Assignment - Cong Hai Kill Read online

  “About Orris Lantern?”

  Her blue eyes darkened. “And about you, Sam.”

  “But mostly about Orris.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I’m going to find him and bring him home to the States, it it’s possible.”

  “Yes. So you say.”

  “Anna-Marie, it’s my job,” he told her patiently.

  “But I could see in your eyes,” she said, “when you told me Orris was a traitor to your country and had been a prisoner in Hanoi and Peiping for so long, how you hate him. You call him a defector, a double agent, a man who chose treason, but who now seeks sanctuary. You do not trust him. You do not know him, but you have already judged and condemned him.”

  She paused, then added with a new and quiet dignity: “I will not help you or Deirdre anymore. If I can prevent it, I will not let you take Orris Lantern home with you. He—he loves me, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” Durell said, and cursed silently over this omission from the briefing he’d had three days ago in Washington. “Nobody told me you knew him that well.”

  “Orris is fine and good. I know. I feel it.” She touched her breast with a curiously old-fashioned gesture. “And I cannot let you do what I know you plan to do to him. I cannot let you kill the man I love.”

  3

  HE FOUND a pedicab in a larger street only a few steps from the peaceful isolation of “Uncle Chang’s” house on the klong. He was careful about the girl, keeping a firm hand on her slender wrist. She wept a little when he walked with her through the empty house where she had sought refuge.

  “Anna-Marie, I’m not your enemy. Orris asked you to help him, didn’t he? And you called on Deirdre, your old friend, and she called on me. I’m not a policeman, as you seem to think—”

  “No, I know What you are,” she said bitterly. “The Cong Hai would call you an imperialist, war-mongering spy-”

  “Is that what you call me, too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know what to think now. I’m frightened. I admit it. Perhaps I was foolish to try to run away from you, after promising I would help.”

  “What did you hope to gain from this ‘Uncle Chang"?”

  She smiled wanly. She wore no lipstick. “He is not a real uncle. There are two brothers, twins, and one is Papa’s plantation manager, named Paio Chu. Chang was also employed in the mountains with the tea cultivation. But then he became a merchant and moved back here to the sea and became very rich and important. I haven’t seen Uncle Chang for-—oh, five years. But I—I always loved him, and thought of him as a kind and wise old man.”

  “But a Chinese?”

  “Of course. Are all Chinese suspect in your eyes?”

  “Right now, yes.”

  “Then you are a monster, just as I said.”

  “I’m trying to stay alive. And to keep you and Orris Lantern alive, too. Where do you suppose your Uncle Chang could be? No servants in the house, nobody around.”

  “It is peculiar,” she admitted. “But he is probably away on a business trip.”

  “To Hanoi? Or Peiping, maybe?”

  Her eyes flashed with quick Gallic fury, then she saw he was teasing her and she returned a small, provoked smile of her own. “I do not understand you. You are a strange man, and you frighten me.”

  “Just don’t run away again. I need you. But if Orris Lantern and you are lovers, then he needs you, too.”

  Nothing happened on the way back to the single habitable hotel in Gia Pnom. No one followed them, no one dashed at them with a murderous knife. Along the single paved road that followed the curve of the tropical shore, he could see a faintly lingering band of lime-green light over the Gulf of Siam, where the sea picked up long, oily bands of starlit radiance in its stagnant, tepid lift and fall with the world’s tidal breath. Lights shone along the Embankment Road, where French-built houses of Victorian style, from the last century, made an impressive facade that hid the tumult and color and seething native life behind it. The wind blew from the sea, down the long tropical coast from Bangkok to the northwest, and it smelled of many things——of exotic vegetation and cooking and death. There was death in the very air here, Durell thought, hiding quietly behind the shine in every man’s eyes. Death and terror, sliding like twin snakes into a garden of paradise.

