Assignment The Cairo Dancers Read online

  Chapter One

  IN ROME one day in early spring, Dr. Paolo Nardinocchi vanished. It was not intentional. He did not know it was all prepared for him. But on that day—or rather night, for that was when he indulged his weakness—he disappeared utterly.

  It was a rainy evening, and he liked to walk along the Via Veneto and look at the American tourists crowding the Excelsior, the movie stars in their spectacular dark glasses, and the glamorous women and parasitical men of Roman cafe society. They were as far removed from Dr. Paolo Nardinocchi's life as if they lived on Mars—which, indeed, was closer to the doctor's understanding than these elegant, chattering people at their cafe tables.

  He was in a hurry. He had a wife and two teen-age daughters and a fine apartment rent-free, thanks to the Optical Institute—which received mysterious subsidies from the American Government for Dr. Nardinocchi's work—but he was not heading for home and family that rainy, romantic spring night.

  He was going to see Gina.

  Gina was a late-blooming orchid in the good doctor's life, a last brightening of a dying flame within his male ego. Until he met Gina, he thought of himself as a respectable, bearded, middle-aged scientist slightly bored with the emotional storms exhibited by his children, who were tasting the first lusts and languors of life. Gina changed all that. He had to admit he was behaving worse than the most irresponsible youth.

  But Dr. Paolo Nardinocchi did not care.

  At fifty-seven, he was in love with all the fervor and violence of a colt, ignoring home, wife, children and work. And it was all for Gina.

  She was dark and voluptuous and dedicated to the sole proposition that life was equated with pleasure. He did not know where she came from, and he did not care, as long as she did not depart. He was already heavily in debt because of her. He was a slave to her sleek, smooth, sinuous body. Wlien he visioned her ripe breasts and clasping thighs, he would be beside himself, unable to work, eat, think, or do anything but run to her—as he did on this rainy, romantic night in Rome.

  "Paolo," she sighed. ''Carissimo, you are late."

  He gasped in relief. "Gina, you waited."

  "Of course, Paolo. I promised you I would wait one more day, did I not?" She pouted, and her ripe mouth was the essence of an orgy, a red riot of paradise. She kissed his left ear and lifted herself from the divan. "But I am not one to risk poverty, dear Paolo. It would kill me, literally."

  "It will not happen," he breathed.

  "Dear Paolo, of course not. You brought the items?"

  "Yes. Yes, I did. It was very dangerous. But I—I need some wine, something to drink—"

  "Where are they?" Gina asked.

  "The papers? In the attache case—over there."

  "Ah, good," she said. "This will be worth a lot of money, and I shall be rich."

  "But you will stay here in Rome?"

  "Of course, Paolo, pet." She looked at him with long, green eyes, and he remembered how she had danced for him the other night, all alone, for him alone, enchanting and wildly lustful, until he thought his heart would burst with desire for her. Anything she wanted, anything, was hers. He could not and would not lose her. He watched her slide toward him, her green eyes great and generous with promise as she said, "Paolo, could anyone understand such mysteries, other than you? Your work is so complicated, such a terribly important and brilliant project—"

  "I could explain the formulae, of course—"

  "Could anyone else?"

  "I am not certain. But let us not talk of my work—"

  "If no one could understand it, of what value are the papers?"

  "I don't know. You said you could get money for them, and although I know I am selling my soul for you, Gina, I stole them, and they are yours."

  She pouted. "But perhaps they are worthless, without you to explain them."

  "That may be so."

  'Then you will have to go along with them, will you not dear Paolo?"

  "I do not understand—"

  "You will," she promised "Ciao, darling."

  And her eyes were pools of drowning sadness as she plunged the little needle into the nape of his fat neck.

  Dr. Paolo Nardinocchi fell instantly unconscious.

  And he was never seen again.

  That summer. Professor Anton Novotnik was taken in quite another way.

  He wanted to defect to the West.

