Assignment - Budapest (3 page)

At that moment there came a sharp, snapping report from outside the quiet house. Durell’s move was so swift and fluid that Deirdre was hardly aware of his movement as such at all, until he was at the window, a bit to one side, with his hand in his pocket.

It was only a backfire from the pungy’s engine in the cove. He did not relax.

“You’re jumpy, Sam. What is it? What did McFee want?” “I’ve got to find a man,” he said. “Someone got loose in the country. He’s got to be found, fast.”

“Or what?”

“Or he’ll kill somebody. Somebody very important.”
And Korvuth will try for you, too
, Durell thought. But he didn’t tell her that. “I’ll have to leave you now, hon,” he said.

“I suppose there is no point in asking you to be careful,” she whispered.

“I do what has to be done. It’s my job,” he said.

Dickinson MeFee was at the little airport two miles west of the town of Prince John. The rain was colder, half sleet now, and the trees in the grim gray daylight were beginning to glimmer with a thin coating of ice. A four-seater Beach liaison plane, with private registry markings, was waiting for him. Durell did not know the pilot. He met General McFee in a small shelter hut a short distance from the battered old hangar.

“Sorry to break up your weekend like this, Sam.” McFee looked tired, a small erect man of gray, with a mouth and voice possessed of the incisive quality of a steel trap. “I hope Deirdre didn’t mind too much. Did you tell her I gave a negative on her application?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“All right, then. I have to go to London tomorrow. You’ll be in charge of K Section for a week. Take it easy. Sidonie will hold down your desk for you at Twenty Annapolis. Whatever synthesizing has to be done, she’ll do it. Holcomb will run the rest of the office and attend the weekly briefings with State, and tomorrow’s briefings with Joint Chiefs. That gives you some free time for Bela Korvuth.”

“You said over the phone he left word with some farmer that he was going to gun for me.”

“Yes. Does it worry you?”

Durell smiled. “I’d be a fool if it didn’t. But it’s not quite the way you think.”

“No? Well, I’m taking it seriously, too. I’m going to put a couple of men to watch Deirdre. She won’t know they’re around, but we don’t want anything happening to her, and a man like Bela Korvuth may decide to hit you from any direction. There’s your grandfather, too, down in Bayou Peche Rouge. Not much chance of Korvuth getting down there, but you never can tell. There’s no point in guessing how much they know about you in the AVO and MGB offices. Not since the Stella Marni case, anyway. We’ve got to assume they know as much about you in their dossiers as we’ve got on Bela Korvuth, which may even the odds a bit. I don’t know. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Durell said. “Korvuth is a professional. He’s been in the game longer than I. This whole thing is too easy. He didn’t have to come over here disguised as a Hungarian refugee. A dozen other ways would have been better for him. And nobody in the business would deliberately break his own cover by talking to a local farmer about his mission. It doesn’t make sense.”

McFee sighed and nodded and looked out through the small window of the shelter hut toward the waiting plane. He somehow managed to fill the small room with his presence and the quiet strength of his personality. Durell often wondered about this small gray man who knew so much, whose connections made a web that girdled the world, and whose job was the anonymous direction of strategy in this dark, silent war that seemed to go on forever.

“I was wondering how soon it would occur to you, Sam,” he said. “You’re going to have to be very careful.”

“Is Korvuth a blind, then?”

“We don’t know. Your guess at this stage of the game is as good as mine. You’ve seen his picture?” When Durell shook his head, McFee took out a small leather folder containing a photograph of a gray-haired man of about forty, with mild eyes and a saddle nose and a prim little bowtie. “Don’t let him see you first, Sam. Looks like a small-time business man, doesn’t he? Looks harmless, eh?”

“No, not harmless,” Durell said. He had felt a quick twist of something turning over in him when McFee suggested a guard for Deirdre. He wasn’t sure, but it could have been fear for her, and this dismayed him, because he knew he should not be thinking of anything now except the job McFee was discussing. He knew McFee was watching him, an objective curiosity in the little general’s pale gray eyes. He didn’t think anything showed in his face as he went on. “The eyes in this photo are all wrong. It shows there, and in his mouth, too. Is Korvuth a Magyar?”

