Assignment - Sorrento Siren Read online

  chapter one

  IT STARTED out all wrong.

  The westbound plane was four hours late, with a twenty-minute hold at Istanbul on Pan Am Flight 204 from Bangkok. By the time Durell arrived in Geneva, it was eight o’clock in the evening.

  Then, coming in off the passenger ramp and having his passport stamped—there had been no time to establish a cover and he was using his diplomatic passport as an economic attache—he literally ran into Anton Pacek.

  It couldn’t be avoided. It was one of those things that just happened, and no amount of careful planning could avoid it. Pacek seemed as surprised as Durell, although he was too professional to give anything away. Durell walked through the crowded air terminal as if nothing had happened, and although he was late and his orders had been marked with urgency, he took the time for a cup of coffee and then walked over to the kiosk to buy a pack of American cigarettes.

  He did not have to look around to know that Pacek was still with him. The Czech had decided to follow along.

  He wondered if the KGU man had actually been waiting for him at the airport. Durell did not think so, because Pacek would have been more careful about bumping into him and allowing that startled, face-to-face meeting. But obviously Pacek had recognized him—after all, they both had been in the business for a long time—and Pacek was an expert, able to improvise a spot decision when necessary. Equally obvious, Pacek’s discovery of Durell’s arrival in Geneva had required a quick change in KGU plans.

  He chose a public telephone at random and called 61-51-61. The lights were coming on in the terminal building and the booth felt hot, although it was early September and there was a cool wind off Lake Geneva at this time of year.

  “Gallerie Chez Ellen,” a woman’s voice said.

  “The package is here from Bangkok,” Durell said.

  There was a small silence, an exhalation. “Sam?”

  “Right.”

  “Your plane was late?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. Lordie, I’m glad you’re here. How are you, Sam?”

  “Just fine, Ellen. And you?”

  “Waiting for you on the proverbial pins and needles. I haven’t much time. None of us do. I’m so glad they sent you, though.”

  “You sound as if it’s a crash job.”

  “Isn’t it always, Sam?”

  He didn’t reply for a moment. Through the glass doors of the booth, he saw Pacek walk by, a barrel of a man with his black Homburg perched squarely on his round head. Pacek looked older, Durell thought, but his hard face and thrusting underlip were as stubborn as before; but then, they were all pushing it harder now, and the business took it out of you, one way or another, faster than life on the outside. He returned to the telephone.

  “Ellen, it’s been almost three years since I was last here in Geneva. I wasn’t expected, was I?”

  “I’ve missed seeing you, Sam. Nobody expected you.” “Then why was Pacek waiting for me?”

  “Who?”

  “Major Anton Pacek, KGU, State Security, usually works out of Prague and does the Lowlands territories under cover of an industrial technician in mining machinery and dust control operations. He’s damned good in his cover line, too. A fine engineer. He was head of STRAS, their murder arm, for a while. He’s the one who killed Bobby Langstrom in Amsterdam, remember?”

  “Has he seen you?” Ellen asked sharply.

  “We bumped into each other, for a fact. Grunted apologies and went on. But he’s been a mustard plaster for the past ten minutes. Why?”

  “I don’t know, Sam.”

  “Is your place bugged?”

  “No. Art Greenwald came through just last Tuesday and fanned everything. We’re quite clean here.”

  “Major Pacek doesn’t make it look that way.”

  “It’s got to be an accident, Sam. Sam, listen, we haven’t much time. You’ll have to shake him and get over here as soon as you can.”

  “All right, Ellen.”

  He hung up. Anton Pacek was buying some Dutch cigars

  at the nearby counter. Durell walked the other way. Pacek did not follow, but Durell, who was always careful, did not assume that the KGU man had lost interest or hadn’t used the minutes during the phone call to get a shadow-tail on him. He went into the terminal restaurant and sat down as if he had time to kill and ordered coffee and a sandwich.