  He remembered old Czechoslovakia, in the days before the Hitler regime, and the subsequent Soviet tidal wave that had submerged his busy, industrial little country and transformed it into a drab and miserable wasteland. He loved Prague, so of course They did not permit him to work there; instead, he was stationed in Bratislava, on the gray and chilly Danube, in the optical laboratories sponsored by Project Sunbeam.

  Professor Novotnik thought the code name was a grisly jest.

  But he was devoted to his work and grateful that he was permitted to continue with it. It was important enough to shake the world. Like Archimedes, if he were successful, he could well move the world, not with a lever, but with a ray of sunlight. Still, he hated his Soviet masters and the Czech puppets who profited from his labors and sucked the juices of his genius.

  Freedom was only the width of a river away, across the Danube in Austria.

  That summer he was offered escape, and he took it.

  A man who soon identified himself, most carefully, as an American—though he seemed a Levantine to Novotnik, who knew, however, that America was a melting pot and that there were all sorts of people from all over the world who were U. S. citizens, indeed, did he not hope to become one himself—this man offered him escape from Bratislava to freedom across the river.

  "We can do it tonight, Professor. It is one of those warm nights when the Danube is covered with mist."

  "Yes, and on such nights the patrols are doubled and redoubled," said Anton grimly.

  "That will be taken care of."

  "How?"

  The "American" laughed. "Do I ask you how you run your laboratory, Professor? Would I understand it, even if you tried to explain it to me?"

  "No, I suppose not," said Anton.

  "Then don't ask me the details of my business."

  "But," said Anton practically, "I am placing my life in your hands."

  "You will lose nothing," said the stranger, laughing, "but your chains."

  Professor Novotnik thought it was an unhappy paraphrase of the Communist slogan for the world's workers. But he went along with it. He was eager for freedom. He saw no real menace in this new-found friend, this young man who risked his own life behind the Iron Curtain just to save him, out of respect for his intellect and scientific achievements. The professor was something of an egotist, and his opinion of himself, however warranted, was often swollen beyond the reaches of common sense; hence his unscientific approach to this nameless man who promised him escape from the dreary world of Communist enterprise.

  It was an appropriately foggy aight when the attempt to cross the Danube was made. The American's face was always vague, and seemed cruel and hard, with the cruelty of young people, the professor thought, and the hardness of someone confident of his own strength.

  "You don't want to see your wife, do you. Professor?" asked his guide, as they waited on the foggy riverfront.

  "No."

  "She might give you away, eh?"

  "She would. She is a devoted Party member, a fanatic. They call her the 'Hanging Judge,' you know," said Professor Novotnik, and he shuddered.

  The American chuckled. "Question is, Anton, are you running from the Reds because of all we promised you, or are you just running away from your wife?"

  "Something of both, I suppose," Anton said wearily. "Wh
ere is the boat? It is late."

  "Don't get nervous. Did you bring your extracts?"

  Anton patted his worn briefcase. "It is all here, all the data I've been working on."

  "Good. You won't regret it."

  The last thing Professor Anton Novotnik saw was the Danube waterfront, with the gloomy piles of Bratislava's river industries looming weirdly in the night mist. Beyond the oily, dirty waters of the Danube was Austria, far, far from sight.

  He never saw it.

  The needle gave only an instant of pain, and then he fell down at the "American's" feet and knew nothing more.

  And he, too, vanished.

  The third disappearance was Dr. Hubertus Steigmann, whose last address was Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A.

  By now it was autumn.

  In Hubertus Steigmann's case, the lure was not the bait of warm and willing flesh, as with Dr. Nardinocchi in Rome, or the promise of freedom in some bright western horizon, as with Novotnik in Bratislava. In Steigmann's case, both the whip and the carrot were used.

  The whip was an ancient murder charge that he thought was completely unknown to anyone in the world. It was an especially brutal and unnatural crime. He had killed his own brother, and never regretted it.

  But someone knew.