  The Palace Hotel stood in lush gardens on a small square facing the Government House, flanked on one side by a Catholic church and on the other by an ancient Buddhist temple. After the maze of canals and alleys of the native quarter along the river, it was like being transported suddenly into a stage-setting of Victorian Europe. But the tropical palms, the chattering monkeys, the silent saffron-robed Buddhist monks, and the yells of the peddlers of spicy chili peppers and rice were jarring notes that nothing could hide. Along the sidewalks were women in traditional panungs, the gaily colored cloth wrapped tightly about graceful hips and falling in soft drapes to their tiny feet. The Thais were a happy people who smiled easily and loved their traditional freedom and who were fiercely proud of their ancient and honorable history here on the “Golden Peninsula.” Modern ideologies that warped the international world seemed remote from this provincial port town. But the enemy had filtered down over the highlands and through the jungles, along the dense green riverways and narrow roads that threaded past the rubber and teak and tea plantations, down into the coastal lands where rice paddles glistened in a heat that numbed the mind and drained the energy of Western man.

  The enemy could be right here in the hotel, behind its facade of quiet comfort.

  Durell kept a grip on the girl as he paid off the pedicab and waved away the solicitous attendant at the door. Anna-Marie straightened her shoulders with pride.

  “You need not hold me as if I were a prisoner," she said. “I will not run away again.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. For now.”

  “Okay. You’ve got a parole, then.”

  She walked proudly ahead across the tiled floor of the Palace lobby, with its rattan furniture and huge wooden fans. The fans were motionless, and the light came from scores of oil lanterns and candles set about the lobby. The power had failed again. It could be sabotage, or simple mechanical failure. The oil lamps might look romantic, Durell thought grimly, but just now, they couldn’t be more dangerous.

  He ignored the solicitous comments of the alert Thai staff who noted his wet clothes and the blood on his shirt and face. He muttered something about a minor accident and, ignoring the useless elevator, ushered the French girl up the broad steps to the upper floor and down the wide, shadowed corridor to his room. On the way, he knocked lightly on Deirdre Padgett’s door and kept going; she would join him ‘in his own room in a moment, he hoped. ‘

  “I must change my clothes,” Anna-Marie protested.

  “You can trust me in my own room, please. Just ten minutes.”

  “No,” he said. “We talk this out first.”

  “But I won’t run away again, I promise you.”

  “It’s not that. We didn’t know how deeply you felt about Orris Lantern. You didn’t tell Deirdre, and you were supposed to tell her everything.”

  “Did she come here only to learn my secrets?” Anna-Marie snapped.

  “She’s your friend. She came here to help you.”

  “But she works for you. So I cannot trust her, either, now.”

  He didn’t argue about it. If you live long enough in a world of shadows, a World of suspicion and plot and counterplot, a silent war in which there are no bugles and often only a quick wit or trained reflex saves you from sudden and ugly death, you must inevitably reflect some of that lack of trust to others whom you wish to believe in you. He often wished that he could do something about this, that he weren’t set quite so far apart from the lives of ordinary men and women. But he had been in the business too long to change; he had chosen a lonely road, and he had no real regrets about it. He was dedicated to his job, and he had long ago p
assed the point where his survival factor meant anything hopeful. Tonight had been a bad sign, and his nearness to death at the hands of what he must call an amateur shook his confidence for a moment.

  He entered his room ahead of the girl, using all the normal techniques of precaution. The manager of the Palace—a Chinese of slender and graceful manners—had promised, with many a high wei-the traditional greeting of folded hands before the chest or face—to have the hotel’s power generator working by nightfall. But of course the room was dark, except for an oil lamp on a teakwood table next to the Bombay chair that faced the balcony. Durell disliked rooms with balconies, but the Palace boasted of one for every room that faced the sea. He drew the girl inside and closed the door silently behind them. He breathed slowly. He was not sure that he smelled anything alien or not. But there was a sense of intrusion, of someone having been here during his brief absence when he’d chased after Anna-Marie along the klongs. It was difficult to tell. His old Grandpa Jonathan, with whom he had spent his boyhood in the green Louisiana bayous, taught that a hunter should be able to locate an enemy literally by smell. The converse was true, of course; a hunted man, in danger, should have doubly keen senses.

