Assignment - Ankara Page 8

  “Been looking for you, Mr. Durell. Why haven’t you reported to me? I want to know what’s been going on here in the village.”

  “How did you get down from the Base?” Durell countered. “I walked, of course.” There was pompous satisfaction in the fat man’s voice, as if he challenged Durell to doubt that he could have made it. “I don’t intend to be left behind in this damned hole, no matter what sneaky and treacherous plans you’ve been making to desert me here.”

  “Now, just a moment—”

  “Whatever you plan to do,” Wickham said quickly, “I’m going with you. You can charge me with pulling rank, if you like—and you don’t have to like it. But as top-ranking officer in the military establishment here in Musa Karagh, I’m giving the orders henceforth. Is that clear?”

  Susan Stuyvers said in a flat, toneless voice, “But of course, Colonel Wickham.”

  Wickham whirled and stared hard at her, as if seeing her for the first time through the false fury he directed at Durell. “Oh, it’s you. Where’s the reverend, Miss Stuyvers?”

  “In the next cottage, visiting with the others,” Susan said smoothly.

  “Oh. And you’re here with Durell—” Wickham paused and stared with sudden hardness at the girl, then at Durell, and licked his lips. He started to say something, and a cunning came into his bloodshot eyes and he decided against it. “I see. Durell, did you find Dr. Uvaldi?”

  “We did.”

  “Ah, good!”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Didn’t you expect it, Colonel?”

  “What? What do you mean?” Wickham sputtered. “Was it the earthquake, after all?”

  “It was murder. And the coded tape he carried is gone, too.” There was abrupt silence in the hut, except for Wickham’s wheezing, tempestuous breath. Some of the flush faded from the man’s jowls, and his gaze faltered and swung away from Durell’s dark, steady eyes.

  “Oh, God. Oh, no.”

  “You know what it means, Colonel? It means there’s an enemy agent loose somewhere in Musa Karagh.”

  “Well—Well, but that’s your business, isn’t it? That’s in your line, what you’re trained for, right? Why are you wasting time here?”

  “I’m not, Colonel. How long have you been down from the mountain?”

  “About an hour. But—” Wickham sucked in a longer breath. “Are you suggesting that I am suspect?”

  “Yes. Everyone is, until I get the tapes back.”

  Durell waited, wondering if Susan Stuyvers might now mention the spool of coded ribbon delivered to her by the peasant woman from the village inn. But Susan had sat down, hands folded placidly in her lap, her blonde head bowed, and there was no hint of the passionate woman he had seen a moment ago. She was remarkable, Durell thought—and perhaps dangerous. Perhaps she had been acting a role the last few minutes in order to keep him off guard. But he touched his pocket, to make sure the tape was still there, and sighed silently. Perhaps Colonel Wickham had been loose in the village, too, when Dr. Uvaldi was murdered.

  Nothing was certain. No one could be trusted.

  Durell arranged with Kappic to keep guard at the end of the little valley, hemmed in by cliffs, where the huts were located. No one could get in or out without the Turk, or Anderson, his alternate relief, spotting an intruder. Finally, Durell found himself alone for a few moments in the hut with Francesca Uvaldi.

  The girl looked calm enough in her exhausted sleep. Anderson had managed to find a scratch meal for them all, together with a bottle of milk raki that pleased the colonel. Durell had said nothing about finding the tapes in Susan’s hut, among the missionary’s books. For the moment, he decided it would be safest to go on as if the tape was still missing. Someone among them was as anxious to get the Uvaldi tape as he had been, judging from the attack on Francesca. He frowned, lit a cigarette, and stared at her as she slept on the bed. Then she turned over, the blanket pulled up to her chin, and looked wide-eyed at the rafters overhead, where the pigeons moved and burbled. She saw Durell and her mouth tightened a little, and he noticed the tear stains on her cheeks, and presumed she had taken her few moments alone to weep silently.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m such a fool.”