  Durell was a tall man, heavily muscled, with black hair streaked with gray at the temples. He had a lean face and calm dark blue eyes that shaded to black when his Cajun temperament betrayed him into anger. He had an athlete’s grace of movement and clever, strong gambler’s hands, inherited from his Grandpa Jonathan down in the bayou country below New Orleans. He was a sub-chief in the K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency, and before that he had been with G2 in the Pentagon and, long years ago when it all began, with the old OSS in Europe. It was lonely and dangerous work, but he could not now imagine any other kind of life for himself.

  When ten minutes passed, he spoke to the waitress briefly and got up and walked quietly out of the terminal, leaving his meal on the table. He moved directly to the taxi stand and got into the first cab without turning his head to look back. He gave the driver the address of the Hotel de la Paix on the West Shore, on the Quai du Mont-Blanc.

  Durell did not think he was tagged, so he tried to relax and enjoy the change from Bangkok’s steamy monsoon season to Switzerland’s high, dry September air. Geneva’s downtown streets were brightly lighted and crowded, and from the quays along the Rhone you could see the brilliant Jet d’Eau, the hundred-foot fountain they floodlighted as it spurted from the surface of the lake. The tides of tourists had ebbed since Labor Day, and most of the Americans you saw here were relatively permanent residents—Madison Avenue types with crew cuts and gray flannels and Ivy League voices. American investment corporations and U.S. government missions to the endless conferences here had jostled the medieval, Calvinist city into a building boom that was still going on, Durell noted, although it was three years since his last passage through here.

  Leaving the cab, he walked through the busy lobby of the Hotel de la Paix and came out again and took another taxi down the quay-side promenades. He got out after a few blocks and walked to the right, along the Quay des Bergues flanking the Rhone, crossed on the Pont de l’lsle and walked down the Rue de la Corraterie to the Grand Theatre.

  He was not being followed now.

  The Gallerie Chez Ellen was the CIA safe house and message drop operated by Ellen Armbridge. From the park which contained the university and Geneva’s famous monument to the Restoration, Durell walked along winding, cobbled streets in the Old Quarter, up ramps and stone stairways to the Grand-Rue. There was nobody behind him. The evening air was warm and peaceful. From the Bourg de Four, the ancient square dreaming of past centuries, he turned left, then left again, and found himself on the Rue Saint-Pierre. The art shop was in a little street just off it, at No. 8.

  The house was tall and narrow, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder with its medieval neighbors. The lower floor had been remodeled to accommodate the shop, and the three upper stories were used for living quarters. The top floor, under the steeply pitched slate roof, was a message center and communications relay drop, crammed with miniaturized radio equipment. Below were some bedrooms where couriers could rest, and a conference room. The floor immediately above the art shop was Ellen’s personal apartment.

  She had been hired by the chief, Dickinson McFee, over six years ago, Durell recalled—and he himself had recommended her. She was a fine young woman attending the university at Geneva then, of independent means, with a calm mind, quick insight and impeccable taste. Her interest in ar
t had led naturally to the setup of the Gallerie Chez Ellen. She was an expatriate whose work for K Section had often proved invaluable.

  The shop was closed when Durell arrived. There was a Manet in the window, nothing more. He walked past it under the chestnut trees that were just beginning to turn brown in the September air. At the far corner there was a cafe, and he heard the sound of students singing there. The quarter was given over to dormitories and pensions used by the youngsters and some of the faculty. The street seemed quiet and serene.

  He turned the corner, reached a narrow alley with stone steps going up between the old buildings, walked to the end of it, and found the green-painted wooden door unlocked. He walked in and up a flight of steps and rapped a brief signal on the second-floor door. Ellen let him in.

  “Hello, Cajun. It’s so good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too, Ellen.”

  “Come on in. What did you do with Pacek?”

  “Ditched him.”

  “That man always gave me the shivers. Is he the one who really killed Bobby Langstrom?”

  “We think so.”

