At his side Preston Mohr said: “The titles and lead-in are rather primitive. I doubt that Blackstone had anything to do with them. Probably done separately.”

  Blackstone? Nick shrugged mentally. Never heard of the man.

  The film was in color. After an establishing shot of an American prison—a subtitle stated that the most desperate criminals, murderers and sex perverts were confined therein—the camera moved in to show a riot in progress. Prisoners were being brutally beaten and machine-gunned. Bodies of guards lay everywhere in pools of blood.

  The camera cut to another area of the prison. The women’s quarters. A subtitle said: American female gangsters are as brutal and perverted as the men.

  A little group of female prisoners were attacking a buxom woman guard. They swarmed over the helpless guard, kicking and beating and stabbing. The camera cut sharply away to show two young women in a cell. They were half-dressed and were fondling and embracing each other. The older woman, in a language that Nick guessed was Malay, said: “Let those other fools fight. We will keep to ourselves and make love.”

  The camera swung back to the rioting women. Most of the female prisoners had drawn away from the nearly dead guard, but one prisoner remained straddling the inert body. She was brandishing a long knife. The camera moved in for a close-up of the prisoner. Her face filled the screen. She was a beautiful woman. Or would have been, in repose. On the screen now, she looked like Medusa gone mad, the dark hair straggling wildly around the livid features, the face stained with blood, the teeth glinting like shark’s teeth behind a red wound of mouth.

  The knife plunged down. In close-up. The guard’s throat was ripped from side to side and great gouts of blood rolled from the raw wound. The woman stood over her victim and brandished the bloody weapon. Her prison clothes had been torn and ripped away to reveal a lush white body. Again the camera came zooming in to show her face in close-up. This time Nick Carter got it. Never mind Hawk’s caution. Nick could not restrain himself.

  “For God’s sake!” said Nick. “That’s Mona Manning!”

  From the corner of his eye Nick saw Hawk signal with a hand. The projector stopped whirring. The face of the actress, huge in close-up, remained frozen on the screen.

  Preston Mohr said: “Yes, Mr. Carter. It’s Mona Manning. I hope, for your peace of mind, that you’re not a fan of hers.”

  Killmaster was in no sense a movie fan. He said as much now. “But I did see her on the Late Show not long ago. She was pretty good.” He studied the frozen image on the screen. “It wasn’t such an old picture, come to think of it. And she didn’t look very old.”

  “Mona is in her mid-forties,” said Preston Mohr. “She made her last Hollywood picture about five years ago. Since then I believe she’s done a couple in England and one in Spain. And these things—

  Hawk leaned toward Nick. “Take a good look at her, boy. You may be seeing her soon. Now let’s get on with it. There’s a lot to see yet.” He signaled the projectionist again.

  As the film began to move once more Preston Mohr said: “One thing you should know, Mr. Carter, that will help you understand this a little better. Mona Manning has been insane for years!”

  The picture ran a little over an hour. The plot was simple enough. After the prison riots were put down the ringleaders were tried and sentenced to death in the electric chair. There were three of them—the woman, portrayed by Mona Manning, and two gorilla-faced men.

  As the time of execution approached, the scene shifted to Washington. Newsreel shots. Interior shots showed a harried conference of high officials of the CIA. Nick grinned a little at that, and shot a look over his shoulder at Boynton. The CIA man was slumped low in his seat, his chin on his chest. A gentle snore wafted to Nick. Boynton must have seen the film a dozen times.

  More details emerged. The CIA was hard up for good agents to work behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. They had lost a great many agents. Those who were not killed in the line of duty were well, even gently, treated. They were kept in spotless modern prisons. Many of the CIA agents begged to be allowed to defect, to remain with their captors and share in the brave new world that was arising in spite of the criminal gangsters of the United States.

  The top brass of the CIA, most of whom were depicted as effeminates who liked boys, came up with a smashing idea: Use prisoners, condemned criminals, to replace the lost agents!

