Assignment - Quayle Question Read online

  Brambles slashed at Durell’s hunting outfit. A leafy branch slapped his face. He jumped fallen logs, went through a thick area of brush, then took a long slide down the rocky slope toward the edge of the road.

  Durell had shot accurately. The right front tire of the Porsche was flat, breaking apart, pieces of the rubber flying high in the air. As the driver desperately fought the wheel, the vehicle hit the shoulder again, tipped on its side and rolled over, skidded on its roll-bar like an upside-down beetle, and came to a halt at the edge of a steep drop into the valley stream below.

  Dust boiled up around it.

  “Wait,” Franklin gasped. “It might explode—”

  “Let’s get Tomash’ta out of there.”

  Durell did not look back to see if Franklin had followed. He ran across the road toward the wrecked vehicle, and fought at the upside-down door handle. The panel was caved in; it would not open. The windshield was starred and shattered in an intricate maze of webbed cracks. He could not see inside. He ran around the front of the car and tried the other side, where the driver slumped, hanging by his safety belts behind the wheel. This door was stubborn, too. Durell yanked at it, got it partly open, and reached in for the man who hung there so helplessly.

  Behind him, Franklin drew a handgun and waited.

  A small tongue of fire leaped from the back end of the car. Durell’s movements were careful and precise. The buckle of the lap and shoulder belts was stubborn only for a moment. Then the driver was free. Durell smelled the acrid smoke, thought of the gas tank, thought of it exploding and enveloping them all in a boiling ball of flame. He pulled the driver free by the shoulders, heels dragging, and got away from the wrecked car, down the shoulder of the road, ten, twenty, thirty feet.

  The fuel tank exploded with a deafening roar. A great cloud of black smoke billowed up into the evening air. The sound rumbled back and forth between the long mountain ridges on either side of the valley. Durell felt the blast like a blow across the stomach; he stumbled, kept hauling at the driver, got him safely into the brush.

  The Porsche burned with a crackling finality.

  Durell rolled the driver over.

  Franklin began to swear in a thin voice. “That’s not a Japanese.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not Tomash’ta. But it’s his car.” Franklin sounded outraged, as if such a thing could not be, and was a deliberate affront. “What happened?”

  “Tomash’ta outsmarted us. This one is just a decoy.”

  He felt urgency vibrating along all the intricate nervous patterns of his body. His eyes went dark. The driver was just a boy, with straw-colored hair, a freckled face, a checked flannel shirt, and corduroy slacks held up by a wide, brass-studded belt. Durell flicked hands over the young man’s body, found no weapons, plucked out a wallet.

  “He’s still breathing,” Franklin said. “Thank God.”

  “His name is Henry Fields. From Jackson Station. That’s about fifteen miles from here, at the junction of the Interstate.” Durell flicked the wallet. “He has a hundred dollar bill, two singles, and some petty change. Local youngster.”

  “I don’t get it,” Franklin complained.

  “It means Tomash’ta knew, or guessed, that we were waiting here to bushwhack him.”

  “Knew? Guessed?”

  Marcus and Henley came running down the road toward them. They were still some distance away.

  Durell breathed thinly through his nose. Franklin said, “But he couldn’t have known about us, Cajun.”

  “I think he did.”

  The remote valley was quiet. The sun was gone, sliding down behind the ridge. The darkness of evening fell like so many thin gray curtains, and the pale sky to the east was already black over the mountaintops. The White Spring Spa Hotel was two miles away to the north, and beyond it was the village. Someone there would see the plume of black smoke rising from the wrecked car. The Porsche burned with a hungry, crackling noise. Durell could feel the heat of the flames even from where they stood.

  He thought of Deidre in the command post set up in the hippie van. He thought of the silent radio, the alarm and surprise in her last words before communication was broken.

  He swore tightly.

  The boy was coming to, groaning. There was a bad bruise on his forehead, his nose was bleeding, and his left arm looked broken. When his eyes opened, they had a dazed, faraway look in their gray depths.

  Durell knelt beside him. “Son?”

  “Oh, gosh. I’m hurt. My arm—”

  “You’ll be all right. What happened to you?”

