not very nice, you know. I must insist that in the future. . . ." Her voice stopped abruptly.
    "Sure," I said, after waiting out a long moment of utter silence. Headlight beams swung over my head suddenly, and the sound of the car washed over me. When it had died away, I rose slowly. I said, "Sure, kid. In the future."
    Then I was sorry I'd said it, because she wouldn't have liked being called "kid." Not that it mattered now.
    III.
    TRACTEURSTEDET, the restaurant with the untranslatable name—untranslatable by me, at least—was still open for business. The watcher I'd spotted in the shadows, earlier, was still where I'd left him, right on the job; a small, rather shabby man, from what I could make out. Then I saw another, larger, male shape back up one of the alleys. It's nice in the movies. You can tell the white hats from the black hats; and sometimes even the Union Blue from the Confederate Gray. Well, as long as they minded their business, whatever it might be, I'd mind mine.
    Standing among the old wooden buildings in the steady, cold, Norwegian rain, I studied the lighted windows for a moment. I was feeling a bit shy after my evening dip in the harbor. I saw that there was an outside staircase leading directly to the upstairs dining room, bypassing the snack bar below. I took that, and looked through the glass of the door. They were still where I'd left them over an hour ago: Hank Priest and his rather colorless young lady-friend.
    There are two kinds of operations. There's the precision-mission in which Agent A stays at point B for C number of minutes after which he proceeds at D miles per hour to point E. This hardly ever works as planned. Somewhere along the line somebody slips by thirty seconds and the whole schedule goes to hell. Opposed to this is the seat-of-the-pants operation where you're told to hang around a likely area as long as you feel you may be needed there, and then go to some other spot of your choice, where your talents may come in handy, as fast as your instinct tells you. With luck, and the right people, this sometimes clicks. Apparently, I had some right people on my side tonight. At least, something had kept them dawdling over their coffee so I could find them when I needed them.
    I opened the door and, overcoming my shyness, marched right over to the table hoping that, in this dismal weather, my coat and hat would do a reasonable job of covering the fact that underneath I was actually wetter than any normal rain would account for.
    "Excuse me," I said when the two of them looked up at me. "Excuse me, I was here before, sitting right over there, remember? You were kind enough to help me with the menu."
    "Yes?" It was the girl who