Assignment - Palermo Page 2

  “A euphemism, Samuel, for the same type of outlaw organization as the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, what-have-you. O’Malley claimed he was on the run, with his two friends, because he refused to go along with new orders that slanted all their operations toward planned sabotage. He claimed that all the things that had happened to date were simply test forays. To check feasibility and probabilities of success. The network is enormous. It stands poised to cripple every part of the country at any moment deemed desirable by this nation’s enemies. It’s a knife at our jugular vein. It is dangerous. It is critical. It must be stopped. And you will stop it.”

  McFee paused. Durell said nothing.

  “O’Malley reported,” said McFee, “new faces and new people in the Fratelli top ranks. And new orders. Until then, he said, he ran an honest shop at his casino.” McFee grimaced slightly. “Bruno Brutelli worked as a strong-arm collector for the numbers operation in Los Angeles. And Joey Milan, the jockey, was back at his old business as a second-story man. He is a human fly, apparently. His orders sent him into many places but not to steal money. He went in for data on power plants, defense factories, missile silos, city water supplies. You name it, Cajun, and you have it.”

  “Then, why didn’t the FBI take O’Malley’s information at face value?”

  “It came before all the evidence had been collated through their computers. A clerk interviewed him. O’Malley asked for you. He couldn’t know about K Section, of course. All he knew was that you worked in some such organization. Of course, when no information was available about you, he walked out. Twenty-four hours later a hold order was broadcast for him. It was too late. He had flown to Europe with his friends.”

  “I wonder why?” Durell murmured.

  “That’s for you to find out. They’re after him. His outfit, the Fratelli della Notte, considers him a traitor. A defector. He’s marked for death. You can save him— or kill him, if necessary, however the truth comes out.” “O’Malley is an old friend,” Durell said.

  “Can you do it?” McFee asked.

  “If I have to.”

  “Can you find him?”

  “I’ll find him.”

  “Do so—before Kronin gets him.” McFee waggled his potent walking stick again. There was a small phosphorus bomb in it, tear gas, a dagger, a pistol—all built into the innocent blackthorn. They were anonymous in the throngs of strolling tourists who had arrived in the District for the Cherry Blossom Festival. McFee went on. “The Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Fratelli —a rose by any other name, Samuel. I admire your loyalty to old friends, and yet I deplore it. O’Malley’s organization is on a sabotage footing—for when, as, and if. And it’s being run by Karl Kronin. And now Kronin knows about you.” McFee’s gray eyes touched Durell’s hard face briefly. “You’ve tangled with Kronin a few times, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but not successfully.”

  “There was a leak in the Bureau somewhere. Otherwise, they wouldn’t know that O’Malley went calling on the cops for you. O’Malley doesn’t know our business, but Kronin certainly does. How close did he come to you last night?”

  “There were two tries in the last two days.” Durell felt no warmth in the sunshine as he remembered it. “Not very imaginative. But they’ll get better. One was a taxi that apparently blew a tire and ran up on a sidewalk and almost greased me to the wall. Last night was a little touchier. It was a faked Code B message from you. So I left my apartment at one o’clock in the morning. There’s a park across from the building, and the gunman was waiting there. Standard silencer equipment. I picked it up afterward, and the lab boys have the weapon now—a Russian PP SH. Luckily for me, he missed the first shot because a car came around the corner and intervened. I never gave him a chance for the second shot.”

  “But the assassin got away?”

  “Clean. The park is big and dark at that hour.”

  “You must be very careful, Samuel. Kronin will do anything to keep you from contacting O’Malley and getting the rest of his information. You must work fast. If Kronin senses defeat, he may push the button, activate his entire—ah—mob, and do inestimable damage to the nation. Spread panic. Economic chaos. Political disaster. Joint Chiefs and the White House kept me up half the night last night, while you—ah—had your stroll in the park. I’d like you to stay alive, Samuel.”

  Durell permitted himself a small smile. “Are you worried about me, General?”

  “Any man can be replacecL^But it takes time. I trust you’ve studied Kronin's dossier thoroughly. You fly tonight to Europe to find O’Malley.”

