Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  The Colonel reached for another file, then stopped and nodded to himself. There was no need to look up any names. Who, after all, had provided the Colonel with this valuable source in Crete in the first place?

  Who indeed? Stern, of course. Stern had recruited the woman soon after Crete had fallen to the Germans. She had been an acquaintance of Stern's from somewhere over the years, and it had been Stern who had gone to her and convinced her to undertake the role of a collaborator, with all the danger and humiliation that entailed. And then not long after Colly had disappeared in Crete, Stern had managed to get himself sent there on another assignment altogether. But obviously his real purpose in going had been to find out about Colly.

  Stern must have known Colly, the Colonel now realized, from the time when Colly had been in Palestine.

  Perhaps they had even become close friends then, for they were the kind of men who would have been naturally attracted to one another. Colly with his resourcefulness and his many idiosyncrasies, an eccentric dreamer who was more religious than rational, who was a firm believer in the Bible and who had become an ardent Zionist while working in Palestine fired with a mystical sense of the special mission of the Jews.

  Yes. Colly would have appealed to Stern and they had probably become close friends, unknown to the Colonel and even to the Monastery. So when Colly hadn't returned from Crete, Stern had worked out a way to get himself sent there, to find out what had happened to his friend.

  It fit, the Colonel was sure of it. It was exactly the kind of thing Stern would have done. And once in Crete, Stern must have left the safety of the mountains and taken the risk of going down into town, disguised as a Cretan mountaineer, and looked up the woman he had previously recruited for the Colonel, to learn for himself what Colly's fate had been. And later mentioned the fact of Colly's death to the Monastery, disguising his source.

  It fit, and it troubled the Colonel. It was a little bit terrifying sometimes to think of the chances Stern had taken. This one, for example, strictly on his own. Thinking up a plausible assignment in Crete and getting himself sent there, simply to find out about a friend. To the Colonel, there was something disturbing about that. Something profoundly puzzling and suggestive of Stern's whole character.

  But for the moment the Colonel put aside these intriguing considerations. Before he did anything else, he had to set matters straight in his own office.

  ***

  I'm afraid I might have given you the wrong impression just now, he said, when I implied O'Sullivan had been killed. The truth is, we don't know whether he's dead or not. Our Colly might well be still alive in the mountains of Crete, which are extensive and rugged, after all.

  I understand, answered the Major.

  I'm sure you do. Undoubtedly you heard a lot about him as a boy, and you know there was no stopping him ever. Absolutely astonishing when you think of it. The Sergeant O'Sullivan. The noncommissioned officer of the Empire. I mean our very own, yours and mine and everyone's Our Colly of Champagne, right? So all we can say about it now, here, is that Colly can't be the Purple Seven who was in that Arab bar last night with Stern. And that's all we can say in respect to Colly.

  I understand fully, said the Major.

  The Colonel paused. Another thought had come to him. He went back to the report drawn up by the Egyptian policeman, to the information that had been copied down from the Armenian's passport after the explosion. The physical characteristics given for the Armenian were the same as Colly's had been.

  The Monastery hadn't even bothered to change any of the entries in the passport, although they certainly would have, if there had been any reason to. Did that mean the Armenian not only resembled Colly, but resembled him exactly?

  The Major must have already noticed this coincidence of physical details.

  Did Our Colly have a brother? he asked.

  The Colonel groaned.

  Please. There's no way we can get into that.

  Sir?

  There were an enormous number of brothers, all of them older, as I recall. Colly used to claim the reason he had so many brothers was because his father ate so many potatoes. Some kind of local superstition where he grew up. Anyway, most of the brothers emigrated to America at an early age, to someplace called the Bronx, where they became roofers or drunkards or both.

  Roofers?

  Reaching for the stars in the New World, was the way Colly used to put it. And becoming drunkards, sadly, when the stars still proved to be out of reach, even over there. But no matter. It's an intriguing idea but it can't lead anywhere. The Bronx is simply too far away. Even Jameson couldn't penetrate such an exotic place.

