Assignment White Rajah Read online

  No one was waiting for him. The back door was not locked. He smelled spices, ground roots, and pepper. He stepped inside. The darkness was absolute except for a glimmer of moonlight from an upper window that fingered the stairway. He went up the steps in silence.

  The apartment was furnished with a huge Chinese bed, some porcelains that might or might not have been genuine, a straw rug, bamboo jalousies. Birds or mice rustled on the attic beams overhead. There was a small kitchen, a table and four chairs, a Japanese tatami mat beside the bed, a stained enameled coffeepot on the two-burner stove. A smell of stale cigar smoke tainted the air. A fine ivory Mah-Jongg set lay scattered in flowered tiles on a low table, and on the walls were Arabian brass plates and an old musket. In one comer was a small stone Buddha with incense pots under his smiling, serene countenance.

  Durell looked in the tiny bath, saw a shaving brush with dried lather on it and a razor glinting in the moon-Ught that came through the window. He stood at the window for a few minutes, looking down at the klong and the nearby bridge. If you watched for birds long enough and silently enough, they thought you were a tree or a bush or a shadow and went about their normal activities.

  But nothing was normal about this night in Pasangara.

  He felt the tension as surely as one senses the electricity in the air before a thunderstorm.

  The night was hot and windless. The apartment above the Chinese apothecary's shop was stifling. Durell moved prudently to save his energy. He looked over the bed, found an Mk. 4 recorder bugged to the mattress, and was not amused. There was another recorder in the bathroom, fitted over the cabinet. He did not detach either mechanism, although he was aware that the sounds he had made in entering, however slight and careful, had activated the batteries, and the little spools were silently whirling, recording all his movements.

  There was a large wardrobe of ornate, carved mahogany, a modem piece perhaps from Hong Kong, with circular yin and yang symbols on each of the two doors. He did not touch it for a moment but used his pencil flash to study the carvings and the big brass key that hung at an obtuse angle in the simple lock. It was pointed at an angle equivalent to forty degrees on a compass rose. Two wires were connected to the hinges, very thin and filmy stuff. He traced them to the back and removed them from the terminals of what would be a very loud and noisy alarm. Then he turned the key upright, due north and south, turned it to the left twice, and the wardrobe opened.

  There was only clothing inside—^Chinese costumes, black trousers, jackets, a beautifully embroidered coat with mother-of-pearl and gold-braid dragons on the back. Most of the clothing was a woman's. The scent was light, delicate, exotic. There were also several very short, filmy nylon nighties, a garter beh, and a pair of high-heeled straw pumps, sitting cozily beside a man's worn leather bedroom shppers. With the pencil flash Durell studied the interior walls and dimensions and decided there were no hidden compartments. Then he carefully closed the wardrobe, replaced the key at the 40° angle, hooked up the alarm wires again, and turned to the big, red-lacquered Chinese chest against the opposite wall.

  That had to be it.

  There were double doors and the outside panels were easy enough. As he opened them, however, moving very slowly and resting on his haunches before the cabinet, he heard the faintest click, then a dim whirring, another click, and then silence. He stood up at once and backed away, dousing his light and wiped his hands on a handkerchief, and went back to the window.

  The alley and the klong beyond were silent and black under the big moon. The sky over Chungsu, a mile away, still glowed red, but he no longer heard any sirens. Nothing moved down there except a cat that lazily crossed the alley and the embankment and jumped aboard one of the moored sampans near the bridge.

  He returned to the cabinet and considered the two inner doors. These were also lacquered, with applied moldings in an ornate Chinese design. He ran his fingers over the pattern and found the two strips that were raised fractionally above the others. They connected to the hinges. Durell began to sweat a little. It was not going to be as easy as the wardrobe.

  He wondered how much time he had.

  It would be a JP-6 device, he decided, with enough plastic explosive behind the inner doors to blow his stomach against the opposite wall. He did not hesitate. He pressed both thumbs against the ends of the raised embellishments on the twin panels, exerted pressure, and twisted simultaneously, the right thumb going counterclockwise, the left rotating to the right. Nothing happened. He drew a deep breath and tried again, using more force this time. There was a second click-whir-click sequence. The pencil flash, on the floor at his right knee, was no help now since he had to use both hands. He pushed hard, and the panel suddenly released itself, coming down forward across his thighs as he knelt before the cabinet.