  “I know all about Kronin,” Durell said.

  He remembered every word of the dossier. He hoped it wouldn’t be the last thing he ever remembered.

  3

  SUMMARY, K Section File 22 Zeta 5:---

  Kronin. Karl Antonescue, alias Johan Borg, alias Pavel Vanek, alias Pierre Dumas, alias Donald Dunn, alias Kapek Kromsky:

  Age: 42

  Birth: Believed born Sofia, Bulgaria, 1924, father a merchant shot by Nazi counterintelligence units Abwehr 1942, August. Mother d. tuberculosis Soviet prison camp Novokirsk, Siberia, 1951. No siblings.

  Education: Sorbonne, Paris, geology degree, transferred law and political science. Two years Egypt, Saudi Arabia, followed by term in Prague. Merchandising enterprises throughout Europe, international oil trade, finance.

  Description: Six feet, four inches, eyes brown, bald, brachycephalic, wounded by guerillas Greek Civil War running guns to both sides. Left leg amputated above knee. Uses prosthetic aluminum limb of own design. Slight limp. Above average strength, intelligence, health. IQ Sorbonne: 159.

  Analysis: It is known that subject is an active, independent agent dealing in military and political and economic intelligence, selling data to highest bidders without moral or political scruple. Headquarters a villa near Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland. Swiss authorities have no evidence to inhibit activity or deport. Subject suspected head of assassin organization for political effect in Congo, Nigeria, Southeast Asia, France, Morocco, Poland. Believed owner of gambling casinos in Riviera, Spain, Italy.

  Suspected by U. S. Narcotics Bureau of operating the Green Line of opium smuggling from Red China via Lebanon to South America, possesses strong links with criminal organizations in the U. S.

  History: No arrests. No photographs. Operates with known murderer, Anton p.ugale if, A1 b an i an member Starjek Cell Number Six:

  Prognosis: Subject is most dangerous. As an independent agent, cannot be trusted for operations of any kind. His organization is believed responsible for the disappearance of three K Section operatives from Geneva Central, London Control, and Naples Central. His known personal appetites for women, money, and luxury are subject to private perversions. He is believed responsible for the disablement and retirement of Colonel A. G. Mignon of Section C2/Theta. (See File Theta 22/6.)

  Instructions: K.O.S.*

  *Kill On Sight

  4

  DURELL put on dark green sunglasses and nodded to the heavy-hipped servant woman who closed the bronze gate of Mignon’s villa after him. It was almost noon. He had a rented black Caravelle, parked close to the ornately trimmed shrubbery alongside the black-topped road. He looked to the right and left and up the steep pitch of the wooded mountainside that rose up out of the lake shore. Nothing. No one. The birds sang. A squirrel chattered. The sound of a boat motor echoed up from the glittering surface of the water. It was hot and breathless in the lee of the villa, where the breeze could not reach him. The scruffy palm trees in the garden at his back reached dusty feathers to the Ticino sky.

  But something was out of focus.

  He had checked in at Geneva Central yesterday, when his jet landed there, and conferred with Arnie Thompson, the K Section resident in the bookshop on the Grande Rue of the old quarter, near the cathedral. Thompson had arranged for the little black car. Its radio, he explained, was two-way; the special frequency would always get someone at the Geneva listening post. Thompson had
no information on Kronin’s headquarters at Lugano except to say that it was reported deserted and Kronin abroad somewhere. Arnie had wanted him to give up his snub-barreled .38 S&W and use a Walthers instead, but Durell had declined. He preferred the feel of the .38 in its inner holster just under his left armpit. It did not bulge in his dark blue suit.

  Something was different.

  He could sense the change since he had gone into the villa an hour ago. The shadows had shifted, the sun was higher, the road curving to the left and into the nearby tunnel high above the lake was in bright sunlight now. The tunnel mouth looked darker.

  He did not glance about overtly asTie turned to the parked car on the grass -verge beside the road. But all his instincts were suddenly honed to a painfully sharp intensity.

