Assignment Star Stealers

by Edward S. Aarons

  "I have insomnia sometimes," said OlUver. "She tells me stories to pass the time."

  "Thousand and One Nights?"

  Olliver grunted, put away his pistol, and lifted himself painfully to his feet, leaning on the cane. "Come along." The room was very long and narrow, stretching into dark, cornered shadows beyond the bed. Windows opened on the courtyard below. There were inlaid tables, batik hangings, a Bukhara rug that would have brought a five-digit bid at any Fifty-Seventh Street auction. A copper tray was heaped with the remains of another meal, rice and skewered lamb and a bottle of Algerian beer. Durell wondered how Olliver stayed so lean and vulturine. Olliver spoke over his hunched shoulder. "What have you got for me?"

  "Some Aerospace satellite experimental data from HCI's confidential files."

  Olliver stopped short and twisted his head. His long-nosed face made a strange shadow on the white plastered wall. "You work fast."

  "Amanda Coppitt gave them to me. I have to return them. It was requested by her stepson, Richard."

  "Ah. Our vanished genius."

  "It doesn't make sense to me," said Durell.

  "It will, it will. You want copies?"

  "That's what I came here for."

  He followed Olliver into another room, a section of the attic under the flat roof of the sprawling house. Lights sprang into blinding glare at the touch of Olliver's finger. There was a high-powered T/R radio, a Xerox outfit, a green filing cabinet, a steel desk, steel swivel chair, and a gooseneck reading lamp over the desk. Olliver wiggled his fingers behind him.

  "Give them to me. Shut the door."

  "Do your servants ever get in here?"

  Olliver looked angry. "My security is fine. What was that crack about singing birds?"

  "You have a bad leak, somewhere. How are your finches, by the way?"

  "Impossible. No leak is possible."

  "Then Skoll is a figment of the imagination?"

  "He's smart, that Russkie bastard. I've got a couple of eyes on him."

  "I'll want one on Amanda Coppit. In triplicate. Around the clock. She's waiting for word from her stepson Richard as to where to meet him with this data."

  "She is, is she?"

  "Let her meet him, Olliver."

  "Naturally. But then—"

  "Play it by ear," Durell urged.

  The Xerox machine hummed and whined, and the sheets of paper came sliding out like a dignified regurgitation. Durell reached for the originals and pocketed them. "One more set, Ollie."

  "Who for?"

  "Zurich." Durell paused. "I also want to use your radio."

  Olliver looked resentful. He made clicking sounds with his tongue and leaned heavily on his cane. His breath smelled of beer and stale food. His teeth were long and yellowish. He was wearing a faded flannel bathrobe and gray slippers, with a long-naUed toe poked through one end. Durell wondered about the luxury of the house and the shabbiness of the man's clothes.

  "Okay, I'll take care of the people to watch Amanda," Olliver said. "I have some good men. It bends the budget a bit, but they're worth it."

  "They'd better be good. We don't want to lose her."

  "What do you want the radio for?"

  "Zurich's business," Durell said.

  He coded a message with OUiver leaning over his shoulder. It made him uneasy to have Olliver stand Uke that at the desk. Olliver made more clicking sounds and said, "Sorry I didn't have bourbon for you tonight. What kind of code is that, Cajun? It's not in my files."

  "Curiosity killed the cat," Durell said.

  "But look here, old boy, this is my territory. I mean, we're not a military organization, but there are certain grades and standards. You take orders from me."

  "That's right, Ollie."

  "You get to know only what I want you to know."

  "Right."

  "So what are you sending?"

  Durell didn't answer. He worked the radio with quick, adept fingers.

  Subject: Stephenson, Gary. Employment: Executive VP Coppitt Industries. Data Requested: Full dossier, including age, marital status, education, social activity, political aflBliations and donations, relationship with Mrs. Amanda Coppitt, personal engineering capabilities. Relay data soonest Fez Hotel Raschid el Fez.

  "You're going to get into trouble, Sam."

  "That won't be anything new."

  "You're really McFee's fair-haired boy, aren't you?"

  "I like to think so."

