Assignment - Budapest Read online

  “A man in Washington by that name, yes.”

  “What exactly did Korvuth say?”

  The Dunstermeirs exchanged another quick look. The fear wasn’t there any more. Something else glittered in the pale blue eyes that watched Breagan’s heavy, tired movement across the kitchen. Was it triumph? Violence? Hatred? He wasn’t sure. He could be imagining all of it.

  The woman spoke quietly.

  “Korvuth said he came to this country to kill two men. He wanted the police—the CIA, he said—to know that. He would not name one of the men. But the other he named. It was Durell.”

  McEneny made a small, vague sound and looked at Breagan. “Isn’t he the one who worked with our New York office on the Stella Marni case?”

  “Yes,” Breagan said.

  “We’ve got to let him know.”

  Breagan exhaled softly. He found that his hands were clenched at his sides, and Mr. Dunstermeir was looking at them, aware of the explosive impact of his words. But the farmer’s stony face gave nothing away now. I’m getting too old for this, Breagan thought again. Too old and tired, when a man like this can read me so easily.

  “I’ll call Washington,” he said quietly.

  Chapter Two

  Durell put the telephone away and walked down the hall back to Deirdre. A thin rain was falling, turning the Chesapeake, glimpsed beyond the village of Prince John, in Maryland, into a dimpled plate of sullen gray steel. It was ten-thirty on that Saturday morning. He had driven over from Washington for breakfast with Deirdre Padgett, with a long winter’s weekend ahead of them, alone here, just the two of them. That was gone now, but he didn’t let the disappointment trouble him after the first few moments.

  “It was Dickinson McFee,” he said to Deirdre, and sat down at the table again.

  “Do you have to go?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes. There will be a plane at the local airport soon. We have half an hour.”

  “Oh, Sam . . .”

  “Forget it, hon,” he said. “Where were we?”

  “What does it matter?” Her words were toneless. “We could talk about it forever, and nothing would materialize out of it. One phone call from your little general, and all the talk in the world between us goes up in smoke and remains just that—idle, wishful thinking. Talk, smoke, nothing at all.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t ask where you’re going, or why.”

  He smiled. “You know I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Yes, I know. I know it only too well.”

  He watched her fill his coffee cup again. The kitchen of this fine old Maryland house was quiet and peaceful. A small fire that he had built burned cheerfully in the red brick fireplace set into the kitchen wall, opposite the modem stove and the shining antique copperware that Deirdre loved. Through the twelve-over-twelve windows, he could see the sweep of wet lawn from the house to the water’s edge. A man was out there in the chill rain, dredging for Chincoteagues from an ancient, dirty-white pungy in a cove of the bay, just north of the beach here. Durell knew the ways of the bay oystermen, in their bugeyes and pungies, and there was nothing really unusual about a crew of two or three going out in this weather. But he saw only one man, bent over on the narrow deck, forward of the small pilothouse. He wondered if it meant anything, and he sat very quietly while he considered it, his suspicion and alertness silencing him for the moment.

  He was a tall man, black of hair, just over thirty, with a small dark mustache and a taut, competent mouth. His blue eyes often appeared black when he was angry or especially thoughtful. They were very dark just now. There was a fine coordination in the way his lean body moved. His hot Cajun temperament had been carefully honed and controlled by the years of his training and silent warfare he had experienced since his boyhood in the Louisiana bayous, far from this place. It had been necessary to learn that often the difference between the quick and the dead was patience, silence, and watchfulness. A long series of ghosts, of dead men he had once known and worked with, were grim evidence of the price one paid for a mistake or a miscalculation. The war that Durell fought was not one that rang with bugles or trembled to the beat of drums. It was dark and silent, fought with nerve and skill; the war of espionage; and its battlefield was only too often the dirty streets and black slum alleys of faraway corners of the troubled world. The weapons of this war were more often cunning and vigilance rather than strength, although occasionally knife or gun came into swift, explosive play. The years in which Durell had served in this war had left their mark upon him in indefinable ways. He had survived until now, when so many others had failed or broken or died, and this spoke for itself as to what he was and what he had become.

