Assignment - Karachi Read online

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sarah Standish didn’t smoke. Sarah has gray eyes, not blue. She’s at least two inches taller, and her hair isn’t tinted. Her glasses are fake, with no prescription lenses, worn because she feels they defend her, somehow. Perhaps she think’s they give her more of an air of business competence.” Durell’s voice was flat and harsh in the hot, still air of the garden. The girl had shrunk a step or two away from him. “I don't know. I only know that you’re not Sarah Standish. Where is she?”

  “I—”

  “And who are you?”

  “Oh, please—”

  “Is she safe?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Alive?”

  “Of course, I—”

  “Where?”

  “In Karachi. With the von Buhlens.”

  “Then why are you here, as Sarah Standish?”

  “We arrived just yesterday. We thought it best—”

  Her voice trailed off again. He did not want to give her a chance to recover. It might have been useful and interesting to have waited a little, to learn her game without smashing down her defenses, to see what her ultimate objective might be. But he could not wait. His job was to protect Sarah Standish. He had to know the truth at once.

  He looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock. He had landed in Karachi nine hours ago, and thanks to the attempted to murder him—for which he had a number of unanswered questions—he had contacted no one except K’Ayub, as yet.

  The girl had not replied to his last query. She turned away, biting her lip in a gesture that was most uncharacteristic of Sarah. A professional actress could have done much better. A professional in Durell’s business would have had no such difficulty.

  Amateurs were always getting themselves killed. . . .

  “Did you all know what plane I was landing in?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “All of us knew. I’m sorry, but— please keep your voice down. I suppose this whole thing is silly, but Colonel K’Ayub isn’t supposed to know yet. After all, if the whole group is in some kind of danger—”

  “Where do you fit into it?”

  “I’m Jane King,” she said.

  “And?”

  She smiled wanly. “I’m secretary to Miss Standish. I always have been—that is, for the last two years. It feels like always to me.”

  “And who asked you to act out this masquerade?”

  “Mr. Donegan, at the American Institute Building. He said we were all threatened, somehow, considering what had happened to the members of the first expedition to S-5, and that fanatics were everywhere. He said that Miss Standish was a sitting duck for a kidnap attempt and that she had to be protected at all costs.”

  “So you volunteered to be a decoy?” Durell asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Knowing the danger?”

  “I—I’m being well paid,” she said.

  “Doesn’t your salary as Miss Standish’s secretary pay you enough? Do you deliberately have to stick your neck out to someone who might want to kidnap or even kill Miss Standish?”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said thinly. “It was only for today and tomorrow, anyway—just until we all leave to pick up our equipment in Rawalpindi.”

  “It doesn’t take long to die, sometimes,” Durell said. He did not know what to make of this girl. He was sure she was not telling him everything. She looked flustered and dismayed, because her attempt to fool him with Sarah’s identity had failed so quickly and miserably. But there was more to her discomfort than that. He looked at her steadily for a moment. She met his gaze, crushed out her cigarette, and recovered enough poise to smile wryly.

  He said quietly, “Donegan suggested the masquerade for you?”

  “Yes. After all, he’s an intelligence officer—”

  “Who else? I mean, who else here knows who you really are?”

  “Well, Rudi knows—I mean, Mr. von Buhlen.”

  “How well do you know him, Jane?”

  “We met in Switzerland last winter.”

  “When he became engaged to Miss Standish, your employer?”

  Jane King flushed. “Yes.”

  “I hear that Rudi von Buhlen is charming to women.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he charm you?”

  Her chin came up defiantly. “You’re insulting, do you know that?” “I mean to be,” Durell said. “It’s one way to provoke answers. Anyway, Rudi knows you’re posing as Miss Standish, to draw any fire that might be aimed at her.”

  “If you want to put it that way. Rudi first suggested it. And Mr. Donegan thought it was a good idea. But I guess I just wasn’t up to it with anyone who really knows Miss Sarah.”

  “Who else knows of this extra job of yours? Miss Standish? Mr. Donegan? No one else?”

