"AI hamdu JilJah rab a! alimin/" cried the street speaker. "Glory to Allah, Lord of the Two Worlds. If you die martyrs, paradise is your abode, God be praised!"
From the tiled room behind the Q'adi, Colonel Ta'arife spoke gently. "We waste time. As you see, everything is ready."
"Not quite, Colonel."
"The atmosphere will never be more propitious."
"Have you decoded the American's cable?"
"It is done, Q'adi. Nothing will be accomplished there."
"We must make sure of Amr."
"The prince? He is smothered in the soft, perfumed flesh of women. He dreams with the lotus, Q'adi. He is no longer a man."
"The mob down there adores him, Colonel."
"Amr will not return."
"Are you sure?"
"I will make certain."
'The Americans will try to bring the prince back. And possibly with Zoraya. How can you be sure this will not happen?"
Colonel Ta'arife answered, simply, "Death is sure. It is a certainty for all men, Q'adi, even as the Qur'an promises paradise to all fighters for Islam. And death can be arranged."
The Q'adi was silent, looking down at the dust and heat and confusion of the bazaar below. He was a tall figure in a black robe, with hooded, thoughtful eyes and a long face of strength and intelligence. He was the chief religious judge of Jidrat; his word was the law. He was an expert in interpreting not only the one hundred and fourteen suras, the chapters of revelations in the Koran, but also the Sunna, with its collection of Traditions that contained all the elaborations of Koranic teaching.
Not many people knew of his travels during the years before and after his traditional hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca where he had bowed in the dust before the Kaaba and recited the long prayers required of every Moslem who hopes to attain heaven.
He had seen the world, and he knew the feel of its substance. He knew that never before in history had opportunity been so finely shaped to the times.
He felt in himself the fervor of his cause and the immutability of his destiny, like a reflection of the heat of the sun on the sea, the light on the desert. It would be as Allah willed. Colonel Ta'arife had his own ambitions; he was akin to those others who came with machinery and promises, with evasive words and propaganda against the Western imperialists. All true, all true. But they were no more to be trusted than the English before them, and the Americans now—those international businessmen who had corrupted the land and the people.
He remembered Jidrat as it was in the old days, when camel caravans filled the bazaar below, when sheep and goats were herded through the narrow streets, when the harbor contained only a few dhows and baggaJas, traders and slavers from across the sea, to help the slave market flourish with cheap labor.
Today, there were the big, flashy cars of the tribal sheiks whose lands held oil, who were held in feudal submission to the aged Imam. Today there were both camels and Cadillacs, neon lights on the Mosque of Jidrat, and an electronic voice replaced the muezzin in the minarets for the five daily prayers.
It would all be useful. One bowed to the destiny prescribed by God.
The Q'adi turned and looked at the colonel. "Do you suggest now that Prince Amr be found—and killed?"
"It will be safer." Ta'arife shrugged elegant shoulders. "It can all be arranged. If you insist on waiting until the matter of Zoraya is cleared up, however . . ."
"The woman must not be allowed to interfere."
Ta'arife grinned. "Can she make a corpse walk home?"
"So be it," the Q'adi murmured. He looked back at the cool, remote shadows of his sheltered garden. The water of the fountain splashed and sounded a cooling note against the dry, aching heat of the day. "Kill him, then."
"And the woman?"
"If it is necessary."
"And if the Americans interfere?"
"Eliminate whomever they send."
A roar went up from the crowded bazaar. There were screams and shouts as posters and portraits of the Q'adi and the colonel, all carefully made equal in size, were pushed up and down above the open-mouthed, wild-eyed animal that, with its many heads, was the street mob of Jidrat.
The Q'adi sighed and turned and left the balcony.
In Washington, McFee was on the telephone in his office at No. 20 Annapolis Street. It was a private line with top security restrictions. The man at the other end was never mentioned by name.
"I have the man for you," McFee said. "I was right. Sam Durell is in Geneva at the moment."
"So is the prince. Just coincidence?"
"I sent Durell there yesterday."
