Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  JOHN FEDORA,

  free-lance liquidator on hire to Britain, part Spanish, part Irish, all killer, is the creation of a brilliant new writer who has rocketed to top place in the spy-thriller game.

  UNDERTOW

  is the name of his novel. The setting is Franco’s Spain. The action races at a sex-spurred pace. And the plot is one of the most devious and sinister ever to come out of Cold War espionage!

  “Desmond Cory seems to me to accomplish in Undertow precisely what Fleming is aiming at. This is a sexy, colorful, glamorous story of intrigue and violence, complete with spectacular setpieces (including a grand finale in a long-submerged submarine) and even a torture scene. And it is written with finesse, economy, humor and full inventive plotting. For my money, Johnny Fedora, professional killer for British Intelligence, more than deserves to take over James Bond’s avid audience.”

  —Anthony Boucher, N. Y. Times

  On the floor of

  the Gibraltar Straits

  lies a sunken Nazi U-Boat.

  Nearby on the Spanish coast two men lie in wait: Johnny Fedora, the debonair British spy . . . and Feramontov, a Soviet agent—a devious plotter who has concocted a most ingenious scheme involving a seductive beauty and a psychopathic killer.

  Both men want the same thing, the World War II documents that still lie in the shattered hold of the submarine. Many will die before Fedora and Feramontov meet in an encounter so bloodcurdling that it may well wrench a scream from the unprepared. . . .

  “Desmond Cory provides what is far and away one of the most sheerly exciting climaxes of the year. Undertow is a gem-hard thriller, plotted tightly, told with economy and vigor. It calls for loud hurrahs for Mr. Cory—and for many encores.”

  —Buffalo Evening News

  “Desmond Cory has written the ultimate in international spy activities . . . a real old-fashioned thriller.”

  —New York Morning Telegraph

  Copyright © 1962 DESMOND CORY

  All rights reserved. No portion of this work may he reproduced

  without permission except for brief passages for the purpose of

  review. For information address Walker & Company,

  10 West 56th Street, New York, New York 10019.

  Published as a SIGNET BOOK

  by arrangement with Walker & Company,

  who have authorized this softcover edition.

  A hardcover edition is available from Walker & Company.

  First PRINTING, JULY, 1965

  All characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK— MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A

  SIGNET BOOKS are published by

  The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.

  1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  JUAN Guerrero lay face down on the stiff, rutted clay to one side of the road, and a small black beetle crawled over the palm of his hand. Guerrero took no notice. He wore the loose grey uniform that is issued to all inmates of Franco’s prisons; the cuffs were rucked back to show his thin forearms, grey with the pallor of the jail, furred with tiny black hairs.

  Juan Guerrero was dead. There was a small wound at the base of his throat, a wound that had been made by something like a meat skewer; something that had penetrated the sinews of his neck and severed the carotid artery. Guerrero had fallen to his knees and had then pitched forward, and the rough soil had tom open the skin of his nose and forehead; he had felt no pain, though. He had been dead already. The artery had continued pulsing for twenty seconds or a little less, spouting his blood on to the dry Spanish soil; but the earth had long since swallowed it up and now nothing was left but a dark circular stain, about three feet in diameter, in the centre of which his head rested. A stain like a black halo.

  The tall man with the camera stood up and nodded, and the two men who had been watching him stooped down and turned Guerrero over. The tall man leaned forward; the impassive eye of the camera lens stared at the tiny puncture in Guerrero’s neck. A sudden blink of sharp white light, a click. The tall man changed the flash bulb, took another shot from a different angle. His movements were unhurried, unconcerned.

  In the end he dismantled the flash carrier, snapped the camera into its case and turned casually away towards the waiting SEAT four-seater. The other two men followed, ten paces behind him. The car doors slammed noisily in the throbbing evening stillness; after a moment’s pause, the engine picked up and the car drove off. A fine white powdery dust drifted up into the air, and grains of it settled on Guerrero’s crumpled body.

  EXCELLENT,” said Acuña. “Excellent.”

