"Never mind. Did you see Linda back there?" Durell rasped.
"Yes, she's all right. She's waiting for us." Denis kept staring at the Chinese girl and then he saw Madame Hung's crumpled body. "Good God. Are they both dead? What kind of place is this, anyway?"
Durell tested the electric screen carefully. There was no reaction, and he climbed up on the shadow box. Evidently the steel sword he had thrown to trigger the lethal bolts had short-circuited the diabolical device. Denis looked as if he were going to be ill. He explained haltingly how he had found the boatman, Charlie, and prevailed on the sampan owner to ferry him back to the Seven Isles; he had then used his underwater gear to reach the inner islet and the pagoda, and had stumbled by luck upon the scene with Madame Hung.
"Was Pan with Li Yon when you left?" Durell asked.
"Yes. I think so. No, I'm not sure."
"Make up your mind."
Denis said helplessly, "I didn't see her. I hope I didn't interrupt something important for you "
"You did. You saved my life, I think," Durell told him. "You weren't fooling when you said you were good at underwater swimming."
"It's the one thing Linda likes about me," the young man said shyly.
"All right. Come on."
Durell jumped down from the improvised, life-size reproduction of the "Nuclear Nude" painting and gently lifted Jasmine Jones in his arms. He spared only a glance for Madame Hung. The woman looked dead, and he was tempted to make sure of it with his sword, but then Jasmine moaned again, through her steel-skewered mouth, and he handed her up to Denis, being very careful with her, and then took her from the thin young scientist and followed Deakin through the door out of the shadow box.
There was no sound of alarm anywhere. Behind the shadow box was a large Chinese-furnished bedroom, with a huge black and red mandarin bed in the center of the room. Linda lay on the bed. Her face was pale and marked with the exhaustion she had suffered from the long hypnotic dance she had endured. From somewhere she had found a robe, however, to hide her nakedness. Her eyes were still dulled by the drug, and she spoke haltingly, but her words were coherent and she made sense.
"Where is Charlie now?" Durell asked Deakin.
The young man took his eyes reluctantly from the girl he loved so hopelessly. "Waiting for me. I told him to move in closer, because I figured if Linda was here, I couldn't swim underwater with her "
"Denis," the girl whispered. "I never thought—I guess I never expected to—to see you again."
"It's all right, baby," Deakin said. "We're going home now. Everything is fine."
Durell did not think everything was fine, or that they were home free at all, but he said nothing, and picked up Jasmine Jones's limp form again and followed Denis and Linda out of the room. .. .
Deakin seemed to have charmed away all danger, perhaps through his bland and naive ignorance of what they were walking through. He carried Linda tenderly and gently ahead of Durell, who supported Jasmine Jones's grotesquely masked figure, and within ten minutes, he watched Denis signal with a small underwater flashlight, and then Charlie's sampan drifted into sight onto the beach. Durell asked Deakin the time, since his watch had not been returned, and learned, somewhat to his surprise, that it was only two o'clock in the morning. So much had happened to him since he first arrived here that it was difficult to believe it had all been compressed into the space of only a few hours. Watching Deakin, his opinion of the young scientist underwent a sharp change. Denis was firm, confident, even aggressive in his water element, taking command of Linda in a way that would have
seemed impossible only a few days ago. And the girl, who had despised him then, was meek and submissive as Denis gave the orders and they quietly left the lights and distant crowds that thronged Madame Hung's "pleasure isles."
Once they were away and reasonably safe, Durell felt a reaction that left him momentarily indecisive. The aura of Madame Hung's hatred and power faded as the islands were left behind them. He wished he had checked the woman more carefully. The sword he had thrown that short-circuited the lethal electrical barrier might also have saved Hung's life. He wasn't sure if she was still alive. He hoped not. He wanted her dead. He wanted to be sure of it. But it was too late to go back and find out for certain now.
Linda was still groggy. At the waterfront, which was quiet and dark, Durell sent the boatman for a taxi, and a battered old Chevrolet soon nosed its way down to the pier. Linda and Deakin tried not to look at Jasmine's grotesque mask. The Chinese girl was in a bad way. Her breathing went in slow and irregular patterns through her nose. She had started to bleed again from the multiple wounds from the skewers, and Durell wished he could remove them, but did not dare.