  The carrot was his daughter, Lisl. He didn't know she was still alive, until she wrote very guardedly to him. The letter reached him secretly, and it left Hubertus in an abnormal state of emotion and remorse and a vast expansion of paternal love for a twenty-two-year-old daughter he had never once seen. Everything he had tried to forget came back to him like a torrent of water sweeping through the fissures of a burst dam.

  Dr. Steigmann had been given probationary clearance by the CIA personnel division long ago, as a refugee, and the same rating had been granted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in charge of domestic security, when they probed his past in East Germany, twenty years ago. There were no papers anywhere to prove or disprove anything, and the skimpy dossiers had grown yellow in the files in Washington by the time this autumn rolled around. Dr. Steigmann was now a naturalized American citizen, familiar to the readers of scientific journals and a popular lecturer at engineering conventions. If there was no hint or proof of evil or subversive politics in his distant past, there was also no proof of his innocence. But he was on the verge of a vital breakthrough, and his contribution to America's defense would vindicate the tentative clearance he had been granted in war-torn Berlin almost a quarter-century ago.

  Steigmann seemed to be a gentle man. He tried not to appear sentimental, and the staff who worked under him at the laser laboratories in Huntsville hardly thought of him as a romantic. But They discovered this and located Lisl, his daughter, and took it from there.

  After that, it was quite simple.

  Dr. Steigmann flew to attend a joint Anglo-American conference on the imminent breakthrough promised by his work, and from London, he found an excuse to visit Edinburgh University for a day's research. Security was both lax and complacent. No one saw him take the BEA jet to Munich that autumn afternoon, and no one even knew he had gone back to Germany, after all those years, until lurid headlines broke in the newspapers of Western Europe about his capture and arrest by the German Federal authorities as a long-wanted war criminal and high Nazi official guilty of the most monstrous crimes during the darkest days of the Hitler regime.

  As if that were not enough, on the second day of Dr. Steigmann's imprisonment—he escaped.

  And Dr. Steigmann, like his fellow workers, Dr. Nardinoc-chi and Professor Novotnik, completely vanished, too.

  That was when it came to Sam Durell.

  Chapter Two

  DURELL flew to Huntsville for two days, then took a jet back to Washington and No. 20 Annapolis Street, headquarters for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was a field agent for K Section, with a sub-chief rating in this troubleshooting department whose budgetary details. were buried in General Accounting, and whose boss, General Dickinson McFee, reported directly to the National Security Agency, Joint Chiefs, and the White House.

  The day was one of those hot, humid September days in Washington when air-conditioners overheated and blew fuses and tempers were held under minimum control. Gen-

  eral McFee, that small, haunted gray man, was the only person Durell met who looked cool.

  "Sit down, Cajun," McFee said. "There won't be much time ahead for you in which to rest."

  "It's always hurry-up-and-wait," said Durell.

  "This time, however, we have to hurry, and we can't wait. All the signals are red. Everywhere."

  "I couldn't dig up a thing on the missing Dr. Hubertus Steigmann—not down in Huntsville, anyway."

  "Steigmann is only one thread in a very tangled skein, Cajun. But he's a thread we may be able to pull on and get to the center of the knot. We've perceived a pattern now, and it's damned serious. The missing Herr Doctor, if I may mix metaphors, may be the detonating cap to a bundle of dynamite."

  Durell was silent. McFee rarely spoke this way, and he felt a cold squirm in the pit of his stomach while he waited. McFee pushed dossiers with red tags signaling URGENT across the desk toward Durell, who did not touch them yet.

  "You can read these, Sam. In brief, they cover over fourteen major disappearances of top men from everywhere in the world. I'm not just talking about Americans, British or Italians. We've lost Steigmann, and he's the last we know of, but before that there was Wilde-Evans from Wales, and Senor Alvarez from Brazil, Jacques Rondville in Paris, a young Chinese genius named Sung Laio from Taipeh, Nardi-nocchi out of Rome—well, I could go on and on. We thought at first these were defectors responding to a new pattern, a fresh sort of bait. But we can't find a trace of them in the East. Neither in Moscow, nor in Peking. Not a word out of them. And we've gotten three feelers from your counterparts in the KGB, Sam."

