Assignment The Cairo Dancers

by Edward S. Aarons

  "You admit your identity, Mr. Durell?"

  Durell shrugged. "Why not? Your hopped-up goons don't worry me as much as you think they do."

  "You are brave, but your bravery may be mingled with rash stupidity. You know, of course, that we heard every word you said to the learned doctor?"

  Durell took a calculated risk. He had to intrigue El-Raschid by implying he knew enough about the Dancer outfit, and that K Section was also alerted, so that El-Raschid would take him captive on the underground railroad, rather than execute him out of hand. He said casually: "I took the chance that you might have the place bugged. It makes no difference. My people know about you and we'll move when we're ready. We've handled bigger problems than you." Durell's laughter was hard. "What's all the 'Second Prophet' business? Have you designs on immortality among your followers, Mr. El-Raschid?"

  His confident tone sounded hollow in his own ears. But one of the hounds stirred and leaned forward, and although he showed no weapon, there was no mistaking his yearning desire to kill Durell then and there. Again the man in the middle restrained his guard.

  "What I am and what I shall become are of no moment, my dear Durell. It is what you are and what you may become that should concern you now. I must say, you are very close to death."

  "And so are you," Durell returned. "I'm not alone in this, you know."

  "You are lonelier than you think, or you would like me to believe. I am suspicious, Mr. Durell. A man in your profession should hold his tongue more carefully."

  For a heart-squeezing moment, Durell felt that his gambit to make himself valuable enough to be taken captive had failed. The man was too intelligent to be fooled. He had to admit that the aura of power emanating from his opponent was greater than he had expected. This was no ordinary man, with wits and training he was prepared to counter. He'd always known that one day he might meet his equal or setter; the statistics on survival in his business were always discouraging, but so far he had beaten the odds. Now, he was not so sure. He heard the gusty breathing of Dr. Steigmann behind him, and knew that the same uncertain terror gripped the bearded scientist. But he allowed none of this uncertainty to show on his face or bearing as Selim El-Raschid considered him with heavy-lidded, almost sleepy black eyes. They were reptilian eyes that weighed him without emotion.

  "Yes, I am suspicious of you, Mr. Durell, and I do not underrate your abilities. I have almost as complete a dossier on you as your friends in the KGB Center in Moscow. You are neither foolish nor reckless. And this last factor persuades me that you may have information of use to me. I have been curious about your super-secret K Section for some time, and although I know much, you may fill in the few gaps that are inevitable in such gleanings. You must tell me all that K Section knows about what you call the 'Dancers.'"

  "Not a chance," Durell said flatly.

  "Do not be hasty. I am not a vengeful man, pandering to spite to salve my ego, yet you surely know that persuasion has no limits beyond the mortality of human flesh. The instinct to survive is too strong in a nfan like you to hold out against the refinements I have at hand to 'persuade' you to cooperate." El-Raschid paused, and his smile was almost benign. "Yes, I have doubts about you, Mr. Durell, and I cannot forgive you for the episode in Frau-lein Lisl's apartment in Munich. You killed one of my Dancers there, and for this you must suffer due punishment and then indoctrination—if my decision is favorable to you."

  "One of your Dancers also murdered Carole Bainbury," Durell said harshly.

  "Yes, that was Mahmoud, here. He is a very refined instrument, quick and efficient and heartless. It was necessary to eliminate her. She and her Israeli associate, Simon Asche, were a nuisance. Just as you are." Selim El-Raschid sighed. "It would really be simpler if I left you to Mahmoud and his brother."

  "What country do you really work for?" Durell asked.

  The man smiled. "Am I a child to reply to such blunt-ness? But I do not mind. Expedience warrants your immediate removal, and yet—you could be useful to me, for a time. Life is precious, is it not? Every day gained, every hour and minute, for example, gives hope to a man condemned to die. Each instant can be a lifetime. . . . No, I work for no country and no man except for the land of Allah Himself, praised be His name. I am His true Prophet, a second son of Allah, meant to bring light and peace to all the world. And so it shall be." Again Selim paused and smiled, his cruel brown lips parting to reveal white teeth. "I see you think I am a madman, touched by a pseudo-divine mission. Your opinion is of no importance. I do wish I could believe in your usefulness to me, Mr. Durell—"

  It was time, Durell decided, to convince him.