“Hard to tell about these people. I pulled what we had on friend Bela out of the dossier files, but it isn’t much. The rest of the physical description makes him about five-ten, weight one-seventy, a little paunchy, but awfully, awfully fast. So don’t let his sloppy physique fool you. It isn’t that way at all. His hair is brown, his eyes are brown, and he’s got a steel-capped molar in the lower right jaw. We got that from a dentist in Buda who worked on Korvuth last year.”

“All right,” Durell said. “Don’t kid me about it, please.” “I’m not kidding. There’s nothing to laugh about or ignore about this man. Bela Korvuth is probably the greatest master of political assassination and sudden death since the Middle Ages. We know he was responsible for the disappearance of Boganov in Prague two years ago, when Boganov anticipated the swing away from Stalin and jumped the gun. Now the pendulum is reversed, and even if they had let Boganov live, he’d be in the doghouse again. Then there was the poisoning of Imre Kardovi in Bucharest last year, the death of the wife of a Soviet attache in London six months ago—she had fallen in love with a junior clerk in Downing Street—and there was the killing of those two MGB boys who made contact with Frank Duggan in Rome and wanted to peddle a few secrets to us. You can check the rest of it in the office when you get a chance. But you have to get an idea of what this man is, Sam. When the freedom fighters in Hungary were stringing up AVO men by the heels from lampposts in Budapest, Korvuth was giving orders to machine-gun women and children in Parliament Square, and we know he personally organized the deportation movement when the Russians sent in their Mongolian troops. Another idea of what sort of man this is, and his nerve, is the fact that he deliberately took the chance of mingling with the refugees to get over here, when he’d have been torn to pieces by them if they learned who he was. All I want to impress on you is that this man is as good or better than you. I don’t want to lose you on this, Sam. And he’s here to do a double job.”

“It still doesn’t add up,” Durell said, frowning.

“Well, he was Stella Marni’s lover back in Budapest in fifty-four. We just got that recently. You put the Marni woman on ice six months ago, and he’s going to enjoy cutting your heart out.”

“No,” Durell said, “he’s too professional to let that bother him.” He lit a cigarette, to McFee’s annoyance. It was close and hot in the shelter hut, with a kerosene stove going full blast. McFee didn’t smoke. “Any guesses on the other victim he’s going after?”

“We can’t afford to guess. It’s up to you to find out.” “What about this Zoltan Ske? And the woman?”

“We don’t have anything useful on either of them, Sam. Just the cover stories they used at our Vienna office to get flown over here with the last group of Hungarian refugees. You can get their pictures from Breagan.”

“Check,” Durell said. “Now what do you really think, general?”

“I agree with you. It’s all a blind.”

“You believe they’d throw away a man like Bela Korvuth just to keep us busy while they try for another objective?” 

“Yes. I see it that way, Sam.”

“Would Korvuth know it?” Then Durell could have bitten his tongue. “Sorry. Of course, Korvuth has to know he’s the patsy. I must be a little tired. Korvuth would never break his cover this way, otherwise. For him, it might well be a suicide mission; and he’s got to know that. He’d obey orders, of course.”

McFee looked uncertain. “Maybe I’d better put Holcomb on this, Sam. You may be too close to it—what with Deirdre, and all. But I don’t see how you can stay out of it, anyway, with Korvuth after you.”

“I’ll be all right,” Durell said. “What do you think Bela Korvuth is trying to cover with his sacrifice?”

McFee said irritably: “Put out that damned cigarette, will you, Sam? It’s the refugees, of course. We’ve heard rumors about a number of their agents getting through on innocent covers. Maybe a dozen, in all. We’ve got to know who they are and where they are—every last one of them. It’s probably a highly specialized sabotage crew, ready to take up jobs and ordinary lives and officially vanish—but with the difference that these dozen or more people are going to be dedicated to the proposition that when a certain day comes, they can and must and will paralyze something vital to our national defense. We’re supposed to forget about that possibility while we chase after Korvuth and try to stop him from getting his announced victims—you, and Mr. X, whoever the poor devil may be. It’s damned clever of them, really. We can’t afford to ignore Korvuth’s being here. We’ve got to find him and stop him. There’s nothing small or unimportant about his mission here, and that’s what makes it even more important to find out what he’s been sent to cover up. A sort of doublethreat play, as I see it. The old one-two. It’s going to have to work out fast, before our dedicated friends get too well set in their cover personalities and too deep in the ground for us to dig them out in time.”

