Durell slowed his breathing deliberately, shook the tension out of arms and shoulders. He gave a tired grunt as he bent to pick up the spent 7.62 mm cartridges. Kneeling there, he twisted his head back toward the terminal, the hangars and freight warehouses.
The Grumman blocked them from his field of vision.
What happened here had gone unnoticed.
He turned and walked away.
Chapter Thirty-one
Chad Mitchell swiveled his chair around from the window as his willowy blond secretary showed Durell into his deeply carpeted office. The furnishings here befitted a rank two or three grades higher than Chad's, Durell thought, but that was all right. Chad would move up fast enough. In the meantime appearances were important to him.
"The warrior comes home," Chad said and extended his hand across the polished desk. He held a half-smoked cigarette in the other hand. He smiled beneath his impeccably trimmed mat of oiled yellow hair, but his moody brown eyes reserved their secrets.
Durell ignored the hand, sat down heavily across the desk from Chad. "Did you get Otelo's story suppressed?"
"I talked with the editor—"
"That's not what I asked."
Chad lifted a shoulder, as if his coat were binding him. "You know how it is with freedom of the press," he said. Then, apologetically, "We can't push too hard, Sam. We're not like you, in and then out. We have to live with these people."
"Still afraid to make waves," Durell rasped.
"So what? We've wrapped up the mission."
"Not quite."
"Okay. A few odds and ends, some reports. The embassy can truthfully say you've left the country by the time the papers hit the streets."
"Or shortly thereafter," Durell said. He made his face bland. "Maybe it's for the best."
"Sure. And get this: that Indian kid is over at Government House getting patted on the back—after we did all the work."
"I know. I took him there."
Durell glanced casually about the big office with its conference table and leather-upholstered sofa and expensive paintings. "You've reported the kernel of events to K Section headquarters, I presume."
"Yes." Chad sucked quickly on his cigarette. "And to the ambassador, of course. I'm afraid you stepped on a lot of toes, Sam. I tried to smooth it over. You'll apologize to the ambassador, now that it's all over—^no point in leaving bad feelings to fester."
"No apology, Chad." Durell's tone brooked no argument.
Chad's eyes fell to his desk, then met Durell's gaze. "Very well, old man. No hard feelings between you and me, right?"
"Why should there be?"
"I don't care for your tone. Okay, we guessed wrong about Boyer—^he hadn't been a careless fool, after all. And about the East Indians. Everybody makes mistakes, goddamn it."
"Your mistake might have cost me my life—it might have cost Guyana its freedom, not to mention the ultimate price of revolution and conquest throughout South America."
Chad's yellow-stained fingers plucked angrily at his chin as the two men exchanged stares. Then he took a breath and said, "So you're pissed off." He dropped his voice and put an edge to his words. "I'll tell you something: I don't give a shit. I came out of this smelling like a rose, baby. You should see my report to the ambassador."
"Needless to say, you took as much credit as you could."
Chad gave a quick nod and grinned spitefully. "And there's nothing you can do about it. Write all the reports you like for K Section; mine is in State, and the twain shall never meet."
Durell just stared at the man, his eyes dark.
Chad said: "The prime minister called the ambassador to thank him for our help, after returning from the dam. The ambassador let me speak with him. I'm on my way, Sam, like it or not." He blew out smoke and added with a big smile: "I suppose you'd best be on your way, too. General McFee has informed us that a Miss Deirdre Padgett is waiting for you in Rio de Janeiro."
Durell felt a warmth that only the mention of Dee's name could bring, then Chad continued: "Your ticket to Rio is waiting at Timehri airport for you to pick it up."
Chad's eyes traveled over Durell's grimy clothing. "Before you leave, why don't you get a new suit? And take a shower, for god's sakes."
"So you've managed to take credit." Durell shrugged. "That's fine. You can take responsibility for the death of Eisler, too."
Chad's face paled. "You're joking."
"I had to kill him."
"For god's sakes ..." Chad's thin jaw was hanging.
"And Police Inspector Sydney James. At the airport, half an hour ago. It's what I came to tell you."
"But—why? You son of a bitch!"
"I suppose there will be a hell of a stink," Durell said and rose from his chair.
"Surely there's an explanation!"
"Maybe. If the ambassador wants to read the K Section reports. He might get clearance in a month or two."
Chad stood up behind his desk. "You're not dropping this in my lap and walking out?"
"I'll send you a postcard from Rio," Durell said.
He strode through the door.
Watching the time carefully, Durell picked a blue suit from the rack in a small men's apparel shop, added a light blue tie with a woven pattern, white shirt, shoes, socks and underclothing, then returned to the Berbice Hotel for a steaming shower and shave.
He desperately wanted food and sleep, but there was time for neither, so he settled for bourbon and ice, brought by room service.
He carried his drink with him as he moved to the Demerara shutters, pushed them open and breathed deeply of the moist tradewind. His eyes ranged from the pink and white licorice-striped lighthouse to the distant seawall, the coffee-colored ocean beyond and back to the arcaded street below.
Down among the crowd of black and brown faces that drifted to and fro, newsboys had just begun shouting the day's headlines.