  It seemed to Durell that there was the smell of someone here in his room that had not been there before, a compound of sweat that reflected fish and rice in the diet, and of a sticky sweet smoke, not unlike opium. When Durell moved into the big room, silently pacing the shining tiles, moving with a lithe ease for his size, he found nothing behind the drapery or in the wardrobe closet or in the huge bathroom area. The connecting door was locked, the key at the same angle he had left it.

  He went out on the balcony and looked down at the square with its dark flower beds and pedicabs and the beautiful Thai women walking beside the sea, and he thought of his earlier image of death and danger coming into paradise. He was annoyed when he looked back at Anna-Marie Danat.

  She was an unexpected complication now, instead of a dependable ally. Back in Washington, General McFee had been very explicit about her.

  “You can trust Miss Danat, Cajun. She’ll turn Orris Lantern over to you—provided you’re with Deirdre. She trusts Deirdre, so she’ll trust you, too.”

  “And if she doesn’t?” Durell had asked.

  “Cajun, I know how you feel about people like Orris Lantern. One bad apple spoils the barrel. But Orris Lantern trusts this girl and he’s turning himself back to us voluntarily. We need him, Sam. We need him desperately."

  “I don’t want to do business with a traitor.”

  “He’s changed his coat, Cajun. He’s coming home.”

  Durell’s voice was raw. “With the usual guarantee of amnesty? I can’t touch him?”

  “You put a finger on him,” the general warned, “and your neck goes in a noose. I’m not fooling. You’ll spend the rest of your life looking at the walls of Leavenworth.”

  “I’d like to kill him,” Durell said simply.

  “Exactly. So you coddle him and nurse him and bring him back without a scratch on him. Understand?”

  “Send someone else,” Durell said.

  “There is no one else. I'm sending you. It’s simple. I don’t care if Orris Lantern spits in your face, Sam. And from his dossier, he might just do that. He knows he’s valuable and he’ll know you’re restricted in how to handle him. Whatever he does, you don’t lay a finger on him.”

  It had been a hot September day in Washington, three days ago. Durell, who was a field sub-chief for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency, had hoped for a better release from the desk job he’d held down in Analysis for the past six months. But you can’t write your own ticket in the business. After his last assignment, he’d been lucky not to draw down a stiffer penalty for going across Czechoslovakia on his own, against every order from Geneva Central. But he’d still hoped for something better when McFee sent for him in his office at No. 20 Annapolis Street, that anonymous graystone house in Washington’s Northwest that served as cover HQ for Durell’s trouble-shooting K Section of the Agency.

  Dickinson McFee reported daily to Joint Chiefs and NSA and the White House, in addition to briefings at the Pentagon twice weekly. Durell often accompanied him through these ordeals. McFee was a small, gray man whose impact was felt the moment he stepped into the room. Durell didn’t know if McFee still drew down a two-star’s pay or it McFee’s status was that of retirement and his capacity in K Section’s rough-and-tumble unit solely that of a civilian. No one knew much about Dickinson McFee. He worried about you, and cared for yon, and would send you to your death without the slightest change in his glacial gray eyes, if he thought your death might be useful to some important project hatched in his fertile mind.

  Thinking of his interview with McFee as he stood in his hotel room halfway around the world, Durell reflected that the electronic air-conditioning in McFee’s office had failed that day, and the Washington heat then, ironically, was as humid and suffocating as that in the Palace Hotel. Durell had asked for permission to smoke one of his rare cigarettes, and permission had been bluntly denied.

  “Read these dossiers,” McFee had said, pushing folders across his desk. “I got on my knees to pry them out of the cellar files at NSA. They’ll tell you all about Orris Augustus Lantern of Hemmington, Kentucky. Read ’em and weep, Cajun. And remember that there, but for the grace of God, and so forth.” McFee paused. “Don’t judge him too quickly. Whatever you feel about men like Lantern, remember this: you’re going into the Chaines des Cardamomes, in Thai or Cambodian territory, legally or illegally, and bring him back here—alive and talking. In three weeks, Cajun, you have him sitting in that chair across from this desk.”

  “What does he have that's worth so much?”