  Deirdre saw him watching the man in the pungy.

  “It’s only old Tom Yordie,” she said quietly.

  “From Prince John?”

  “He’s been around ever since I was a child. He’s perfectly harmless.” Deirdre sighed. “You never relax, do you, darling? What is it with you? A perfectly fine old man, who’s never missed a day oystering in his life, and you look at him with such suspicion. How long does such dedication to your job go on?”

  “I can’t afford to relax, Dee,” he told her.

  “Well, that’s what I mean,” she said.

  He looked away from the fisherman in the cove. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I can’t get out of it now. It's all I know.”

  “And is it too late for me? For us? Look at me, Sam. Is it?”

  He saw her in all her quiet, solemn loveliness, the one woman who had broken through his barriers and touched the emotions he thought he had buried and forgotten. He knew women better than most men, loved them and used them and forgot them. Deirdre Padgett was quite different. She had reached something in him that he had tried to destroy, and breathed life back into it; and sometimes he was sorry about this, not for himself, but for her, because there was no answer to the question she was asking him.

  She got up and moved toward the brick kitchen fireplace.

  Her back was straight and slim, her fine hips pliant and curved under the soft jersey dress she wore. Her dark black hair shone with luster in the gray morning light. Her eyes were somber. He had been attracted originally by the inner peace and composure she possessed, by the tranquillity of her, some of which he had destroyed by allowing their relationship to reach this point. He knew her as intimately as any man could know a woman. There were no secrets between them, except those of his profession, and it was this that constantly created a barrier between them that no amount of patience or understanding could overcome.

  She spoke with her back to him. “Did you talk to McFee about me yesterday?”

  “Of course. But I didn’t tell him I would resign. I can’t do that, Dee. I’ve been in this game too long, and I’m getting old in it.”

  “Like an old fox, or a wolf, in the wilderness.”

  “Yes, it’s a wilderness, all right,” he admitted.

  She turned now to look directly at him. “But you love it, don’t you, old fox?”

  “It’s my job. I love you, too, Dee.”

  “But never the twain shall meet,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you if we married,” he told her. “Not to you or me or to McFee.”

  “Does he come into our private life, too?”

  “He comes into everything. I couldn’t do my job properly then. Not if I had to worry about you and know how you were worrying, too.”

  “But you know I’m willing to accept all that,” she said tightly. “I don’t want you to become a machine, like some of the others. Always suspicious, always living under some sort of cover personality so that sometimes when we’re together and I look for you, I see someone else, not you, someone you make yourself into for the job. And I don’t know that someone at all.”

  “It has to be that way. It’s a question of survival.”

  “I know all that, too,” she said. She came back to the table, picke
d up the silver coffee pot, looked at it, and put it down again. Durell was still watching the oysterman in the pungy. A touch of sleet hissed against the windows beside the dining table. The Chesapeake looked cold and ominous, and he suddenly held in his mind, for just an instant, the vignette of Bayou Peche Rouge, hot in the steaming sunlight, dark and secretive and green, all mysterious and wonderful in his boyhood. He watched a fish-hawk float into a small grove of pines near the point to the north.

  Deirdre said: “Sam, I love you. It’s just that I want to share everything with you. Didn’t you ask McFee about a job for me?”

  “No. I don’t want you in it.”

  “That’s for me to decide,” she pointed out. “I could work with you, and—”

  “No. Never.” There was suppressed violence in him. “Why not?”

  He looked at her and wanted her and cherished her and felt the grievous sadness of the pain he constantly gave her. He wished he could be free to stay with her this weekend, here in this peaceful old house, just the two of them alone, to make love and talk of things remote from his work.

  “Don’t you know what might happen, Dee?” he said. “There might come a time and a place whan I would have to drop you. Abandon you, sooner or later, in some crisis or emergency. Or you might have to leave me somewhere, with no way out. To die, you understand?”