  He was in.

  8

  One side of the interior had shelves stocked with file folders on the lower level and an aerial Epsilon-V camera for infrared exposures at 10,000 feet altitude above sea level. Durell opened the camera and saw it was empty, but there were cannisters of film that were still sealed and unexposed, and he left them all where they had been positioned. He riffled through the file folders, found a tab marked "Thrasher: BETA 77/c," and put it on the floor beside him.

  On a second shelf were folded maps, and he took these out, spread one, and saw three plotted courses, heading from 27° to about 208° south, on an old AAF Aeronautical Chart Nimibered 859 that showed the coast of Malaya with the Goening Benom mountain in Negri Sembilan province oudined with an angry-red grease pencil. The Pasangara River twisted by devious routes toward the mountain from the marshy, jungled shore of the delta. The chart was on a scale of 1:1,000,000 marked 000-E 10200 / 400Nx600 and dated AIC Nov. 1949. The equipment was outdated.

  The middle shelf held a tape recorder, an audioscreen-ing device, and a tiny oscilloscope screen. There was a spool of tape on the recorder, and Durell turned the volume down to its lowest pitch before snapping it on. The recorder hummed and the spools turned. He heard nothing. He turned the volume up higher, and presently he heard a faraway sound, a whisper, a growing roar, a screaming that made him quickly turn it down again. There was a long blank, hissing silence, and then the sounds were repeated two more times.

  Thrasher engines.

  The spool turned and turned for several moments, and then there were pilots' voices:

  "Running low, Theta Hammer Five."

  "No sweat."

  "How much longer?"

  "Four minutes, thirty seconds."

  "I'll have to ditch, Theta Hammer."

  "Hang on, old buddy."

  The voices were mixed—a Midwestern nasal tone, an Alabama drawl, a Yankee twang.

  "Theta Hammer Seven, for Christ's sake, where are we?"

  "Don't worry."

  "Overdue by forty-nine minutes. Jesus, the old man will skin us."

  "We're expected, I told you."

  "Listen, I—"

  "Maintain radio silence, please."

  "I don't give a damn what you say, old buddy, I'm tumin' back. My daddy tol' me never to trust to no strangers—"

  "Shut up, redneck."

  Durell turned to the audioscreening mechanism and the oscilloscope. It was an electronic device used to amplify and select any constant in mixtures of sound, such as traffic, group conversation, or machinery. It could pick out in traffic the characteristic clicking of tappets on one single vehicle out of dozens; in conversation, a single voice in a group debate; in machinery, a particular motor out of a factory floor full of operating hardware. The oscilloscope blinked on with a green glow when he threw the switch; then it showed a series of undulating, widely varying Unes. He pushed a second button and the lines flattened, became constant as they were supposed to.

  "No sweat. Four minutes, thirty seconds."

  And: "Don't worry. We're expected, I told you. Maintain radio silence."

  There had been three sequences of Thrasher jets, three pilots' exchanges,
and in aU of them, one engine and one voice were the only constant.

  Durell snapped off everything, picked up his pencil flash, and considered the dossier file marked "Thrasher: BETA 77/c." There were two sheets of flimsies typed on what looked Uke a West German Olympia with Congressional type:

  PANDA PAS/1/1 SOLO HUNGE3^ CLASS. AA/l/AA Coordinates follow:

  ll/9/69@ 7°-N 104° YIELD 6° 103.66°E Kuantan 6440 118.Imc Zed Gamma Freddie 2. Alt. 2500 est. lowering.

  ll/22/69@ 7.4°N 103.9E Do above Alt. 4700 est. lowering.

  12/19/69@ 7.1°N 103.9°E CS Zed Gamma Freddie

  ---. .--. ..-. Visib. Tanjong Gelang F1.7 sec.

  40 lowering fm. 2000 alt. est.

  URGENT PANDA PAS / ONE: EPSILON-V and Screen 5 Mk.7. Deliver by Williams.

  XX CLASS 2: Monitor since 12/19/69 NEG. Monitor all flights PANDA PAS/1 Neg. Surveillance 24 hrs. neg. DRONE JUDAS 1 course 0*'45'E dates 12/6-12/18-12/22-12/30-1/4-1/7 ALL NEG.