"Good, Dickinson. We've checked all the probabilities, as many aspects of the situation as we could. There will be an upset in Jidrat very soon. A matter of days."
"What does T. P. Fenner say?"
"It doesn't matter. We'll leave him there. It will serve as a cover, indicate that we're not aware of what could happen there."
"He can do a lot of harm," McFee said angrily. "How a man like that gets put into a sensitive spot—"
"Let us consider your man, Dickinson. He's been briefed?"
"Not yet. Haggarty is in Geneva. He can do it. 1 "Good. There's one other thing, Dickinson." "Yes, sir?" "Let's try to keep him alive."
Chapter Two
Durell slept until nine o'clock and then made two telephone calls. One was to the room clerk at the Hotel de la Paix, ordering breakfast; the second was a deliberately dialed wrong number. He sat on the edge of his bed, the spectacular Swiss Alps looming beyond the lake that shone in the distance from his hotel-room window, and listened carefully to the hum, the click, and the slight electronic hesitation when he made the second call. He was certain, as he hung up with apologies in French to the woman who'd answered his wrong number, that his telephone was tapped.
It had been quick, efficient, and ominous. He thought about it for a moment and decided to do nothing about it.
He showered and dressed and ate the breakfast sent up by the management.
It was a warm, sunny day in Geneva. The city was caught in a building boom, jolted out of its medieval, Calvinist atmosphere. You saw Madison Avenue-type Americans—complete with gray flannels, crew cuts, and Ivy League voices— almost as often as you saw native Swiss. Everywhere there were branches of American investment companies, manufacturing corporations, banks, U.S. government departments. The present meeting with the Russians on this neutral ground dealt with the subject of propaganda. Headlines proclaimed it the "Conference on Abatement of Propaganda." Yet the round table was a marvelous sounding board for the daily ideological blasts that the meeting was designed to curb.
He had finished his second cup of coffee and was thinking of London and the routine work he had cleared up there, when the phone rang.
He answered it carefully. It was Haggerty. "Sam?"
"I'm bugged," Durell said.
"Oh, sure. We know that."
"Your man?"
"Hell no. Don't get stacked off, Cajun."
"I have no cover," Durell said. "What am I here for?"
"Call this number." Haggarty recited six digits. "It's a pay phone."
"Not from here."
"Of course not. Outside. Make it in ten minutes."
Durell hung up and went out.
He was a careful man. You had to be careful and suspicious—every minute of every day—or you didn't survive, in Durell's business. He had been with K Section for a long time now—since Korea—and before that there had been G2 and the old OSS in Europe and intelligence work for State. He knew the business. And he knew the business had changed him, set him apart, made him different from most men.
If you told Sam Durell he was dedicated to his job, he would have laughed it off. Yet he knew nothing else, and wanted nothing else. His work was enough.
Sometimes he wished he could get out, but the wish was always followed by the corollary that there was no way out. He was a marked man. At No. 2 Dzerzhinski Square, the Moscow headquarters o
f the MVD, there was a complete, accurate dossier on Samuel Cullen Durell. The dark, shadowy war in which he fought, in which so many friends had died in remote corners of the world, seemed to go on and on. You walked hand in hand with death, wherever you were. It came in dirty ways, usually: a knife in the back in a Hong Kong alley; a gar-rote on the Marseilles waterfront; a sudden grenade hurled in Algiers; a runaway double-decker red bus in London; or a sudden push from behind as you waited on a platform of the Paris Metro. . ..
You could never be too careful.
Durell was a tall man with thick black hair tinged gray at the temples, a small, neat mustache, and dark blue eyes that changed to black when his Louisiana temper broke through. He had trouble controlling this temper, and he knew his survival depended on its control. He took carefully calculated risks; but there was, also, always the sudden hunch, the instinctual reaction of the gambler, which he had been trained to be. And this was what had helped him when other men had died and failed in their missions.