  Her face was pale. “I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “But I would, to you,” he said harshly. “I’d have to. And if you wanted to live in this game, you’d have to do the same to me.”

  “No,” she said. “No, no.”

  He stood up. “There you are. That’s what I mean.” Deirdre searched his lean, dark face and shivered and hugged herself as if she had suddenly gone cold because of what she saw in him. She was so beautiful that he ached all over for her.

  At that moment there came a sharp, snapping report from outside the quiet house. Durell’s move was so swift and fluid that Deirdre was hardly aware of his movement as such at all, until he was at the window, a bit to one side, with his hand in his pocket.

  It was only a backfire from the pungy’s engine in the cove. He did not relax.

  “You’re jumpy, Sam. What is it? What did McFee want?” “I’ve got to find a man,” he said. “Someone got loose in the country. He’s got to be found, fast.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or he’ll kill somebody. Somebody very important.” And Korvuth will try for you, too, Durell thought. But he didn’t tell her that. “I’ll have to leave you now, hon,” he said.

  “I suppose there is no point in asking you to be careful,” she whispered.

  “I do what has to be done. It’s my job,” he said.

  Dickinson MeFee was at the little airport two miles west of the town of Prince John. The rain was colder, half sleet now, and the trees in the grim gray daylight were beginning to glimmer with a thin coating of ice. A four-seater Beach liaison plane, with private registry markings, was waiting for him. Durell did not know the pilot. He met General McFee in a small shelter hut a short distance from the battered old hangar.

  “Sorry to break up your weekend like this, Sam.” McFee looked tired, a small erect man of gray, with a mouth and voice possessed of the incisive quality of a steel trap. “I hope Deirdre didn’t mind too much. Did you tell her I gave a negative on her application?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “All right, then. I have to go to London tomorrow. You’ll be in charge of K Section for a week. Take it easy. Sidonie will hold down your desk for you at Twenty Annapolis. Whatever synthesizing has to be done, she’ll do it. Holcomb will run the rest of the office and attend the weekly briefings with State, and tomorrow’s briefings with Joint Chiefs. That gives you some free time for Bela Korvuth.”

  “You said over the phone he left word with some farmer that he was going to gun for me.”

  “Yes. Does it worry you?”

  Durell smiled. “I’d be a fool if it didn’t. But it’s not quite the way you think.”

  “No? Well, I’m taking it seriously, too. I’m going to put a couple of men to watch Deirdre. She won’t know they’re around, but we don’t want anything happening to her, and a man like Bela Korvuth may decide to hit you from any direction. There’s your grandfather, too, down in Bayou Peche Rouge. Not much chance of Korvuth getting down there, but you never can tell. There’s no point in guessing how much they know about you in the AVO and MGB offices. Not since the Stella Marni case, anyway. We’ve got to assume they know as much about you in their dossiers as we’ve got on Bela Korvuth, which may even the odds a bit. I don’t know. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Durell said. “Korvuth is a professional. He’s been in the game longer than I. This whole thing is too easy. He didn’t have to come over here disguised as a Hungarian refugee. A dozen other ways would have been better for him. And nobody in the business would deliberately break his own cover by talking to a local farmer about his mission. It doesn’t make sense.”

  McFee sighed and nodded and looked out through the small window of the shelter hut toward the waiting plane. He somehow managed to fill the small room with his presence and the quiet strength of his personality. Durell often wondered about this small gray man who knew so much, whose connections made a web that girdled the world, and whose job was the anonymous direction of strategy in this dark, silent war that seemed to go on forever.

  “I was wondering how soon it would occur to you, Sam,” he said. “You’re going to have to be very careful.”

  “Is Korvuth a blind, then?”

  “We don’t know. Your guess at this stage of the game is as good as mine. You’ve seen his picture?” When Durell shook his head, McFee took out a small leather folder containing a photograph of a gray-haired man of about forty, with mild eyes and a saddle nose and a prim little bowtie. “Don’t let him see you first, Sam. Looks like a small-time business man, doesn’t he? Looks harmless, eh?”