  "It's a pain in the ass, trjdng to work with somebody like you who doesn't follow the rules." Olliver began to laugh. It sounded as if he should have quit smoking years ago. "You're very lucky, though, Sam. I've taken good care of you."

  *'Have you? But that's your job, Ollie."

  "That matter of the man you had to eliminate at Volubilis." Olliver limped away across the tiny crowded office, leaned on a file cabinet, and kept his head down for a moment as if exhausted. He looked up and grinned. "I've taken care of the body. Sent two men to get rid of it. He's been identified."

  "Who?" Durell asked.

  Olliver laughed again. Durell wished he wouldn't. The man's eyes were murderous. "He wasn't local talent, you know. Rene Bonache, of the French DST—Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. Parallel intelligence apparatus of the French Surete Nationale." Olliver looked mean and triumphant. "What do you make of that apple?"

  "He's a sour one," Durell said. "He's been listed as missing from duty for the last three months. He was presumed dead some time ago."

  Olliver was disappointed. "Well, he's certainly dead now. I'd have liked to talk to him."

  8

  It was two in the morning before he returned to his hotel. He checked out his room as a matter of routine. Nobody sprawled on his bed, no one stood behind the beaded curtain that separated his bedroom from the bath. His luggage had not been tampered with. He thought it was too good to be true.

  He remembered having seen Rene Bonache's dossier on his desk back at his Washington office at No. 20 Annapolis Street. It had been a routine notice, along with political briefings, industrial statistics, and a precis on the latest Latin American strongman. Bonache's folder had been stamped k/de Poss.b.

  Which meant that the French authorities held it as a moderately strong possibility that Bonache was not dead, but was a defector.

  When he went to check the windows, Durell looked down at the market lane below. It was narrow, but not too narrow for the Jaguar. The high-bodied black car was nosed into the opening of a cross alley. He was glad he had not put on any lights. He watched silently, not moving, and at last distinguished two men standing in the black shadows of an arched doorway. A cigarette end glowed and briefly outUned the lower part of a face, nostrils, a strong Arabic nose, a patient policeman's jaw.

  He decided he ought to consider Olliver a bit more seriously.

  His arm ached, and he cleaned the scratch carefully, then found some tape in his bag and covered it again. Gathering up some bedclothes, he left his room and walked silently up the back stairs to the roof.

  He made himself comfortable, aware of his weariness. His eyes felt as if he had half of the Sahara's sand in them. When he stretched out on the blanket, however, he found himself v^de awake. The stars reeled, shining overhead. He stared up into the black bowl of night, feeling himself drawn upward into that limitless space. He felt himself watched from up there, and searched the horizons for possible satellites, but saw only a single meteorite flame briefly to the north and then fade out high above the loom of the hills that surrounded Fez.

  Star bright, star light. . . .

  Somewhere a donkey brayed. A switch engine chuffed on the railroad line that ran north to Rabat from Fez. The mysterious city, once the brilliant capital of the empire, was quiet and asleep. Only the stars, he thought, were noisy.

  As a boy years ago in the hot summer nights of the bayou country, he would climb the faded grand stairway of the old Trois Belles, circle the pilot house, go up the ladders to the hurricane deck, and l
ie there on his back on

  the dry, splintered planks of the steamboat hulk looking at the starry heavens. He would try to count the stars that glowed and glittered between his out-spread fingers. When a shining pinpoint of light moved across the black void, he knew it was a meteorite flashing itself to death in the upper atmosphere. Today, what mostly moved up there were man-made silent orbiters that watched the enemy, scanning with infrared and heat sensors and high-resolution cameras that could pick out a wheelbarrow from one hundred miles up.

  Now the stars were being stolen.

  9

  A VARIETY of noises always filled the dawn in Fez. He heard the crowing of roosters, the grunting of donkeys protesting their new day of labor, the calls of muezzins high in their minarets that spiked the pearly sky. He also heard the soft footsteps that approached him across the roof to the niche where he had slept.

  He woke up with the gun in his hand, under the blanket. The sun wasn't up yet over the hills beyond the Merinide Tombs. From the roof of the Raschid he could see dim shapes on other roofs, spreading prayer rugs, bowing and calling for Allah's blessing. The cries of the muezzins went back and forth in the dawn air over the houses and mosques and palaces of the old city.