  “Oh, gosh. I told him I’d be careful with his fancy little car—”

  “Who did you tell that to?”

  “The foreign guy. The Japanese. He paid me to deliver the car to the Spa.”

  “A Japanese?”

  “Yes, sure. He—”

  “He paid you a hundred dollars?”

  “Yeah. I told him it was too much. He was kind of funny. He never stopped moving. Like a dancer, maybe. Always on his toes. He stopped at Pa’s service station and asked me. Pa said I should do it. Pa is supposed to pick me up at seven tonight, in White Springs. I’m a good driver, mister. I don’t know what happened. It was a great car. Handled like silk. I—”

  The boy tried to sit up. Durell held him down with a gentle hand. He looked at Franklin. Tomash’ta’s dossier recorded the man as a one-time professional dancer.

  “You take care of him,” he told Franklin. “I’m going up to the hotel.”

  “It’s two miles. You going to walk?”

  “I’m going to run,” Durell said.

  Chapter Three

  He tried the radio again. There was still no answer from Deirdre.

  He had been with her on the Chesapeake Bay skipjack he had converted from its original oyster-boat rig to a broadbeamed, stable sailer they used on his rare returns to Washington. General McFee had called himself, and there was no denial to the quiet orders. They had returned to D.C. in her car.

  There was a time when he and Deirdre had almost ended their love affair when she began to insist on marriage. He had refused, not because he did not love her enough to want to make her his wife, but because of the business he was in. He had known too many good men whose lives ended due to a moment’s inattention, a distraction, or the long attrition of concern for someone. An instant’s carelessness could be lethal. More to the point, he did not want to make himself vulnerable by threats aimed at Deirdre.

  She had countered by joining McFee’s little agency herself, training at the Maryland “Farm” and passing every test with high colors. Deirdre was exceedingly competent in everything she did. There was a calm serenity in her that made him feel at home with her, when he had no real home in all the world. A tall girl, she had dark hair touched with coppery tints, like a brush fire seen at black midnight; her oval face and gray eyes never betrayed impatience with him. She gave herself freely and joyously when they were together. But he had not liked it on the few occasions when McFee assigned them to work together. For him, she was the most desirable woman in the world. There had been other women, and he did not question her own life when they were apart. But when they were together, as when they had gone sailing three days ago on the late September waters of the Chesapeake, it was as if they had never been apart.

  No. 20 Annapolis Street was an innocuous graystone building whose brass plaque inside the lobby door advertised the offices of various commercial, legal, and lobbying firms. No one who did not belong there got farther than the lobby. Although there were two elevators, Adam Kesselman, who was on duty when they arrived, waved them down the hall and into a doorway whose frosted glass indicated a manufacturer of Capitol souvenirs and gimcracks. The door actually opened into a small elevator that took them up past the second floor, where Analysis and Synthesis people prepared reports for McFee to present to the White House, Joint Chiefs, and other appropriate bureaus. In the basement of No. 20 Annapolis was the lab, where gimmic
kry was devised and tested—most of which Durell usually refused. The topmost floor held Dickinson McFee’s private apartment, an aerie he rarely left.

  “Sit down, Samuel. Deirdre.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m on leave, you know, General. Ever since I returned from Sumatra.”

  “Sit down, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your contract expires this month, Samuel. No renewal has been recommended. Too risky for you.”

  “It would be too risky for K Section,” Durell said quietly, “not to renew it.”

  Dickinson McFee merely stared at him from behind the desk. The apartment did not look like an office. It could have been any middle-aged bachelor’s quarters, furnished with heavy leather, bookcases from floor to ceiling, a small but efficient kitchen, a bedroom in which there was nothing personal or intimate to betray McFee’s private life.

  On the desk near the fireplace was a pile of foreign newspapers: the Milan Corriere della Sera, opened to a red-penciled article by one Professor Rafaelo Buzzati; the Soviet foreign affairs weekly, Za Rubezhom; a clipping from the Malaysian news agency Bernama, datelined Kuala Lumpur.

