Assignment Zoraya Read online

  Chapter One

  It came to Durell in different ways.

  It began, in one way, when the aged Imam Yazid Abu al-Maari of Jidrat awoke from a restless sleep and saw the evil shine and glitter of sunlight on the curved dagger blade held between the colonel's neatly manicured fingers.

  The Imam was a very old man. And because he had walked hand in hand with death for so very long, he was no longer afraid. He raised himself up on the low bed, among the cushions that supported his frail body, and peered through the ornately carved fretwork of the screening on the balcony. He saw that it was almost time for the noon prayers. There was a white haze over the city. From the height on which Faiz, the imamate palace, was built, he could see Jidrat cupped in the hollow around the crowded harbor with its tankers and dhows and baggalas, all caught forever between burning desert and blazing sea. He saw that Colonel Ta'arife smiled as he sat in the Bombay chair and toyed with his delicate knife.

  "Why do you not kill me now?" the Imam asked quietly.

  "It is not the time, old man."

  "You have overcome the guards, however."

  "It was only a matter of silver, Highness."

  "If Hamam accepts your bribes, he no longer defends me. Jidrat will soon be yours. You must be ready now."

  "Soon," the elegant colonel replied, smiling.

  "We are alone?"

  "Yes."

  "Does the Q'adi Ghezri consent to this?"

  "He consents."

  The Imam sat. His aged heart beat erratically. Dimly, he could hear the sounds of the city beyond the walls of Faiz, the ancient residence of the feudal rulers of Jidrat. Out in the harbor, the pumps made vague thudding sounds, pouring oil into the tankers that swung at the end of the pipelines —sounds like those of strange animals tethered and sucking at mother's milk. Beyond, the Gulf of Oman was a brazen plate of shining heat.

  The Imam's room in the palace was lofty and shadowed, cooled by the thick, ancient walls. The tile floor was covered with rugs and carpets. On a taboret inlaid with mother-of-pearl was the Imam's Koran, massively bound in tooled leather. Within the hodge-podge of furniture—Persian cabinets mingling with a modern desk and bookcases—the objects of the old man's true interest were plainly evident. His tired gaze touched lovingly on the volumes of poetry in haphazard collections from Hamasa, Muallaqat, and Mofaddiliyat. The Imam's thoughts wandered slightly, as he recalled snatches of the personal odes of Amru-al-Kais, written fifteen centuries ago. In other collections around the room were the ancient writings of the philosophers, Kindi and Al-Gazel, and the historic works of Bukhari, Ibn Khaldun, and Tabari. In his later years the Imam had devoted himself to resurrecting the golden ages of Arabic literature. Perhaps it was a mistake, he thought now, to have been so unworldly.

  Colonel Ali Ta'arife was of the new Arabs—modern, efficient, ambitious, in touch with all the world beyond the shores of Islam. The Imam looked at the colonel's neat, slim figure, the smooth-shaven, angry jaw, the cruel mouth made more cruel by a long and bloody past as chief of police and head of the army of Jidrat. Mockery shone in Ta'arife's dark, intelligent eyes.

  The old man sighed. "You are a fool, Ali. You betray your friends for a vainglorious dream. Ybu become a traitor and an eater of camel dung for those who promise much, but who will destroy Islam in the end."

  "I work for the greater glory of Islam," Ta'arife replied. "For a rebirth of our holy destiny, Highness. Would you stand against the will of Allah?"

  "While I slept, you suborned my guard and entered Faiz like the proverbial serpent," the Imam said. "You may kill me now."

  Colonel Ta'arife stared at him. "But where is Zoraya?"

  "Lost in the width and depth and breadth of the world."

  The Imam found it hard to breathe. His great dark eyes were pools of agony in his eroded face. He was ill. He knew that whatever grew inside him, no matter what the medical hakims said, would never stop growing until he was devoured by it. Ya Allah, it was the will of God, indeed. But, he thought wryly, Allah could have waited just a little longer. There had been so many changes in his lifetime. A man's span of years was like a handful of sand trickling through a jinni's hand. But he had seen his people change from sheepherders living in black tents, smugglers, camel drovers and pirates on the Gulf of Oman, to merchants and world travelers, eventually deteriorating into dissipated rou6s and fanatic politicians. They had suddenly been thrust, by the discovery of oil, onto the broad stage of the world, like children given a dangerous toy. The new Jidratti were epitomized by the trim, sleek, uniformed Colonel Ta'arife, who sat here with his elegantly polished boots crossed, smiling under his mustache in imitation of the megalomaniac in Cairo.