  “No one.”

  She sat down suddenly and began to shiver, although the heat in the walled garden was oppressive now. She clasped her hands and pressed them in her lap between her thighs and leaned forward, as if she were in pain. Durell watched her. She denied fear, he thought; but she was possessed by it. His anger was gone—at least, it was no longer directed against Jane King. He believed as much as she had told him. He would take care of the rest of it with Donegan, in Karachi.

  “Jane?”

  She shook her bowed head. He could see the part in her hair, the severe arrangement of the thick brown strands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “There’s nothing to cry about,” he said.

  “Isn’t there?”

  “Unless there’s more, that you haven’t told me.”

  “It’s nothing that concerns you.”

  “Everything about everyone involved in this concerns me,” he said.

  “No. It’s just that I’m a fool, that’s all.”

  “A fool about what? You did your best.”

  She lifted her head with an effort, and he saw the tears in her blue eyes behind the fake, heavily-rimmed glasses. She had a Midwestern accent, too, he decided, that was far removed from the polished finishing-school language of Sarah Standish. When she stood up and walked away from him, down the garden path, he saw that she had the head and face of a prim schoolteacher and the body of an exotic courtesan. And she was probably unaware of either phenomenon.

  There was time for a shower, a fresh bandage on his leg, and food and coffee, before Colonel K’Ayub indicated he was ready to go into the city of Karachi. The thermometer inside the front door of the villa registered 110 degrees. It would be hotter in Karachi.

  They rode in a scout car, preceded by a jeep-load of natty soldiers and followed by two motorcycles. K’Ayub was not bashful about his political and military authority. He chatted easily about international problems, his big, soft body relaxed on the back seat. Jane King, still acknowledged by the Pakistani strong man as Sarah Standish, sat between him and Durell.

  “All is arranged for our departure to Rawalpindi tomorrow,” K’Ayub said. “The equipment is ready, the porters are hired, our quarters as we proceed to Base Camp One and the higher altitudes will be waiting for us. You are acquainted with mountain climbing, Mr. Durell?”

  “I’ve done some. I’m not an expert.”

  “Just so. But S-5 is really not much of a challenge to a climber. Rather uninteresting, in fact, except for the North Peak. I understand the first guide, Hans Steicher, is very professional. I’ve been in the area several times—a wild, desolate and beautiful land. We should be at our goal within the week, if all goes well.”

  “Do you expect it not to?”

  K’Ayub’s pale yellow eyes were without expression. “There is the Emir at Mirandhabad to deal with. And another element, as yet unclear, that obviously wishes to keep us out. We shall learn about it all, in good time.”

  Karachi broiled under the oppressive August sun. The road into it traversed a land that was flat and seared to the horizon. To the right, Durell glimpsed the moving white lines of the surf from the A
rabian Sea. The Indus valley was a land of scorpions and vipers and eternally moaning hot winds. The scorched plain where Alexander the Great led his army from the Indus in 325 B.C. looked empty of water and life, except for the poisonous insects and herbs. Inland, the blazing sand hills rolled as far as he could see.

  Karachi held no charm or interest. It looked parched, a vast sprawl of flat roofs with a few domes and minarets upthrust through brown trees. The asphalt streets oozed, the diesel tramcars clanged irritably, and rubber-wheeled drays piled with cotton and pulled by philosophical donkeys or camels reluctantly got out of the way of K’Ayub’s convoy. Here, too, the white-collared crows that scavenged the city perched on every sagging power line.

  There was noise and heat and confusion. On Victoria Road, Durell saw the ramshackle slums and markets, the improvised minarets and mosques where the mullahs, the Moslem interpreters and teachers of the Koran, held forth in strident voices. It was a quarter occupied by emigrants and refugees crowding into the city because of the seasonal drought. Some of the transients worked the docks along the muddy channels of the Indus, others found occupation in the slum streets. Traffic tangled insanely in the heat. There were bullock wagons and bicycle rickshaws and twowheeled donkey carts, three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, and ordinary rickshaws drawn by skinny, brown, barefooted men in dirty shorts or swathed in the sheet-like lungyis wrapped around their bodies. Here and there a covered tonga cart went by, drawn by a skeletal horse.