He told the cab driver to get them to the Halsey Clinic as fast as possible without being stopped by a cop.
Singapore's night life had already taken itself off the streets and tucked itself into bed—^whose bed was a question that often did not matter. At the clinic door, a sleepy night watchman went shambling off for the resident in charge, who came within half a minute and turned out to be the same Indian doctor Durell had tangled with over Levy Liscomb. The doctor's name finally came through. It was Ghindura.
"So it is you again," he said through a pursed mouth of disapproval as he eyed Durell. Then he eyed Jasmine Jones, dangling in Durell's arms, and he sucked in a hissing breath. "You seem to go in for exotic violence, sir."
"Can you do anything for this girl?"
"I'll open the surgery."
"I want to talk to her as soon as possible."
"It's not likely she will be able to talk. Contusion and edema from these wounds "
"And I want to see Levy Liscomb."
"He is asleep."
Durell said patiently, "Dr. Ghindura, you don't get the picture. Mr. Liscomb pays half your salary, out of good old U.S. funds, whether you realize it or not."
"Mr. Liscomb is sedated."
"Then give him a shot to get him talking. And stop wasting time, Doctor."
Ghindura looked at the sleepy-eyed, drawn face of Linda Riddle. "This other young lady ?"
"She's just tired. Been up all night dancing," Durell said. "These flower children just don't know when to stop. She stays with me."
Dr. Ghindura next turned to Denis, who still wore his frogman's outfit. He opened and closed his mouth on the questions he wanted to ask, looked at Dui'ell, started to speak again, noticed the look in Durell's dark blue eyes, and went off to prepare the surgery for Jasmine Jones. Durell turned the Chinese girl over to two sleepy-eyed attendants who showed up with a wheeled stretcher, and went to Levy Liscomb's room.
Levy's leg was in traction, hanging in its cast from a pipe contraption rigged over the hospital bed. There was tape over his broken nose, and bandages here and there from the multiple wounds and contusions he had suffered in the Great China Bazaar fire. His short, stout body seemed to have shrunk in the twenty-four hours he had been in the clinic. His singed eyebrows and some of his hair had been shaved away.
But the K Section Control man soon looked awake and intelligent as he regarded Durell in the small cubicle of his hospital room.
"I'd about given you up, Cajun," Levy whispered.
"This opposition is hard to beat. I was figuring how to cut our losses and get out of the game."
"We don't have to cash in yet, Levy."
"You—you saw Madame Hung?"
"I saw her. She had me, for a time. Denis, here, pulled me out of it." Durell gestured to the freckle-faced young man, who was sitting protectively with Linda. The girl was shivering slightly. "I'm not sure about Hung. I got away, and maybe it's a draw."
"She's alive, too?" Liscomb asked.
"Maybe. I just don't know. But we have a chance to beat her yet. How much of your operation is still running, Levy? Is anything left of it at all?"
The injured man sighed. "I can't help you, Cajun."
"All right. Don't worry about it."
"I was a jerk, letting them
fire-bomb me like this."
"Listen, can I still send some coded stuff to our people in Bombay, Rangoon, and maybe Kuala Lumpur?"
"Oh, sure. But that's not Uke you, yelling for help, Sam."
"Any port in a storm, to coin a phrase. Tell me what you've got left of the apparatus, and then you can sleep some more on government time. Levy."
"I understand the office is still intact. So is the safe." Levy Liscomb whispered the combination. "The telephone has been rigged up again, too."
"I take it back," Durell said, relieved. "You haven't been loafing on the taxpayer's time."
Durell's money had not been returned to him along with his clothing at the Seven Isles. But Levy had a few hundred in cash, and after some difficulty with the clinic attendant at that hour, it was produced from the office where it had been deposited for safekeeping. Durell peeled off some bills for Denis Deakin and gave them to the young man.
"You're going to run some errands for me," he said.
"I'm not leaving Linda again," Deakin protested.