  He made his play.

  The next moment was like walking a razor's edge, but it had to be risked. To persuade El-Raschid was a dangerous thing, but he had to have that ticket McFee had ordered him to purchase. One way or another, he had nothing to lose but his life.

  He had the twin hounds to consider, especially Mahmoud, who seemed the most eager of the two. He needed a shield against them they would not dare to smash. And he chose Dr. Steigmann.

  The two giants and El-Raschid had moved inward from the doorway. Just behind Durell was the doctor, practically breathing down his neck. His own gun was gone, but the guards had no weapons in their hands. The split-second difference would help.

  He moved with flashing speed that took advantage of that momentary difference, reaching backward for Steigmann and hurling the bearded man bodily toward the trio that blocked his "escape" from the cell. Steigmann stumbled and smashed into them with a bellow of surprise and fear. But it was like throwing a pebble at a concrete pillbox. The hounds reacted smoothly by sweeping the middle-aged scientist out of their way and leaping simultaneously with a deadly flowing motion toward Durell. But Durell was not there when they converged on him. His charge took him around the two and he crashed into El-Raschid, whose great size was more than that of his twin bodyguards. El-Raschid staggered, however, and Durell chopped at his throat, swung about and kicked at the first hound nipping at his heels, felt a hand grip his sleeve and claw at the fabric as if with fingers of steel, and then he broke free.

  He was through the doorway with a swift, solid rush that carried him far down the maze of corridors toward the stage stairs before the guards took after him. They had to leap over Steigmann's sprawled figure for just the split-second's delay that Durell had hoped for. In that time Durell remembered a pair of hunting dogs that his old Grandpa Jonathan had used for game in the bayous around Peche Rouge in Louisiana—lean, hungry animals whose every instinct had been honed to murderous perfection. He knew his chances were almost too small to calculate.

  He did not hesitate at the head of the stairs. Mahmoud was a few inches closer at his heels, and he could have swung about and sent the man headlong down the steps in the hope of breaking his neck. But he meant to save Mahmoud, thinking of Carole Bainbury, for a later destiny. He caught the smooth iron rail and lifted himself free of the treads and slid with sickening speed down to the stage wings, heedless of the bum on his hands. Halfway down he vaulted the rail and dropped twelve feet to the floor below.

  He landed in the middle of a mass of warm, perspiring female bodies, more naked than not, as a line of the girl Dancers came offstage at the end of their act. There were screams and shrieks in half a dozen languages. He staggered, caromed off an incredibly developed brunette, felt thighs, hips and breasts in soft and clumsy resistance, and got to his feet again to plunge toward the stage. He had put the girls between himself and the hounds. But the stage would not do. Something hissed by his ear, nicking the lobe, to thud with a shimmer of steel into a wooden post webbed with stage weights and cords. He grabbed at the ropes and yanked them loose and heard satisfactory thuds and crashes behind him as he swung around the pillar and ran down the wide floor behind the bellying curtain.

  He had gained a few more seconds on his pursuers. But he didn't want to get too far ahead.

  He was again in the maze of cubby-like dressin
g-rooms that served the more outstanding performers. He left behind him a seething cauldron of yelling voices and the quick brass of an alarm bell. What the audience out front might think of the confusion didn't seem to matter. Then he saw the languorous blonde he had first spoken to when he came into the pavilion.

  She was just shutting her door, staring wide-eyed at the uproar and Durell's running figure. Her mouth opened briefly, then her hand lifted to beckon him, and he swerved toward her.

  "Quick! In here," she whispered.

  For the moment, having turned a comer, he was out of sight of the two hounds. He dived past the girl and as she stepped back, he slammed the door shut. Panting, he leaned against it and regarded her. When she started to speak, he clapped a hand over her mouth and dragged her hard against him in a violent warning should she betray him.