  They passed the resettlement project on Drigh Road, cut in and out of the nondescript interurban commuter buses, came into an area of new stucco houses, spacious yards and brown lawns. Water tanks probed the coppery sky from every roof, since Karachi provided no municipal water pressure, and air-conditioners wheezed and pumped in every balcony window.

  Lathri K’Ayub was patient with the traffic, soft-faced and sleepy-eyed. “You wish to consult with Mr. Donegan at once?” he asked Durell, as they reached the more spacious part of the city.

  “I think it would be wise.”

  “And Miss Standish?” His yellow eyes slid to Jane’s knees.

  Durell said, “She will accompany me, from now on.” “As you wish. I have some business to attend to. A plane is ready for tomorrow’s flight to Rawalpindi, where we meet Hans Steicher. The von Buhlens are at a villa rented by Miss Standish. I shall leave the scout car for your convenience, if you will forgive my abandoning you.” “Are the others being guarded against any attempts at injury or sabotage?”

  “Indeed, yes. Although I am not fully convinced as to the fate of the original expedition members. If they met with foul play, however, the plot will be crushed.”

  There was something about the colonel that reminded Durell of other strong men in new countries—tough, ruthless, ambitious.

  “We’ll see,” Durell said.

  Donegan’s suite of offices was in a recently constructed building that was fully air-conditioned, when the apparatus worked. It felt cool, even clammy, after the blasting heat in the streets. Durell took Jane King’s arm and led her reluctantly down the corridor.

  “Must I go with you?” the girl murmured.

  “Why not? I’m supposed to be your bodyguard.”

  “But shouldn’t you go directly to see Miss Sarah?” “She’s safe. I have to assume I can trust K’Ayub.” She looked away and murmured, “I’ve discovered you can’t trust anybody in this world.”

  “Why so discouraged. Because you’re going to lose the extra pay Miss Standish promised you to pose as a. stand-in and target?”

  “Maybe” she said bitterly.

  “You ought to consider yourself well out of it.”

  She looked uneasy. “Are you angry with her, too, for doing this?”

  “I don’t like the idea of anybody using money to set someone else to die for them.”

  “I’m still alive,” Jane King pointed out.

  “I think you’ve just been lucky,” Durell said.

  Daniel Donegan’s business as part-time K Section man for the CIA in Karachi was covered by the offices set up here as a branch of an economic development mission sponsored by the U.S. government. And wherever you go in the world, Durell thought, Washington’s bureaucracy managed to take seed and adapt itself and yet look the same. There were the civil service typists with disillusioned faces in the outer offices, the expensive electronic office equipment and standard green and gray filing cabinets and carefully apportioned desks of various sizes, according to status protocol and the hierarchy of civil service rank.

  Durell left Jane King in an outer room, seated in a leather chair next to a table covered by month-old copies of Time, Life and the Post. The girl was docile now, accepting his orders without question. She sat meekly, hands folded, and nodded.

  “You’re not to leave here under any circumstances until I’m finished with Donegan, understand?” he told her.

  “Yes, Mr. Durell.” She hesitated. “But I haven’t done anything wrong. It was Mr. Donegan’s idea that I pose as Miss Sarah.”

  “I understand that. As soon as we’re through here, we’ll find some tint and get your hair back to normal and you can wear your own clothes and get rid of those glasses.

  I won’t feel easy about you until you can’t be mistaken by some fanatic as your boss.”

  “Yes.”

  He left her sitting quietly in the windowless room and went in to see Donegan, anger riding his footsteps, thinking of Jane’s prim face and lush, provocative body.