  It was done. The two men and the woman were snatched from the electric chair, given brief instructions and weapons, and dropped behind the Iron Curtain on an espionage mission. Here, the plot wavered, became a little vague, and Nick could not quite understand what was going on. It did not matter. The three American criminals, now working for the CIA, were loose behind the Iron Curtain. The reign of terror had begun.

  The trio of Americans committed every hideous crime in the book. They murdered gentle old ladies in cold blood. They broke little children’s legs with iron bars. They poisoned whole families. They captured a brave soldier, drenched him with gasoline, and burned him alive.

  But it was the pornographic scenes that Nick found most interesting and—he could not deny it—exciting. He could feel his loins stirring as he watched, and it took all his concentration not to succumb to the blatant sexual orgies being enacted on the screen.

  The sex scenes were skillfully handled and the technique was simple. They began where an ordinary movie left off. In a conventional movie the lovers—always a man and a woman—would kiss and perhaps walk into the bedroom. Fade-out.

  Not so in Dragon Pictures. The camera moved into the bedroom with them. Every word, every lubricious wriggle and slither was recorded on film. First in duo, then in trio, every sexual exchange was tried, every erotic permutation explored. The three American agents, on vacation from spying and killing, were having themselves a sexual ball. And the ball was kept rolling by liberal doses of pot and heroin. The Americans, in addition to being sex maniacs, were addicts as well.

  As Killmaster watched Mona Manning bestowing a very special and private kiss on one of the male spies, while the other man watched and cooked up a shot of heroin, he felt excitement leave him to be replaced by a growing sickness. There was something loathsome here, something, in seeing a famous motion-picture star so degrade herself, that was obscene beyond the intended surface obscenity. It was rather like entering a brothel and finding the girl next door, Nick thought with a grimace.

  In the end, the three Americans were caught and condemned to death. But a merciful Peoples’ Court intervened. The two men were given life sentences—to be served in clean, model prisons and with every chance to rehabilitate themselves. The girl, Mona Manning, was treated with even more tenderness. She was not, the dialogue implied, really to blame. Her addiction was responsible, and that had been forced on her by the men and by the even more monstrous CIA.

  The final scene was a Victory parade, with thousands of robust, moral, clean-living peasants, carrying banners and singing a rousing song that Killmaster recognized as a steal from The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

  The lights came on with a blinding glare. Nick looked at Hawk. The old man looked gaunt and tired. And mad. He fixed his Number One Boy with a glittering mariner’s eye and said, “Well?”

  For one of the very few times in his life, Nick had no ready reply. He stared back at his boss and said: “Whew!”

  Oddly enough, the reply seemed to satisfy Hawk, who nodded and said, “Whew indeed, son.” He added, in a tone of cold ferocity: “Those dirty, lousy, filthy sons of bitches!”

  Behind them Glenn Boynton said, “I’ve seen the damned thing five times now. I don’t think I could live through a sixth. And I need a drink. Badly. Anyone got any ideas?”

  Hawk stood up. “My office. All of you. I’ll treat. We’ve got quite a session ahead of us.”

  Back in his office, the old man broke out bottles of bourbon and Scotch and sent out for ice, water, and two more glasses. This was, Nick thought as he tilted Scotch into his glass, definitely a first Hawk had never offered him a drink before. He noted that his chief’s glass was nearly half-filled with bourbon. That in itself was unusual. Ordinarily, Hawk was not much of a drinker.

  When they were all settled, Hawk put his glass on his desk, jammed a cigar into his tight old mouth, and nodded at Glenn Boynton. “Okay, Glenn, you start. Fill Carter in as much as you can. Then you can go home and get to bed before you die on me.”

  The fat CIA man rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He looked at Nick and tapped his pocket where he had put the little cardboard box. “You saw it. You’ll remember it.”

  Nick fervently assented. “Yes, I’ll never forget it.”

  “Okay. His name isn’t important. Not now. But he was a good man and he was on to something. Something or someone. For nearly a year now we’ve been trying to find out where those filthy pictures are made.”

