Assignment - Treason

by Edward S. Aarons

  He did not know. He could not guess.

  “Well, now,” Quenton said with satisfaction. “Now we come right down to the nut in this palaver, Durell. You know What I want. More important, you know why I want it. You’ve set your price by now?"

  "Yes."

  “Well, then, name it."

  “Where is the girl?” he asked. “Where is Corinne?"

  Quenton looked at Hackett. The thin man stirred. “Asleep.”

  “I want to see that she’s alive, for myself," Durell insisted.

  ‘Is that your first condition?” Quenton asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she alive, Amos?”

  “Her face,” Hackett said thinly. “I thought she was just being stubborn, like Durell. I thought if I threatened her, if I damaged her looks just a little-"

  “Amos, you’re a fool!"

  “I did what I thought was best.”

  "But she‘s alive?”

  “She’ll live.”

  Quenton swung to Durell. “What else do you want?”

  “I want Hackett," Durell said.

  “Hey?”

  “I want to see him dead.”

  Hackett laughed, then stopped laughing and cursed very softly. “You see, Senator, what I’ve been up against.”

  The reptilian, milky eyes glistened. “Very unusual, Durell."

  Hackett is no good to you anymore,” Durell said. “He and I won’t ever work together. He’s a fool in many ways. you said so yourself. We could have come to terms last night, if he hadn’t been so anxious to practice his sadism on me said the girl. You couldn’t trust him not to make worse mistakes.

  "Shut up,” Hackett whispered.

  You might be right,” Quenton said and giggled.

  The big .44 Frontiersman Was in his hand again.

  He pointed it at Amos Hackett.

  Someone began to shout and scream in another part of the house.

  chapter FIFTEEN

  QUENTON LOWERED his gun. His jaw sagged, his teeth clicked, his pale eyes jerked from Hackett to Durell. “Go see what that was, Amos.”

  Hackett did not move. His thin face was sallow. A muscle twitched and jumped in his bony cheek. His eyes were dull.

  “Go look for yourself. I‘ve just quit.”

  “Goddamn you for an idiot!" the old man screamed. “Who did that yelling‘! Go and see!”

  “No more orders from a crap-headed old bastard who’d sell me down the river,” Hackett said thickly. “I’m through with you and your crackpot schemes.”

  “You can’t quit!" Quenton said.

  Distantly, from the other part of the house, came muted shouts and yells and a long, ululating scream. Quenton began to shiver. His skinny frame came clawing around the desk. He waggled the gun at Hackett.

  “Durell, you wanted to see Amos dead?”

  “Not your way,” Durell said. “I want to do it."

  Hackett cursed, staring at the big gun the old man held.

  “Do you side with me, Durell?” the old man rasped.

  “For now, yes."

  “I’ve got to trust you. Amos, sit down. We’ll talk this over—unless you go see who’s making that confounded noise and why.”

  “No,” Hackett said. “I’m through.”

  A grim spark of admiration for the thin man touched Durell. He knew that Quenton just might squeeze the trigger and shoot Hackett in the face. Hackett knew this, too. But he stood his ground. Durell pulled open the door. His legs trembled. Nausea gripped him, then quieted. When he breathed deeply, his ribs ached. He pushed past Hackett, looked down the corridor to his left. Colonel Henry Gibney came weaving down the wide, carpeted hall. He was very drunk. He had a gun in each hand, and his brick-red face was set in an insane expression. There was blood on one cheek. His red, alcoholic eyes focused on Durell and his dirty-white hair was looped thickly over his forehead.

  “The Marines have arrived!” he shouted. “How ya, Sam?”

  “Hello, Colonel,” Durell said.

  “You all right, pal?”

  “Fine, now."

  “Where’s m’little Corinne?"

  “I don’t know,” Durell said. “Let's find her. Can you spare a gun for me?”

  “Not yet. Gonna shoot me a couple old snakes. Quenton and Hackett. Had enough. Got a gutful. Gonna shoot ’em in the belly and watch the bastards bleed.”

  “Let’s find Corinne first."