  The Colonel shook his head.

  Stern, he muttered. The Armenian. That bar in a slum. One way or another, I don't think they're going to be very happy at the Monastery when I tell them about this.

  One way or another? asked the Major.

  Yes. If the hand grenade was their doing, it has to mean they intended to kill both of them. And if it really was a sordid accident, at the very least it tells them the Armenian went to Stern with what he'd learned, rather than to them. And now that Stern's gone, the Armenian's word is all the Monastery has about anything and everything concerning this operation of theirs against Stern. . . . No, I'm afraid there's no way out of it for the Armenian. Whatever the situation, he's in trouble.

  Perhaps we could look into it further?

  On our own, you mean. Yes, we could try to do that. But it's still the Monastery's operation, so I can't wait any longer to tell them about Stern's death and all the rest of it. Even a little thing like our sending Jameson over for a look is going to make them furious.

  What about Maud? She might be able to pass on a message to her friend, the current Gulbenkian.

  Oh that's not important. He doesn't need to be told where he stands. But I did intend to speak to her anyway, she's waiting now.

  The Colonel looked down at the floor. He sighed.

  The point is, you know as well as I do that when the Monastery's running an agent as a Purple Seven in this kind of case, against a man who was probably our most valuable agent and perhaps their most valuable agent as well, then that Purple Seven can't help but have a very short life expectancy, considering what must have been at stake. What is at stake? If he won he loses, if he lost he loses. And he's going to have to be a very wily Armenian now to live even a day or two with the Monks after him. I only hope he's half as clever as his predecessor in that identity was.

  From what you've said about O'Sullivan, that seems unlikely.

  I know it does. You just don't come across a man like O'Sullivan very often. You can't expect to and you don't.

  Once more the Colonel shifted his false leg. The Major rose to leave.

  Sir?

  Hm.

  I'll look into this as quietly as possible, but do you think you could give me any suggestions? There are so many names and dates and events in Stern's file, I could spend a year just trying to sort them out. Do you have any idea at all what the Armenian might have been looking for?

  It's just a guess, said the Colonel, but my inclination would be to start with Poland.

  The Major looked completely bewildered.

  Poland? Here in Cairo? . . . The war started with Poland, he added blankly.

  And so it did, said the Colonel. Oddly enough, and so it did. But the war only ostensibly started there. Its origins have to lie more deeply in the past, as origins always do. By the time something becomes apparent, well, it's already traveled some distance, hasn't it? It's already been on its course for years and decades and it has a history to it. So although I'd start with Poland if I were you, I'd also keep in mind that's only a beginning. We have to go back, back, to find the Armenian. Because that's exactly what he did to find Stern. Does it sound complicated to you?

  Frankly it does, said the Major.

  But it's not really. It can't be. Stern was a man and the Armenian's a man and Poland's a place. And the Armenian m
anaged to do it working alone, while we have enormous resources at our disposal.

  Why do you say he was working alone? Surely he had the resources of the Monastery behind him?

  No, I'm quite sure he didn't, not in any substantial way. The Monastery would never share anything of consequence with an outsider, that's not the way they operate. There's a reason why they have the name they have, as with most names in this world. So my guess is the Armenian was as alone before as he is now, and he's certainly alone now if the Monks are after him.

  The Colonel gazed off into the distance. It must be an extremely important case, he mused.

  Sir?

  Just on the face of it, from what little we know. Stern and Colly's successor supposedly working against each other? Yet at the same time, not working against each other in some strange way? My God, if you had ever wanted two men to do something for you out here, it goes without saying you would have picked Stern and Colly.

  And Colly's successor?

  The Colonel shook his head.

  Yes I know. It's a mystery, and a pity.

  Sir?

  Oh it's just that I always had such great affection for Colly, and I suppose I must be inadvertently transferring some of those feelings to his successor, this new Purple Seven.