  “You don’t have to be ashamed of mourning your father.” “Roberto? No, it’s just that—I made a lot of mistakes today. I thought I was so clever—and I only succeeded in getting beaten up within an inch of my life. I’ll never forget it. Never.” She shuddered with the memory of the savage attack. “Did you find my gun outside, Sam?”

  “No.”

  “Then he must have taken it.”

  “Who was it, Francesca? Who attacked you like that? And why?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, and—” She paused, looked at him with careful, slanted gray eyes. “How do I know who you really are, Sam? We all seem to travel under false colors here. None of us are what we claim, are we?” “And what are you, really?” he asked grimly.

  “I can’t tell you—yet.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “I want to, but—I’m afraid, I guess.”

  She turned her face away from him and began to cry again.

  Even as she wept, her behavior caused frustration and dismay. She did not understand herself. She had never felt like this before. Always in the past she had been complete, aloof from the troubles of others. Roberto once had called her a cold and beautiful bitch, sterile and heartless. But she did her work well, efficiently and alone. There was satisfaction in using her courage and wits against the enemy, as she thought of it. But she knew her detachment was a fault, although until now it hadn’t troubled her; she’d been quite satisfied with herself.

  Now everything was shaken and changed.

  She had groveled in the dirt, shrinking in terror from the degradation of savage blows, and she had felt the chill of sure death approach her. An intimation of mortality, she thought grimly. The pain had debased her, reducing her in those poisoned moments to one vast, quaking heartbeat, no better or worse than anyone else in the world.

  Her body still ached with her bruises, but she was warm and reasonably comfortable now, and she looked up at Durell with a touch of wonder. She wanted to trust him. She felt alone for the first time in her life. She needed someone now, and yet—

  He had been gone a long time. Maybe with Susan—

  She was surprised at the twist of jealousy she felt. Durell was different from all the other men she had known. There was a reserve about him, an objectivity in his dark eyes when he looked at her. She shivered inwardly, but it was not unpleasant, being watched this way.

  “Sam?” she whispered. She smiled. “I’m hungry.”

  “We all are. But there’s very little good for any of us here.”

  “Being hungry means I feel better, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. I’m glad. You had a close call.”

  She lifted herself on the bed. “I wish—we could be alone for a little while. Not here.” Her gray eyes tilted up at him. “But somewhere.”

  “Some time,” he nodded. “Perhaps.”

  Susan Stuyvers lay stiffly on the bed in the adjacent hut, acutely aware of John sprawled in a chair across the room. Something in her had changed. She hadn’t told John about her encounter with Durell, and it was the first time since he had saved her, out on the Lebanese desert, that she had kept anything from him; and in a way, this frightened and excited her, all at the same time.

  She lay still, moving the palm of her hand slowly against her cheek. In the pale light of the lantern, she saw John stir, breathing gustily, and she smelled the staleness of the Anatolian brandy he had been drinking with Colonel Wickham. Her sense of his strange fanaticism echoed strongly, like the movement of fear within her, and she wondered about it. She felt different, as if her life had suddenly moved into another cycle, a new direction. It was Durell, she thought. He had done it, and she was like a moth attracted to a deadly flam
e. John would never allow it. But she felt as if it was irresistible. Durell was different because he could make her do whatever he asked, out of strength and conviction; and she thought of this and wondered how it would be, to belong to such a man, after all that had happened to her lately. And she felt an inner yearning to give up everything and let him do whatever he wanted, to be mindless and empty and live in waiting, just to be filled by him.

  She was tired of scheming and fighting and clawing toward something better for herself in this world—something she didn’t yet define or recognize. . . .

  John stood up suddenly and walked to the bed and stared down at her. “Susan, my dear.” His voice was deep, quiet. “You are awake.”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down quietly on the bed beside her, a gaunt and feverish man she did not understand, except for his strange, aloof kindness toward her. His thin face loomed over her.