  He was being watched.

  He had left a briefcase on the leather bucket seat under the red plastic wheel. There was nothing important in it. Without touching it, he saw that the case had been moved. Only an inch, but it was enough.

  It could have been a child passing by. A potential thief, who found himself disappointed. Perhaps one of Colonel Mignon’s servants had been curious.

  He didn’t think it was any of these things.

  Up in the conifers that grew on the mountainside above the highway tunnel something moved. It might have been the wind, causing a shift of shadows. But something glinted briefly where sunlight touched metal. He tried to identify it from the tail of his eye but could not without looking directly at the place and he did not want to give away his awareness just yet.

  Except for the briefcase, the car seemed untouched. He got in and put the key in the ignition but did not turn it. He sat for a moment, taking his time, aware of a sudden dryness in his mouth. Then he slid out again and walked around the small car to the rear engine hood. His heart suddenly thumped a little faster than usual.

  When he turned the catch and looked in at the compact Renault engine, he saw the bomb.

  It was a tidy little package in heavy, dark gray metal, a professional rig, competently wired to the ignition. If he had turned the key, the car and he would have gone sky-high.

  He put his right hand forward to disconnect the device, then checked himself again, fingers on the yellow wire. He began to sweat but not from the hot sunlight that struck at the back of his neck. Very carefully he withdrew his thumb and forefinger from the yellow wire.

  He looked up at the mountainside. A man stood there, watching him overtly now.

  Two cars went by in rapid succession, heading for the Italian border. They were followed by a tourist bus for Como and the Villa Carlotta and Bellagio. Their engines echoed hollowly in the tunnel as they rounded the curve that bored into the mountainside.

  The birds sang. Music came from the fishing village far below. Everything had acquired a new intensity and meaning for Durell.

  When he looked down again at the booby trap on the Caravelle engine, he saw the second bomb, tucked under the generator, with the second set of wires leading from the one he had almost pulled free.

  He was expected to find the first bomb. But the wires from the second were black and taped to the coat of road dust and grease along the engine block, almost invisible. If he had disconnected the first, the second packet of plastic explosive would have gone off as he bent directly over it.

  A sure thing.

  So it had begun, he thought.

  Amos Rand, the man assigned to cooperate with him from the FBI, was waiting for him at the little hotel above Paradiso where they had met that morning. Amos would have to wait, Durell decided. He hoped Amos wouldn’t push the panic button and call the Embassy at Berne, where he was normally stationed on security watch. Because he would be quite late after his interview with Colonel Mignon, Durell decided.

  He straightened, closed the engine cover with elaborate care, and looked at the colonel’s villa. He thought he saw one of the peasant servant women move back from a curtain that stirred in one of the tall second-story windows when he turned his head that way. She had been watching, too.

  But it didn’t have to mean anything.

  The man in the woods above the tunnel was quite another matter.

  Durell walked toward the gate of the villa as if he had forgotten something and were returning to Colonel Mignon for it. The oleanders and the clipped shrubs that flanked the road screened him from the watcher in the woods on the hillside. The man moved again, as if to keep him in line of sight, and this puzzled Durell, because a professional would have been as motionless as stone at this moment. He was big, a dark, bulking shadow in the piney darkness, and it was his wrist watch that had caught the sunshine and given him away with its brief flicker of reflected fight.

  It was almost two hundred yards to the tunnel mouth and another hundred up the wooded slope to where the watcher stood. Durell moved behind the screen of clipped shrubbery, hugged the high stucco wall of Mignon’s villa, and moved fast, spurred now by a dark flame, of anger.

  The big man stood in the woods like a monolith, not moving at present, ignoring the still, sticky heat that was like a fog among the trees. A single shaft of sunlight slanted over his massive, hunched shoulders and struck the back of his thick neck like the flat of an axe. The mosquitoes had found him and stung his face and hands badly; he’d had no breakfast or lunch, and since he liked to cook and eat, his stomach rumbled with a steady discomfort that for him was the worst agony he could endure. He had long and powerful arms, the face of a Neanderthal, and stubby legs as tough as oak. He stood rooted in the soft loam of the woods above the lake, solid and implacable and without thought except for the job he had come to do. The gun he carried was a U.S. Army Colt .45, and he had two extra clips to go with it.