  The Colonel smiled, almost shyly.

  Odd, how we do that. I haven't the least idea who this Purple Seven is. He's just a man without a name whom we call the Armenian for convenience. Yet I can't help but feel sad when I think about him. Where he is now and what he knows and what it's come down to for him, just all of it. Of course there's no rational explanation for my feelings, but all the same, a man who could uncover the truth about Stern . . .

  The Colonel sighed.

  Well I guess we'll just have to see, that's all.

  ***

  At a remote site in the desert, deep within an ancient fortresslike structure, a monk in a hooded cassock moved quickly down a narrow subterranean corridor lit at rare intervals by torches fixed to the walls. The corridor disappeared in the gloom and the only sound was the muffled swish of the monk's robes as he padded quietly down the worn stones in the half-light.

  The monk was a powerful stocky man with an unkempt beard, which only partially covered the piece of his jaw that was missing. He stopped at a low iron door cut into the rock, pausing before he flung it open, a shattering noise in the underground stillness.

  The monk was facing a tiny cell. At the far end a man with only one arm knelt in front of a plain wooden cross, his back to the door, heavy chains twisting away from his ankles to a rusty iron ring in the wall.

  When the door slammed open the man's wasted body jerked forward, flinching away from the crashing noise. But he didn't turn around nor did he lower his hand, which remained in front of him in an attitude of supplication.

  The man looked like a desert hermit. His hair was matted and his bare feet were black with dirt.

  Apparently he had been praying in absolute darkness, for the cell lacked even a candle, only a little light reaching it now from the flickering torches in the corridor. The face of the hooded monk was invisible in the blackness.

  For a time neither man moved in the shadowy silence, the two of them somber and stationary in the separate poses of their separate worlds, the powerful stocky monk framed in the low iron doorway, the shackled man facing the crumbling wall as he trembled, waiting. And then all at once the distant opening chords of Bach's Mass in B Minor could be heard booming forth from somewhere high above them in the ancient fortresslike structure.

  The monk crossed himself and removed a coiled whip from under his cassock, a long thick scourge of braided leather. He let the whip unwind until it dangled down to the floor, an ugly many-tongued lash.

  The shackled man jerked slightly, his head sinking lower. It was cold in the cell, yet drops of sweat had broken out around the lips of the monk. He licked the sweat away and spoke in a hard contemptuous voice.

  The Armenian survived the hand grenade, he said.

  The stark words rang in the stillness and a sudden spasm gripped the shackled man, an unmistakable shudder of eagerness, an almost sensual expression of loathing. Frantically he began clawing at the rags on his shoulders, stripping them back to reveal his wasted flesh, deathly white skin crossed with dark uneven scars. In another moment the kneeling man had bared himself to the waist and buried his face in his single hand, rigid again, waiting.

  The monk stood with his feet wide apart. He whipped the scourge into the air and brought it down with all his strength on the pale back of the kneeling man. The ugly leather tongues hissed and whined against the flesh, snapping up again. After the third brutal lashing the monk tossed the bloodied scourge into a corner. He licked his lips and stared. The shackled man had been driven to the floor by the force of the blows, and it was only with a great effort that he managed to raise himself to his knees.

  He was breathing heavily, fighting to keep from falling back on his face. Again he raised his one thin hand to the cross on the wall in an attitude of supplication, the palm of his open hand now wet with tears. His body shook violently as he tried to control himself.

  The Armenian's a dead man, muttered the tortured figure. He's dead but he doesn't know it yet. Kill him.

  But he has eluded us, murmured the monk with great deference. We don't know where he is, Your Grace.

  In that case, whispered the shackled man, find him and then kill him.

  Yes, Your Grace.

  The monk lingered a few moments to see if there were to be any further instructions. But the shackled man in rags seemed oblivious to his presence now, so the monk backed slowly away into the corridor and closed the heavy iron door on the tiny cell, leaving his scourged superior alone once more in the blackness with his ripped flesh and his simple cross, alone and bleeding . . . praying.