  He pushed the photographs across the desk. Valera picked them up, holding them lightly between his fingertips, and tilted them towards the window. “Yes,” he said, staring at them. “Excellent. What was the weapon?”

  “We don’t know. Something he improvised. A ground-down bed-spring, perhaps, or something like that. It hardly matters. Look where he placed it—that’s the point. He hasn’t lost his touch.”

  Valera looked up. “You seem almost pleased about it.”

  “Quite the contrary. But one must admire professional competence whenever one comes across it.”

  Acuña pushed back his chair and stood up. Acuña was a small man with a heavy paunch, so heavy that he seemed to roll himself forward rather than to walk; he had his chin lowered to his chest and his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and both these factors contributed to the effect. The top of his sunken head was big and round and bald and polished. There was something slightly obscene about Acuña. People rarely felt at ease in his presence. The discomfort he caused them was purely physical; his job had nothing to do with it. Only a handful of people knew what his job was.

  Valera knew, but Valera was one of the few men on whom Acuña’s personal appearance made no impression at all. Valera was a policeman, part of a very large machine; he had grown accustomed to treating his superior officers as components of the same mechanism, all performing their functions with greater or less efficiency. And if he ever felt a certain revulsion towards his role as Acuña’s chief assistant, he never showed it.

  Acuña was in fact a mass murderer. In the twenty-odd years since the Spanish Civil War had ended, he had killed nearly three thousand men and women. Death had been the punishment for crimes of which, nine times out of ten, they had been no more than technically guilty; this Acuña knew as well as anyone, but . . . he believed in making sure. He knew very little for certain. All that he knew was that somewhere in that vast pile of three thousand mouldering corpses lay the bodies of seventy-six of the Soviet Union’s most expert and highly-trained spies and saboteurs, and with their bodies so much else. . . . Long years of arduous labour in the Agitprop schools, hours of expert instruction of other spies, a whole vast series of events that had never taken place—burning factories, crashing aircraft, nationwide strikes, unexpected assassinations. That was all that Acuña knew. He didn’t even know exactly which were the seventy-six bodies that counted. It didn’t matter much. They knew in Moscow.

  They knew in Moscow, all right. They knew that in Western Europe there was one man, at least, who had learnt their own methods of total extermination and who put them to violent practice. But they didn’t know who it was. Four men of the seventy-six had been sent to Madrid to find out. They had failed to do so. They had died. And Acuña, meanwhile, lived; a bald, greasy man like a bladder of lard, sending out his executioners to prisons and to private houses all over Spain. A man much hated, but ra
rely despised.

  Valera put the photographs down on the desk again. Face downwards. “Poor sod,” he said. “Poor sod.”

  “Three years in prison. First in Valencia, then in Sevilla. Nine months building up his friendship with Moreno. Step by step, inch by inch. Never a false move. Treated like all the other convicts. Waiting for the move. All right. Then it comes. Then the escape. Not the slightest detail goes astray. One of the warders has to die, even, to make the escape more convincing. And then . . . two hours later. . . .” Acuña wheeled his belly up to the desk, speared the photographs down on the desk’s surface with one fat forefinger. “. . . Moreno kills him. For no reason whatsoever. Other than that he likes killing, that it’s what he does best in the world. And it had to be Juan—one of the best men I’ve ever had, if that means anything. Probably never even tried to defend himself. He knew Moreno had to go free. So he let himself be killed. By an animal. What a way to die. Hijo de la puta.”

  Valera shrugged. “More likely he never saw it Moreno wouldn’t have given him any sort of a chance.”

  “Well, there it is. It makes things a lot more difficult.” Acuña took a pink-tipped cigarette from the silver case on the desk, accepted the flame from Valera’s proffered lighter. “He’ll kill again,” he said matter-of-factly. “He’s bound to. And we have to give the news to the press. If he gets to see a newspaper and there’s no mention of the killings, he’s bound to smell a rat. We have to treat him exactly like any other escaped killer, because if we don’t, we give the game away. All-station police alerts, the whole caboodle. It can’t be helped.”

  “They won’t catch him. Not Moreno.”

