Read Assignment - Quayle Question Online
Authors: Edward S. Aarons
The Porsche roared downgrade toward the bridge.
“Sam?” Franklin whispered.
“Take it easy.”
“What happened to the radio?”
“Deirdre was cut off.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know how come.”
“Think she’s all right?”
“We’ll find out.”
“But you and she, I hear—”
“Shut up.”
Durell’s work as a field agent for K Section, whose work was mostly anonymous, unheralded and unsung, made him liable for assignments in any far and remote corner of the world. He had been in the business a long time. Almost since he had first earned his law degree at Yale. Statistically, his survival factor had long run off the tape. His dossier was on file with the KGB in Moscow, the Black House in Peking, and a dozen other intelligence departments among the world’s leading nations.
Long ago, he had been marked for extinction by certain of these counterintelligence units. But he did not think about it too often. His life was marked by habits of caution. Whether in London or the jungles of the Amazon, in Singapore or the Fezzan desert of Libya, he never opened
He did not worry about it. But he was careful.
The Porsche was at the bridge now, coming toward the turn he had selected as his target area. He could not yet see the driver behind the reflections on the windshield.
“Jesus, Sam.” Franklin sweated, despite the chill breeze that shook the aspens beyond the stone wall. As a special agent assigned to Durell from the FBI, to make Durell’s activities here in the States follow the law that confined K Section’s activities to events abroad, he had been hostile from the start. His department jealously guarded its prerogatives. The other two men from the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, were more prosaic about the job. Marcus and Henley were cool and efficient. But Franklin worried Durell. “Suppose something has happened to Deirdre?”
“I told you to shut up.”
The Porsche was over the bridge now.
Durell did not resent the interruption of his leave with Deirdre at her quiet house at Prince John, on the Chesapeake. He conformed to the needs of K Section, and he accepted this, as he had once accepted the disciplines o1 his old Grandpa Jonathan, when the old man dictated principles to him on the old riverboat hulk moored in tht mud at Bayou Peche Rouge. Old Jonathan had been £ gambler, one of the last of that breed of men on the Mississippi; Durell had learned from him the ways of the hunter and the hunted, a survival pattern that made him unique in this business of gathering intelligence. Whatever the diplomats discussed in the halls of statehood, the fac remained that information was the one precious commodity, bought sometimes with hardship and blood. Intelligence gave those men at the conference tables the cards they needed to play the game that might keep man kind alive. Not that Durell considered himself a patriot although he was. No bugles blew for him, no medals were handed out for his work in the silent world in which he lived.
The Porsche entered the target area.
He squeezed the trigger.
The rifle shot made a small flat sound in the humming silence of the valley. Two crows lifted, complaining, from the pine trees. A squirrel chattered admonitions at him.
He was up before the echoes died, running down through mountain slope toward the road. Franklin scrambled after him. The Porsche suddenly veered from it straight path and swerved back and forth on the narrow asphalt highway. It hit dirt on the left shoulder and left puffy cloud of dust behind screaming, locked wheels, the slammed across the road to the gravelly shoulder opposite.
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.
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 gimmickry 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.”