  The Imam looked at his enemy, the colonel. "I worship not that which ye worship," he said softly. "Nor will ye worship that which I worship. To you be your religion, and to me mine."

  Ta'arife smiled. "You need not quote the 109th sura to me, Highness. In the Tradition of the Sunna it is also said, 'The difference of opinion in my community is a divine mercy/ "

  The Imam felt defeated. He had not expected Ta'arife to be so well acquainted with the moral sayings of Mohammed.

  "I must ask you again, Highness," the colonel said. "Where is Zoraya?"

  The Imam began to laugh. It was the cackle and wheeze of a senile old man. "Find her," he gasped. "Search the wide world for her/"

  "I must know where she is," the colonel insisted.

  "Before you begin?"

  "Yes."

  "Before you kill me?"

  "Perhaps, old man, you will die now."

  The Imam shook his head. "No. By the mercy of Allah, it will not be now. You would have killed me in my sleep, otherwise." He could hear, from somewhere in the palace, the monodic music of a nuba, being played upon a long lute. The cantata was both instrumental and vocal, but he could not hear the voice of the singer. He turned back to the colonel. "You do not dare to kill me yet, I see."

  "Islam will rise again," Ta'arife retorted. "You, with your old ways, cannot prevent it. The Q'adi will lead all the Arabs in a new and holy jihad."

  "I am not that old that I do not know the meaning of war today," the Imam said. "You dream evil dreams. You depend on false friends to supply the arms, yet these same people wait to destroy the Qur'an itself."

  He lay back, gasping. He was an old, old man, his beard was like snow, and the desert had squeezed the juices out of him long ago. Once more he wondered vaguely how Ta'arife had bribed his way past Hamam, the Nubian guard captain, into his sleeping chamber. It did not matter much.

  "I will not tell you where to find Zoraya," he said. "She will not help you, even if you do find her. You will have to search the world for her."

  "I will find her soon/' Ta'arife said darkly. "Then the blood will flow."

  It came to Durell in still another way.

  It began, too, in the office of U. S. Consul T. P. ("Teepee") Fenner, representative to the independent sultanate of Jidrat, on the Gulf of Oman, an island of desert sand and limestone afloat on a sea of oil, straddling the tanker lanes to the West.

  Teepee (Thaddeus Philip) Fenner hated Jidrat. It had been described to him by Senator Henshaw, who had arranged the post for him, as an oasis paradise on the Gulf of Oman. But Fenner hated Jidrat's filth and squalor, hated its oil-wealthy, white-garbed sheiks who drove around in ivory Cadillacs and lived in air-conditioned palaces. He hated the brazen sea, the desert sand, the Arabs, the Imam, the colonel, and the Q'adi. Most of all, he hated his nickname of Teepee, which somehow had followed him here. He did not like to be associated with the Indians of Oklahoma.

  He was fat, with high blood pressure, and he suffered from swollen feet in Jidrat's ungodly temperature. He enjoyed only a strain of madness
in his essential bigotry.

  He was, of course, precisely the wrong man to be posted in Jidrat at this time.

  It had seemed right, at first, back in Washington. T. P. Fenner knew the oil business, as only an Oklahoman with wells in his back yard could know it. He'd grown up in the rough-and-tumble days and knew all the tricks of the trade. Never having married, he'd become interested in politics at the state capitol and then in Washington. He was jolly, smart, wealthy enough—so why wouldn't he be at home with the Arabs who suddenly found oil millions pouring into coffers that had previously held only a pittance gained from trade in hides and dates and smuggling slaves across the Rub'al Khali, the Empty Quarter, to the Sauds in Riyadh? It had looked mighty fine to Teepee. It hadn't occurred to him that he could hate the Arabs as much as he hated the Oklahoma Indians who had once sued him for encroaching on tribal lands while in pursuit of oil.

  And Jidrat, according to the State Department, was safe, two months ago.