  The fireplace was false, leading to a ladder to the roof and an escapeway from the building that only McFee and four others knew about. Also on the desk, next to the newspapers, was McFee’s blackthorn walking stick. It was an instrument devised by the lab boys, equipped with a spring sword, a thermite bomb, and possibly other gadgets that Durell preferred not to know about. He had been threatened with that stick once, and he hoped it would never happen again.

  “It is precisely because of Sumatra that I called you in,” McFee said. “I need you both. It is a matter of fairly high priority.”

  “Isn’t it always, sir?”

  “Are you annoyed with me, Samuel?”

  “My vacation has been interrupted.”

  “It is exactly because you are recently back from the Sumatra assignment that I need you. And Deirdre, too. I saw nothing in your debriefing to indicate that you ran into Kokui Tomash’ta there.”

  “The kamikaze assassin from Red Lotus? No.”

  “But you worked with Eli Plowman,” McFee stated.

  “If you can call it that. He fouled us up.”

  “Tomash’ta was one of Eli’s hit men.”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “No. But he is here in the States, on business. His own peculiar business.” McFee looked quietly at Dierdre, but did not address her directly. “He still works for Plowman.”

  “But I thought—”

  “That we laundered Plowman? He got away from us in Singapore.”

  “I’m not in that end of the business,” Durell said. “I have no sympathy for Plowman’s ‘sanitation squad.’ He’s an assassin, and even if he does fight fire with fire for our side, I’ve never subscribed to it and don’t do so now. He referred to his work as a garbage detail, cleaning the world of killers, terrorists, and it all became an excuse in his mind for selective murder. We didn’t get along in Sumatra. If he got away from you in Singapore, send someone else after him.”

  “I’m sending you,” McFee said flatly. “You and Deirdre. It’s more important that simply changing our policy and eliminating Plowman’s performances. He’s working against us now, in a sense.”

  “In a sense, sir? Either he is, or he isn’t.”

  “Do not be flip with me, Samuel.”

  “No, sir. I simply want to be clear about it. If the job is to find Plowman and kill him, then send someone else. It’s not my line of work.”

  McFee said, “It’s to keep Plowman from killing someone else. Since you worked with Eli in Sumatra, presumably you know something of his methods which, frankly, have been too distasteful and incriminating for us to document. He is a dangerous man. You may not be able to cope with him.”

  Durell smiled. “Then send someone else.”

  “I’m sending you, and a man from the FBI, and two others from DIA, since this will be a domestic assignment.”

  “And Deirdre?”

  “I include Deirdre because I think the safest place for her to be, in the next few days, is with you.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because she may well be on Eli Plowman’s list for elimination,” McFee said softly.

  The thing you always fear the most rarely comes to pass, Durell thought. He ran up the road from the wrecked Porsche at a long, easy stride that ate up the distance to the White Spring Spa Hotel. Behind him, the fire from the car’s ruptured gas tank had died down. Franklin had stayed with the decoy driver, the hired youth from Jackson Station. The first stars began to shine in the eastern sky, far off over the Shenandoah, and there was no longer any direct light from the setting sun. The shadows across the road in the depths of the valley were cold and dark.

  Marcus and Henley kept pace with him. They were professionals, and wasted no time asking questions. They knew what they had to do.

  There was a high brick wall topped by flat concrete slabs with shards of glass embedded in diem, surrounding the cottage compound of the White Spring Spa. Even in today’s relative austerity, there were a number of cars visible through the ornate iron gate to the left. Most of the cottages had wood-burning fireplaces, laid and set by the Jamaican attendants, and many of them were working. The pungent smell of wood-smoke made Marcus sneeze.

  “Keep it quiet,” Durell said.

  “Sorry.”

  Marcus was short and stocky, with the immense musculature of a circus acrobat, which he had once been. His brown face was contrite. In contrast, Henley of the DIA was an ascetic-looking man with remarkably brilliant blue eyes; he had a professional air, and also a look of helplessness that was immensely appealing to women. Both men were experts in the business. They had scouted ahead like bird dogs, fanning out along the rutted trail where Deirdre’s van should have been waiting. They found it half a mile up the mountainside, driven into the thick brush overlooking the Spa. The battered vehicle seemed innocuous, the whorls of wild paint that decorated its panels artfully similar to dozens of other vans and campers that plagued the Federal Forest Preserve.