Durell looked at the girl. She seemed to be half asleep,
lost in exhaustion. "Linda? Linda, answer me carefully. Where did you get the medallions you girls wore?"
"What?"
He was patient. "Your medallions."
"Oh. We had them made," she murmured drowsily.
"Who suggested the design?"
"I don't—I don't know."
"Yes you do. It was one of you."
"They're just flower symbols, Sam."
"No, they mean more than that."
"Not to me."
Deakin said, "Don't bully her now, please."
"Shut up." Durell took Linda's chin in his hand and forced her to look up at him; she seemed too comfortable in Deakin's arms. "Who ordered them and had them made and distributed them to you and Anna-Lise and Pan and Ryana?"
"Pan, I think," Linda whispered.
"Are you sure?"
"Y-yes. I'm sure. Please, I'm so tired . .."
"You're doing fine," Durell said. He looked at Deakin. "Go round up a cab. Not just any one. Find a taxi stand at one of the tourist hotels and pick the second from the front. They'll argue, but you'd better insist on it. Bring the cab around here. And don't waste time."
Deakin hesitated, then nodded. "Whatever you say, sir."
Looking at his young, fresh face, Durell suddenly felt old and more than tired. "And thanks for swimming after me, Denis," he said.
Deakin grinned. "It's one of my few accomplishments."
Dr. Ghindura came out of the small surgery a few minutes later. Durell was waiting in the corridor for him. The Indian medic stripped off his rubber gloves and shook his head. "Beastly thing, really. All the skewers are out, and I have given the young woman antibiotics against infection, of course. Incredible wounds. There will be a great deal of—ah—swelling."
"Will she be able to talk to me?" Durell asked.
Dr. Ghindura shook his head. "The purpose of the skewers, as I understand it, was to render her mute. The poor child has suffered enormously. She will be conscious soon—I could not give her too much anesthetic." The Indian hesitated and looked pained. "Ordinarily, I would refuse to let you trouble her. But I think—yes, you may talk to her soon. After that, she will be kept immobile for a number of days. Breathing tubes, and all that, to bypass the wounds in her mouth. Without plastic surgery, I fear her face "
"Thank you, Doctor," Durell said.
The attendants wheeled Jasmine Jones out of the surgery and down the corridor to a room next to Levy's. It was almost four o'clock in the morning now. The clinic was hushed, with only night lights glowing along the wall baseboards. Durell motioned the nurse out of the small hospital room and went to Jasmine's bedside. The screened window was open, and a breath of perfumed air from a small garden behind the building came through. He looked down at the silent figure of the Chinese girl. Jasmine's face was almost entirely swathed in bandages, but there was a small aperture for the mouth; her eyes were closed, and her long lashes seemed to tremble infin-itesimally.
"Jasmine?" he said in a normal voice.
He spoke to her twice, waiting a minute or two in between, before her eyes opened. They were clouded instantly with terror, with a look of death in them, a confusion that made him feel both pity and rage, all at once.
"It's all right. Jasmine," he said quickly. "You're safe now. I'm Durell. Sam Durell. Do you remember?"
The chocolate-brown slanted eyes turned to him in the white-bandaged face. "Y-yes. But w-what oh, dear God !" Clouds of fear swirled again in her eyes as she remembered. Her voice was muffled, difficult to distinguish as she tried to articulate around the wounds in her mouth. She tried to sit up in panic, and Durell held her, seating himself on the bed beside her. Her black hair was still traced with her perfume. He took her in his arms, trying to comfort her, and she moaned, "I never thought— mmm—one by one— she watched—and l-laughed— mmmm!"
"It's been fixed now," he said quietly. "You're in a hospital in Singapore, and safe. I got you out. I think Madame Hung is dead. Don't be afraid. Jasmine."
Her eyes did not believe him.
"You're safe," he said again.
"W-what do you want?"
"Finish telling me what you started to say on the island, Jasmine. Take it easy. But tell me."
"I'm—mmm—afraid . . ."
"Madame Hung is dead," he said.