Durell sucked in a long breath and closed the shutters.
Chapter Thirty-two
Ana Morera was in a hurry.
She moved with long-stemmed grace among the smartly dressed urban dwellers and the country women in bandana turbans and calf-length cotton print dresses. As she turned into the sun on High Street, her face was the color of ripe grain, her eyes shadowed by a wide-brinmied straw hat beneath which she had piled her hair. She wore enormous rose-colored sunshades, a simple, deep-necked blouse of handwoven silk and a wide, free-flowing skirt of fawn material.
Calvin had called two hours ago and told her about the mysterious barge that had exploded near the dam after they had left there. It seemed he was always the first to know, as if he had a direct line to everywhere in the country. It would pay her to patch up their differences, once Sam Durell was out of the way.
She found it odd that she felt rather buoyant, considering what she had been through, what had happened in the jungle. But it was not as if anyone she'd really known had died out there.
Her life had been preserved.
So had Sam's.
It was as if fate had meant them to have this final moment together. Just them, after all the suspense and speculation, the labor and death.
She had not felt such elation since that time she'd sniffed coke in her dorm room. She had proven herself against the dare then, and again when she'd taken over her uncle's failing plantation and made it one of the most productive on the coast in three arduous years. Indeed, her short, successful life seemed to have been the conquest of one dare after another, from the time she had been orphaned as a small child, through a brilliant college career—and right up to today.
Something in the back of her mind quibbled against the chance she was taking, but her pride strangled the small voice before she could even begin to wonder.
Sam was brusque and self-contained and highly competent, she thought.
But he could be made to love her. And, if not, to desire her.
That would be enough.
She walked through the portals of the aging Berb
ice Hotel with a sense of confidence that was enhanced by the yearning stares that followed her swaying hips to the elevator. She smiled back through the closing doors from behind her sunglasses, then felt dimly alarmed at the passing giddiness.
That querulous little voice spoke again, asking if she knew herself as well as she had thought.
But of course she did.
There was a mirror in the elevator, and it told her that an almost imperceptible wisp of finespun hair had strayed. She pressed the strand back into place, then, in afterthought, ran the thin pomt of her pink tongue around her lips to make them shine.
She placed her sunglasses in her skirt pocket and studied her oval face. She must not look too eager. She took a deep breath, arched the neat lines of her black eyebrows, twitched her small mouth, then let her face fall back into place. Relax, she thought. Tmy stress lines disappeared from the comers of her eyes. The bell rang at the third floor. _
If there was one thing for which she faulted herself as she stepped into the dusky hallway, it was waiting this long—^but the pursuit, the test of wits, had been necessary to her ego, and she accepted that. She told herself that egotism was the necessary price of brilliance.
She curled her sharp little nose at the less than genteel fragrance of the Berbice and stood before Durell's door.
She took a moment to be delighted at the vision of his surprise, another second to run the soft flesh of her pahn down her inner thigh. She smiled to herself.
Yes, it still was there.
The stiletto.
Durell had not reopened the window. The gloom was somehow comforting—fitting, he supposed, to his frame of mind. The air was hot, and the ice melted rapidly in its bucket. He took some of the hollowing cubes into his glass and filled it with bourbon. As condensation frosted the glass, Durell rubbed it across his forehead, aware of the wind slapping the window shutters. Pigeons cooed on the fire escape. A ship's horn mourned.
There came a knock at the door.
"Who's there?"
"It's me."
Durell unlocked the door, and Ana stepped in, smiling. She leaned back against the door to close it. Her eyes were the color of brass against fire, as she said: "I came to say good-bye."
Durell flicked the door latch, took two backward steps, hands at his sides. "You're right on time," he said.
"You were about to leave?"
"The papers just hit the streets.'*
"I should have brought you one. I came to give you something else." She closed the gap a step.
"I know," Durell said.
She was lovely, the wheaty sheaf of her neck a fine arch as her face turned up to him, the puffs of her perfumed breasts high against the low-cut blouse. Her eyes suggested intimacy; her lips expected a kiss. As she watched him, she tossed her hat onto a chair and unpinned her hair and it fell springy and black to her waist. Then her luxuriant body was a seductive pressure against his, the touch of her long thighs an invitation.
She made her voice low, and said: "Make this a special good-bye." Her lips met his with twisting eagerness.
Durell felt nothing, or, at least, not what she expected.
He made no response.
He decided there was little point in waiting, thought he might as well lay it all out.
She said, "Put your arms around me, darling."
And he said, "I ordered a background search on Leon Perez—only he wasn't Leon Perez, he was Martin Morera."
Ana's eyes flared beneath the dark wings of her lashes, and her lips parted slightly.
"Yes, Ana," Durell said. "Your father."
She did not release her embrace.
"He wasn't killed at the Bay of Pigs, was he?" Durell said. "He went there as a double agent for Castro, to betray the exiles and then rejoin Castro's people. And his face wasn't scarred in a volcanic eruption. It happened in that battle."
"Sam, darling—I don't want to talk about it." Her arms
tightened about his neck as she pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He felt her tremble a little.
