Assignment - Amazon Queen

by Edward S. Aarons

  FOR CLIFF

  The Best of Old Friends

  Chapter One

  Durell spoke above the thump, bang, and creak of the massive rocker-arm high above .him on the riverboat's Texas deck. "Remember, there are families aboard, women and children, chickens, goats, the engine gang, maybe some river police. We don't want a panic or trouble with the locals. So you each know what to do."

  "Yes," Wells nodded.

  "I don't think we can do this quietly," Belmont said.

  "I don't like it," Agosto said quietly.

  Durell turned to the Portuguese. "What don't you like about it, Agosto?"

  "He knows we are aboard, senhor. He is waiting for us to move against him. He will be ready. If anything should go wrong—"

  "Nothing will go wrong."

  "But if it does, we have no place to go except into the river. We are all, as you Americans say, in the same boat together. The river is wide and deep. We call it O Rio Mar. The River Sea. I do not swim too well, and I would not like to offer a leg or an arm to the piraiba, the great catfish that can eat children. The river is full of wonders, senhor, and many of them are horrible."

  Durell said quietly, "Agosto, just make sure they are bottled up in their staterooms while I get the key from the girl. Then join me topside in the pilot's cabin."

  Willie Wells' teeth shone big and white when a grin touched his dark brown face. There were lumps of muscle tension along his jaw. "You always get the best jobs, Cajun. But she's a wildcat."

  "This is business," Durell said.

  "She's had an eye on you since we left Belem."

  Durell smiled briefly. "Her name is Inocenza—but she's not so innocent." He looked at the dim glow of his watch dial. "We're all in synch. We'll go now."

  "One moment." Agosto's soft voice interrupted. He was a Brazilian of Portuguese descent, a moreno whose touch of Tapajos Indian blood gave his face a flush like a burning coal, resembling the red wood known as pau brasil. His ancestors might have been among the Portuguese bandeirantes who pushed furiously into Brazil's vast interior in a hunt for slaves and loot, for plunder and glory. He was a short man, wearing a wide-brimmed straw planter's hat and a white drip-dry shirt with very long pointed collars, open at the thick, muscular column of his neck. His slacks were striped, white and black. He affected glove-leather shoes. His shoulder muscles bulged and strained against the fabric of his shirt. He was a thief, a professional, one of the best of men, so K Section's Central had reported. Agosto said, "We do not land, Senhor Sam, at Paramaguito for two hours yet. Let me try the safe myself, first. You know I am an expert at it."

  "And if you're caught?"

  "I am never caught yet, Senhor Sam. If so, I can handle o capitao."

  "Captain O'Hara is tougher than you think."

  "I can compete with him. He is an old man, anyway." Agosto stared at Durell. "Perhaps you do not trust me alone with the contents of the safe? I understand the big money is involved, but—"

  "I don't trust anyone in this business," Durell said flatly. "The key is easier. We'll do it my way."

  They were eight days out of Belem, and time was running short. The river showed no sign of narrowing. It was tremendous, awesome, a massive, mighty, incredible flow of stained water that had already coursed down for almost four thousand miles from the Peruvian Andes. Far, far off to starboard, there were a few twinkling lights ashore, four miles away. To port there was nothing but the inky, star-pricked, hot and shimmering darkness of a humid equatorial night, a sense of timeless and infinite expanse, of unthinkable power. The Amazon's volume equaled that of the next eight largest rivers in the world. It had been rightly termed O Rio Mar, the River Sea, by the first Portuguese explorers who had come here four hundred years ago. Ilha de Marajo was far behind them, with its countless webs of channels and seaborne traffic of rusty freighters, tankers, fishing boats, river transports, patrol launches, tugs, barges, and Indian canoes. The Two Brothers, O Duos Irmaos, floundered, thumped, and thrashed with its two side-wheel paddles against the full flood of the Amazon, which implacably thrust against the current on its way to the Atlantic.

  "We'll start now," Durell said, "if there are no more objections."

  Belmont said, "I'd like to kill that man. Andy was a friend of mine."