  “They might if he were alone. They might just. But I’m hoping that after today he won’t be.”

  They stared together at the large-scale map of Southern Spain that hung on the far wall. An unusual map; a map worth anything in the region of five thousand pounds. That, at any rate, was the price that the Soviet External Intelligence Service had offered for it and might, under certain circumstances, even have been willing to pay. “Here’s where they jumped for it,” said Acuña flatly, “and here’s where Guerrero bought it. Nine kilometres farther south, or so. Inference, that they were headed for Malaga.” His finger pointed now towards the profusion of red-circled dots that showed the whereabouts of known and of suspected Communist centres; he withdrew his hand, and a very fine sapphire ring winked momentarily in the sun. “By now, he’ll be moving through the mountains towards the coast, towards just about any point between Malaga and Torre del Mar. That’s how I read it.”

  He went on looking at the map. At the road that twisted over the dull grey wastes of the Sierra de Malaga. Lonely country, rocky country, wooded country. Country where, for one man, an army could search in vain. And the man they called Moreno knew that country, knew it well. “He’ll have a contact, I suppose,” said Valera thoughtfully.

  “Of course he’ll have a contact.”

  “Well, it’s all right. He’s doing what we wanted.”

  “Yes, but we wanted Guerrero on the spot. We wanted to give them Moreno, yes, but not on a plate.”

  He looked at Valera expressionlessly. His great round forehead was shiny with sweat. “We’ve let loose the wolf all right,” he said. “And now he’s going to join the pack. All we have to know is where.” He turned away abruptly, as though no longer interested.

  “. . . You’d better get down there,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  To the west of the village, the olive trees gave way to the rock and to the rough red earth. The slope grew very steep; a zigzag path led down it. Then, at the foot of the hill, the olive trees moved off again all together, stretching in long low ranks towards the south, and the red earth heaved slowly up beneath them in a massive shoulder that shrugged round to the west and down to the sea. Beyond that last upthrust of the hills, beyond and out of sight, was the flat land, the sugarcane and maize fields of the Malaga coast. To the north lay the mountains, grey as ash and hard of outline, severe and menacing; the village was nearer, a tiny cluster of white walls and brown roofs balanced on the lap of the hill, precariously, as though the slightest of movements would send it slithering and sliding a full half-mile to pile up at last in rubble amongst the olive trees below. The two men who sat on the rough stone wall to one side of the path were facing the village, yet never raised their heads to look at it. Nor did they look at each other. For the most part, they stared over the olive groves towards the sea.

  The elder of the two would have attracted no one’s attention against such a background. An Andalusian campesino, with a widebrimmed straw hat, sunbleached trousers and a grey cotton tunic that he wore loose, buttoned only at the neck. His face seemed hardly a face so much as a nest of wrinkles, of great folded creases, running into one another and branching away again, complex as a Chinese puzzle; in the deepest slits of all were set two pebbles the colour of dry brick, dark and unwinking. His voice, when he spoke, was hardly intelligible; its rasp seemed to strangle all vowels at birth so that nothing emerged but consonants grinding against each other like slabs of granite in a glacier.

  The man who listened to him would, on the other hand, have attracted attention anywhere. He, too, wore the clothes of a southern farm labourer, the drab shirt and colourless trousers and off-white vest; but totally failed to look the part. His body was magnificent as that of an Uffizi Perseus, heavy yet lithe, bulky yet smoothly-muscled, with wide shoulders and long, powerful arms, tight buttocks and compact stomach, carrying hardly an ounce of superfluous fat; while the skin had a cold, pallid translucence like that of marble, emphasising the body’s resemblance to some classic sculpture. Moreno’s hair was dark and cut very short; his chin jutted from the firm, rounded muscles of his neck; his eyes were light brown and his mouth was wide and insensitive. As a farm hand, Moreno looked absurd; and if he was, as Acuña had claimed, an animal, this was hardly surprising. Animals rarely look their best when clothed. In his natural state, though, Moreno was undeniably a very fine-looking animal indeed.