  “Fancy this, getting as far as Istanbul, and perhaps further, as guests of the U.S. government, travel expenses all paid!” “Does it please you, John!”

  “I have been thinking of many things. We will go to Naples, in Italy, and rest in the sun there, while I arrange for the books and scrolls to be sent to the mission library in Philadelphia. I am determined to do this thing, Susan. Under the laws of man, taking the books from Lebanon is an illegal act, perhaps. But in the eyes of God, these things belong with those who treasure and revere them.”

  “I understand, John.”

  “But I have been thinking, Susan—perhaps the mission committee will not approve of my act. I may have to resign, give up the collar and my work, change my whole life afterward—”

  “Oh, no.”

  His thin face smiled. “I think my work as a missionary will be finished then. A different life has been beckoning to me, since—since you came into my world, my dear. You— you have never been like a true daughter, you know.”

  “I—I’m sorry, John. I tried to do exactly what you told me.”

  “It isn’t that,” he said quickly. “I feel differently about you.”

  She stared at him, aware of the way he was looking at her, and she felt excitement, and a little fear.

  “Can we talk about it in Istanbul? Or Naples?” she asked.

  “Of course. Go to sleep, Susan.”

  He got up slowly and went back to his chair.

  Lieutenant Kappic and Colonel Wickham walked slowly back from the village. The local doctor, who had taken charge of village administration when the mayor was killed by a collapsing house, had agreed to send a squad of men to make sure the field across the river was safely cleared for the expected landing of the plane in the morning. The other villagers had calmed down after the excitement at the inn, and the community had settled back into the cold darkness of the night.

  The earth was silent and steady now. There would be no more tremors, the older men said. If the sun shone tomorrow, the rebuilding work would begin, all through the mountain district of Musa Karagh.

  Kappic did not like Wickham, so he walked back to the huts without talking. Kappic had found a half-eaten haunch of lamb and a stale loaf of bread in a ruined house near the wrecked river bridge, and he had shared it with the others at the inn. Their bellies were cramped with hunger and the salt taste of impending starvation.

  He knew what it was to feel your belly growl and sense a creeping weakness in your limbs when there was nothing to eat. As a boy, he had been a goatherd in these hills, near the military frontier posts where the Moskofs watched. There had been nautral calamities in those days, too, and hunger was a common thing, almost a normal state of affairs. And if he had his choice, his heart and memories were with the simple peasants of Karagh, and not with the official dignitaries his Army career had brought him to meet.

  When he gave the food to the doctor at the caravansaries, the man’s eyes had been grateful and surprised. He had not expected Kappic to side with the miserable poor of this calamity-stricken village. The years had changed him, and the young goatherd who had been Mustapha Kappic was outwardly submerged in the modern uniform of the Army official from Ankara. But the roots of one’s heart, Kappic thought, remained in the soil that gave one birth.

  He only had wanted something better for his people when he first went to Ankara. And he had quickly found others who felt the same way. Or seemed to. As a young shepherd in a new and unfamiliar uniform, seeing wealth and waste where he had only known poverty and the necessity to save, he had felt confused by those he met who talked of black being white, of his country’s ancient enemy being truly a friend. He had become involved before there was time to draw back, before he understood. And even now he felt confused. He wished he could understand why he felt as if he had removed himself from the amicable alliance with Durell. According to that little group of plotters back in Ankara, Durell was simply an agent of the enemy, the true enemy of his people. Kappic sighed. He did not understand. He knew what his orders had been from the group to which he so dangerously belonged, the men who could destroy him by informing, with safety to themselves, of his thoughts and his talk in the past. He was trapped, ordered to obey, to do what had to be done.

  Kappic felt confused. He was not supposed to consider anything else. Yet he was a soldier, and he had other duties, too. The villagers, in their misery, had claimed first place in his emotions. He could be shot for his attitudes now. And if he failed to perform what his strange friends had ordered, he could be destroyed for that, too.