  But she did not resist. Her ripe body pressed hard against his, trembling at the sound of feet pounding past the door. The brazen bell clanged again. More feet ran past, and thick Arabic orders were shouted. Durell relaxed his grip slightly on the girl's waist and took his hand from her mouth.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "It isn't much help." She whispered in English, but her accent was definitely Scandinavian. Her costume, too, was scanty enough to prove she was a blonde. She flushed under his sweeping stare and reached for a thin robe and shrugged into it. "By the way," she said, "I'm the Mademoiselle Zuzu you were looking for. I was afraid to admit it before, because I wasn't told of an appointment with you."

  "And now?"

  "I don't care."

  "Is there any way out of here?"

  "None, I'm afraid."

  The dressing-room was just a six-by-six cubicle crowded with scattered costumes, trunks, and furnished with a single chair and a stained mirror circled with make-up lights. Durell drew an unsteady breath. The girl watched him.

  "Why are they after you?"

  "I've offended His Holiness, the Second Prophet."

  "But the twins—how horrible they are!—they will kill you if they catch you here, and they will do awful things to me, too "

  "Then why offer to help me?" he asked.

  "I don't know. It was an impulse. I'm beginning to regret it. I hate them, but I'm afraid of them, and that creepy Harakim—the dance master, you know?—makes passes at me. It was just an impulse," she said, sighing. "Mama always said my nature would get me into trouble this way."

  He wanted to ask a score of questions, but there was no time. There was a clamor in the corridor, sweeping back this way again. Doors slammed, startling the outraged girls in the act of changing costumes, and their cries told Durell he had only moments left. Again he searched for a way out, to prolong the chase and make it look good. But he had darted into a blind alley, here in the statuesque blonde's room, and he was finished.

  "Mr. Durell?" she said quietly.

  He turned, wondering how she knew his name, but he was not quite quick enough. The curious twist of her smile warned him, but it was too late. Something slashed at his head, making the dressing lights explode into a dozen rainbows. But that was not the worst of it. As he fell forward in dismay, aware of her remarkable strength as she pulled him away from the door, he reluctantly chalked one up for the Dancers.

  The female of the species was more dangerous.

  He caught only a glimpse of shining glass and steel as she drove a hypodermic into the back of his neck. In the instant before the needle went home, he realized that his prior request to see Mademoiselle Zuzu had resulted in the girl being alerted from the spider-web center upstairs, and ordered to wait for him and trap him.

  Then the needle plunged home.

  He saw her smile, curiously tender, and her rich body leaned forward solicitously toward him as he whirled off into a space filled with flashes of light that abruptly dimmed and faded into a total blackout.

  Chapter Thirteen

  TIME AND space were confused. He could find no relationship between his body of bone and flesh and muscle and his environment. He was alternately hot and suffocating, then icy cold and shivering; his teeth rattled and his jaws ached. It did not matter. He was aware of these reactions, but they seemed to be no part of him. He felt weightless, and then knew sickening descents and risings and soarings; he heard noise he could not define. At no time could he move more than an inch or two in any direction. He could see nothing except occasional flashes of light that had no meaning. He knew he was alive and that he was being transported somewhere. That was all. He had bought his ticket and he was on his way to—somewhere.

  That was victory enough.

  Then came a long time when he knew nothing at all, and when it ended he felt a deep and primordial fear that had nothing to do with rational knowledge; it was something that lurched up out of his very essence and shrieked only for survival, nothing more.

  He was sick when he came to, with a steady, wracking nausea that knew no end. Slowly and fuzzily, as his thoughts began to cohere and the disintegrated portions of his personality became whole again, he realized he was suffering the after-effects of the drug in Mademoiselle Zuzu's hypodermic.

  The cramping ropes on his body were gone. But that made no difference, either. He had no desire to go anywhere.

  As his awareness grew, he knew he had been transported a long, long way, by a variety of means—car, trains and air. But where he was at this moment remained a matter of doubt.