  On the second typewritten sheet of onionskin was a report:

  PANDA/PAS 2/SOLO HUNGER ALPHA Classification: AA/ll/AA MAKE IT AA/1-l/AA Subject: Judas 12, THRASHER 3. Auth: K sec 5 MALAY SUEZ/McF. Itr 2/J Funds: 22, General. File: 77-K Sec. 556/ALPHA 2. Summary:

  In view of local difficulties, request urgent Lotus plane with Epsilon-V to scan areas and coordinates given last 12/20/ and chute Eps. to Coordinate 22xPhillipsx4. Will pick up. If Lotus denied, must go overland, estimated probability success less than 5%. No local recognition, no official complaints. Request urgent dossier Premier Kuang, suggest replacement David Condon. Any info Merrydales, hist, and contemp. bg., highly desirable. Could use field agent under K Control.

  The vanishment of Thrashers definitely ident. this area above described dates. Three only. No reports other locates. Reported to Adm. Pentemore, Navy Dpt. 4, in triplicate, as to Gen. D. McF.

  Will continue invest.

  Repeat data Merrydales send soonest.

  Durell returned the typewritten sheets to the folder and put the folder back with the others in the Chinese cabinet. He smelled faint incense in the air, and somewhere, not too far off, a dim gong sounded in one of the alleys. It was the first human-made sound he had heard since entering the apartment. He straightened, dried his hands again, and considered the four drawers in the opposite side of the cabinet.

  In the third drawer down from the top, he found four handguns. He chose a Walther P-38 and a box of cartridges for it, loaded it, and went to the window. The alley and the canal were silent and deserted. From far away he thought he heard a cry, but it could have been a dog, a bird, or a cat. Or it could have come from a man's agonized throat or from a woman's pleading mouth. He looked up at the moon through the window and was surprised at how much time had gone by.

  The Walther P-38 felt heavy and solid. He closed the cabinet with as much care as he had used when opening it and then went to the big Chinese platform bed where he stretched out with the gun in his hand so that he could watch the door to the apartment.

  He waited for someone to come up the stairs.

  9

  The footsteps ascended as lightly as a zephyr, almost taking him by surprise. The moon now cast its shadowy hght directly on the doorway, leaving Durell in darkness on the bed. He did not move. The door opened and closed silently. The air was still and hot. The shadows in the room were very black or silvered by the moonlight. He heard breathing, a quick and shallow sound, as if the person had been running. He held the gun ready.

  It was a girl. She stepped forward lightly, her head high with a sense of pride and dignity in the way she cocked it. She looked something like a fawn investigating an unfamiliar woodland, almost on tiptoe, ready for instant flight.

  She did not see Durell in the shadows that hid the bed.

  When she crossed to the wardrobe chest, he saw that she was Chinese.

  She behaved at home here. Her black hair caught the moonbeams and shone with glossy life. It was cut in a straight line across her forehead, and her round face was startlingly beautiful, innocent, and young. Her breasts were more fuUy developed than those of the average Chinese girl; her legs were long, slender, and lithe. She smiled to herself and detached the alarm wire with familiarity from the wardrobe and hummed to herself as she opened the doors.

  Durell lay still, watching, the gun ready. She seemed harmless; but in this business, you never knew.

  With a swift hissing sound, she undid the zipper of her dark, embroidered dress that was like a mini-chamesong, slit high up on the thigh; she stepped out of it gracefully, kicked off her sandals, reached behind her shoulders to tmdo her brassiere.

  Durell did not move.

  When she was naked, she moved like a dream of innocence into the tmy bath adjacent to the big room, and he heard the sound of water running in the tub. Somewhere in the town a siren began to wail again. A cock crowed, although it wasn't midnight yet. The girl was a long time in the tub. He couldn't see her, but he heard her splashing and occasionally humming a little Chinese song. Her words were in pai-hua, the simple Chinese detached from Mandarin Kuoyti. She seemed very sure of herself and of her presence in this place, and he considered it for a while and started to get out of bed very quietly, then thought better of it and remained where he was.

  She came out presently, a towel about her slender body. She dropped the towel on the floor when she returned to the wardrobe and selected one of the thin nylon nighties he had seen hanging there. With her arms raised she looked like a nymph, her smooth young face inexpressibly lovely in the moonlight.

