Paradise Spells Danger

by George B Mair

  ‘What now, David?’ said Mustafa. ‘I didn’t explain until you had seen it for yourself. So where do you want me to put my men?’

  Grant made a snap decision. One further along towards the Grand Vizier end, one here to guard the entrance, and two half-way between here and the wall of the house. I take it we rise fairly sharply and stop in about a hundred metres.’

  ‘You are exactly right, David. I’ll put one man between here and the steps, one half-way up the steps where they angle slightly left, and I can spare a third for the top of the flight. He will keep us in sight.’ He again glanced at his watch. ‘Your letter will now have been delivered and the wires cut. The front should also be well covered. I think we can move.’

  ‘But they do nothing until ordered,’ said Grant, and followed Mustafa along the curving corridor to the staircase. The final stretch was short, and ended at a blank wall which seemed impenetrable.

  The entrance could probably never have been found, so well was it concealed, and so perfect was the mason work and balance of the door, but almost two metres from the end Mustafa kneeled down, fingering the stone-work with quivering fingers which finally rested against two narrow slits smaller than those for a five-penny-piece in a phone box. He then slipped the point of a knife into each and Grant saw that the parallel slits were really longish slots angled like a V. As he began to lift the handles the stone between suddenly opened into two flaps, hinged half-way between the knife points. Two cavities were again exposed and Mustafa drew the handle which was rising in the depths of each. As he did so the entire floor of the corridor ahead slowly dropped down for a distance of about one centimetre to clear the bottom of the masoned blank wall which separated them from the house.

  ‘And now we simply push against the wall,’ said the old man. ‘Let us hope that there are no surprises inside.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘Any last orders?’

  ‘Nose plugs,’ said Grant. ‘In and up for each nostril. Pack firmly and don’t panic if they don’t work perfectly. The stuff is harmless if we do have to use it.’

  Frank was nursing a gun. ‘We’re fixed, David. Get going.’

  Grant decided to take things as they came. One gun was enough, especially if Frank was at the giving end. ‘Okay. Push, Mustafa.’

  The wall hinged exactly as had the middle entrance and pivoted without a sound except for the crash of a wooden table inside. The room was empty, but Grant could hear someone spluttering and being sick towards the front door, and paused while the others allowed the wall to swivel back into position except for a knife blade slipped into the crack at floor level. This prevented it from closing completely, but, thought Grant, was probably an unnecessary precaution. So long as the bolts had been pulled out from the concealed sockets built into the corridor floor the exit was safe. And it was easy to see how the door had been missed during searches of the house. It took up the whole length of one wall from corner to the lintel of a doorway giving to a cupboard, and when closed would have been indetectable. Especially since the wall itself was panelled in wood which had sprung slightly with age at several joins.

  They set up the table and opened one window to confuse the issue. Grant knew that the chemical he had been given evaporated fast, but he had no conception that its effect would be so dramatic. Noises from the hall direction sounded almost like a beast being slowly slaughtered. Gasps, sighs, grunts and groans proved that the stink-drug had kick plus plus. He was even more surprised that the noises came from a woman.

  Moogie was doubled up across a wash-basin and her face pale even under her built-in tan. He stopped dead before she saw him. The set-up was impossible and he felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his stomach as he stepped back into the living-room. ‘What the Hell did you mean, Mustafa? You said the girls were in a brothel.’

  Kemal looked irritated. ‘A man can’t work if he is worried about women and I knew they would be found. It was in your own interests.’

  ‘But you lied.’

  ‘Yes. And remember, David, my hot-headed young friend, that anger is a dangerous enemy. This place has been ransacked, upholstery ripped open and cushions gutted. There’s also a dead man in the next room and I’m wondering if the woman out there fired the shot.’

  ‘You don’t know where Krystelle is either?’ Kemal’s words had scarcely registered with Grant.

  ‘No. But she will be found if she is in Istanbul.’

  Grant was blazing angry and rage seemed suddenly to have thrown a confused picture into focus. If the man in the white house had been shot and the place searched, then reason or no reason, evidence or no evidence, Moogie shot him. He should have suspected the girl right from the beginning. He ought to have realised that it was impossible to remove three unconscious people from the Inter-Con without being noticed. One was just feasible, given a little luck. But three . . . no. Yet he had swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. He had been sleeping with the girl on the night he was kidnapped. She was the obvious suspect. Who else could have gassed him? And who else could have traced the man in the white house but someone who knew the story? But she had known it in detail. She had worked the all-time high for bluff and double bluff all the way and both Krystelle and he had bought it. Moogie held the key to everything. It was a million to a dime that she was a two-faced, two-timing, shyster nympho bitch.

  He remembered again his impression that Tom, her house-boy, understood more English then he cared to show. While he himself, with not more than a hundred or so words of Thai, had picked up a few hints which should have made him think more than twice!

  The relationship between Moogie and her staff had also been off-beat, and what hostess took her guests’ passports? Or could virtually pen them in a suite with two guards on duty outside the door?