"We have to talk about it, Ana. You'll have to do lots of talking."
Her fingers moved coolly across his chest and slipped a button of his shirt, then another. She hardly seemed to hear as Durell went on.
"Since the Bay of Pigs, your father had operated under deepest cover as an agent of the Direccion General de Inteligencia. We might never have traced him, but he was spotted in Africa, where he was instrumental behind the scenes in paving the way for the Cuban intervention in Angola. So many powers were in the shadows over there that he couldn't keep his role secret for long."
"Please, don't go on. We're all that matters now, just us." Her voice was pleading. Her lips touched the flesh over his heart.
"It's necessary that I finish. Ana. I hope you'll correct me where I am wrong. A formal statement will be necessary, of course." He lifted her chin with two fingers and spoke to her eyes. "The Cubans recruited you, with your father's help, in Spain last year. We know now that you were there at the same time—^your name is on the passenger fists Dick kept in his files. They told you just to come back and get to know the right people, learn to be a good Ustener."
He was puzzled by the look in her eyes, and felt dimly annoyed by their frank, open stare, as if she thought that nothing he said could possibly make any difference.
"You won Eisler's confidence," he continued. "He had nothing to do with your operation, just as you had nothing to do with his. But he couldn't hlep boasting about the wealth of Qaudius' diamond find—and you put your Cuban comrades onto the old man's trail. They took it over, then used the fear of the Warakabra Tiger to keep others away."
Ana's cool fingertips made little circles in the hair over Durell's breastbone. "It's so sordid, dear Sam. Can't we forget—for a little while?"
"I can't forget that you betrayed Dick, your old friend. You were Otelo's source, Ana. You told him about Dick. And then about me."
Her reply was oddly detached, as if Durell were a ghost, and his words really did not matter. "Would I do that?" she said.
"You would, my treacherous little Ana. Only you and Chad Mitchell have used my code name here—and Chad is loyal, whatever other defects he might have. Otelo called me Cajun. He could only have learned it from you."
She kissed the middle of his chest and turned eyes the color of wild honey toward his face. "I didn't want you to be harmed—I hoped you'd leave the country. I wouldn't have done those things for anyone but my father."
"Maybe. But it was a challenge. You reveled in it. You threw up roadblocks everywhere. You were too arrogant to kill me—that wasn't exciting enough. You thought you could outsmart me."
Ana lowered her ear to Durell's chest. "Your heartbeat is so strong, so—vital."
"I'm afraid you're not quite well. Ana," Durell said. "We'll find a place for you, back in the States. You'll be interrogated, perhaps for weeks. There's much we don't know about the DGI. After that—"
It happened with stunning swiftness, in midsentence.
Durell did not see where the stiletto came from, only a flash of steel, a needlepoint—aimed at the smudge of Hp-stick that was like a target on his heart.
All his nerves popped, and his reaction was quick and instinctively savage. His arm flew out violently, crashed into Ana with triple the force necessary to knock her away, and, the next thing he knew, her slight figure was sprawled halfway across the room.
Her gasping breath sounded through the stillness, and her raven hair swung in a screen across her cheek as she raised herself on a shuddering arm, rolled onto her side. She pulled her knees up as if to cradle the handle of the knife that protruded from her stomach.
Durell dropped to her side, reached for the weapon.
"No!"
Ana gave an agonized cough. Her hands clutched the silver handle and blood trickled and dripped from the tips of her fingers. Her lips skinned back from her teeth; her eyelids fluttered.
"I thought I could beat you," she
gasped.
"I'm sorry, Ana. You were in over your head all the way."
She made a torn sound of rage and, with superhuman effort, jerked the blade from her body. She raised it to strike—but her eyes turned to muddy ice.
The stiletto clattered harmlessly to the floor.
Durell did not move for several seconds, his nerves ragged, his face wet with sweat. He regarded the body and thought how he could have proven nothing of Ana's complicity, even knowing that Leon was her father. He had not been certain that she was involved in the Cuban conspiracy until she came to his room to kill him. She must have known that even with his cover blown no one would blame the East Indians this time. Not after what had happened at the dam. But, as he had expected, her vanity had pushed her to this last desperate test; her intelligence had outwitted itself.
He dialed a number and wiped lipstick from his chest with the heel of his hand. When a highly placed aide in the prime minister's office answered, he glanced at Ana's face, stiffening with death.
"It's over," he said.
Chapter Thirty-three
Durell sat on the madras bedspread, hands hanging between his knees, as ambulance attendants covered Ana Morera's face and carried the stretcher out the door. The police had been informed through the office of the prime minister, just as they had been told of Inspector Sydney James and Calvin Eisler. In its present mixture of gratitude, alarm and urgency the government had given Du-rell a free hand and full backing for the completion of his assignment—although Chad Mitchell did not know this, and Durell was not about to tell him until the man had stewed awhile. Durell had not dared approach the police directly on his return to Georgetown—he'd had no way of knowing how deeply Eisler's corruption had penetrated.
Now the officers asked few questions, their tones deferential. They left with the sheeted corpse.
Assignment- Tiger Devil Page 18