  Then she saw him.

  It might have been a glimmering reflection on the barrel of his Walther P-38, pointed at her. Or perhaps she saw his eyes in the darkness.

  She was very good.

  She didn't jump or scream or dart for the door to escape. She didn't move at all. She stood very still, her head turned to face him as he sat on the bed, and he thought that any young girl realizing she had been observed in her intimate privacy would, at least, have cried out. But her face was expressionless, drained of the quiet joy that had been evident before. Her black almond eyes were steady, meeting his. She held her pose for a few long moments, then—

  "Who are you?" she whispered.

  "A friend of George's."

  "George sees no friends here."

  "He sees you," Durell suggested.

  "I—I'm different. We—we're to be married."

  Saying nothing, he continued to sit on the bed, holding the gun. She was aware of it, but she didn't look directly at it or react to it in any overt way. Her self-assurance was a Uttle disturbing.

  She said, "I'm Lily Fan. The premier of Pasangara is my father through his second wife."

  "His favorite daughter, I'll bet."

  "Yes," she said, "I am his favorite."

  "Does he approve of you and George?"

  "No."

  "Do you visit George often here, like this?"

  "Yes."

  She said it simply, almost with pride, her small chin raised, her almond eyes defiant. Durell got up off the bed, the gun in his hand hanging at his side, and moved out of the black shadows that had hidden him. He stood in the shaft of moonhght shining through the window so she could get a good look at him. He was careful with his movements, as he would have been with a wild woodland animal, not wanting to frighten her into flight. She didn't back up or move away from him. Except for the quick rise and fall of her small roimd breasts and a certain posture, as if she were on her toes and ready to whirl and run, she seemed calm and sure of herself. Maybe, he thought, that was because she was the daughter of Premier Kuang.

  When she saw his face, Lily Fan said, "Oh, you must be Sam Durell."

  "Hammond mentioned me, did he?"

  "Oh, yes. This morning, he told me about you."

  "Did he, really?"

  "He said you are an old friend in the same agency with him"

  "What agency is that?" Durell asked.

  "Oh, George doesn't tell me too much. You don't hav
e to worry about that. He is very careful, even with me."

  "I'll bet."

  "He is!'" Her exclamation was defensive. "He is a fine, good, wonderful man, who has been so terribly, terribly hurt in his life so many times, and I love him dearly—"

  He interrupted with deliberate brutallty. "You're a little young for him, aren't you, Lily?"

  "Age makes no difference when one loves the soul as well as the—as well—"

  She dropped her glance, and he saw the thick black arcs of her lashes. They formed little fans on her round cheeks, and her face was Uke a lily, too, and he decided she was aptly named. Her aura of innocence was incredible. Standing as she did in her brief nylon nightdress, her black hair tied up with a ribbon in a bun at the top of her small head, she was an object of every man's desire. She opened her black eyes wide, suddenly.

  "George didn't say you were coming tonight."

  "No, I suppose he didn't."

  "And no one is supposed to know this is his place."

  "That's right."

  "How did you find it? Are you angry with George? You sound angry. You wiU please point that gun away from me? It makes me so nervous. Please?"

  She didn't look nervous at all. She came closer to him at last, and still as if on tiptoe, she looked up at his height, his sun-browned face, his eyes that looked black in the moonlight. She touched his cheek.

  "Oh, you are a friend," she whispered.

  "I don't think so."

  "You will not hurt Lily Fan, will you?"

  He was silent.

  "Or George? I love George. He is so wonderful— "

  "George is a tired old man," Durell said harshly. "And you know too much, Lily."

  She was quick, but not quick enough, as she tried for his gun. He held it with a deliberate appearance of looseness in his fingers at his side, and her knowledge of grips and holds would have done credit to the training given to K Section people at the Maryland "Farm." She was small but adept and strong, and she almost threw him off balance with her heel hooked behind his, her chop at his throat, her knee rising to smash into his groin. He avoided the last, countered her chop by catching her wrist, twisting the fragile bones down and outward, and at the same time, he pinned her, all in one movement, around the end of the Chinese platform bed and threw her backward. She landed with a thud, bounced, tried to rise, but he was over her kneeling, his forearm across her throat, applying just enough pressure to wain her that her larynx would be crushed if she resisted.