  The Imam Yazid Abu al-Maari ruled the small, independent state with an iron, if aged, hand. True, there was the Q'adi, that religious fanatic preaching a new holy war for Islam, reviving not only the Wahabi movement that had put the Sauds into power nearby, but going beyond that into Shiite prophecies that called for a restoration of the true caliphate under an unrecognized Alid imam, who would be known as the Mahdi, the Deliverer. And true, there was Colonel Ta'arife, chief of the army and the police, modeling himself somewhere between Nasser of Egypt and Kassim of Iraq, playing a tortuous game between the Soviets and America, weaving a tapestry of palace intrigue and incipient revolt.

  But Teepee could handle it, the State Department had decided.

  He hated it. The post as U.S. Consul was not at all the sort of plush, glamorous, powerful job he'd been led to believe it would be.

  His office, near the main bazaar, was hot and stifling at the noon hour. He could hear the monotonous voices of praying Moslems in the square, hypnotically repeating the siki in praise of God. He mopped his round, red face with a handkerchief and wished he had stayed at the Hotel al-Zaysir where Messaoud, the bartender, kept a special bottle of Jack Daniels oourbon for him. Instead, he had to deal with this Englishman standing adamantly in his office.

  "Goddam it to everlasting hell, Kenton," he said, "but I told you I can't do anything about it! You know the rules here. I can't go running to the Imam and complain that our intelligence man is lost in the desert—"

  "Not lost," Kenton said. "I didn't say that."

  "No?"

  "Murdered."

  "What?"

  "I saw his body, Mr. Fenner. I want you to see it, too."

  Fenner shook his round head. "I've seen dead men before.

  This place is built on the bones of dead men. But, by damn, Kenton, you're an Englishman, and it has nothing to do with you! Why not stick to your bones and stones in your digging? Don't come telling the U.S. Consul what to do, damn you!" The English ircheologist was bony and tall, with a long placid face that rebuffed Fenner's words and refused to accept his insults. Paul Kenton was patient. He stood there and stared down at Fenner.

  "Blaney was your man. Don't you believe me?" "I hardly knew him," Fenner replied. "He never came around here. Never told me what he was up to. Had his own office. Far as I'm aware, he was an economic attache working on the oil contracts for next year. It's you who say he was an intelligence man."

  "He told me so," Kenton said quietly. "I believed him." Fenner sighed. "Well, I'll send a wire home on it." "Coded, of course."

  "Are you still telling me the consulate's business?" "I want you to see Blaney's body," Kenton insisted. "He was my friend. Esme and I often had him to dinner. He's still out there."

  "Whv didn't you pick him up, then?" "I think the Arabs want you to see him, too." Fenner's mouth fell open. "How do you know?" "I've been here a long time," the Englishman said. "I'm almost Arab myself. I didn't touch him. I came straight to you."

  Fenner chewed his lip. His white drill suit was rumpled, sweat-stained. "What do you think happened? Was it one of the natives running haywire?"

  "No. This was slow, bloody, deliberate, and painful." Reluctantly, Fenner got up. "All right. All right. Let's go see."

  Fifteen minutes later they drove out along the new palm-lined boulevard through the B lb-as-Salam, the Gate of Peace, and were on the relatively trackless desert. Five miles from the port of Jidrat, the Englishman indicated a turn off the trail. To the west, the harsh Djebel Haradh Mountains loomed against the brazen sky. The spot might easily have been the moon; there was nothing here but desolation, an emptiness lost in the blinding white haze of the midday heat.

  Fenner parked the consulate jeep at the head of a narrow wadi and got out, wincing under the double assault of the sun's heat from above and the reflected heat from the stony ground below. There was some fresh camel dung beside the trail that Paul Kenton directed him to follow. He tried not to breathe too deeply of the fiery air and walked with head down after Kenton, following a zigzag trail along the floor of the ravine.

  "What were you doing out this way, anyway?" Fenner asked.

  "My diggings are this way. A few miles farther out, at Ain Gemilha. Astonishing ruins, really. I found a direct connection between the culture evidenced in the shards and the Na-batean developments in the Sinai and Negev areas."

  "What made you stop here?"

  "Blaney was still alive. He cried out." Kenton's long, impassive face suddenly yielded to an intense rage. "Johnny was dead by the time I'd scrambled over to him. I hope you have his recent reports. They will be important."