  Daniel Donegan shook hands with a quick, limp gesture and gave Durell’s credentials only a cursory glance. He was a small man, his shoulders narrow in a white cotton suit. Although it was comfortable in the air-conditioned office, he was sweating, and there were beads of moisture on his brown, freckled scalp. He listened to Durell’s report on what had happened since he landed in Karachi, nodded once or twice, and blinked bloodshot brown eyes rapidly, offering apologies for the whole matter.

  He seemed, to Durell, to be a man living in a swamp of fear.

  “I’m sorry, truly sorry,” Donegan said, blinking again. “I’m not equipped to cope with this sort of thing. It’s really not my line.”

  “Why not?” Durell asked. “It’s a simple matter.”

  “Miss Sarah Standish cannot in any way be considered a simple matter. To be responsible for her safety in this city— indeed, anywhere in this country—is too nerve-wracking. You don’t know what she’s like. She wants everything her way. And she’s such an important personality back home, I shudder at the thought of anything happening to her.”

  “But you’re not so worried about anything happening to Jane King, is that it?”

  “Miss King does not represent Standish Nickel and eight hundred million dollars,” Donegan said thickly.

  “Does all that money bother you?”

  “Miss Standish is an influential woman back home—”

  “And her money has thrown you off balance, is that it?” “See here, I resent—”

  “Listen to me,” Durell said harshly. His anger was thick in him, his dark blue eyes looked black and hard and cruel. “You can’t equate money with the value of anyone’s life.”

  Donegan protested feebly. “Your job is to protect Miss Standish, to see that she comes through this utterly quixotic venture without harm. She’s in the company of a rather peculiar lot of foreigners, I must say. And I merely thought it would be helpful to arrange a simple subterfuge to throw any potential fanatics off the track. We’re not wanted up there in Pakhusti, you know.” Donegan’s bald head glistened with sweat. “You know what happened to the members of the first S-5 group. The Pakhustis have people everywhere. They resent anyone coming into their province. The Emir at Mirandhabad has sworn to be independent. He’ll do anything to keep you from reaching S-5.”

  “I understand all that,” Durell said. “It’s still no reason to put an innocent girl in jeopardy.”

  “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Donegan demanded.

  “A busin
ess like this is too full of danger to have any place for amateurs,” Durell rapped.

  “I didn’t really think—”

  Donegan’s eyes were haunted. “I’m sorry, Durell. I guess it’s all that money belonging to that stony-eyed woman. It’s put me in a panic. If anything happened to Sarah Standish here, my career is finished. Years of work gone out the window. I want to go home, Durell. I’ve got a wife and kids back in Chicago, a mortgage to get rid of, education bills to pay. I don’t want to make any mistakes this last year of my duty out here.”

  Durell knew you cannot reason with fear. He felt a twinge of pity for Daniel Donegan, but an even greater apprehension for what the man had tried to do. The smell of big money created different reactions in different men. In Donegan, it made for poor judgment and cowardice.

  “When did you speak to the real Miss Standish last?” Durell asked.

  “She’s all right. She’s at this villa I got for her and the Austrians—the von Buhlens. I phoned them less than ten minutes ago.”

  “And you spoke to Miss Standish, personally?”

  “Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Durell said.

  He left Donegan’s office a few moments later and paused in the small anteroom outside.

  Jane King’s leather chair was empty.

  The girl had gone.

  chapter five

  SHE walked quickly through the crowded, noisy streets, away from Mr. Donegan’s modern office, but not too quickly to attract attention. The heat outside struck her like a brazen fist, making her flinch. She felt as if all her thoughts had glued together into an amalgam of despair, compounded by the hot sun, the smells, the fear and desperation that gnawed at her belly. For a time she thought she was going to be sick again and throw up on the street. But that would not do. A policeman might stop and be solicitous, and she could not attract sympathy or pause to say who she was or where she was going.

  She couldn’t have answered, anyway. She did not know her destination.

  Everything had gone so wrong since last winter in Switzerland, Jane thought. From a wonderful, miraculous success in New York, getting her job as secretary and companion and —yes, friend, too—to Sarah Standish, things went steadily downhill from a dizzy height of satisfaction.