  "Sam?"

  ''Here," he said. "How did you find me?"

  "M'sieu Gatane, the proprietor, took me to your room. You weren't there, and the bedclothes—I mean, he thought you might be up here on the roof."

  "Just a minute," he said.

  He looked carefully over the edge of the roof into the still-dark lane. The black Jaguar and its two occupants were gone. In its place stood a slick Mercedes 220 SE. A tall, veiled man was moving toward the hotel door. Durell put the gun away and stood up. Amanda looked startled as he pocketed the .38. She carried a large yellow-leather purse and swung her sunglasses looped over her finger. Her costume this morning consisted of a white blouse under a practical jacket, slacks of fine tan sharkskin, and low polished boots. He remembered her clearly now—she wore her lustrous red hair in pigtails this morning, and her smUe was the same shy smile she had used when she had hung about the landing beside the Trois Belles,

  But there were shadows in her green eyes, and despite herself, her mouth quivered briefly.

  Pale lemony light shone across the eastern sky like a sudden explosion. The ululating calls of the muezzins seemed louder.

  "Have you had breakfast?" he asked.

  "Not yet. I haven't even slept, really."

  "Come with me. What are you afraid of?"

  "Does it show?" She walked with him to the stairs. "I guess I just felt lonely last night, after you left. The way it was when I first lost Hannibal. No special reason for it. I felt as if I'd come here on a fool's errand, and maybe a dangerous one, and you're the only one I can trust in the whole world—except Gary Stephenson, of course; and he's still tied up in New York on company business."

  "I'm going to be busy myself, today," he said. "I have to go south. I have to look for someone."

  "For Richard?"

  "Not yet. Someone else."

  "I'd like to go with you," she announced flatly.

  A Blue Man waited in the hotel courtyard beside the tables set for breakfast. The light grew brighter by the moment as the sun rose, although the air was still chilly. It would be a scorching day. M'sieu Gatane brought them coffee and croissants, eggs and rice and bacon. Amanda only toyed with her food, while Durell ate steadily and methodically. The Blue Man, he learned, had been sent by Olliver. The Taureg spoke excellent English.

  "Si Durell, I'm your guide for today."

  "Does Olliver think you can help me find Dodd?"

  "I can follow his path and act as an interpreter, when necessary, and question the people on the way and try to learn what happened to him. You will find me most efficient. Si Olliver explained it all to me. I have worked for him before. My name is Hassan Iffra, but Hassan will do. I am at your service, sir. And the lady's, too, if she joins us."

  "I'm joining you, definitely," Amanda announced.

  Durell warned her. "We'll be gone all day, perhaps longer. It will be very tiresome."

  "I will not stay alone in that hotel any longer."

  The Blue Man, veiled and robed and tattooed in the custom of the Saharan Taureg, withdrew and seated himself patiently on the tiled floor of the courtyard.

  "Did anything special happen at your hotel?" Durell asked the girl. "I mean, did you get any phone calls, or hear anything at all from Richard?"

  "No." She shivered in the morning air, drank some coffee, lighted a cigarette, and crushed it out after one puff. "I just feel uneasy, that's all. And you're the only person for a thousand miles that I feel I can trust, and depend on."

  Don't count on it, he thought.

  Amanda offered her Mercedes for the trip south, but the Blue Man had a Land Rover parked near the souk, and it was more serviceable, Durell agreed. They put on sunglasses as they eased through the crowded markets and out of the city's crenellated walls by way of the Bab Maroug, skirting the Cherardah kasbah. Hassan Iffra drove the heavy Rover with ease through the morning hours, taking National Route P-21 through Azrou and Ksar es Souk. Like most Tauregs, Hassan was very tall, with the typically large head, dark veil, and blue tattooing on his face.

  The highway took them across the High Atlas, where the mountaintops glittered with snow. On the Sais plain the shepherds looked as if they had stepped out of Biblical days. There were also smart-looking tourists who roared along in quest of vacation pleasures. At Ifrane, holiday villas nestled in forests and along lakes and orchards. They were held up for fifteen minutes at Boule-mane, where a young shepherd in a flapping yellow jellaba sent two dogs snapping at the heels of his herd of sheep.