  Killmaster was surprised and showed it. “You mean not in China? I would have thought—”

  Boynton’s smile was weak. “So did we—at first. We wasted a lot of time, and lost some good men, trying to run down the source in China. Or elsewhere in the Orient—Hong Kong, Korea, Indonesia. No soap. They wanted us to think that, to go wild-goose chasing all over the place. And for a long time we did. Then we captured enough of the films to give our experts a chance. They figured it out from the exteriors. The bastards are pretty cagey, but even so, they slipped up. Some of the exteriors show buildings, parks, statues, that our men could identify. Those films are being made in Europe. In Hungary. In and around Budapest.”’

  Nick tapped cigarette ash on Hawk’s linoleum. “The Russians? I’m a little disappointed in Ivan. I would have thought they were beyond such crudity these, days. Years ago, yes, but the Russkys are pretty damned sophisticated now and—”

  “Not the Russians,” said Boynton. “The Chinese. The Chicoms. It’s their operation, all right. Every sign points to it. Their gold is paying for it You know the old cliche about the Chinese being clever—well, in this instance they are. That dirty trash is being ground out behind the Iron Curtain instead of the Bamboo Curtain.”

  Boynton took a pull of his drink and rubbed his forehead with stubby fingers. “This one has been a bastard, Carter. In lots of ways. We’ve even come to doubt that the Hungarians, or the Russians, know that the operation is being run behind their frontiers. They must know about the pictures, of course. Half the world does. But they could be as puzzled as we were about where the pictures are actually made.”

  “That’s a possible angle for exploitation,” Nick said. “If the Red Chinese are running a smut factory behind the Iron Curtain, without the locals knowing it, then maybe we better try to zero the locals in on matters. Could be they’d do our work for us. The two aren’t exactly buddy-buddy these days.”

  Hawk interrupted for the first time. “We thought of that. Or they did.” He jerked his chin at Boynton. “Only it’s not as promising as it looks. For one thing it would take too long. Too many angles, too much to go wrong. Most important thing—maybe the Russians, or the Hungarians, wouldn’t like the idea of the Chinese running this deal behind their backs. But maybe they wouldn’t stop it, either. In a way those films are grinding the Russian axe, Maybe,” —Hawk’s grin was hard—”maybe all they would do is start charging the Chicoms a big rent. No. We can’t depend on anyone else to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. We’ve decided that this is a pursuit job, a find-and-destroy mission, and the CIA has called us in. From now on, it’s our baby. Right, Glenn?”

  “Right.” Boynton tapped his pocket again and Killmaster could not refrain from an inward wince: All that was left of a good man!

  “He,” said Glenn Boynton, “was the only one of five agents we sent in who came out—and who came up with a lead. He called me from London the night he was killed. I think—in fact I’m sure of it—that he was killed before he could finish talking to me. Either killed or knocked out or kidnapped—something like that—then murdered later.”

  Again Boynton tapped the little box in his pocket. “This came a couple of days after I talked to him. From London. Registered and special delivery. No note. Nothing. Just—just what you saw. Plain enough, of course. Our man was getting too close. Lay off.”

  Killmaster nodded, “It has the Chinese touch, all right.”

  Hawk swore. “The whole operation has the Chinese touch. Imagination and infinite patience. The concept that time is on their side. They’re pushing this smut the same way they push heroin and cocaine, on the theory that every little bit helps. Every time they can get a kid, or an adult, anywhere in the world, to look at their filth, and buy it, that person is a little more depraved than he was, a little weaker morally and that much easier handled and just a little more susceptible to propaganda.”

  “The propaganda,” Nick said, “is pretty damned obvious, maybe too obvious: That all Americans are villains, perverts and degenerates. That film—well, it was too much!”

  “That film wasn’t intended to be shown at Radio. City Music Hall, Carter!” Glenn Boynton said angrily. He pointed a pudgy finger at Nick. “We know it’s a lot of crap, but what we know doesn’t matter a damn. That stuff is slanted at millions of poor, ignorant bastards who never get enough to eat—and automatically hate us because we do. Most of them are illiterate. So the Chicoms give it to them in pictures that anyone can understand. Another old Chinese saying: One picture is worth a thousand words! And every picture is slow poison working against us. Believe it? You’re damned right they believe it—millions of poor peasants all around the world believe it. And a dozen of those films, like the one you just saw, are showing all over the Orient right this minute. Not to mention the filthy stuff they pour into this country!”