  Right from the beginning he should have spotted that she was the clear number one suspect. Yet he had slipped up because she played ‘little girl’ and was good in bed. He was still blazing with anger and self-reproach when he rushed back to the bathroom, a tiny place off the hall, and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck. If he needed further proof of guilt the sheer hate in her eyes would have been enough.

  The men forced her on to a chair and thrust her head between her knees while Frank soused her neck with cold water and Grant kept up a smacking rhythm against her cheeks. Her body was limp, but Grant rated it as one more of her tricks and eased off only when she had been fixed to the chair with nylon handcuffs.

  ‘How did you get here?’ she said at last and spat straight into Grant’s face.

  ‘One moment, David,’ said Mustafa. ‘I want to find the safe. The addresses may be inside. Forgive while I look round.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ snapped Grant. ‘I’m going to deal with her.’ He sat down opposite her chair. ‘Where is Krystelle?’

  She retched again but later began to compose herself. ‘You are more clever than I thought. But I wonder how far your nerves can stretch. Could you torture a woman to make her speak? I’m not telling you anything. Do what you like.’

  Grant nodded towards Harry. ‘Fix that syringe. A so-called truth drug,’ he explained to Moogie. ‘You get a shot into a vein and then you talk. Now do you want to speak awake or asleep? I give you the choice.’

  Her eyes became cunning. ‘Even now you would believe me?’

  ‘You forget something,’ said Grant. ‘We already know a great deal. So if you lie once about things we know to be fact then you get the full truth drug routine. Take your choice.’

  She seemed to try and steady herself. ‘Ask.’

  ‘Did you mean to kidnap us in Bangkok?’

  She smiled slightly. ‘And I did.’

  ‘You only switched tactics because you discovered that your father had been killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the devices I thought were microphones were really live, and our conversation was monitored?’

  ‘Yes. But you were so incompetent that you forgot ever to ask about these “bulbs”, so you
weren’t clever.’

  ‘Your original idea was to kill me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake why?’

  ‘I hated my father. He neglected my mother. Left her alone. She died asking for him to come and see her. You were his best friend. So I hated you. If I killed you I felt it would be killing part of my father and making a small revenge.’

  ‘Your house staff are also revolutionaries?’

  ‘Patriots. I work under the orders of Tom.’

  ‘So I suppose you are Chinese agents.’

  ‘We work for one particular party in China and south-east Asia. Yes.’

  ‘And it was you who kidnapped me while I slept.’ Ideas gelled as Grant thought fast. Such a kidnapping would make sense to Krystelle when she heard about it and Moogie had put ideas into her mind. Everyone knew that he was number one target and kidnapping had been half expected. ‘So you continued to con Krystelle, bum-rushed her into a swift exit from Siam, probably with a story that you had to avoid police routines and delay.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And you knew she would be a difficult prisoner. So you would feel happier knowing she was around.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And your people took me to Austria.’

  ‘Why do you say so?’

  Grant decided to humour her. The grilling had become a challenge. ‘You had tricked us into taking you to Mr. Alvis and you heard his story. So you were up to date about the man in the white house and why he was important.

  ‘But Mr. Alvis said nothing to make us feel that Brandt still had any sense of personal danger. Or at least no more than usual. The authorities had fed him a reasonable story about the so-called murder in his house. And for a while Brandt must have been sitting on red hot coals. But he drifted back to normal when nothing more suspicious happened.

  ‘Now, thinking back, and when I recall that Mr. Alvis was killed during our second visit I begin to think that your own people arranged it.

  ‘And for the same reason as myself. You hated him because he had been a close friend of your father. Well you wouldn’t want to write off three of your own staff, so I imagine you hired three professional thugs for that job and briefed them well.’

  ‘They were hired guns,’ said Moogie.

  ‘But you had had time to brief them thoroughly. So that must have been done when you went home after the first visit to Alvis. And since you work under orders you must have liased with someone. Tom, I imagine. But if you were to continue hoodwinking us it was important for your assassins to act on cue and you knew nothing about your father’s will at that time. So you used your own fortune as bait and got the thugs to act on the words “thirteen million.”

  ‘But I was ahead of you all the time, David Grant. You know this only because of hindsight. Why don’t you tell me about Austria?’

  Grant was thinking in over-drive. ‘Since you are tied up with “patriots” in China and south-east Asia you are politically red. The obvious country to choose would be Albania where you would have enough pull to get round immigration or customs problems. And you wanted to get me out of south-east Asia to speed up the action. There was no time for finesse. So you took a flight to Albania via Cairo or Karachi. From there, even with the detection stations, you could have done a low-flying exercise into Yugoslavia, make it north to the frontier and then off-load me where I would be free to operate in the direction of clearing up my legacy. But it had to be Austria. Eastern Europe would have been unsuitable. Your priorities were the money and the manuscript.’