He wore a dark blue suit of medium weight, a little too warm for Geneva in August. His white shirt and dark-maroon necktie were inconspicuous. He did not look like either a businessman or a tourist. He moved gracefully; he had trained himself, during endless and tortuous hours of practice, to react instantly. He knew every dirty trick of judo fighting: how to kill a man with a knife, a gun, a thumb, a rolled-up newspaper. And some of this showed in the way he walked and the way he looked at the world.
Long ago, as a boy in Bayou Peche Rouge, down in the bayou country below New Orleans, he'd sat in a pirogue with his old grandfather Jonathan, fishing in the shade of towering old gum and cypress trees that grew along the ancient chenidres, and there he had learned the art of hunting and gambling.
The old man—in his nineties now—had been a good tutor. Old Jonathan had been among the last of the old-time Mississippi riverboat gamblers; a man with shoulders and back as straight as a ramrod, with keen eyes and a unique way of looking at the world. Durell's earliest memories were of the old side-wheeler steamer, the Tiois Belles, on the mud-bank near Peche Rouge. The side-wheeler had been home to him after his parents died and he went to live with the strange old man in the bayous.
Old Jonathan had taught him tricks with cards, dice, guns, and knives. The old man knew what it meant to fight for survival.
He was being followed. There was a team of two assigned to him, and the first, a stout Swiss man with a florid face under a ridiculously squared Homburg, picked him up as he left the lobby of the Hotel de la Paix. The second team member was a woman who looked like a young matron on a casual shopping tour of Geneva's downtown streets.
Durell walked along the quai beside the Rhone, heading for the Auberge k la Mere Royaume. It was ten minutes past twelve. The river flowed busily into the broad, bright reach of Lake Geneva where Mont Blanc towered into the blue summer sky, its snow-capped peak dazzling in the sunlight. He wished he had time for an ap6iitit near the Jet d'Eau, that spectacular hundred-foot fountain spurting from the surface of the lake. Pleasure boats and water taxis hummed on the river. The bridges to the old part of town were crowded with traffic. When he sa^ he could not shake either tail without being overt about it, he ignored both the fat man and the casual woman and entered a public phone booth on a side street off the Rue du Rhone, near the main shopping center.
He dialed the six-digit number Haggarty had given him, and his call was picked up at once.
"Sam?"
"I'm being tailed. What gives?"
"I don't know. What were you doing in London, Cajun?"
"Nothing vital. Who's your opposite number here?"
"Kolia Mikelnikov. The major of Budapest fame, remember? He's in charge of Russian security at the C.A.P."
"Well, he put two people pn me," Durell said. "Maybe they picked me up at the airport. Or maybe you have a leak."
"Either is possible," Haggarty admitted. "No man is infallible."
"Shall I let them ride?"
"Better shake 'em, Sam. Let's meet at Georgi's. Remember it?"
"At the foot of Grande Rue, down in the old town," Durell said. "Near where Rousseau was born."
"You remember the damnedest things about places. In an hour?"
"Time enough."
"Oh, and one thing, Cajun. This job is urgent."
"What job isn't?" Durell asked.
He hung up and stared blankly at the telephone. Traffic bustled outside and he looked at the crowded sidewalk, the busy, clanging streetcars, the beetle-like European autos. Geneva was supposed to be neutral ground; the Swiss were adamant about that. He wondered if the Swiss police themselves had put the fat man and the woman shopper on his tail. Not impossible. But not very likely, either.
He could not see either the Homburg or the matron anywhere.
And then he heard the roar of the approaching lorry. Through the glass of the phone booth he saw pedestrians swirling in from the Rue du Rhone under a bright traffic light. Then he saw the truck. It was American; a converted Army tractor that violated traffic rules by being on this street at all. It came around the corner fast, like a huge prehistoric monster shouldering aside a swarm of unimportant creatures on its flanks.
A woman screamed.
And Durell saw that the truck was headed straight for his telephone booth.