  "Killing Stepanic won't bring Andy Weyer back to us. We need Stepanic, anyway, for another day. Or at least until we leave Paramaguito. And we don't know what consortium is backing him."

  "He deserves to die," Belmont said. He was a lean shadow, a faceless silhouette, in the darkness under the overhang of the old steamboat's hurricane deck. He wore a dark turtleneck sweater, although the night was suffocatingly hot. Dark slacks and black crepe-soled shoes made him almost invisible. Durell had picked him up on the flight from Geneva to Rome, coming in from Budapest. There was a streak of white hair above his cadaverous face. He spoke Brazilian Portuguese, among other languages, without a flaw, and he had once been a member of K Section's "Q Squad," which meant that he knew everything there was to be known about killing. Tony Belmont cracked long, knobby knuckles. There was a sense of tightly leashed violence in him. The light, popping sounds of his knuckles were all but drowned in the chug, splash, and thump of the paddlewheeler's ancient engines. He said, "All right, Sam. We do it your way. But before we get the next directive, Stepanic is dead."

  "I want to know who the Albanian is working for, before you do anything, Tony."

  "He gets paid by the Black House," Belmont said. He almost spit the words. "Who else?"

  "Then it's an off-color, unauthorized mission for him. Peking's sent an official team, a legitimate crew, on this same job."

  "How do you know that?"

  Durell did not answer Belmont's question.

  "Let's go," he said.

  He went down the ladder, a tall man with heavy shoulders, black hair streaked with gray at the temples, eyes that were dark blue, sometimes black when he was angry or thoughtful. For his size, he moved with a lithe grace and a balanced silence. He had worn a moustache until some years ago, when it became an identifying item in his dossier in Peking and in the files of the Foreign Directorate of the Soviet Committee of State Security—the Komitet Gosudarstvennei Bezopastnosti —the KGB. Then he had shaved it off, but his survival factor according to the computers was still dangerously low, and he had been granted, without asking for it, a bonus in his annual contract with K Section, that troubleshooting arm of the Central Intelligence Agency run by General Dickinson McFee. He had made a habit of caution until it was primal second nature, an instinct imprinted on all the nerve-patterns of his neural and muscular system. He was careful opening doors, turning corners, entering any room, however familiar the setting might be.

  Durell knew the dirty nooks and crannies of the world's jungles and great metropolitan centers intimately; he spoke a dozen languages fluently, along with a score of minor dialects. If Tony Belmont was an expert at killing methods, Durell was Belmont's tutor. Durell could kill or maim in any number of swift, silent ways. He did not like to. It was sloppy, it left ripples in his wake, and he preferred to move about unnoticed and unremarked, and, particularly, unidentified for what he was by local police. He thought he might have to put some extra restraints on Belmont, although Tony was not like that madman he'd been forced to work with in Malta. Unlike Keefe that time, Belmont had brains. Which might just make him more troublesome than Keefe had been, on this strange job.

  He regretted the death of Andy Weyer. It was Andy's fault, of course. Andy had been careless m Belem; he was supposed to stay at Durell's side, helping to guard what Durell carried with him. Perhaps Andy had been overanxious, and impatient with the blackout in which the whole team had moved for almost
two weeks now. But in Durell's business, you could not look back for too long. Andy Weyer and Belmont had been partners for some years. It was a tough break. Stepanic had proved smarter than Andy, and you paid dearly in this business for one moment's hesitation, a split-second decision that might prove wrong. You died silently, almost carelessly, without oratory or accolades, and always officially by accident. Belmont was wrong to feel personally involved in Weyer's ugly death. Emotion had no place in the business. It could kill you.

  Still, it was a good team, patient under the lack of information they all possessed, not knowing where they were going, or why, in this strange paper chase. It was like being a pawn in a child's game, except that they operated in deadly seriousness, moving so far around the world, from Washington to Geneva, from Addis Ababa to Tokyo and then to Belem and then aboard the rickety-rackety chuffing O Duos Irmdos going upriver on the immense Amazon to a destination none of them could even guess at.

  Durell had decided tonight not to follow orders blindly any more. He had come far enough. It made him uneasy not to be in command of the situation.

