Assignment - Ankara (11 page)

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—

He tried to shout, but no sound came from him. He was hit again, and then again. He could not see his enemy. He felt the hard earth slip away from under his struggling limbs, yielding to a black, soft darkness. . . .

But he did not lose consciousness completely. A desperation to live, to fight back, kept some of his senses functioning. He heard footsteps running away. He heard someone shout. He smelled the gravel under his face and opened his eyes and rolled over and saw the sky and the hut reel in a crazy kaleidoscopic pattern before they steadied under the effort he made.

“Kappic!” he called. “Kappic!”

He heard a faint cry of response and pushed himself up onto his feet and staggered, crashing against the doorway of the hut. Dim figures were running toward him.

“Kappic, stay on your post! Let no one out!”

He heard an answering call and drew a deep, shuddering breath. His scalp was bleeding. Francesca stood behind him, touching him anxiously. He shrugged her off. He saw Susan and John Stuyvers standing near their hut, their attitude uncertain. Anderson and Wickham were walking toward him from the dark blur of the olive trees. He took his gun from his pocket.

“Stay where you are—all of you! No one must move!”

They froze as they were. He heard Wickham expostulate, heard Anderson call anxiously if he was all right, while John Stuyvers, at a distance, demanded to know what had happened. Durrell took a step forward and his foot crunched on metal. He stood there briefly, aware of a squirming nausea in his stomach; but determined not to yield to it.

He had stepped on the small green case that had held the Uvaldi tape. But the case was empty now.

The tape was gone. . . .

Later, in the minutes that followed, he knew he had done all that could be done. Carefully, each watching the other as he directed, he drew them forward out of the darkness of the night, off the small field and out of the olive grove, and finally into Francesca’s hut. He ignored their questions. He did not permit Francesca or Susan to touch him when they wanted to attend to his scalp wound. He knew that every moment and every move had to be arranged just right, or everything would be lost.

If he had been unconscious even for a few moments, there would be no point in what he did. But he knew that his attacker couldn’t have escaped.

He questioned Kappic first.

“Put your gun on the table, Mustapha.”

“My gun?” the Turk said. His dark face frowned. “But why?”

“Just do as I say.”

“Very well.” Kappic slid his service pistol from its holster and put it on the rough board table. In the lamplight, his features scowled, and his moustache made him look fierce and angry and hurt. “You do not trust me, Durell?”

“I trust no one now. You were on guard at the footpath?” “As you ordered me.”

“And no one went by?”

“No one. It is the only way out of here.” Kappic gestured. “The cliffs rise on one side, they drop on the other. There is only the path to the village. No strangers came here or left.”

“Good. But where was Anderson and Colonel Wickham?” Anderson bulked hugely in the lamplight. His voice was a growl of dismay. “Wickham wanted some more raki. I woke up when he left his pallet, so I went down to the village with him to keep an eye on him. We had passed Kappic when we heard your shout. What happened to you, Cajun?” The Tennessean’s drawl was thick with urgency. “Who slugged you?”

“One of you,” Durell said. “And one of you has the tape.” “But—”

Durell cut him off. He went on with his questions. It quickly developed that each of them had been in sight of another, as far as could be determined, from the moment he first called. He knew there was an error here, that it had to be one of them, somehow. But repeated questions did not break the deadlock, and after a few moments he drew a resigned breath.

“All right. Somebody—one of you—took the tape from me. You’ll all have to be searched.”

Anderson said, “If an enemy agent were after that tape— and I reckon somebody is, judgin’ what happened to Dr. Uvaldi—his only object would be to lose or destroy the tape, Cajun, to prevent us getting the information on it back to home base.”

Durell nodded. “But he—or she—had no time to ditch the tape. He—or she—took it from its container, but couldn’t get away or out of sight of any of you others.”

“We can search the area, though,” Anderson insisted. His big head ducked as he stared in pale hostility at the small group.

Durell nodded again. “We’ll search each other, first. If nothing turns up, we’ll search both huts, then every inch of ground between here and where Lieutenant Kappic stood guard.”

“Let me help you first,” Susan whispered. “Your poor head—”

“Francesca will search you,” Durell said flatly. “Your clothes first. Then strip down. Use a blanket for a screen, if you wish. Francesca will search you everywhere, do you understand? Your clothes and your body.”

“I won’t submit—” Susan began.

“You will. Francesca?”

The dark-haired girl looked pale. “I understand. And then Susan can search me.”

“All right. The men will search each other.”

But nothing came of it. No one had the tape.

It was not in either hut. It was not in the field and not in the olive grove. It was not on the roofs of the huts. And while the search went on, each man watched the others, to make sure that somehow, if the tape was still, incredibly, on someone’s person, it was not thrown away or hidden or destroyed.

It was a long, exhausting hour. And the tape was not found.

Durell ordered a second search. Negative. He settled the matter, then, by keeping everyone in one hut, while the night dragged out its long hours. No one slept, and he wanted it that way. Let them watch each other, he decided. Let them suspect each other. If someone made the smallest move to hide the tape, wherever it might be, someone else would spot it.