  “Huh?”

  “Corinne,” Durell said.

  “You seen her?”

  “Let’s go this way.“

  Henry Gibney wavered in the hall. Durell Walked toward him. His knees felt stiff. He looked back and saw that the door to Quenton’s room was closed. Gibney licked his lips and then Durell put a hand on his arm and turned him in the other direction.

  “My God,” Gibney said. “What happened to you?”

  “I’ve been talking to Hackett all day.”

  There was no smell of liquor on Gibney’s breath.

  Durell said, “Where are all the private goons?”

  “They won’t touch me. They don’t dare. Let's find Corinne.

  “Right. This way.”

  Durell went ahead down the hall. A burly, thick-necked man in a gray suit saw them coming and scrambled out of the way, slamming a door. Durell reached the room he had been kept in, opened it, looked inside, closed it again. Someone was shouting out violently angry orders somewhere. From a window, Durell glimpsed the patio and cedar fence that faced the sea. The chairs and tables were empty under the floodlights. No party tonight. No guests.

  Corinne was in a room two removed from where he had been kept imprisoned. The entire wing was remote from the main part of the house, connected only by a glassed-in breezeway of abnormal length. He glimpsed another gray-suited guard running across the patio as he opened the door to Corinne’s room.

  She sat in a wooden chair, facing them. She sat primly, knees together, hands folded in her lap. She wore a shapeless flannel robe.

  Gibney’s breath hissed. “Good Lord.”

  “Corinne?” Durell said.

  She gave no sign of seeing or hearing.

  “Look at her face,” Gibney whispered.

  He no longer sounded drunk.

  They found a side door that led out of the house. Corinne walked between them, moving like an automaton. A chill wind blew from the ocean. Durell tasted salt on his puffed lips. He held Corinne’s hand and her fingers were cold and unresponsive. The earth rocked unsteadily under him. He did not try to understand now the riddle of Gibney’s appearance. When they reached the sandy dunes that paralleled the beach, he halted.

  “Wait. Let Corinne rest,” he said.

  “I’m all right," Corinne said.

  They were the first words she had spoken. He turned to stare sharply at her, and she said dully, “Don’t look at me. I don’t need a mirror to know how I look. It must be awful. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “You’ll be all right. A good doctor—”

  "I don’t want a doctor,” she said flatly.

  Gibney said nervously, “We can’t stay here. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  “You came here deliberately, for us?” Durell asked curiously.

  “Naturally. Mary insisted.”

  “Why should you help us?”

  “Please,” Gibney said. “Mary is waiting.”

  There was a thickening overcast in the night sky, and the stars were obscured. The cold salt wind made Durell shiver. He looked hack at the house. There was no pursuit yet. He wondered what was happening between Quenton and Hackett. Something that held up and confused the chase. The lighted windows made an irregular pattern against the black night. Far up the beach, other windows shone beckoningly.

  “They won’t let you get away with it,” Durell said. “You’ll pay for it, Colonel.”

  “It doesn't matter anymore,” Gibney said. He breathed, swallowed, breathed again. “They can’t hurt me now.”

  Co
rinne’s head came up. Her face was a grotesque mask in the windy darkness. Her voice was thin. “Henry—have you heard from Roger?”

  “Please. Let’s start walking. They’ll be after us.”

  They walked on down the beach.

  “Have you?” Corinne persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it, Henry? What have you learned?"

  Gibney said, “Mary wants to help you, Durell. She says you’re not a traitor or a spy at all. God knows how she can guess at these things. I told her she's wrong, that you stole that file to pay me off. She says no. She wants to tell you what you came here to find out. About Quenton and everything else.”

  Durell felt the slow growth of horror.

  “Why are you suddenly willing to do this?”

  Corinne said in a high voice, “Is it Roger? Is it?”

  “My son is dead,” Gibney said. His voice was thick and dull and dusty with despair. “He’s been dead for two months.”

  Corinne stopped walking. She looked at the sea. Durell put a hand on her arm and she pulled away with a quick, savage movement. “Don’t touch me!” she whispered.