  At the foot of the ladder he paused, oppressed once again, since boarding the old side-wheeler, with a heavy wave of nostalgia, of deja vu, of having been here before. For all practical purposes, the overcrowded riverboat was not new to him. He knew every inch of each deck, every companionway, stateroom, gallery, cargo holds and the engine room of the Two Brothers. He could have made his way blindfolded about the ancient, shuddering vessel, and never err.

  Long ago, as a boy, he had been brought up on this vessel's sister-ship, the Trois Belles, beached in the mud of Bayou Peche Rouge in Louisiana, after a long life as a gambling paddlewheeler on the Mississippi. He had lived alone there with his grandpa Jonathan until he went off to Yale for a law degree and then, by one step and another, had entered the employ of K Section, under that remarkable little gray man. General Dickinson McFee. As a young boy in the bayous, Durell had been taught to hunt, and had learned the tricks of the hunted, too, in the dark green abysses of the delta country. He knew the ways of wild things as well as he knew the evasions and wiles of men. His years aboard the Three Sisters with old Jonathan, while the riverboat moldered in the muddy dock in the bayous, had taught him all there was to know about the gallant breed of riverboats that had once breasted the currents of the Mississippi channels. It was like coming home again, to be aboard this throbbing, chugging, reeking old vessel that nosed through the channels of the mighty Amazon.

  Someone came down the ladder after him.

  He paused at the rail, not turning his head. He knew it was Willie Wells by the light, springy footsteps.

  "Cajun?"

  "Take it easy, Willie. You belong up forward."

  "I'm on my way. I was wondering—"

  "Yes?"

  "You know the skipper of this stinking hulk?"

  "He was a friend of my grandfather's."

  "You sure of that?"

  Durell turned. "Why do you ask?"

  "Why did Cap'n O'Hara leave the Mississippi?"

  "He was bought, along with this boat, maybe seventy years ago. O'Hara was just a young man, then. He'd been mate aboard the old Trois Belles once, ray grandfather said. He mentioned O'Hara once or twice."

  "Good or bad?" Wells asked.

  Durell looked at the wide, enormous river under the vibrating black tropical sky. There was no relief from the heat, even by the movement of their passage. A barge and tug lights moved against the darkness, perhaps two miles away.

  "Not very good," Durell admitted.

  "Your Grandpa Jonathan didn't like O'Hara?"

  "I think not. He didn't talk much about him. It was a long time ago, Willie."

  "But you remember it, don't you?" Wells persisted.

  "Yes, I remember it. A Brazilian rubber baron, during the wild rich days of the rubber boom up here on the Amazon, wanted a riverboat and bought the Two Brothers, lock, stock, and barrel, had it dismantled, crated, and shipped to Manaus, where it was reassembled, renamed O Duos Irmdos, and was used as a private yacht in Senhor Claudio Villas Jeronymo de Sousa's service."

  "You been doing some homework, Sam?"

  "I just happen to remember it." Durell paused. "But it was a long time ago, Willie. Those frontier days on the Amazon are gone forever. The rubber boom ended and the rubber barons moved out. But O'Hara somehow kept this steamboat. That's all there is to it."

  Willie Wells stood almost as tall as Durell, a lithe strong man with the air of a predator about him. Maybe all the men in K Section's Q Squad looked this way, Durell thought. Wells, after a bitter tour in Vietnam, had been a black mercenary in Africa when Durell first met him. Willie called himself a citizen of the world, and his reaction to Brazil—where all men were color-blind and saw only the man, not the color of his skin—was strange. Wells was affronted. His fierce pride in his black skin made him want to be recognized for what he was. He had been estranged from society through an ugly childhood in the ghettos of Philadelphia. Later, when Durell helped him get a contract to work for K Section, the man proved to be ruthless, dedicated to whatever employer paid him for what had to be done. His devotion to a job was implacable. Once, in Ceylon, due to a misunderstanding of orders. Wells had even set out to kill him, wiping from his mind the fact that Durell had been his benefactor. Durell had beaten him that time, but he would never look forward to a second encounter.

  He saw Wells' white teeth flash in his black face. "Is something bothering you, Sam?"