  “Yes,” he said, when the old man had finished talking. “I understand all that.”

  “All you got t’do is wait. Wait till the boat comes, see? Never mind if it’s late. They said not to worry.”

  “I never worry,” said Moreno.

  “Right y’are, then. You got the clothes now an’ you got some food. You won’t be wantin’ me for anything else.”

  “There wasn’t any message, then?”

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t any message?”

  The words seemed to hold no special intonation, but the old man turned his head to look at Moreno. Then Moreno sat on the wall and watched him until his legs stopped twitching. . . . Then the light died slowly from Moreno’s brown eyes and he reached up a hand to wipe away the saliva that had coursed down from the comers of his lips. Three, he told himself. That will have to be enough. . . .

  Even though he was killing to be safe, not for pleasure. Three times within twenty-four hours. The warder; Guerrero; now this old man. Even after eight years in prison, that would have to be enough; now he must discipline himself, ration out the deaths, for that was the only way to keep it pleasurable. Three within twenty-four hours, but all three of them men; that was probably why he still felt unsatisfied. Eight years, eight long years to be paid for. Even so, it was wise to be careful. . . .

  The old man lay on the side of the path, the fingers of his right hand buried in the soft earth. Moreno kicked him slightly in the ribs with his black cloth shoes as he stepped past, then picked up the canvas bag and slung it over his shoulder. He set off down the path, whistling softly as he went; Cara al Sol, the National Hymn of the Falangists. He had no sense of humour, but he appreciated irony.

  His feet moved a trifle awkwardly on the rough stones; not shuffling, but not with a countryman’s ease. In prison he had kept himself as fit as he could, which was very fit indeed; but his legs were still unused to any but flat surfaces and
it would be some little time, as he guessed, before they grew accustomed to the change. It hadn’t prevented him from making good speed across the sierra, and he expected no trouble from this the final stage.

  He walked on through the olive trees. He had no watch, but by the heat and by the angle of the sun he knew that it was still the siesta hour; he would meet nobody in the olive groves, nobody awake. He stayed alert, though, for the sight of sleeping bodies in the shade. He saw none. Eventually the path forked, as the old man had said it would, and he took the right-hand branch that turned towards the sea. The armpits and the back of his shirt were darkened already with sweat, but he did not relax his pace. He was in a hurry, but not because he was afraid. He was quite calm and confident. He was Moreno. They would never catch him.

  HE reached the coast well before the sun had reached the hard blue line of the horizon. He had two hours, at least, to spare. He stood amongst the sand dunes looking down at the bay of which the old man had spoken, at the rocky promontory with the umbrella pines, at the line of foam left behind by the slow-moving waves as they lapped against the beach. It was a beautiful scene and Moreno was sensitive to beauty. Indeed, he found after a while that he was crying. He felt at once sad and exultant. In eight years, he hadn’t seen the sea.

  Now it was there before him, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do. In the old days, what Moreno wanted and what Moreno did had been always one and the same thing. And now he was Moreno once again. He slipped off his clothes, ran swiftly down to the water’s edge and plunged in.

  Anyone watching him at that moment might have thought that he had been returned, like a fish, to his native element. The slight clumsiness that had marked his movements on land instantly disappeared, was lost in the smooth, powerful roll of his shoulders and the kicking thrust of his thighs. He went through the clear green-blue water like an arrow, diving and surfacing again and again; went deeper, and then there was a whiteness flitting like a phantom over the ribs of sand beneath the waves. Two hundred yards out, he turned over on his back and floated, as totally and unconcernedly relaxed as a seagull; then arched himself into a sudden parabola of twisting muscle and headed fast for the shore, travelling with that deceptively lazy Australian crawl stroke that swirled a foaming wake behind it like that of a speedboat. Back on land, he ran to where he had left his clothes and lay down to dry himself in the sun. His great body gleamed like pearl, like the nacre inside a seashell. Eight years ago, it had been tanned almost to a negro’s darkness; already it was responding to the touch of the sea and the sun, held the most delicate possible of pink undertones. Though the sun itself was now sinking fast. . . .