Read Matt Helm--The Interlopers for Free Online Page A

square, target-type sights against the prone figure below me, with both elbows firmly on the ground and both hands on the gun. One-handed pistol shooting is mandatory in target matches, but this was simple homicide and there are no rules for that.
    The man down there—if it was a man—stirred uneasily, obviously wondering where I’d disappeared to and what I was up to. Well, it was about time. He lifted his head from the rifle stock and glanced over his shoulder as if he’d sensed my presence, and it was nobody I’d ever seen before in real life or in photographs, just a hippie-looking youth sporting longish hair, a droopy mustache, and long fuzzy sideburns.
    I drew a long breath, realizing that, hair or no hair, small rifle or big, I’d subconsciously been expecting to see a man I knew—well, a man whom I’d never actually met, but whose dossier I’d studied very carefully, a man who was supposed to be good both with knives and rifles. Without quite realizing it, I’d been looking forward to finishing right here the principal part of my mission, the part assigned me by Mac. Somehow I’d convinced myself it was Holz I was up against already, although why Holz should be shooting down Nystroms wholesale hadn’t been quite clear in my mind.
    Still, as Mac had pointed out, couriers had been eliminated before by the people for whom they’d worked. Mr. Smith’s mysterious source of information to the contrary could be all wet. It still wasn’t totally out of the question that this espionage ring we were after had first summoned their kill-specialist to handle a personnel problem, and then sent him on to deal with an obvious impostor. But the man in front of me was not Hans Holz.
    I sighed and lowered the gun, wondering who the hell the young marksman was and what to do about him. Of course, he had been trying to kill me, which was naughty of him. It even prejudiced me against him rather strongly, but we’re not supposed to act on prejudice. Dead men are awkward to have around. They tend to get the local police all upset, and I still had work to do in Pasco that would be more easily done without police interference. Reluctantly, I started to let down the hammer of the Colt. Regardless of their age or importance—or unimportance—I don’t like leaving behind me, alive, people who’ve clearly indicated their eagerness to shoot me dead, but sometimes it has to be done.
    The young man in the bushes stiffened suddenly, watching something out in front of him. He put his face to the stock of the rifle once more, peering through the big telescopic sight. I looked where he was aiming, and there came the black pup, loping across the hillside straight toward us, pausing every so often to check his radar. I mean, he wasn’t tracking me; he wasn’t following the roundabout way I’d come. He was no ground-sniffing hound. He had his nose in the air, as a bird-dog should, and he was reading my scent on the gentle breeze, and making straight for the source of it.
    A foot and a half of chewed-off leash dangled from his collar. Well, nobody’d told him not to chew his leash in two. Nobody’d really told him to stay put, either. Orders, he might have obeyed, but a little leather string had been only a momentary hindrance to be disposed of with the nice, sharp, adult dental equipment that had recently replaced his puppy teeth. A couple of good chomps, and he’d been on his way to find the boss.
    I looked bleakly at the boy in the brush below me: he had the rifle ready, he was preparing to shoot. I remembered that the real Hank had been shot, we still didn’t know why. I knew a funny little stirring of anger: the juvenile sonofabitch was going to shoot
my
dog. This was sentimental and irrelevant, but professionally I was just as concerned, because the pup was essential to my Grant Nystrom cover. It occurred to me that I might have got hold of an important idea here, but I had no time to develop it.
    I just recocked the .357 and