  “Keep going, Corinne. You have to."

  “But he’s dead!”

  “Keep walking, Corinne.”

  She walked toward the dark line of the surf. Gibney made a strangled sound of dismay. Durell started after her, then halted when the girl paused. He felt helpless. He did not know what he could say to her. He looked back at the house. There was still no pursuit.

  “Who told you about your son?" he asked Gibney.

  “There was a telephone call. It was from Dickinson McFee.”

  “When?”

  “Dinnertime. Two hours ago.”

  “Then it’s confirmed?”

  “His body was returned to the U.S. military authorities in Berlin last week. It‘s just been identified by dental records. The date of death was last June—two weeks after he disappeared. The cause was pneumonia. Roger wandered over the line in a delirium of fever and was kept in an East Berlin hospital. So everything that followed afterward was a tissue of lies the hopes we were given, the betrayal I was forced to make. All lies. And all for nothing. My son is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Durell said, knowing his words were inadequate, knowing nothing could compensate this man for the price he had paid and the emptiness lodged in his soul.

  “They tricked me. They lied to me,” Gibney said.

  “Who first approached you?”

  “Hackett. And Quenton.”

  “Hackett was your contact?”

  “Yes. Please. Let’s go. Mary is waiting.”

  “What does she have to tell me?"

  “All about Quenton. She knows where you can get the proof of what he’s been doing. Proof enough to destroy him. She says that’s what you’re really after.” Gibney peered up at Durell’s face. “That right?”

  “Yes,” Durell said.

  He looked down toward the water for Corinne.

  She was gone.

  His pulse slowed, then jumped, and he started involuntarily for the darkly ominous surf. Then he saw her running awkwardly toward Quenton’s massive house above the beach. He shouted her name at the top of his voice, heedless of danger. She neither slackened her pace nor gave sign that she heard. He took a step or two after her and heard Gibney shout a warning and saw the swift, racing figures of three men who spurted from the house and converged on the running girl. She halted and faced them. There was an odd challenge in the tilt of her head, the stance of her body. Durell checked himself. The three men came together where the girl faced them in the dim light from the house windows. There was a moment of confused motion, soundless under the thunder and crash of the surf. There was another moment of fluidity, then a rapid movement back to the house by one of the men and the girl.

  “She's going willingly,” Gibney said, wonderingly.

  “You know why.”

  “Should we try to stop her?”

  “No,” Durell said. “She was in love with your son."

  The other two men were coming down the beach toward them, but not too rapidly. He touched Gibney’s arm and they moved into the deep shadows of the dunes that barricaded the sea from the marshes inland. He did not think a serious attempt would be made to overtake them.

  There are times when you have a choice that is not really a choice at all, he thought, a difference between two paths to follow; but because you are what you are, trained and knowledgeable, you can’t even now abandon this cold weighing and balancing of this route or that, of Corinne’s life against the information Mary Gibney has for you. It’s not a question of doing this first and that afterward. Both are concurrent, and you can accept only one or the other. The pattern is clearer now, and what remains to be done had better be done as fast as you can do it. If Corinne wanted help, she could have asked for it. But is the Corinne who returns placidly to her place of torment and death the same Corinne she was yesterday and the day before? What she was yesterday is forever gone; what she was only a moment ago, before she learned about her Roger, is also gone; and what she is now is the way she chooses to be. And she wants to go back alone. For revenge. For oblivion. Don‘t follow her. You can’t follow her. Your job is in the other direction, and there‘s no time to waste.

  He pushed ahead and did not look back again.

  The Gibney house was ordinary compared with the lavish headquarters Quenton had built for himself. It was a ramshackle wooden affair of Victorian vintage, standing alone like something forgotten by time, on a slightly higher dune than those to the south. A veranda encircled the seaward side and there were two turreted wings, and a small beach protected by a sagging palisade. The windows were all dark. Something kept clinking and ringing with a metallic, rhythmic sound, and he saw it was the halyard and metal block on a steel flagpole, swinging back and forth in the chill sea wind, striking the flagpole with quick, impatient tapping sounds.

