The Terrorizers Read Online Free PDF Page A

Helm.
    Helm. Matthew Helm, son of Karl and Erika Helm. Just as the man on the phone had said. It was confirmed now; I could go on from there. I was Matthew Helm, profession unknown, alias Paul H. Madden, free-lance photographer; but why the masquerade? The answer to that question, along with the more recent part of my life to which it belonged, remained unremembered, but other things were coming back…

4
    Somebody was talking to me. I came back across the years from the dry, sunny, southwestern country of my boyhood to the sterile northwestern hospital room with rain on the window.
    “What did you say, Doctor?” I asked.
    “Are you all right, Mr. Madden?”
    “I’m fine,” I said.
    It was a time to be very careful. I now knew for certain that I was a man who’d constructed a false identity for himself and worn it for at least six months—and had then, somehow, wound up in the ocean with a cracked head. The two circumstances might have no connection, but I couldn’t count on that. It was no time to be passing out personal information to anybody, beyond what was absolutely necessary to keep them happy and unsuspicious.
    “I guess I was thirteen or fourteen at the time,” I said. “Later, I recall getting kicked out of college due to some kind of fight I got into with a bunch of upperclassmen who were trying to push me around.” I grinned. “I must have been a feisty young fellow. I finished up at another school. Then my parents both died within the same year. I got a job with a camera on a newspaper in the state capital, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Later I worked for some other New Mexico newspapers. I did say all this took place in New Mexico, didn’t I? After that—”
    I stopped abruptly. It had been coming with a rush, but suddenly there wasn’t any more.
    “Go on.”
    “That’s it,” I said. “That’s all she wrote, at least for now. It ends with that last newspaper job—the last I remember, anyway. That was in Albuquerque. I don’t remember leaving, and there’s nothing after that.”
    “I see,” he said. He frowned thoughtfully, watching me, for a second or two. Abruptly, he got up and walked to the window and spoke looking out at the rainy view. “Mr. Madden.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m inclined to turn you loose. Physically, Dr. DeLong tells me you’re coming along very well. Mentally, I feel you can’t be helped much more here. There’s no skull fracture. The concussion seems to have produced no impairment of function. The danger of hematoma—blood clots—is past. As far as your memory is concerned, I think you can deal with the problem yourself. If it comes back, fine. If not, as I told you earlier, it’s something most patients adjust to quite easily, although their friends and families tend to take it more seriously.” After a little pause, he swung around at the window to face me once more. “However, if you think you’re up to handling it, I’d prefer to send you off with all the information we can give you.”
    “What information?” I asked. “Don’t tease me, Doctor.”
    He said carefully, “We’re in possession of some rather puzzling data—rather disturbing, I might add.”
    I realized, from the way he was studying me, that for all his psychiatric training he wasn’t any more sure than anybody else that I wasn’t kidding him about my loss of memory. He was looking for a guilt-reaction that would tell him I already knew what he was going to say.
    I grinned. “Well, if I go into shock, this is a good place for it, isn’t it?”
    He smiled thinly. “Very well, Mr. Madden. You might, in your idle moments, try to recall how you acquired three submachinegun bullets in your right shoulder and arm not too terribly long ago, say within the past two years.”
    I won’t say I hadn’t noticed the scars, or the faint residual stiffness in the mornings, but I hadn’t given them any thought. Perhaps I’d deliberately avoided thinking about them. I could see why Dr. Lilienthal