“You think it may begin with Korvuth?” Durell asked. “Bela Korvuth’s aim is to lead us away from the infiltration of the crew that came in with the innocent refugees. He’ll certainly try to lead us down the primrose path into a blind alley. The sooner he’s stopped, the better. At the same time, Korvuth might possibly be a connecting link to the other apparatus. We can’t tell. It’s up to you to find out, Sam.”

“Then I’d better get up there.”

“You’ll work with Breagan in Jersey,” McFee said. “As long as the trail stays there, anyway. After that, you’re on your own. Call for help at Twenty Annapolis, if you need any. Holcomb will assist, if I’m not back from Europe yet. Try to keep your cover intact, Sam. We don’t know how much Korvuth really knows about you, but we’ve got to assume the worst and hope for the best, understand?”

Durell nodded. He was suddenly impatient to be going. McFee had nothing more for him. He looked at his watch. It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning.

At twelve-thirty Durell met Matt Breagan in the kitchen of the Dunstermeir farm in New Jersey. Almost six hours had gone by since Bela Korvuth, Zoltan Ske and the woman known as Ilona had made their break from the refugee reception center at Kilmer. The perimeter of the search area had narrowed considerably, with no tangible results. A sense of discouragement and futility was plainly stamped on Breagan’s square, tired face.

It was still snowing, and Durell was grateful for the tweed overcoat he had worn. He stood in the center of the shining, clean kitchen, his feet slightly apart. The Dunstermeirs, man and wife, stood in an attitude of patient waiting; their faces were like rock, expressionless, betraying no particular interest in Durell, who was not introduced by name.

Breagan said, “So far, we haven’t spotted the truck or the hired hand, Endre, who drove off with Korvuth and his crew. It’s been snowing steadily, and by the time we got here, the tracks of the truck were pretty well covered. They seemed to turn out to the road, wich had been plowed just a few minutes before that time, and they were lost there.”

“I’ll have a look later,” Durell said. “Right now I’m more interested in the hired hand. Endre Stryzyk, that’s his name?” “Yes,” Dunstermeir said.

“How long have you had him with you?”

“Over six months now. We took him from Kilmer. A fine boy. We had no suspicions of him at all.”

“Do you mean he went with this man willingly?”

“Endre seemed to know the man. It was almost as if he had been waiting for him.” Dunstermeir turned his thin gray head toward his wife as she made a small, almost unaudi-ble sound. The woman abruptly turned away toward the big iron and nickel stove. “Naturally, we had no suspicions,” the farmer went on. “You people are supposed to check the ones coming in now, not so? We accepted the fact that it was safe to employ him.”

“And you don’t think so now?” Durell asked. Dunstermeir only shrugged.

“What was your occupation in Germany before you came here?” Durell asked suddenly.

The man’s mouth twitched. “I was—I was also a farmer.” “You don’t speak like one. Where did you learn English?” “Am I under suspicion, too?”

“It is not impossible. Answer the question, please.”

“I went to the University of Bonn. But I left Germany long before the war. Our two sons were forced to stay over there. They were killed in Normandy, finally.”

“You should have suggested they were killed on the Eastern front, fighting Russians,” Durell said coldly.

“But they were not killed there. The English killed them.” “And you were not a farmer then,” Durell stated flatly. “No. No, I was an engineer. Here, one does what one can.” “And what was Endre’s occupation before coming over?” “He was not one for speaking much about himself. He was young, you understand. About twenty-two or -three. One of the young freedom fighters, he claimed. He said he had no family, no occupation, except for having had odd jobs here and there in Budapest. But he was a hard worker.”

“You speak of him as if he’s gone for good.”

“We will not employ him again, if he comes back.”

“Because he seemed to know Korvuth?”

“Yes. Endre knew him.”

“And he drove the truck willingly?”

“Let us say that he seemed to be resigned to it.”

“I’d like to look at the place where you kept the truck,” Durell said.

Dunstermeir shrugged. “This side of the dairy barn.” Durell went out with Breagan. Breagan didn’t have much to say as they walked into the cutting sleet that slanted across the dooryard toward the big red barn. Beyond the immediate environs of farmhouse and outbuildings, the land reached in flat fields for half a mile toward a line of woods, black against the lowering gray sky. The coating of ice and snow had been thoroughly trampled by troopers’ feet and rutted by the police cars that had come and gone throughout the morning. Durell kept his annoyance about this to himself.