  Boynton’s voice broke. He finished his drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a small, uneasy silence in the room. Nick glanced at the movie director, Preston Mohr, who had been sitting quietly in a corner, nursing his drink. Mohr met Nick’s glance, then shook his head almost imperceptibly. Nick had wondered briefly about Preston Mohr’s status in all this.

  Boynton said: “I’m sorry, Carter. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. My nerves are in a hell of a state.” He looked askance at Hawk. “Okay if I take off now? You can fill him in on the rest.”

  “Sure,” Hawk agreed. “Take off. Go home and sleep for a week.”

  Glenn Boynton took the cardboard box from his pocket and stared down at it for a moment. “I can’t sleep yet,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ve got this to take care of first. I’ve got to see the widow, too.”

  Boynton put the box back in his pocket. He shook hands with Nick and Preston Mohr, nodded to Hawk, and left the room.

  When the door closed behind the CIA man, Hawk said softly: “The agent who got killed in London was his best friend. They grew up together. Right now, Boynton is in a pretty bad way. He’ll be all right, I think, but I wish he wouldn’t carry that box around like some sort of a talisman. Not very professional.”

  You had to know David Hawk very well indeed, Nick considered, to gauge that last remark correctly. His boss was not a heartless man. He was dry, but not cold. But he was, every sparse inch of him, a professional. That said it all.

  Preston Mohr helped himself to another drink, then took Boynton’s vacated chair. “I’d like to get on with it, sir,” he said to Hawk. “I’m catching a plane back to Hollywood, and I’m cutting it a bit thin as it is.”

  Again Killmaster wondered just who Preston Mohr was—apart from being a famous director. It was very unusual for Hawk to allow an outsider to sit in on an important high-level conference. Then Nick chided himself for fuzzy thinking. The answer was simple: Mohr was not an outsider.

  The director was stuffing a pipe. He lit it, then pointed the stem at Nick. “I’ll give you the facts on Mona Manning first, as I know them. There’s not too much, really, because the secret of her insanity has been one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood for years.”

  Nick turned to Hawk. “Okay if I question as we go along, sir? Faster that way, and if Mr. Mohr has to catch a plane—”’

  Mohr glanced at a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of wristwatch. “I do,” he said. “Oh, I do, indeed. The little lady won’t wait—not even for me.”

  Hawk’s thin mouth, with the cross-hatched wrinkles around the corners, cracked in a grin. He managed to cover it. He nodded to Nick. “Play Twenty Questions if you want to, but get with it.”

  Nick leaned toward Mohr. “How long has Mona Manning been insane?”

  Mohr brushed his moustache with the tip of his little ‘finger. “Nearly twenty years. I directed her in a picture about ten or twelve years ago and she was gone then, a candidate for the yo-yo academy. Not always, you must understand. Her spells came and went. At least, in those days. I should think, that she’s probably way-out by now.”

  ‘Killmaster let his skepticism show. “And it was kept a secret all this time?”

  Mohr nodded. “It’s still a secret to the general public. The Hollywood moguls spent a hell of a lot of money and brain power to keep it that way. Mona was very big box-office, as you may remember, worth millions to the studio. They really sweated to keep the secret. Whenever she had to go into a sanitarium, as. she sometimes did, it was always for alcoholism or a mild nervous breakdown.” Mohr’s white teeth flashed below the moustache. “They were very clever, really. They chose the lesser of two evils. Better to have Mona known as a drunk—or even a neurotic—than an outright nut. Only a very few people knew the truth. Even I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t worked with her. In my job you often notice things that an ordinary observer wouldn’t spot. On the set, some things become pretty obvious, even to a. layman.” Mohr fumbled in his pocket and brought out a gold lighter. He held it upside down over his pipe.

  Nick caught the hint of self-deprecation and recognized it instantly for what it was: Instinctive protective coloration. He had had no preconceived ideas about Preston Mohr, so he did not have to revise now, but he began to understand. Mohr might well be a member of AXE.