  He was not afraid. He just wished he could see things clearly, once and for all, before he took this last, irretrievable step that might brand him as a traitor. Soon he would have to make his choice. Until then, he was determined that no man would read his mind and his heart.

  Colonel Wickham walked beside the Turk and thought about the morning ahead. He told himself he had only to wait until then. The plane would come. After that, everything would be different. Then this idiot’s nightmare would end. Then he could make his move.

  But he would have to watch Durell and Anderson. Those two were a dangerous, competent, somehow terrifying pair. Their training had molded them alike, into men who were not like other men in their dedication and purpose.

  A man had to play chess in everything that mattered, Wickham thought. Life itself was a chess game, to be carefully schemed out, planned and executed with cold calculation.

  Wickham liked chess. He had played it since he was a boy. He preferred the crisp, safe logic of the game to the unpredictable emotionalism of life. On the chessboard, the only uncertainty was the intellectual capacity of your opponent and his emotional stability in the face of your attack, apparent or real. It was strange how calm one could be in the quiet of a study, facing the board, with your antagonist only a dim and unimportant shape across the table. Here, in these wild mountains, everything was different. Emotions you never suspected had seized you and almost destroyed you.

  They all thought they were so strong and smart, Wickham reflected. Durell, Anderson, Kappic—and those two women, each so different from the other, yet so much alike, really.

  Like Betty, back home in Arlington.

  Betty had lived with him as his wife for ten years, yet she never came to know the man he might be, or actually was. Wickham chuckled, and felt Kappic turn his head and stare coldly at him as they labored uphill toward the huts. Kappic’s eyes looked cruel in the night, shining white with a peculiar crescent look.

  Betty looked at him like that, now and then. Did she suspect what he really could be, some day? Hard to tell. Wickham knew his own limits. He was a physical coward. And yet his purpose was strong and implacable, and his ambitions could not be discouraged.

  If he got out of this alive, he would see to it that things were different in the future. He would arrange it so that nothing like this could happen again.

  One couldn’t always cope with the cruelties of nature. Disaster struck everyone, without warning or prejudice.

  Well, he’d show them all, Wickham thought.


  They’d get some surprises, tomorrow. All of them. . . .

  Durell awoke suddenly, all at once. He did not move. He waited, orienting himself in the darkness of the hut. A pigeon stirred sleepily on the rafter overhead, and someone sighed and moved in the big peasant bed across the floor from his pallet. Francesca? She was alone in the bed. Kappic was on guard outside, at the entrance to the little cup-like space among the craggy cliffs, where even a goat could not descend.

  Carefully he looked at the glowing hands of his watch on the underside of his wrist. Four in the morning. He sat up, knowing that something had alerted him. The tape, in its green metal box, was still in his pocket. He touched it to reassure himself. No one was near him. No one—

  He was alone in the hut, except for the sleeping girl.

  Wickham and Anderson were gone.

  Durell stood up quietly, all in one movement, and walked to the door and paused, listened, then opened the door and looked out at the night.

  Nothing.

  He heard the steady pulse of his blood in his ears and the strange, singing pressure of the mountains and loomed gigantically all around him. The Stuyvers’ hut was dark. He turned his head and looked beyond the little copse of olive trees where Francesca had been attacked. He did not see Kappic at his post on the trail, but that meant nothing. He wondered about the colonel and Anderson, and took a step from the doorway of the hut—

  Too late, he saw what had wakened him and brought him outside.

  A broken tile from the roof lay at his feet.

  And even as he turned his head sharply, sucking his breath in with surprise, something landed on him from above, where the threat had been crouching darkly on the edge of the roof, waiting for him. . . .

  The impact sent him crashing to the ground. There was an instant of dismay, when every reflex screamed and drove him upward against the implacable weight that pinned him down. He got his legs flexed and heaved up—and felt the sharp blow on the back of his head, aware of the bone-jarring strength with which it was delivered, and then aware of harsh gravel grinding into his face, of hands rapidly searching him, ignoring his gun, delving in his pockets—