  His neck was stiff, his head pounded, and his body was soaked in sweaty rags. When he lifted his head to look about, the reaction was so severe that he lay shivering for many minutes before he ventured to try it again. He made no sound, except for his irregular, stertorous breathing; he changed nothing in his outward aspect. Better to be thoroughly conscious, he decided, before anyone watching was aware that he had come back to the land of the living.

  It did little good. He could not orient himself. He knew he was sprawled on hard-packed earth, and that the temperature had gone from dry, bitter cold to a heat that stunned and parched and stupefied the mind. He was hungry and thirsty, and no one came to help him. He heard some mechanical and some animal sounds, but they had no meaning and for some time he didn't pay attention to them. He hoped, dimly bitter, that General McFee would be happy that he'd ridden the railroad this far.

  "Herr Durell? Sam?"

  He heard the thin eerie whisper like a ghost seeking reassurance from the dark, but did not move or allow the tempo of his breathing to change. It was the first tangible sign that he was really among the living.

  "Herr Durell? Are you awake?"

  When he opened his eyes this time, he saw a faint sliver of white light, long and vertical like an exclamation point, far off to the right. Otherwise, the darkness remained—and the heat. Tlie heat was beyond belief. His lungs strained and gasped, and his body was afire from the desiccating torment. Something sharp and pointed thrust between his shoulders from the hard-packed earth that smelled of dung and urine, both human and animal. He felt very clever then. He opened his eyes a slit and looked to right and left without moving his head. And he promptly felt a cooling, miraculous hand on his forehead.

  "Oh, Sam, you are alive, nein? You will live!"

  Now he could see by the light of that bright and blinding slash in the otherwise total darkness that it was Lisl Steig-mann who whispered to him. He could not believe it. He rejected the idea with dismay, and knew he was not yet functioning as he should, still lingering somewhere in that mindless never-never land induced by the drug.

  Then he sat upright in the gloom, with alarm clanging and banging along every ragged nerve of his body.

  "Lisl?"

  "Hush!"

  "Where are you?"

  "Here. Beside you."

  "I can't see you." He felt panic. "My eyes—"

  "It's all right. There is no light."

  "What is this place?"

  "A house—a hut. I do not know where. Please, keep very quiet. They are busy outside."

  "Busy?"

&nbs
p; "Listen, please. Oh, thank God you are alive! I watched you and thought you would stop breathing any moment and that I'd be left alone in this awful place with your body. . . ."

  He could see her now, and came totally awake. She tried to push him back when he sat up, but he put her hands aside and forced himself to his feet. The effort was exhausting in the dizzying heat, and he collapsed again. She did not say anything this time. Her face was a pale, luminous oval drifting nearer and then farther away; her gray eyes were enormous and rounded with astonishment as he tried to pull himself together. She wore the ragged remnants of a woolen black suit she had last been wearing in Munich, but the heat was too much for it and she had discarded the small jacket and hiked up the ragged skirt to expose her long, strong legs for whatever coolness might be obtained. She wore a prim white cotton bra that was hard put to contain her swelling, provocative breasts. Her soft shoulders were slim, somehow vulnerable. Her long, pale hair, almost like a white halo in this unearthly dinmess that as yet had no relationship to reality, seemed to drift around the concerned contours of her young face.

  "Water?" he whispered.

  She nodded hastily, eager to please. "I saved some for you. Do not spit it out, even if it tastes awful. It is all we have."

  He understood her warning when she lifted a crude bowl to lips. The water was brackish, almost as salty as the sea, and certainly as warm as the air, which was well over one hundred degrees. He drank the foul stuff carefully, and would have drained it all had not her words suddenly registered.

  "How much water do we have?"

  "That is all."

  "How long have we been here?"

  "Two days, I think."

  "Two days? And how often have we been given water?"

  "Once a day. Forgive me, I know how it seems to you, but—" She made small, instinctual gestures to tidy herself, irrepressibly feminine. She reached for her discarded jacket and Durell checked her, saying: "Don't bother. You'll suffer heat exhaustion if you put that on."

  "You were unconscious for so long, I thought they'd given you too much of the drug and that you'd never wake up."