  He didn’t like the woods or the country or anything that didn’t have the solid, comforting feel of a city sidewalk under his feet. He had an odd, primitive fear of nature and he would gladly have left his post to return to the comfortable house where the others were waiting.

  But they couldn’t wait. And you did what you were told. There was no turning back. They had you in a hammer lock and they’d break your back if you weren’t very, very careful.

  They. . . .

  Only a few minutes to go. Then he could report back. He moved, looking at his watch. It was past noon. His stomach rumbled emptily. He had the strength of two ordinary men and ate enough for four. Being hungry was awful. He dreaded it almost as much as the countryside made him uneasy. He looked at his watch again. He couldn’t see anything down on the road. To hell with it. It was time to go.

  Beyond Mignon’s villa a footpath led down toward the red and yellow roof tiles of the fishing village, making a series of steps down the steep slope to the lake. Along the verge of the road toward the tunnel, a row of clipped evergreens gave Durell an effective shield. He moved quickly, parallel to the highway, reached the cut-stone face of the tunnel mouth and paused. The shoulder of the hill blocked his view of the spot where the man had been standing. He scrambled up, using small shrubs to pull himself above the tunnel and over the road. A few more cars whined by, echoing under him in the heart of the mountainside. He kept climbing, ducked into the shadows of the pines, and approached the spot where the watcher had been.

  But the man was gone now.

  Durell swore softly and quickened his silent step through the brush. There was a path of sorts here, winding upward through the pine needles. There was not much he could see in the hot shadows of the trees. The footpath cut sharply right and came out on a small level area where he could look back and down to the terrace of Colonel Mignon’s villa. The old man wasn’t on the chaise any more. Nothing stirred down there. A chipmunk made a flash of striped browns almost underfoot. He paused and listened. There were small thudding sounds on the hillside above him. He followed, moving quickly and in silence.

  He came to a place where the big man had tripped over a root and fallen. The imprint of a massive hand was clear in the soft earth under the pines. He took off his sunglass
es and shoved them with his left hand into his breast pocket and took out his .38 The sounds of the other man came from the left, away from the path, which had become almost invisible in the loam. He had lost his way and was standing still, confused. Durell climbed higher, above him, still not actually having his quarry in sight, feeling more puzzled by what seemed to be an unusual ineptitude on the other’s part. He started down toward him, moving very slowly, watching every footfall.

  There was no sunlight here in the deep woods, and the air was still and stifling. At last he saw his man in a small clearing, turning right and left in uncertainty. He was a huge shadow, moving around the clearing like an animal in a cage.

  The man turned at the last moment, squinting, and saw Durell coming. Durell made the clearing in a last quick rush and slammed his gun into the other’s big belly.

  “Drop it,” he said.

  “Hey, now—”

  “Quickly!”

  “Look, how did you—?”

  The man spoke English; he was obviously an American. His voice was an animal grumble of puzzlement. He was grotesque and beetle-browed, the ugliest man Durell had ever seen. He wore a gaudy sport shirt under a rough linen coat. His belly was enormous but it did not yield to the prodding pressure of the gun. It was like probing into rock. From under the heavy brows the man’s small eyes regarded the .38 with disdain.

  “Lay off, pail,” he rumbled.

  He kept his Colt .45 in big bananalike fingers. Then he looked into Durell’s eyes and dropped it, grinned, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re Durell, hey? The guy they call Cajun?”

  “You ought to know. You’ve been watching me long enough.” Durell’s anger was dangerous; he tried to control it. “You gimmicked my car.”

  “Not me. It wasn’t me.”

  “You were looking straight at it. You saw who did it?” “It was a repair truck. While you were in the pink house. I figured you had engine trouble and sent for them. Two guys in overalls. They wasn’t long.”