The other boat was faster, however. He spotted it drifting away from the stone wall after Julian Wilde abandoned it with a single mighty leap that took him to the top of the embankment, shoving the speedboat out toward the harbor again. Durell knew Cassandra could not duplicate his quarry’s leap, and he swung the launch toward the landing steps. It gave Julian an advantage. By the time they reached the sidewalk above, facing the medieval shops and chandleries, the sound of a motor car came beating back though the drifting fog.
“This way,” Cassandra gasped.
“No, he’s heading there.”
“But my car—a Mercedes—we can overtake him. It’s parked in front of the Boerderij.” She caught his hand. “It is the leading hotel here. Haven’t you been there?”
“Not yet.”
“Then come. The Mercedes will do the job for us.”
He waited a moment. He heard the girl panting for breath, and he could hear the muffled clamor of search and alarm in the harbor. The air was cold and damp as he drew a deep breath and listened. The sound of Julian Wilde’s motor car drummed off to the north, on the dike road that led to the Gunderhof. He waited until he was sure that his quarry had gone beyond the hotel, then he ran with the girl for two blocks along the brick walk atop the embankment.
Her car was sleek, low-slung, powerful, seating just two. Cassandra gasped, “You drive. I don’t think I can— I feel so—”
He slid behind the wheel, felt the quick, powerful response of the motor, and swung the Mercedes in a scream-mg circle around the embankment and onto the road after the fleeing Julian Wilde.
At no time until now had he analyzed his motives in giving chase to Wilde. It was not from any desire to catch a murderer. In this case, Durell was not concerned with criminal justice. His assignment was above all ordinary considerations. It did not matter that Julian had killed General von Uittal—whose death, in any case, was long overdue. But he could not let the only man who controlled the Cassandra virus drive off in a red, lustful fury for vengeance. He had to stop Julian before the man took other drastic steps. There was no telling what might be in Julian Wilde’s mind.
He glanced sidewise at Cassandra. Ten minutes ago she had seen her husband murdered, after he accused her of an affair with Marius Wilde. But she sat now in the careening Mercedes with a strange small smile on her lips.
“Did you get a look at Julian’s car?” he asked her.
She stared ahead. “Yes. It was English. A Jaguar, I think.”
“Can we catch it?”
“You can try.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I never met Julian,” she said quietly. “Marius never mentioned his brother. But I will not let you take him to the police for what he did to Friedrich, if that’s why you are chasing him.”
“No, it’s not for that,” Durell said.
“I did not think so.”
They flashed past the lights of the Gunderhof and bored north through the fog on the dike road. It was like driving through a dark tunnel that curved slowly to the northeast, following the shore toward Groningen. There was very little traffic. Two ruby tail-lights far ahead on the flat landscape told him where his quarry was, when they became suddenly visible though a momentary break in the sea fog. But the lifting of the curtain was frustratingly brief.
“Where does this road go?” Durell asked the girl. “North, through Groningen Province to Germany.” “Did Marius live in this area?”
“I never learned where he lived.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why do you always doubt what I say?”
“Why do you always lie? You had an affair with Marius, but I’m not concerned about that. But surely you met somewhere in private.”
“I never slept with him. Friedrich was wrong about that.” “All right, you never did. But you met him where he lived.”
She was silent.
“Where was it, Cassandra?”
“I can’t tell you. That would be where you would go to find Julian, too, is it not?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ve just decided I don’t want you to find him.” He spoke in exasperation. “Then why did you come with me? Why did you lend me your car?”
“To make sure you don’t catch up with him. You see, we’re going to run out of fuel in a moment. You’ll see.” And she laughed softly.
It was not a normal sound. It was quiet, but it was laced with a deep, sensual pleasure, and she wriggled deeper in the car’s bucket seat, like a cat turning around to curl up in cozy security.
A few moments later the Mercedes’ engine sputtered and died. The fuel gauge showed empty, exactly as she had predicted.
Durell let the heavy sports car glide slowly off the road lane to the shoulder of the dike. In the silence, when they rolled to a halt, he heard on the right hand the singing of crickets in the field below the level of the sea wall; on the left, he heard the easy crash and sigh of surf on a beach where the North Sea surged in tidal strength against the dike. He settled back behind the wheel in controlled anger.
“Well, we’re stranded. Have you got a cigarette?”
“In the glove compartment,” the girl said.
“What do we do now?” he asked, helping himself.
“We can walk back. Or wait here. Someone will be along soon.”
“Not too soon, on a foggy night like this,” he said.
“You don’t mind sitting here with me, for a while?”
“You shouldn’t have tricked me,” he said thinly. “It’s important to get to Julian Wilde.”
“I don’t want him to be punished. He struck off my chains and set me free tonight.”
“You don’t sound like a grieving widow.”
“I’m not. You saw what my husband was like—how he treated me, what he thought of me. Why should I weep for him? Oh, he wanted so much to marry me, when he thought he loved me and passion had inflamed him. For once in my stupid life, I did the right thing, and I gave him nothing, you understand, until we were married and he signed over an irrevocable settlement of his estate that will make me a rich woman. But even then I was stupid. He was stripped of everything by the West German courts. He lived on his neo-Nazi party funds, you see. Things were provided for him by those who still dream of revived glory and power. But von Uittal himself turned out to be penniless.” She laughed bitterly. “However, the yacht is now mine, and everything aboard it. So I do have something after all from the humiliation and degradation he gave me. It was worth it, to be patient.”