  "Then Moscow is missing people, too?"

  "Some pretty good ones. The last was Novotnik, the Czech expert on molecular light control. He left word he was defecting out of good conscience to the West and going over to Austria for refuge. But he never got there."

  "Any others?"

  "Four more from Russia. Two from Red China. The dossiers are there. Somebody is picking brains, Sam—picking and collecting them, right?"

  Durell waited again.

  "We want Steigmann back, of course. He's important. I don't know what the charges were against him in Germany.

  If he's really a fugitive war criminal, we'll work that out later. But we want him back with all the information he took from the Huntsville laser laboratories. I know how you feel about war criminals, Sam. They've got something on Steigmann, over in Munich, that we don't have. Our records on him are clean."

  "Could he have been framed over there?"

  *'I think so. Maybe there's some fire under the smoke, though. We're not infallible. We screen people like Steigmann as well as we can—but they come to us, stateless, without passports, penniless. So who can tell? I'll leave it all to your discretion."

  "What is that, sir?"

  "If you can't bring him back alive, you may have to kill him."

  "I see."

  "But most of all, Sam, whatever underground railway is operating to spirit brains out of the laboratories of the world, you've got to find that railroad, ^ind it, and follow Steigmann if he was maneuvered aboard, buy a ticket on it, and ride it to its final destination."

  Durell said: "They wouldn't let me in the station, so to speak. I'm not a scientist."

  "I don't care how you get aboard this underground railway, Sam. That's up to you. But you must find the other terminal. Be a decoy. Play it dumb. Blunder about a bit." McFee looked haunted. "Of course, Cajun, you could get killed that way."

  "I'll try not to let that happen. General."

  Chapter Three

  HE READ copies of the dossiers on his flight to London, concentrating on Dr. Steigmann's records, but the files showed little more than what McFee had tol
d him. He burned the records in the plane's lavatory and flushed the ashes into space over the Atlantic. In London, he spoke to shocked research technicians who expressed horror over Steigmann's arrest, escape, and disappearance in Munich. None of it helped. He went to Edinburgh. The trail was cold there.

  Steigmann had contacted no one befere boarding a BEA jet to Munich. So he moved on to Germany.

  Within an hour after he arrived in Munich, Durell knew he was being followed. This pleased him, and he was careful to do nothing to confuse his shadow. Until this moment, he felt he was running down a blind alley in the wrong maze, but now he knew the correct route was near the girl, whom he picked out as his shadow.

  He did not think she was dangerous, at first. Her technique was clumsy, so he spotted her easily. He doubled back and learned she was staying at a mediocre place called the Hotel Prinz and that her name was Carole Bainbury and she used a British passport. On the other hand, it was so easy that he began to think she was being clumsy by intent. If she were only pretending to be an amateur and wanted to be spotted, then he might be less pleased with himself. He decided to be more careful.

  At the same time, he felt better, because it was always easier on the conscience to deal with a professional instead of an outsider. You never knew when someone migBt need killing, and he did not relish amateurs mixing into the business.

  When he had been in Munich for twenty-four hours, he called the K Section field man, using the prescribed formula, and arranged a meet. He went to the reconstructed Peters-kirche when a white disc was posted on the northern side of the tower, which meant that visibility was clear all the way to the Alps; if the signal for tourists had been a red ball, indicating visibility limited only to the city, he'd have had to wait one more day. Up in the tower, basking in the September sunshine with the autumnal tourists churning about in excited, beery groups, he spotted Henry Gordon, a bald and tweedy man smoking a meerschaum pipe. They stared at the floating Alpine peaks on the horizon while they talked.

  "Where did you first spot her?" Gordon asked.

  "At the Platzl Inn, opposite the Hofbrauhaus," Durell told him. "Drinking beer, naturally. What else do you drink in Munich?"