  Twice, at small villages, Hassan got out and spoke to local tribesmen, his figure towering high above them. Each time, he came back and nodded.

  "Si Dodd traveled this way, alone, sir."

  Amanda said, "Who is this man you're trying to find, Sam?"

  "He's either a traitor, an embezzler, or he's a corpse."

  She did not flinch at his words. "You sound so matter-of-fact about him."

  "It's a tough business. Dodd has been missing for three days, but I can't tell you any more about him."

  "But is he mixed up in Richard's business?" she insisted.

  "He might be."

  From the southern slopes of the High Atlas range, they left the pine and oak forests and descended into the suffocating heat of Erfoud and Rissani, in the ksour country. Palm trees nodded under the scalding Saharan sun. Heat waves danced on the far horizon ahead. There was a camel exchange at the souk in Rissani, and Hassan parked at a new small Hotel du Sud, one of the chain developed by the ONMT, the National Tourist Office. They had lunch there of rice and charcoal cooked mutton, mechoui, amid the noise and dust of the market and the importunities of the Oileuh tribesmen. The Blue Man and the Chleuhs were not friendly. Hassan Iffra excused himself and vanished for twenty minutes. When he came back, he seemed to be smiling under his veil. He stood out among the shorter tribesmen like an arrogant giant.

  "Si Dodd is remembered here, because of the chain on his wrist."

  "The chain?"

  "He carried a small case attached to his wrist, sir. It made these local people wonder about him. He stopped and spoke for some time to the people at the Zaouia. That is a religious fraternity. He posed as a taleh, a medersa student, and wore a tarboosh, a red fez. But they knew he was an imposter. It was foolish of him."

  *'Did he leave safely?" Amanda asked.

  "So they say, madame."

  There was a standard piste going south into the heat haze of the oasis roads toward Taouz, following the Oued Ziz, a trickhng stream that eventually drowned itself in the southward sands. But the Blue Man turned right into a side trail after half an hour. The way was little more than a rutted trace that twisted away from the narrow green relief of palms and walled ksours, the desert village-forts. For an hour the road was reasonably
defined, although their speed was cut to less than fifteen miles an hour.

  The heat grew stronger. There were extra cans of gasoline and water in the Land Rover, and a rifle was slung by leather straps in a side boot. Hassan Iffra followed a narrow ravine where the air grew stale and tasted of brass. Beyond this was a waste of burning dunes and empty horizons that danced and shimmered in the glaring light. A thin plume of dust lifted from behind the tortured wheels of their car.

  Presently, Amanda asked, "Are you sure of where we're going, Sam?''

  "I'm not at all sure. Hassan is our guide." He looked at her. Her mirrored sunglasses stole all expression from her face. "You insisted on coming along, Amanda."

  "Yes, of course." She drew a deep breath. "Now and then, though, I feel confused—and lost. Seeing you again is like finding an oasis in the desert."

  The mountains were only a shivering mirage to the north when they came upon a tiny, walled village boasting a few drooping date palms, and half a dozen houses around a brackish pond. There was nothing to relieve the eye to the south but an ocean of dunes under an incredible sun. Durell felt hot and sticky with the sand that had crept through his shirt and clung to his sweaty skin.

  Near the pond two buff dromedary camels, equipped with the regalia of the Meharis —the Royal Camel Corps enlisted from among the Taureg—were tethered.

  "We will leam more here about Si Dodd, insh'Allah," said Hassan.

  Durell suggested that Amanda stay in the car, but she insisted on accompanying him. A small group of robed and veiled men and women with naked children playing in the dust gathered curiously around the Land Rover. Hassan confidently led the way to the largest of the mud-walled houses, beyond a small djenina, a garden. Another Blue Man came out of the house before they reached the door. He was even taller than Hassan. From behind them the metal of the Land Rover suddenly creaked and banged from expansion in the hot sun, sounding like distant gunshots.

  Hassan spoke in a quick dialect that Durell's Arabic could not match. After a few exchanges the Tauregs both turned and stared in silence over their veils at DureU and Amanda.

  "What did they say?" Amanda asked. "Why is it really so important for you to find this man, Dodd?"