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( Matt Helm - 4 ) Donald Hamilton

ONE

THE MOTEL WAS Off the left side of the highway leading from Washington, D. C. , to the eastern shore of Maryland by way of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. So said the map; I'd never been there and wasn't about to go. At least I didn't think I was. In my line of business, you can't ever be absolutely sure where you'll wind up tomorrow.

As I made the turn and headed into the driveway, my watch said I was arriving precisely on schedule at a quarter-past-ten in the evening. I parked the little car that had been assigned to me among others displaying an assortment of license plates. Mine read Illinois, and I had a complete and phony identity to go with it, in case of trouble.

My real name is Helm-Matthew Helm-and certain government records have me cross-flied under the code name Eric, but for the evening I was James A. Peters, employed by Atlas Enterprises, Inc. , a Chicago firm. The nature of the company, and my exact position with them, remained carefully unspecified on the identification I carried. Anyone who became really interested, however- interested enough, say, to send a set of fingerprints to the Chicago police-would be informed that I was known locally as Jimmy (the Lash) Petroni, a man with influential friends and an unsavory reputation.

In other words, I wasn't, for the record, a very nice guy. It was just as well. The job wasn't a very nice job. In fact, one agent had already turned it down.

"Sentimentality!" Mac had snorted, in his Washington office on the second floor of a rather ancient building, never mind where. "These delicate buds we get nowadays, nurtured on beautiful thoughts of peace, security, and social adjustment! They may be brave and patriotic enough in the right situations, but the thought of violence turns them inside out. Not one of them would kill a fly, I sometimes think, to save an entire nation from dying of yellow fever.

"Yes, sir," I said. "Yellow fever isn't carried by flies, sir. It's transmitted by mosquitoes. "

"Indeed?" he said. "That's very interesting. I could have made it an order, but the young fool probably would have botched the job, feeling the way he did. It's a damn nuisance. Being on the spot, he was the logical person. However, I remembered that you were on your way in from Cuba; and I thought you might like to spend a little time by the seashore-the bay shore, to be exact. Not that you'll have much time for swimming, if everything goes according to plan. "

"I'm a lousy swimmer, anyway," I said. "I lack buoyancy, or something. Besides, it's getting a little late in the season. "

"You know the area. You took two weeks of small boat training at Annapolis during the war, according to the files. "

"Yes, sir, but there wasn't much time for sight-seeing. I wouldn't say I'd learned much about the area. Besides, it will have changed considerably since those days. " Subtlety wasn't getting me anywhere, so I said bluntly, "Besides, there was some talk of a month's leave, sir. "