  -3-

  Hopi Mesa Kiva

  Some months before the obscure gunrunner Stern was killed in Cairo, a large black automobile sped silently down a remote secondary road deep in the arid wastelands of the American southwest.

  In the rear of the automobile sat three distinguished gray-haired men, wearing rumpled white linen suits and broad Panama hats, their faces creased by the long journey from Washington in a military aircraft. In addition to having been youthful heroes for their respective nations in the First World War, the three shared reputations for unorthodox brilliance in their different professions. And now with a new war sweeping over the earth, they had become men of vast secret powers in innumerable corners of the world.

  Of the three, only the Britisher was completely unknown to his countrymen at large. An old Etonian and a member of two London clubs, he was a professional military officer who had been a colonel in the Life Guards before being anonymously seconded, years earlier, to an anonymous post requiring strictly anonymous secret duties, in keeping with traditional British anonymity in matters of intelligence.

  At the moment he was knitting.

  The Canadian was small and slight with hooded eyes that watched everything. Originally famous as an air ace in a Sopwith Camel, then as the world lightweight boxing champion and the man who had perfected the method of sending photographs by radio, he had gone on to become a millionaire industrialist with worldwide business interests.

  The Canadian was stirring a mixture over ice in a chemist's beaker.

  While the large Irish-American contented himself with gazing out the window at the dwindling light of that late desert afternoon. A law-school classmate of the American president and the former commander of the famed New York regiment known as the Fighting Sixty-ninth, he was a self-made success who had become a Wall Street lawyer with international dealings.

  The Britisher was known to the other two men as Ming, from the first syllable of his surname, which wasn't spelled that way at all. He was the first to break the silence in the backseat.

  Let's see how this is for length, he said, the knitting needles in his hands running through a
final flurry of clicks.

  He raised the black knitted material from his lap, held the end of a tape measure to one of its corners and reached across the rear seat. The American took the other ends and pulled them taut, while the small Canadian in the middle, his view suddenly blocked by the screen of black material in front of him, slid down in his seat and peeked beneath the knitting in order to keep his beaker in view.

  Still a little short? suggested the American.

  Although commonly known as Wild Bill, the American was referred to as Big Bill on the various joint committees run by the subordinates of the three men, to distinguish him from the Canadian, who was half his size and had the same first name, and who was consequently known as Little Bill. The small Canadian, in his quiet intrepid way, being considered as wild as anyone.

  Rumpled white linen suits and dented Panama hats eccentrically cocked at odd angles.

  Big Bill. Little Bill. Ming.

  And in Washington and Ottawa and London, mysterious identical memos in the hands of their staffs stating cryptically that the chief would be in the company of the other two chiefs for the next forty hours or so, strictly out of touch on a secret mission of great importance, destination and purpose unknown.

  Apparently Ming agreed with Big Bill about the length of his knitted material. He nodded without expression and went back to work with his knitting needles. Little Bill removed a chilled long-stemmed glass from an ice bucket, gave a last stir to the contents of his beaker and poured. He added a twist of lemon peel, then sipped judiciously.

  Delicious, he murmured, immediately taking a much deeper drink so that none of the martini would spill.

  For some minutes the three men sat once more in silence as the automobile sped across the barren wastelands, the stillness inside touched only by the hum of the automobile engine and the rhythmic clicking of Ming's knitting needles. Again it was Ming who interrupted their musings. Briefly he laid aside his handiwork and fitted a Turkish cigarette of strong black tobacco into a cigarette holder. Without lighting the cigarette he sucked vigorously on the mouthpiece of the holder three or four times, then stuffed the still-new cigarette into an ashtray on his armrest. Sitting very erect, he looked out the window to his right and surveyed the empty lunar landscape. They were now not far from the secret destination that had caused so much speculation in their respective capitals, a tiny Indian pueblo, or village, where they would meet the chief medicine man of the Hopi tribe.