The Intriguers

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The morning I got shot at, down there in Mexico, I'd been out fishing in the high-powered little boat Mac had lent me, along with a trailer to carry it and a station wagon to pull it. Generosity with government equipment is not my superior's outstanding characteristic; but he'd explained that the outfit had been assembled by another agent for a job which was now completed. As a reward for years of faithful service and for taking a bad crack on the head in the course of a recent assignment-he put it differently,.but that was the general idea-he was willing to let me take the rig on leave with me, since I'd be needing a fishing boat where I was going. When I brought it back, in good condition of course, it would be sold for whatever it would bring. Unfortunately, our departmental budget doesn't cover the maintenance of yachts, even fifteen-foot ones.

That morning, I'd been fishing at an offshore island, an hour's run-some twenty-four miles at my relatively cautious cruising speed-from where I was staying in the little resort village of Bahia San Carlos, just outside Guaymas, a good-sized port on the mainland side of the Gulf of California. I've had to learn a little about boats and oceans in the line of business, but I'm still a landlubber at heart, and from a small boat twenty-four miles of open water looks like a lot of water to me, even when it's calm. When it starts getting rough, I want no part of it, so when the wind began to pick up gustily around ten o'clock, I aborted my day's fishing plans and got out of there in a hurry, leaving the big boats and the real sailors to cope with the waves and the weather without me.

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