  "A little. It's of no importance."

  "Something about O'Hara?"

  Durell said, "We're on a paper chase, Willie, as I said. We don't know what our orders will be in Paramaguito, right? Maybe we'll be sent off in another direction."

  "Yuh. A strange job, this one is."

  "But an important one."

  Wells hesitated. "You're carrying a lot of money on you, Cajun."

  "So is our competition."

  "Do you know who they are, yet?"

  "Some of them. They're coming from everywhere, all over the world. Maybe they're being summoned, like us, by different routes. But we know Stepanic, anyway. Get on forward. Time is running out."

  Wells grinned. "Good luck with a pobrezinha —the poor little girl." He chuckled. "Inocenza. What a name. No noise on that one, huh?"

  "No killing," Durell said. "Only to save your own life."

  2

  He waited until Wells vanished along the broad curve of the hurricane deck, then went down one more ladder and moved silently forward. The paddlewheeler turned slightly to port, following the channel buoys in the maze of the enormous river. The swinging bow revealed, far, far ahead, a dim pinpoint of light from the river port of Paramaguito. It would be just about dawn when they docked. He looked at his watch. Behind him, the massive sidepaddles churned and splashed. The steamboat shuddered through a dark tangle of driftwood floating down the current from hundreds or thousands of miles upstream.

  She was waiting for him in the warm, private darkness of her special cabin.

  The riverboat was crowded with transients, travelers to the interior, farmers, Indians, road-builders, the flotsam and jetsam that collected along the watery highway, including those who couldn't afford or couldn't find available air transportation. Aboard the Duos Irmaos were shoestring traders, unemployed, vagabonds, men, women and children, all those whose business had taken them from one infinitesimal spot on this gigantic river to another. He was acutely aware of the press of humanity packed aboard, of the sounds they made in their sleep, of a single dim light in one cabin where men in stained whites gambled with greasy cards, while tethered chickens huddled in a corner of the stateroom. He heard the bleat of a goat somewhere aft, where Stepanic had managed a suite of rooms along with his assassins.

  He tapped lightly on Inocenza O'Hara's stateroom door, tapped again, then tried the lever handle. It opened easily. He felt better. She had expected him.

  "Sam?"

  Her voice was a w
hisper, intriguingly accented.

  "Yo."

  "Oh, I have been waiting. I think you never come."

  "Well, I'm here," he said.

  "Lock the door, please."

  "Yes."

  "And draw the curtains."

  He did as her voice requested. A dim, rosy lamp bloomed in the darkness. Her breath came in lightly, expectantly. She was O'Hara's adopted daughter, but where he had ever picked her up, or why, he hadn't learned yet. But he meant to. She was as unlike the gross, gray-grizzled old steamboat capitao as a jungle orchid is to slops thrown to swine. She had turned up in Belem as his contact when he was directed to take passage aboard O Duos Irmaos. She'd been all business then, quick and direct, wearing a lightweight, fashionable suit, dark sunglasses, looking as much a part of the smart Brazilian scene as the most social of its esteemed society. Something had passed between them, however, in that brief, businesslike meeting. When , she took off the opulent sunglasses, her eyes were the palest of blues against the darkness of her suntanned Latin face—a face as pure-looking in its oval perfection as a saint's. Inocenza, she called herself, and smiled. But the eyes gave her away then, as they did now.

  "You like me, Sam?"

  "I like."

  "You thought of how I would look naked?"

  "From the first moment," he said. "As I did, with you. We understood each other, eh?"

  "Yes."

  "So I have been waiting here."

  "All night?"

  "Since we left Belem. Come here, Sam."

  Her slender body, with proud breasts and womanly hips, moved; and when she moved, on the wide, plush ornate bed that had somehow been installed in this miserable hulk of a riverboat, the golden chain around her neck swung a bit, from nipple to nipple, revealing the crucifix and the key to the riverboat's heavy, improbable safe.

  She laughed, a throaty sound. "Come, Sam. You never saw a true Amazona? In the olden days, when people believed such women as I were warriors, it was true, in a way. I shall do battle to you, in this bed."

  "Inocenza—"

  "Please. Come here."