“Did you ever love von Uittal?”
She lit his cigarette for him. Her mouth, rich and smiling, looked wet in the glow of the match. “No. I never loved anyone.”
“He thought you loved Marius.”
“Marius was not enough man for me. —I feel good,” she said abruptly. “I feel like singing and dancing. I feel free! Can you understand that?”
“I think so.”
“I want to do something utterly mad. I want to walk in the sea. Come with me, will you?”
With no further warning, she opened the car door and jumped out and ran across the dike to the other side. In the fog, her figure was tall and pale, vanishing over the dike.
“Cassandra!”
She looked back and gestured with her hand, and then she found steps going down to the narrow beach on the seaward side of the dike and she ran down them. Durell elbowed his door open and stepped out. He felt an unaccountable concern for her, mixed with the residual anger at the way she had ended his chase of Julian Wilde. There were questions he wanted to ask, and answers he had to have from her. He started across the foggy road after her, leaving only the parking lights to mark the Mercedes’ location in the dark.
On one of the sandy islands out at sea, a lighthouse sent probing beams of brightness swinging in a rhythmic arc across the sea and the land. It touched the dike regularly, alternately turning the night to the jeweled brightness of fog, and then cool, anonymous darkness. I
n the interval of light, he found the steps and ran down them.
“Cassandra!” he called again.
“I’m here. I’m walking in the sea.”
The dike looked enormously high when he reached the strip of beach at its base. The surf was mild, splashing gently in small combers developed in the shallow tidal areas. Tall reeds grew here where the land and sea dissolved into one another like languorous lovers. He heard the girl splash through the shallows, and a duck awakened with a cry of alarm and flew off with an exaggerated slapping of wings.
The girl laughed softly.
“Here I am.”
The beam from the lighthouse touched her in its orderly circuit of the horizons. She had loosened her hair again and it hung in cascading waves of heavy gold. Her mouth was parted, and he saw the gleam of her white teeth when she laughed throatily.
“Over here,” she said.
“Come back to the car,” he ordered her. “Are you ill?”
“No, I feel wonderful. I feel happy and free. I want—I want to celebrate my freedom, darling. I want to know that I am finished with Friedrich at last. Time enough later for details. There will be such boring sessions with the police, and all the lawyers in Hamburg won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. How can I be angry with Julian Wilde? He did what I wished to do and never dared. He struck off my chains.”
He splashed through the warm surf toward her. There was an offbeat ring in her voice that sounded a warning note of the abnormal. The beam of the lighthouse touched her again and her head was tilted back, her pale brown eyes regarding him, and then she held out her arms to him as she stood in the wash of salt water among the reeds. “Come here, darling. I want you.”
“Cassandra, your husband—”
“My husband is dead and I’m happy about it. I want to prove it to myself, don’t you see? I want to prove it with you.”
She surged toward him in the knee-high salt water, and as she waded nearer she took off her blouse, and he saw she had no bra on and did not need one. Then she paused and with a quick wriggle of her hips she rolled down her slacks, stepped out of them, and hurled them happily toward the beach.
She stood naked before him, arms outstretched.
“Come here,” she called. Her eyes were wide, unseeing. “Please, I need you. Don’t understand? He took me when I was only a child in Berlin, and I knew nothing. He was rich, he said, and if I gave him what he wanted, he would give me everything else, he said. So I did. Anything he asked, I did. Things I’d never imagined. Sometimes I tried to wash the touch of him away, in bath after bath, because he made me feel like an animal. Later, he beat me and cursed me and called me stupid, and treated me like a pet beast he had use for only at certain times. Do you see? You saw how he was tonight. Ready for his fine dinner, while I stood at the table and waited like a slave, a female!”
Her bitterness spilled over with the sharp impact of her words. She stood like a blonde Aphrodite rising from the reedy sea. The silent flashing beam of the distant lighthouse touched the massive wall of the sea dike towering darkly over their heads, shone on the white beach, and bathed her body in a pale glow, swiftly, fleetingly. There was a challenge in the way she stood with rounded hips askew, with firm breasts and flat stomach and long legs steady where the sea ebbed and washed and rolled.
“I feel drunk,” she went on, whispering. “I need something, do you understand? Or I shall fly apart and destroy myself. Something is wound up tightly inside me, after all these years with him, and tonight I must be released. In Amsterdam I played a game with you, obeying his orders. Tonight I am free and I do this because I wish it, and no one else. I am my own mistress. We can finish what we began in Amsterdam, you and I. You saw me then, like this. Did you want me then?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you want me now?”
“Yes,” he said.