"Y-you're not sure "
"She can't hurt you anymore. When you're better, and feeling up to it, I'll arrange for you to go back to the States. Anywhere you like. Free passage. She won't be able to touch you again. But if you keep quiet now, and don't talk to me, than she wins, don't you understand? You'll be doing exactly what she wanted when she hurt you like this."
The brown almond eyes suddenly swam, and tears jeweled the girl's long lashes. She nodded slightly, her jet-black hair fanned over the white hospital pillow. Durell heard murmuring voices down the corridor and looked at the door, but he didn't leave Jasmine's side.
"I want to know more about the route by which you were brought to Madame Hung. The part about elephants, and the private plane, with the 'Sun in the East' insignia on it, like the emblem you were given to wear tonight."
"It's her—mmm—private airline."
"How many planes?"
"Three. And—mmm—herricom " She wept.
"Helicopter?"
"Mmm."
"Stops at Kuala Lumpur? Last stop before Singapore?"
"Mmm."
"Did you hear anything about the last shipment that's due in today or tomorrow?"
"Today."
"You know about it?"
She nodded.
"Tell me," he said urgently.
Her tears stopped. Anger glittered in her almond eyes, then hatred. It was not directed at him; she was thinking about Madame Hung.
"Plane missing," she whispered. "Hung thinks you— mmm—did it."
"Where is the plane missing, Jasmine?"
"Here and—mm—Malaysia."
"This side of Kuala Lumpur?"
"Yes. She—mm—looks."
"For the plane?"
"Yes."
"Do you know ?" he began, but then he saw her eyes cloud again, and the pain in them suddenly became insupportable. He stood up quickly and went to the door and called in the nurse, who had a hypodermic ready.
"She will not be able to speak again for many days," said the nurse coldly.
Durell nodded. "She said enough."
17
Denis Deakin had a taxi waiting. Linda had rested enough to be able to walk out of the clinic with them. Durell went in to see Levy Liscomb and learned of the code books in Levy's safe and the recognition signals to the man in Malaysia's Control at Kuala Lumpur, and then walked down the hospital steps to the waiting taxi. The night air was cool, breathing of an imminent dawn. The driver was a middle-aged, sedate Malayan. Durell gave the address of the Great China Bazaar, and Deakin said he tho
ught they were going to get Pan.
"Afterward."
"I thought you were in a hurry."
'I am," Durell said.
Linda was silent and subdued during the drive through Singapore's deserted streets. Now and then she turned her head and stared at Denis in wonderment, and sighed, and then compressed her lips in firm reluctance to speak. At the site of the Bazaar, where the fire had been, there had been a great amount of work already accomplished in clearing out the debris. Durell told the driver to wait and went into the smoke-smelling, charred interior of the store. A few heaps of charred, wet rubbish still remained, and he picked his way through the dim darkness to the stairway, which was still intact, and went up to the second floor and Levy Liscomb's bombed-out office. The wreckage here was more complete, the darkness more absolute. He wondered at the lack of a watchman, but then reflected that everything of value that had survived the incendiary blast had already been carted away or stolen. He hoped the safe was still there. And it was.
He knelt and struck a match and considered the dial for a moment, remembering the combination Levy had given him, and a few moments later he had the safe open. The code books were still there, and intact. He wondered if Kuala Lumpur would have switched codes, hearing about the fire here; but he had to chance it. It took only five minutes for him to absorb the transpositions needed to get his message across. But then, although the telephone on the windowsill was still operative, he had to wait a long time for the switchboard to get him through from the island to the Malaysian mainland, and then to the capital far up the peninsula. There was an even longer wait while the telephone rang at the Control station up there, and he looked down at the street below, watchmg the taxi where Deakin and Linda waited. Two men walked by on the opposite side of the street, but their gait was purposeful and they did not hesitate or pause until they vanished around the comer. The glass in the window was broken, and the cool dawn air brushed Durell's face. He was consumed by impatience. Then at last he heard a sleepy voice announce that he was awake, and that the radio station was off the air. K Section's cover was a small transmitting outfit for commerical weather reports out of Kuala Lumpur. The Control man's name was Hank Sweeney.
Assignment Nuclear Nude Page 14