  ‘You think well and might have been a good agent,’ said Moogie. ‘But you were badly trained and you now think clearly only because you have nothing else on your mind. Like myself, for instance. My body kept you so active as an animal that you failed to reason like a man.’

  The contempt in her voice stung Grant like a hornet. ‘You mean it was all, and I mean all, an act?’

  She again spat straight into his face. ‘You are a fool. When we met you were suffering from flight hang-over and tired. But I saw to it that you lost even more sleep. Then I provoked you and made your woman lose sleep as well by either making her jealous or keeping her up late. I tormented your mind and exhausted your body until neither of you could think straight. Or was it vanity which made you think that a woman like me would waste herself on a middle-aged man when she can have her choice of youth? But I flattered your vanity, and that, more than anything else, put you off guard. You are, for me, worse than the fuzz. You are a pig dog.’

  Grant forced himself to cling to his cool and was glad only that Frank was taping the whole exchange. Krystelle, if ever they found her, would want to hear it. Abruptly he changed the subject. ‘The numbered bank account in the letter you hung round my neck refers, I take it, to some transaction arranged between the Bank of Switzerland and the Bank of China?’

  ‘This could be so,’ said Moogie, ‘but the money left to you by my father saved your life and you will still pay it out. My party can use foreign currency of that size.’

  ‘You mean that you are offering an exchange? Krystelle’s address for seventy million?’

  Another thought had crossed Grant’s mind. ‘Before we discuss that, go back to the men killed at your house in Thailand. They died before talking in my presence. Since the killings, I now remember, were done by Tom’s people you must have had good reason for not wanting me to meet them.’

  ‘So?’

  Grant tried desperately to recall the precise order of events. ‘They arrived before my department could have received my resignation. If they had been after my life there would have been no reason for your killing them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘So they must have been sent by your father’s Department. Probably to wise me up on detail.’

  ‘Now you can understand what I meant,’ said Moogie. ‘You think quite well when there is nothing to distract your attention. They were NATO agents, though I don’t know how they traced you to my house.’

  ‘You know they were NATO?’

  ‘Tom has a tape of the interview. But you may be too squeamish ever to listen. They screamed a good deal before they spoke. Tom is wonderful at making people open up and I was curious to see how you would handle things. But I hadn’t thought of the truth drug. Which is why I am saying a little.’

  ‘Their bodies showed no sign of torture,’ said Grant.

  ‘Did you look? Or have you forgotten how quickly one of them was wrapped in palm leaves? He was the one who showed marks. But once again I was able to keep your eyes occupied. You just can’t resist a split skirt. Two of my house-girls were wearing them. Remember?’

  ‘Keeping now to essentials,’ said Grant. ‘Where is Krystelle?’

  ‘In a pension. It is safer to keep a woman like that free but working in the dark.’

  ‘And you’ve hoodwinked her for over a week?’

  ‘Why not? She too has things on her mind. Like you, for example. She worries. And she isn’t back to normal after so much sleep loss. Dysrhythia, she calls it.’

  Frank interrupted for the first time. ‘Krystelle is my sister and David is a nice guy. But I’m just mean. Are you going to sing or do I start carving up your tits?’ He ripped off her top and pressed the point of his knife against her right nipple. ‘The way you talk it might be better to put you out of circulation. Permanent. But maybe I’ll just mark you instead and tape the screams. They’ll give Krystelle a big kick.’

  Moogie took them by surprise as she suddenly thrust herself forward and Frank reacted by pulling away the knife. ‘Mean! You think,’ she said. ‘You haven’t the nerve.’

  Harry, moving while she spoke, held her head firmly under the chin and with his knife hand hacked away tufts of hair until she looked like a caricature. ‘We don’t go for torture, honey,’ he said quietly. ‘A straight female killing, yes. But torture is for kinky guys like you. Or maybe sometimes for emergencies. And this is an emergency. Where is Krystelle? She plays good poker and I like
her.’

  Moogie froze and her voice became very soft. ‘So you are the mean one. It’s good to know.’

  ‘Krystelle’s address,’ said Frank. ‘Or I take over.’

  ‘Honey-chile Moogie girl,’ said a voice from the doorway behind. ‘This is where Krystelle herself takes over.’

  Grant felt himself go almost sick with relief, but he knew better than to ask questions. It would all come out in good time.

  ‘That nice Turkish gentleman let me in when I was ready to ring the front door bell and we’ve been listening fo’ de las’ two three minutes.’ She turned to Mustafa. ‘Dat jes’ about makes the grand slam, man. ’Cos we’re all here. An’ now, Moogie dahlin’. What gives? You got de manuscript?’

  Mustafa relaxed on to a chair and smiled broadly. ‘I found it, David. The safe was in the wall of the corridor itself. Just outside. You know. Near where we came in, but you can’t see it till the wall has been moved. Very cunning. Probably they even used it in the old days for storing jewels or money. I’ll show you exacly when we have more time.’