  He followed her down the hall, thinking that the time since he’d been here had served only to improve and mature her fine figure. She wore a simply tailored suit of tiny brown and white checks, with a white silk blouse that featured a high standing collar. Her shoes were Parisian. When he’d last seen her in the shop downstairs, she wore business-like reading glasses; but she wasn’t wearing them now. Her perfume was delicate. Ellen Armbridge was a lovely woman in her mid-twenties. She was tall, with straight shoulders and dark auburn hair and deep brown eyes that reflected her quiet intellect.

  “Sit down, Sam. You must be tired.” Her voice was faintly throaty. When he saw her face in the lights of her sitting room, he thought she had been crying. But he wasn’t sure. She looked troubled, and her smile was a bit forced. “You’ve had a long flight from Bangkok.”

  “The world gets smaller every day,” he said.

  “I’m glad they sent for you, though, instead of someone nearby.”

  “I was helping the economic mission we have in Prince Tuvanaphan’s territory—something to do with a tin purchasing deal, about five hundred tons. The Czechs are dickering for it, too. Does that explain why Pacek was at the airport?” “He couldn’t have been waiting for you because of a leak at this end, Sam. Maybe Bangkok did it. But I think it was an accident, as you suggested. It’s too bad. He’ll know you’re here because of Tuvanaphan.”

  He said drily, “That’s more than I’ve known up to now.” “Didn’t they brief you in Bangkok?”

  “I got on the plane last night. They said you’d have the story.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s all in my lap, that’s true. Si Hanson from the consulate is in on it, though. Do you know Silas?”

  “F.B.I. attache on foreign duty.” Durell nodded. “Yes, I know him.”

  “What’s the trouble, don’t you like him?”

  “We get along. Is it a criminal problem?”

  “Si thinks so. You know how his office is—jealous of their jurisdictional prerogatives. I told him this was our own baby, now, but I didn’t give him the details. I thought I’d leave that to you. You’ll have to work with him, Sam.”

  He waited. It seemed to him as she turned to pour him some bourbon—she claimed she kept it especially for him and that it came from a still near Bayou Peche Rouge—that Ellen’s voice was a little too tense, and the lavender shadows under her brown eyes didn’t belong there. He said nothing about it. Dimly through the front windows he could hear the sound of the students singing in their cafe on the Rue Saint-Pierre.

  Her hand wasn’t quite steady, either, when she gave him the drink. There were small lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked vulnerable, he thought, and he wondered why, because she had always been self-sufficient and coordinated.

  “Ellen.. ”

  “I know,” she said ruefully. “I’m upset and you can see it. You always were quick at sensing how people felt, Sam. And tolerant. But it’s all this pressure. Doesn’t it ever let up? Won’t it ever end?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the world we live in. It never bothered you before.”

  “It never hit me like this before.”

  “Are you personally involved in this, Ellen?”

  “No. Well, yes. I wish . . .” She bit her lip. “I hate this work. I used to think it was a good thing, but now I hate it. I want to go home. I’ve asked the chief to let me off the hook. I want to go back to Illinois and live like everybody else, in a white clapboard house on Elm Street, with a husband who sells automobiles, perhaps, and comes home regularly at five. I’m tired of wondering how I’m going to die, Sam. I’m tired of hearing about Bobby Langstrom in Amsterdam, and how John Peters was drowned in Hong Kong, and Eliot Singer got pushed in front of a train in the London Underground. And then there are all those who just disappear, and we never hear of them again or know what happened. I’m sick of it, Sam.”

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” She smiled thinly. “It’s no business for a woman.”

  “Women have their place in it,” he said bluntly.

  “I know all about that part of it, too.”

  “As a matter of fact, I heard you were planning to get out. I heard you were planning to marry some fellow out of the local office—someone named Jack Talbott.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “What’s the matter. Did he jilt you, Ellen?”

  “Worse than that.”

  “How much worse?”