  Gibney paused. He sounded odd. “She was waiting in the library.”

  “Lights on?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your car still here?”

  “Let‘s look.”

  It was parked on the sand tracks that led from the island’s main road. The back of the house was dark, too. The wind whipped and crackled in the brush on the dunes. Sand stung Durell’s battered face as he turned toward the sea again.

  “Let’s go in.”

  “Wait,” Gibney said. His voice, normally heavy and booming, recently slurred in deliberate drunken accents, was now pitched high with worry. “Why did she turn off all the lights?”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yes. We have no servants here.”

  “Give me one of your guns," Durell said.

  Gibney handed him a Colt .38. The cold metal felt solid and heavy and reassuring. He checked the clip. It was fully loaded.

  “Let’s find your wife,” he said.

  The metal pulley clinked loudly on the flagpole as they stepped up on the veranda. The front door stood open. The wind did not seem strong enough to have blown it open. There was nothing but darkness inside. Gibney’s face was a pale blob in the gloom. His white hair looked smudged as he stepped over the threshold.

  “Mary?” His call was high and thin.

  There was no answer.

  No one appeared.

  There was nothing but the smell of death, strong and ugly in Durell’s nostrils.

  Gibney made a small keening sound in his throat. He hung back in the open doorway, touched Durell’s arm, and Durell felt the shuddering tremors that racked him. “What is it? Where is she, Durell?”

  “That room to the left is the library?”

  “Yes. She said she’d wait for us there. She told me to get you. She worked it out. She said if I acted drunk enough and wild enough, they wouldn’t quite know how to cope with me. And if I found you and dragged you with me, they couldn’t actually stop us without violence. She said that Quenton couldn’t risk that wi
th me. Quenton wouldn’t dare.”

  His words were a quick, breathless monotone, as if he were trying to dispel and drive away what he knew waited for them in the dark room.

  They couldn’t wait too long.

  “Did you tell anyone else about Roger’s death?” Durell asked.

  “No. We were alone here when McFee telephoned.”

  “The call came from Washington?"

  “I suppose so.”

  “Mary took it?"

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I’m not sure, really. An hour ago. Maybe longer.”

  “Weren’t you with her when she got the call?"

  “I was upstairs. She sat down here alone for perhaps twenty minutes. She was so still, I finally began to wonder about it, and I came down. She looked at me as if she—as if she hated me. I saw at once that she’d been crying. Not making a sound—-but crying. She—she had told me how she tried to kill Corinne.” Gibney made a plaintive noise. “I know how she hated being so fat. It was a glandular thing with her—it began when Roger was born, when she was pregnant with him. Somehow she never could control it. I guess I—I guess I rather neglected her. I should have tried to understand. . . .”

  He was talking as if he already knew she was dead.

  Durell went through the doorway, groped on the wall for the light switch, and snapped it on.

  chapter SIXTEEN

  SHE WAS SEATED ponderously on a wide Victorian settee that faced them, her massive arms resting at her sides, her tiny feet spread the way fat people sit, with knees apart. She Wore a voluminous cotton dress that had no shape at all. Durell saw at first no sign of injury except the ugly congestion of her small face. Her eyes were like dark plums protruding from the swollen flesh.

  “Mary?” Gibney whispered.

  “Don‘t touch her,” Durell said. “You can’t help her. Draw the shades.”

  Gibney was unable to move. There was a decanter on a massive walnut sideboard and Durell found a glass and poured bourbon into it and handed it to Gibney. The man downed it as if it were water. He stared Without comprehension at his dead wife, while Durell examined the woman more closely. He still could not determine the cause of death. Then his attention was caught by a small loop of wire that dangled from under her long pale hair at the nape of her neck. Very gingerly he lifted the heavy mass of hair and saw how the wire had been looped around the woman’s throat and drawn so tightly that it was buried in the double and triple layers of fat on Mary Gibney’s neck. She had been strangled with efficiency. It had happened to her without warning. There had been no time for any sort of struggle.