He returned Kappic’s gun, and explained to the Turk and Anderson, “I lost the tape. I was outsmarted and now I’m being out-tricked. I don’t know how, but I’m sure one of these people—one of us—has the tape hidden somewhere.”

“We’ve searched them all,” Anderson drawled. “It just ain’t a particle possible, as Pappy used to say, every time the revenue people found one of his stills.”

Durell looked sharply at the grinning courier, then smiled, too. He felt better for the other’s casual humor. “It is possible. It’s happened. I don’t think the tape was swallowed, because the plastic would cut up the intestinal tract—and I don’t think we’re up against a suicide type here.”

“Just a mighty clever one,” Anderson said. “So what do we do?”

“We take them all with us, tomorrow.”

“But suppose the tape is just thrown away?”

“We can’t let that happen. We watch each other, and we wait.”

“Maybe we watch an empty barn, eh?” Kappic suggested.

“Let’s hope not,” Durell said.

Anderson grunted. “The way you figure it, we’re looking for just one traitor. But maybe there’s a team of them. Two, anyway. And they’ve been giving us the old razzle-dazzle by passing the tape back and forth between ’em, during the searches.”

“I’ve considered that,” Durell said. “But which two is it?”

Anderson and Kappic were silent.

Durell watched, and waited.

THE fog came back in the morning, and there was no sunrise. The mist drifted over the mountaintops in a thin tide that hid the dawn in a curtain of pearly iridescence, then poured sluggishly, like steam, through the valleys and crannies of the countryside. The light was a long time coming. Bonfires were built by the villagers at each end of the improvised airfield across the river, and for long minutes after the dawn, their ruddy, leaping light was stronger than that of the feeble sun.

Durell and the others waited near the fires at the southern end of the field. They had been up for an hour, with only a thin soup and a cup of tea for breakfast, provided by several village women who appeared in silence, unsmiling, to serve them the food. Afterward, they trudged, shivering, through the predawn darkness of the streets and across the ruins of the bridge to the rough field.

The dawn air was wet and penetrating. The sound of the river was a steady, unrelenting roar against the twisted abutments of the bridge. The noise of the water made it difficult

for those who were listening for the sound of the promised plane.    

Durell stood near Susan Stuyvers. She clutched the big black handbag in both hands, holding it to her breast, and stared blankly at the dark sky. John Stuyvers looked like a grim, harassed prophet of doom beside her, his eyes smoldering with that strange fanatical light. Durell walked to where Francesca Uvaldi stood alone, apart from the others.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you,” she nodded. “But I wish—I can’t believe the plane will really come here.”

Durell said nothing. In the cold mist of morning, the little group huddled on the edge of the field. For a moment, catching Kappic’s alert eye and Anderson’s nod, he had a moment of sinking doubt.

The risk he was taking could not be measured, if he was wrong. He told himself that no one had had a chance to get rid of the tape from the instant it was taken from him outside the hut. At every minute of the long night just past, all of them had been under close watch, with Kappic and Anderson checking each other. They had reported nothing. Both huts had been thoroughly searched again at dawn, and every inch of the surrounding ground had been covered. If someone here had the tape, it was still hidden on their person, somehow.

But he could not find the answer here. He had checked Francesca’s sketch box and the Stuyvers’ old manuscripts, and turned up nothing. There were no false compartments in any of the luggage the others carried. Whoever had the tape had concealed it in some way that defied discovery here. But at least, by watching them all through the night, he had made sure that the traitor had had no chance to destroy it or get rid of it.

One of them, too clever to be caught under these circumstances, still had the tape. Durell was sure of this. He had to play a waiting game, he decided, and never relax his watchfulness until, at the airport in Istanbul, a proper search could be made. At least, he thought, the person with the tape was caught in the group, and couldn’t make a move now without betraying himself.

Yet Durell wondered if he could be wrong. He’d had no sleep, and his eyes felt gritty and his body ached with fatigue. He started toward Kappic, then felt Francesca touch his arm and speak to him again.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you and I had a truce, Sam?”

“I offered one last night,” he said.

“I know. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Since that man caught me last night—I feel as if everything in the world was turned upside down,” she murmured.

“It sometimes happens like that,” he said. “When we have a close brush with death, our perceptions are usually sharper for a time afterward.”

She smiled. “So I ought to see what a sterling character you really are, is that it?”

He grinned in return. “Is that too much to hope for?” “No. I wish you’d forgive me for getting so weepy last night.”

“That’s understandable, too.”

“No, it isn’t. I don’t understand it, anyway. I wasn’t crying for my father, you see. I know this may make me seem even more suspicious, but Roberto Uvaldi was just my stepfather, for one thing. We never got along, and we never meant much to each other.”

“Then why did you make this rough trip to see him?” Durell asked. “Visiting Dr. Uvaldi, or searching for peasant designs for your couturier concern, is just an excuse for coming to Karagh, isn’t it?”