  “He’s the reason we had to send for you, Sam. He’s been accused of stealing the Dwan Scrolls from Prince Tuvanaphan, here in Geneva. It can blow the tin-purchasing deal sky-high. Jack has disappeared. The scrolls are gone, too, as of yesterday. We have to find those paintings and we must find Jack, too. You might have to kill him.”

  chapter two

  SHE SPOKE quietly, but the way she sat with folded hands and looked across the tasteful room at him betrayed her real disturbance. It was too bad, Durell thought, because she had been graded very high in the files back at No. 20 Annapolis Street, in Washington—the headquarters of K Section. As a sub-chief, Durell had the data on his scattered crew at his fingertips. He could quote verbatim from those dossiers.

  Ellen Armbridge—unmarried, age 26. Goucher graduate in liberal arts; two years at the Sorbonne in Paris. Both parents dead; only child. Home town, Springfield, Illinois. Height five-four; weight 118. Appendix scar; birthmark on left shoulder. One love affair in Paris during student years at the Sorbonne. Successful as a buyer and seller of art antiques. Quiet dresser; hair dark auburn, eyes brown, complexion fair. Trained at the Maryland Farm, accomplished in judo, graded AA in marksmanship with small arms, adept with a knife, rated 720 on psychiatric tests, speaks French, German and Russian.

  “Ellen . . .”

  She smiled again. “I know, Sam. I just don’t know how you go on the way you do.”

  “We have to go on. That’s the job.”

  “It’s so dark and secret, this war. It doesn’t ever seem to end.”

  “Perhaps it won’t, in our lifetime. Tell me about Jack Talbott.”

  “Sam, I know what you’re thinking. You believe I’ve allowed an emotional involvement to color my judgment. I assure you, it hasn’t. I know what it’s like for all of us, living the way we do, and I know the danger of allowing personal attitudes to influence decisions. I’ve leaned over backward in this. I wouldn’t let you down, Sam, no matter how much it hurts me.”

  “I believe you. Are you in love with the man?”

  “I was,” she said quietly. She looked at her folded hands. “Perhaps I still am.”

  “Do you think he stole the Dwan Scrolls?”

  “Yes. I think he did.”

  “That puts you on a pretty sharp hook, Ellen.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day, waiting for you. I know you’re already figuring on sending me back
home, at once. But I don’t want to go now, until this is settled. I want to know all about it, the good and the bad.” Her smile was wan. “I was afraid of you, Sam—of what I might say to you and how much I’d be tempted to color the facts, from a sense of loyalty to Jack. But there’s only one loyalty in this business, isn’t there? We do the job, and that’s all there is to it. Even if your best friend is in danger, you abandon him if necessary, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes,” Durell said.

  “Have you ever done that, Sam?”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “But how could you . . . ?” She paused and drew a quiet breath. She was a very pretty woman, he thought; and a deeply disturbed one. He felt sorry for her, but this attitude was only on the surface, and it did not affect the decision about her that he had already made. “I’m sorry,” she continued. “I’m not very efficient tonight. The human factor always crops up, like Hamlet’s conscience, and you’re being very patient, Sam.”

  “I can wait,” he said.

  “No, we can’t. We’ve only got three days to settle this deal. That’s the ultimatum that Prince Tuvanaphan gave us.” “Ultimatum?”

  “Do you know about the Dwan Scrolls? I think they are Tuvanaphan’s most precious possession. Anyway, they were, until they were stolen from him last night. It’s been a delicate matter, keeping the prince amenable to our suggestions.

  It isn’t a matter of internal meddling with his state, Sam— you know the directives against that, these days. But in the matter of purchasing the tin output from his country, Noramco Tin has been making good progress here in Geneva. The Czechs have their own mission working on Tuvanaphan, and you know what happens when they get their technicians and ‘experts’ into a neutralist state as vulnerable as Tuvanaphan’s. The State Department encouraged Noramco Tin to buy up everything the prince has to offer. We had a directive from Joint Chiefs and the National Planning Board indicating that Washington thinks the Czechs may be acting as a front for the Chinese here, but we’re not sure. The negotiations have been going on for several weeks, and they looked successful, until last night.”