His reaction was instantaneous, a conditioned reflex. He elbowed the booth door open and spun around to face away from the truck. For one split-second of eternity he thought he couldn't make it, thought this was his moment of fatal carelessness. Then he stumbled to the curb, the roar of the careening truck thundering in his ears. He could see it, out of the corner of his eye, looking like a monster of red steel with a blinding windshield that reflected a stray shaft of afternoon sunlight and effectively erased any glimpse of the driver. Then he dove off the sidewalk and into the street, and from behind him there came a crash of splintering aluminum and glass as the booth was swiped by the truck and hurled into the air. Something struck his shoulder, spinning him around. Something else slammed his thigh. Wheels whined and screamed and he knew he was on his hands and knees in the gutter, traffic shattering its pattern to protect him.
The roar of the truck faded away with remarkable speed and was replaced by the shrieking cry of a woman again and the clamor of angry Swiss voices and the skirl of a police whistle.
"Are you hurt, m'sieu?" someone asked in French.
Durell looked up at a stranger's concerned face. "No. No, thank you."
"You must remain absolutely still. It is incredible. It could have been a terrible tragedy. These American drivers are maniacs."
"I'm all right," Durell said. He knew the driver had not been an American. He climbed to his feet. His legs ached and trembled. He brushed at his clothing automatically. "Quite all right. Thank you. Then you must have seen the truck."
"It is gone, m'sieu. Like the telephone booth. Had you not jumped out at just the right instant, I shudder to think of the ending for you."
Durell saw a traffic cop shouldering authoritatively through the crowd. He could not remain here as the center of attraction. The accident was not an accident at all, of course. It was an attempt on his life, and he could only conclude that Major Kolia Mikelnikov had decided to violate Swiss neutrality in an attempt to eliminate him. But why? What was so special about him now?
Mikelnikov, however, in DurelFs book, was something special.
Just as there was a dossier in the MVD files in Moscow on Samuel Cullen Durell, so there was a similar file on Major Kolia Vassilivich Mikelnikov at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington.
Major Mikelnikov had gone into Budapest with the Soviet forces during the Hungarian uprising. He had been associated with the bloody purges that followed, and Durell, who had been on a brief mission in the country at that time, had become his prime target. Mikelnikov^ assignment contained orders not to relent until his mission was accomplished. Durell had stung the opposition badly during his brief stay in Budapest during the turmoil.
The result was Mikelnikov's mission:
Find Durell. Remove him. Destroy him. Eliminate him. Close the file on Sam Durell.
Chapter Three
Mikelnikov had pale blue eyes and a wide mouth and deep seams in the rough skin around his lips. His hair was grayish, cropped close to his well-shaped heid. He looked out of place among the tourists crowding the cafe tables of the Auberge & la M&re Rovaume. Yet there was an arrogance, a flamboyant air about the man. You looked at him twice, instinctively. If vou met his pale gray eyes, you usually looked away quicklv, somehow disturbed by the glimpse of a cold, icy hell. Mikelnikov did not like people studving him, although in his dossier there was a brief note about a short turn in the Bol-shoi Theater, where the man had been an actor in his younger years.
There were three other chairs at Mikelnikov's table. A heavy-set man sat on one, talking urgently to the major, who seemed not to be listening. Durell walked angrily toward the table, threading his way through knots of tourists chattering in the sunshine. Pigeons suddenlv wheeled and swooped and settled on the sidewalk, coming in from the riverside quai, and then took >ff again with a great flapping of wings. Durell pulled out a chur t Mikelnikov's table and sat down.
"Good afternoon, Kolia Vassilivich," he said in Russian.
Mikelnikov looked at him and flicked a finger at the heavy-set man. The other man got up clumsily and walked away. Mikelnikov smiled. "Sam, my friend. Gospodin Durell. I heard you were in Geneva this morning, when you arrived by Swiss-air from London. You find the weather here in Switzerland more pleasant?"
"Neutral air is sometimes easier to breathe—if neutrality is respected."
"The Swiss are not always alert to breaches of neutrality. You maintain your CIA drop, run by Mr. Haggarty, for example."
Durell said, "Your truck missed me, Kolia. It was very clumsy, not worthy of you."
Mikelnikov smiled. He had big teeth, one of which was capped with gleaming steel. He looked like a bemused horse. "My truck?"
Assignment Zoraya Page 2