  “Orris reneged out of our S.F. units in Vietnam after his outfit was zapped, and they took him to Hanoi. He made himself indispensable, and they took him to the Grass Basket, in Peiping. Then they put him to work with the Cong Hai—brothers-in-arms in sabotage and treason to the V.C. over in Vietnam. He has a gift for guerrilla warfare. The best man they have. He's led them in burning, ravaging, murders-—through his Cong Hai infiltrators. He’s started a small war on our flank that We must eliminate. And he’s been clever enough so the Thais blame the Cambodes and the Cambodes raise hell about the Thai border. He’s developed some fortress areas in the highlands near the Cardarnomes, just as the Viet Minh and Viet Cong built up ‘safe areas’ in Saigon territory. He knows where all the caches of rice, weapons, and money are. He’s worked with the outlaw Kuomintang army people who were stranded in northern Thailand and he’s developed a big opium-running racket that finances his jungle empire. As a matter of fact, we first got onto it through the dope angle. Interpol and our own Narcotics Bureau sent it over to us.”

  “And you turn it over to me,” Durell said dryly.

  “To you and Deirdre Padgett. Her new job for us.”

  Durell’s face betrayed neither shock nor dismay. He sat quietly, wishing for a cigarette, aware of the heat and the window facing a blank wall behind McFee and the guards and security devices on every elevator, door, and corridor in this inner sanctum of K Section. If McFee pressed a button, he would never get out alive. . . .

  Deirdre, he thought.

  “You’re breaking all the rules, General,” he said.

  “I am aware of the rules. I make them, myself. Deirdre loves you, Cajun. You’ve known many women, but you always return to her. She’s too damned good for you, of course. We have no rule against married men, but it’s easier on bachelors in this business, and we prefer men who don’t have their minds on wives and families back home. You’ve always agreed with this, I know.”

  You take a moment off to daydream, Durell thought, and it could be the last moment and the last dream you ever enjoyed. He shifted in his seat.

  “General, you know how I feel about Deirdre. You’ve been a good friend to both of us. You also know I’ve done all I could to keep her from signing into the Agency. I don’t
want to work with her. It wouldn’t be successful.”

  “You mean, if she were hurt, or killed?” McFee’s manner was unchanged. He might have been discussing the weather. But putting it into words was like twisting a knife. Durell did not like to think of himself as being vulnerable anywhere. But when Deirdre was concerned . . .

  He had seen her only last night, having dinner with her at her rose-brick Colonial home at Prince John, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. She had given nothing away, not by word, gesture, or flick of a beautiful eyelash, and this troubled him because it meant she could be competent enough to handle the job, and he didn’t want her in the business, no matter how good she might be at it. She had smiled into the candlelight, her mouth soft, her gray eyes serene, filled with love, reflecting the autumnal beauty of the mirror-like Chesapeake beyond the terrace where she had served the dinner. McFee had known he would be there, of course; McFee knew everything. She had already been briefed for this job, too. But her oval face, her raven hair, her fine body and poised, controlled hands, hadn’t given him a hint of what Went on behind her serene brow. She had been a fashion editor for a Washington daily, and he often had rendezvoused with her in Rome or Geneva or Paris. But to work with her as a team, on a job in Southeast Asia under Bangkok Central’s control . . .

  He mentally shook himself.

  “Why Deirdre, especially, sir?” he asked McFee.

  “She broke the whole thing to me. It came to her first.” McFee spoke flatly, gray eyes bleak. “It seems she went to finishing school with a little French girl named Anna-Marie Danat, the daughter of a French tea planter in the South Thai highlands who weathered and even prospered after the French exodus from Indochina. In any case, Orris Lantern, who until now has been a wraith and a devil, organizing the Cong Hai in that district for future subversive warfare, got to know Anna-Marie Danat. We don’t know if she influenced his thinking and made him homesick, or what. That motivation worked with some defectors from Korea, you’ll remember. You might pin it down, or leave it to the psychiatric department when you bring him back. In any case, Orris Lantern asked this little French girl on her papa’s tea plantation to get m touch with an influential American back home and