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come, Karl," Hazel greeted him warmly as she joined us. Erikson and I shook hands. "I hoped you'd accept my invitation to visit us here, but I really didn't expect you'd be able to manage it this soon."
        "Didn't I tell you I'd come?" Erikson said easily. He eyed me up and down, the familiar cynical expression on his hard-bitten features. "How's the Shoot-'Em-Up Kid?"
        "Great. Did they get all the lead out of your ugly carcass?"
        "Enough to get me perpendicular again."
        "Let's go inside and have coffee," Hazel urged.
        We trooped into the ranch house. "I'm just leaving for Tucson," I told Erikson as he setded himself carefully at the kitchen table. "But I'll be back in a couple of days, and Hazel will make you comfortable here in the meantime."
        "I'm just on my way down to Tucson, too," Erikson said. He accepted a cup of steaming black coffee from Hazel and regarded me over its rim as he sipped. "To the Colonial Airport. Why don't we ride down together?"
        I tried to hold my face together since he was obviously enjoying my surprise. "The Colonial Airport," I repeated while I tried to get my brain in gear. How in hell could this big moose know about the Colonial Airport?
        "I hope you can spend some time with us, Karl," Hazel said. I knew she was attempting a diversion while I pulled myself together. "You're not fit to be working again so soon."
        "Something came up that my boss decided needed my delicate touch," Erikson said.
        "You're about as delicate as a man lighting a cigarette with a blow torch," I snorted. "Now what's this about a Colonial Airport?"
        His eyes were riveted on mine. "You're onto something that fits into my assignment. I want to know what it is."
        "D'you mind starting at the beginning?" I inquired.
        He glanced at Hazel as if about to ask her to leave the room, then changed his mind. Karl Erikson knew where he stood with Hazel Andrews. Did I say that Hazel piloted the boat to Cuba that picked us up, and was in the drink with us when the Mig-jockeys were circling our blazing cruiser?
        "I'll keep it brief," Erikson said. "I'm on temporary loan to two government agencies who have overlapping intelligence interests. The names don't matter. I'm supposed to act as liaison between them and a special group of Israeli intelligence people who have been warning the State Department about Arab fedayeen operations in this country, operations aimed at pulling coups to raise money in the U.S. to finance their guerilla activities in the Middle East. Up to now, I'm afraid, no one took their warnings seriously enough."
        He sipped at his coffee again. "We have feelers out all over the country, of course, and when we heard a rumor about a supposed hijack of an airliner near Las Vegas, I started to check into it. I found that powerful influences in the state had clamped such a tight lid on the affair that no one could produce a proper list of the plane passengers for me to follow up on."
        He accepted Hazel's offer of a cigarette. "It looked like a dead end, but we always have ways and means to widen a crack. We came up with a tip finally that the hijackers used a private plane to make their getaway, so we took a look at all FAA flight-plan records for that particular day, looking for nonscheduled flights within a thousand miles of the scene. And we found that all flight plans had been closed out except one from the Colonial Airport near Tucson."
        Erikson set down his coffee cup. "That was enough to bring me out here yesterday morning. Last night I learned that the missing private plane had been found with the pilot alone in it. He'd been shot in the back of the head. Then I learned that an inquiry had been made of the White Pine County's law enforcement office about a plane with the registration number NR eight-one-three-three-two, the number of the dead pilot's plane. Imagine my surprise when I