  Deirdre was not in the van.

  Durell checked for the keys, found them still in the ignition, and opened the back doors to search further. Old sleeping bags were arranged on the floor in a mare’s-nest to allay any local official’s suspicion. The radio, which had been incorporated into a commercial frame, was not operative. There was no sign of violence. Henley checked the leafy, spongy ground around the van, sniffing like an old Indian tracker.

  “Anything?” Durell asked.

  “She went down to the Spa, Cajun.”

  “Alone?”

  “Can’t see anything else in this light. Can I use a flash?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “Don’t get tight about it, Cajun. The transceiver probably conked out on its own initiative.”

  “I think not.”

  “What do you think, then?”

  Durell was silent, then signaled the two men to follow him down to the compound wall. Marcus swung himself up into the limbs of a white oak and vanished into the gloom. It was growing totally dark now. The stars and a rising new moon offered little help. Durell heard the hooting of a small owl in the forested slopes that formed the north side of the notch. The clock in the Town Hall belfry of the village, half a mile north, sent out mellow chiming sounds. It was just seven o’clock. High on the crest of the ridge, a few lights shone from a building or a house situated up there. Durell looked at the faint yellow twinkling through the leaves, then looked up into the big oak tree.

  “Marcus?”

  “In a minute, Cajun. No sweat.”

  There was a faint crackling of broken twigs, a sly creaking in the tree, a few fallen leaves, betraying Marcus’s movements up there. Beyond the wall, a brook chuckled and rippled in its chilly movement.

  “Cajun?”

  It was Marcus’s whisper.

  “Cajun, they have security men and gua
rd dogs. Coming this way. Shall I take them?”

  Durell sent a whispered order upward. “No. The dogs would bark. Come on down.”

  “How do we get over the wall, then?”

  “We’ll go under. Henley, the brook you hear has to have an exit culvert. Can you find it?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Marcus leaped soundlessly down out of the tree. They moved north along the high wall, came to the circular culvert where the brook came out of the hotel grounds. A web of iron rods blocked the way in. Durell tested them, kneeling in the icy water, and found that the grill had been removed and then carefully replaced to look untouched. It took only a moment for them all to crawl through.

  According to McFee’s briefing, the cottage he wanted was the third one up a steep walking path beside the little brook. He waited until the watchman with the guard dog had turned behind the massive building that housed the indoor swimming-pool and gone up the other side toward the Spa’s main building. Then he was up, moving fast, the sense of urgency within him stronger than ever.

  Chapter Four

  FILE KAPPA 2375/GB AS DEPT.

  FOR: McF. Eyes Only

  FROM: MAGDA 1001

  Sections 2290/Zed 5, 18/Sigma.66

  COLLATOR: A. Mitstein

  COMMENTS AS FOLLOWS:

  On Friday the 15th, in the high cordilleras of the Bolivian mountains near the village of Tacuiba, the Argentine industrialist Señor Roberto Gomez da Ucuman was kidnapped from bis private ski lodge by a group of six or possibly seven men equipped with submachine guns and rushed away in >a high-powered car.

  The local Indian servants and family of Señor Roberto Ucuman were unable to give more than a confused and garbled version of the affair. They seemed terrorized. Their statements were contradictory.

  Ucuman had had his usual breakfast and stepped out on the terrace to enjoy the cold dawn over the spurs of the snow-capped Andes. The authorities under the district minister believed this was yet another terrorist move aimed at wealthy businessmen, foreign executives, and industrialists, designed to extract a large ransom to finance the outlaw groups, following the pattern of such events in South America. Señor Ucuman was president and major stockholder of Partigas Industriales, S.A., a multi-million dollar complex of tin mines, shoe factories, sheep ranches, department stores, a small railroad, a fish cannery in Venezuela, two oil tankers, and a number of small newspaper chains including the well-known L’Assuncion.