  Fenner hesitated, then admitted reluctantly, "All right. I knew he was a sort of gumshoe. But he always saw spooks. These Arabs conned him properly. He saw Russians and rebellion everywhere."

  "Well, he found some of it, I think. There he is."

  The Englishman lifted a hand and pointed.

  John Blaney's body was staked and spread-eagled on the desert flint, naked under the incredible white sun. His mouth was open: a black hole showing the bloody stump of his tongue. His eyes had been cut out. There was another bloody stump below his navel. An intricate pattern of fine, sharp lines had been carved on the skin of his stomach with the delicate point of a sharp knife.

  T. P. Fenner looked and turned away and his stomach lurched and he vomited. Finally, he looked again.

  "That ain't Blaney," he whispered hoarsely.

  "It is."

  "But . . . why?" he whispered. He forgot the heat, the silence, the rocky rim of the wadi that closed in upon them like the fingers of an iron fist. "Why did they do it?"

  "He discovered something dangerous, obviously."

  "But what?"

  "Don't you know?" the Englishman asked. "He worked for you. You admit now that he was your intelligence man, right?"

  "You're too smart for your own good, professor. Do all those squiggly cuts on his body mean anything?"

  "It's writing. It says, 'Death to the Imperialist Spy.' "

  Fenner didn't believe him. He looked again at the mutilated body. He couldn't believe that such savagery still existed. He wanted to throw up again, and his stomach heaved, but there was nothing left of his breakfast in him.

  "All right. I'll get off a cable pronto."

  The cable went to Washington, and from the Foreign Office of State it was sent to K Section of the CIA. At No. 20 Annapolis Street, the electronic files were checked. There was a conference between General Dickinson McFee, head of K Section, and several Middle East experts. It took place at two o'clock in the morning.

  "Jidrat has to stay with us," an anonymous gray-haired man told McFee. "And not just for its oil. It's in a strategic spot, but more important than any possible shipping restrictions, it's a symbol of the whole area since the British gave up there. If we lose the imamate, we'll lose more. You've heard of the Q'adi Mohammed Ghezri?"

  "Some sort of religious fanatic," McFee said.

  "Right. We can lose the whole Middle East if he gets s
tarted."

  "I can sent another man out there," McFee said. He looked irritated. It was August, and hot in Washington, and he hated to learn that another man was dead. He had liked Blaney.

  The anonymous man had bleak eyes that seemed to be looking deep into destruction. "If we could only get Prince Amr to go back. The Imam is too old, probably senile now. The prince is somewhere in Europe, as usual, drinking, gambling, drugging himself to death. . . . Did you know he went to Yale, Dickinson?"

  "No," McFee said. "I can't know everything."

  "Things were different then. Yes, he was educated in this country. Amr ibn Alid al-Maari must have made some friends among his American classmates, long ago. What we might do is persuade him to go home to Jidrat and take the reins firmly in hand again. Ram a steel rod up his spine, so to speak."

  Someone in the conference muttered, "He's a disgusting swine."

  "Granted. But his people would back him up."

  "He's a womanizer, a degenerate, a weakling."

  "Amr is a symbol of authority that the Jidratti would follow, other than the Q'adi or that Colonel Ta'arife. There's a lad we've got to watch, too. Amr is the only opponent we can put up."

  "Didn't he run out on some girl?" asked McFee. "Some desert princess he was supposed to have married as a child?"

  "Yes. Zoraya. The scandal sheets ran some stories on it some months ago."

  "Didn't she follow him to Europe?"

  "Yes, she did. . . . Are you suggesting we persuade her to help us with Amr al-Maari?"

  McFee stood up. "I've got a man who may have known your prince when he was at Yale, years ago. A man who might find Zoraya for you, too. His name is Sam Durell."

  The Q'adi Ghezri watched the crowd from behind the screens of his balcony. Behind him, the gallery circled an oasis of peace, a garden with a huge bowl, supported by stone lions, in which a fountain swayed and tinkled. In the narrow street below, the crowd of Jidratti listened to the impassioned oration of a street speaker, one of the dedicated workers for the cause. The crowd swayed with the rhythm of a hypnotized cobra, chanting its replies, roaring its approval, screaming with impassioned hatred. The Bombay Hindus whose shops fronted on the street had discreetly put up their iron shutters and closed for the day. Their barasas, the platforms in front of their shops, were empty.