They came together slowly in the briny warm water, with the mist moving slowly on the faint sea wind and the monstrous height of the sea wall towering over them. She shivered and shuddered desperately. Her mouth sought his with a ferocity that was shocking. Her body swayed and jerked. Her head was tilted back as he held her and he saw that her eyes were wide open in the misty, white-jeweled glare of the swinging light—wide open, and staring at nothing at all, or at something that did not include him as Sam Durell, but only as an instrument for her orgasmic satisfaction in her husband’s death.
He let her go.
She clung to him frantically, seeking completion.
He thrust her away again.
She moaned and suddenly stood with her naked body rigid. Her face was transfigured by what she was feeling. Her eyes closed, opened wide, and then she gave a small, ragged cry that was torn from her throat. And she slid to her knees in the warm surge of salt water.
“Please . . .” she whispered.
“No. I’ll get your clothes, Cassandra.”
She looked at him with hatred.
“I’m sorry to be cruel,” he said. “You did it to yourself, though. Get dressed and I’ll take you back to Amschellig.”
“I will not go anywhere with you,” she breathed.
She stood up, walked out of the water, and picked up her clothes from the beach where she had flung them. Without looking back, she walked off into the darkness, under the dark shadow of the dike. She walked away in the direction of the town.
Durell let her go. He climbed the steps back to the road and returned to the Mercedes. He settled down to wait for someone to come along and give him a lift back to Amschellig.
Fourteen
A Swedish couple, driving a Saab down from Denmark via Groningen, picked him up and took him back to Amschellig. The Swedish woman clucked over Durell’s battered face, reminding him of his session with Erich, and he assured her it looked worse than it actually was. The husband simply grunted glumly over his wife’s concern for a stranger.
Inspector Flaas was waiting in Durell’s room at the Gunderhof when he let himself in. The Dutch security man looked the same as in Amsterdam—stolid and determined. He was smoking one of his crooked Italian cigars. He wore a brown seersucker, a dark red tie, and heavy shoes. There was sand on his shoes, and his eyes followed Durell’s glance and he shrugged and smiled.
“What happened to you, my friend?”
As Durell stripped and took a hot shower in the big tiled bathroom adjacent to his room, he told Flaas about Marius Wilde’s murder by General von Uittal, and of Julian’s vengeful raid on the Valkyron. Nothing changed in Flaas’ manner.
“Yes, yes, I know all this,” the Hollander finally said. “But the local police can hafrale that end of it.”
“What about Julian Wilde?” Durell asked. “Will you pick him up now on a charge of murder?”
“You will leave that to us now.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Precisely what I said, Heer Durell. Our government has again changed its collective mind. I warned you in Amsterdam that there were factions resentful of knuckling under to the threat of Virus Cassandra. They have gained the upper hand. And with it, perhaps the end for Julian Wilde.”
“What have you done?”
Flaas smoked his thin black cigar for a moment. “This is a small country. We have a rather complicated network of roads and canals—did you know that you can take the Amschellig Canal here and work your way down by barge and launch to Amsterdam and through Belgium all the way to Paris, and never once leave the water, although you will be many, many miles inland? It is true. However, we have bottled up all available outlets from Friesland and Groningen, and the international borders will be completely sealed, of course. Julian Wilde will not escape us.”
Durell came angrily out of the shower, a towel wrapped around himself. “You’re not serious? You’re not going to pick him up without finding the Cassandra bunker first, are you?”
“Those are my orders. Incidentally, a doctor should look after your bruises, my friend.”
“I’m all right,” Durell said shortly. “Julian Wilde knows where the bunker is. He can spread the plague, if he decides to. And he will, as soon as he learns you’ve thrown a net around this area. For God’s sake, you can’t—”
“I cannot change the situation. I do not like it, but I cannot change it.”
Durell drew a breath. “Where do I fit into the revised picture?”
“Nowhere, sir. That is what I came to tell you.”
“Then I’m pulled off the job?”
“I regret to say so, but—yes.”
“Who also says so?”
“The Netherlands Security Administration has been in touch with Washington. You have a reputation for creating explosive reactions, Heer Durell, but Dutch lives are at stake, and our nation’s existence may be in the balance. We cannot permit you to continue here.”
“Whatever happened here would have happened anyway,” Durell objected.
“Perhaps. But now we are concerned with containing Julian Wilde in this area—much as one would seal off an area containing a dangerous beast. Can you appreciate this?” “Of course. He raised the ante, you know. He wants ten million now.”
“We have accepted this demand. It has been arranged.” “Arranged? But you just said—”
“We have thrown a cordon around this place and put the money in the Swiss bank for him, and are prepared to offer him amnesty. One must explore every avenue out of this strange dilemma. All parties in the government are agreed for the moment that there must be no aggressive activity against the people who know where Cassandra is buried. We have lost General von Uittal as a witness—and his information might have been of immense value. So you will suspend all your activities and return to Amsterdam in the morning. Your embassy in the Hague will have further orders for you. I am sorry, Durell. I like you. I think you were doing the right thing. But we have no choice except to obey.”
“How many men are you using here?”
“Over one hundred. Why?”
“Won’t Julian notice the noose around his neck?”
“They are trickling in one by one. Some are women. They arrive by bus and train and motor. They will not be noticeable among the other tourists.”
Assignment - Lowlands Page 11