  “No, not harmless,” Durell said. He had felt a quick twist of something turning over in him when McFee suggested a guard for Deirdre. He wasn’t sure, but it could have been fear for her, and this dismayed him, because he knew he should not be thinking of anything now except the job McFee was discussing. He knew McFee was watching him, an objective curiosity in the little general’s pale gray eyes. He didn’t think anything showed in his face as he went on. “The eyes in this photo are all wrong. It shows there, and in his mouth, too. Is Korvuth a Magyar?”

  “Hard to tell about these people. I pulled what we had on friend Bela out of the dossier files, but it isn’t much. The rest of the physical description makes him about five-ten, weight one-seventy, a little paunchy, but awfully, awfully fast. So don’t let his sloppy physique fool you. It isn’t that way at all. His hair is brown, his eyes are brown, and he’s got a steel-capped molar in the lower right jaw. We got that from a dentist in Buda who worked on Korvuth last year.”

  “All right,” Durell said. “Don’t kid me about it, please.” “I’m not kidding. There’s nothing to laugh about or ignore about this man. Bela Korvuth is probably the greatest master of political assassination and sudden death since the Middle Ages. We know he was responsible for the disappearance of Boganov in Prague two years ago, when Boganov anticipated the swing away from Stalin and jumped the gun. Now the pendulum is reversed, and even if they had let Boganov live, he’d be in the doghouse again. Then there was the poisoning of Imre Kardovi in Bucharest last year, the death of the wife of a Soviet attache in London six months ago—she had fallen in love with a junior clerk in Downing Street—and there was the killing of those two MGB boys who made contact with Frank Duggan in Rome and wanted to peddle a few secrets to us. You can check the rest of it in the office when you get a chance. But you have to get an idea of what this man is, Sam. When the freedom fighters in Hungary were stringing up AVO men by the heels from lampposts in Budapest, Korvuth was giving orders to machine-gun women and children in Parliament
Square, and we know he personally organized the deportation movement when the Russians sent in their Mongolian troops. Another idea of what sort of man this is, and his nerve, is the fact that he deliberately took the chance of mingling with the refugees to get over here, when he’d have been torn to pieces by them if they learned who he was. All I want to impress on you is that this man is as good or better than you. I don’t want to lose you on this, Sam. And he’s here to do a double job.”

  “It still doesn’t add up,” Durell said, frowning.

  “Well, he was Stella Marni’s lover back in Budapest in fifty-four. We just got that recently. You put the Marni woman on ice six months ago, and he’s going to enjoy cutting your heart out.”

  “No,” Durell said, “he’s too professional to let that bother him.” He lit a cigarette, to McFee’s annoyance. It was close and hot in the shelter hut, with a kerosene stove going full blast. McFee didn’t smoke. “Any guesses on the other victim he’s going after?”

  “We can’t afford to guess. It’s up to you to find out.” “What about this Zoltan Ske? And the woman?”

  “We don’t have anything useful on either of them, Sam. Just the cover stories they used at our Vienna office to get flown over here with the last group of Hungarian refugees. You can get their pictures from Breagan.”

  “Check,” Durell said. “Now what do you really think, general?”

  “I agree with you. It’s all a blind.”

  “You believe they’d throw away a man like Bela Korvuth just to keep us busy while they try for another objective?”

  “Yes. I see it that way, Sam.”

  “Would Korvuth know it?” Then Durell could have bitten his tongue. “Sorry. Of course, Korvuth has to know he’s the patsy. I must be a little tired. Korvuth would never break his cover this way, otherwise. For him, it might well be a suicide mission; and he’s got to know that. He’d obey orders, of course.”

  McFee looked uncertain. “Maybe I’d better put Holcomb on this, Sam. You may be too close to it—what with Deirdre, and all. But I don’t see how you can stay out of it, anyway, with Korvuth after you.”