Durell nodded. The whiskey and the food had helped to settle his stomach and end the slight vertigo he had felt.
His ribs seemed intact, but there was a massive ache in his belly where he had been kicked. He went to the door, limping a bit, and opened it to look out at the night. A shadow stood up from the weeds beside the entrance.
"Belmont?"
“Yo, Sam. I want to thank you."
“No need. Where is the main house?"
"That way. Are you okay?"
Durell rubbed the back of his neck. "I've felt better. How many of these Indians do you guess there are?"
"Forty, maybe fifty. They're all armed with Russian rifles, Kalashnikovs, and some Israeli Uzis. They're spooked to the eyes. Don't make any sudden moves near them, Cajun."
"Any chance of grabbing some weapons?"
"Not right now. I tell you, they're alert."
Durell looked to the left. The old plantation's original sheds, warehouses and outbuildings had long yielded to the implacable hunger of the Amazon wilderness, but the main house, on a small knoll, was brightly lighted in the central area. The shadows of armed Indian guards moved steadily in a tight perimeter around the building. There were other bunkhouses similar to the one to which they had been assigned, all around the compound. He wondered which one contained Sally. Beyond the clearing, the forest of rubber trees made a dark wall of forgotten cultivation in the moonlight. The airstrip was only a quarter of a mile away. The hangar doors were shut. The guards were alert there, too.
Belmont said softly, "Did Willie tell you the bidding has started, Sam? Looks like we've been left out of it."
"Not likely. Who else is here, exactly?"
"Damnedest collection I've ever seen. The British are here, represented by Major Philip Stokes-Hawley. Number Two man in their G-6. And Pierre Armand Polineaux, Surete. There's a Yugoslav, an East German, and Herr Schumann from Bonn's BfV, the Bundesant fur Verfassunsschutz. Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujilikaka, of course. Very cocky. A Swede I don't know, all pious idealism to save the world's ecology. Mr. Soo, playing the inscrutable Oriental. The Russians, with Vodaniev now all smiles and heavy-handed peasant anecdotes like Khrushchev used to be." Belmont shook his head. His eyes were sunk deep in his face. "A dozen others. All top intelligence people. There's never been anything like it, Sam."
"And Guerlan Stepanic?"
"Him, too. But the others ignore him." Belmont paused. "Sam, they picked your clothes apart like they were looking for nits, then sewed 'em up again. Did they get your letter of credit?"
"No."
"Then where is it?"
"In my belt. It's double-stitched."
Belmont's face was shadowed in the moonlight. "But they've started without you, Sam."
"No problem," Durell said.
He waited. He was accustomed to waiting, in this business. He sat outside the bungalow door and watched the moonlight on the compound. The place was full of ghosts. Indian slave labor, tapping the trees under the eyes of watchful, brutal guards; the clank of machinery and the slosh of the precious sap in great vats under the corrugated tin roofs of the warehouses; the fine, elegant parties that Don Federico held in his sumptuous plantation house. It had been a world of incredible wealth and luxury built upon the bones of desolate misery. Durell watched the Indians pace stolidly around the bungalows. They eyed him curiously, but did not come close when he called softly to them. Their eyes gleamed like liquid silver in the hot, tropical night. He waited another ten minutes. Some of the bruising aches in him began to ease off. The other bungalows were dark and silent. Again he wondered which one was occupied by Atimboku and Sally. Then a jeep motor started up behind the big house. Headlights flared, dimming his night vision. He began walking toward the plantation house. To his left was the airstrip, well-guarded. He got no more than ten paces from the bungalow when two guards stopped him. Their flat faces were hard and sullen.
"No, senhor," one of them said. "You must stay."
"I want to see the boss."
"He has been advised that you are awake and well. He comes now."
In a few moments, the jeep halted beside him.
2
The bald man had an air of decay, as if some of the leprous rot of the old plantation had invaded his being. The first swift impression Durell had was that of a terrified but desperate man. He looked as if he once had been stout and jolly, but the Amazon had wasted him, eroding flesh and muscle, so that his white silk suit, which should have been elegant, now hung on his medium frame in shapeless lumps and folds. He wore round, silver-rimmed glasses, and one of the side frames had been broken and impatiently repaired with a strip of black electrician's tape, as if he couldn't be bothered by getting new frames. Behind the glasses, his eyes were bright and owlish, but oddly incurious. He was middle-aged, with a sallow, fevered skin and a two-day stubble of gray beard. There was a thin shine of sweat on his bald skull and upper lip.
"We are having a brief intermission, Mr. Durell. So far, the bidding has been a disappointment."
"What did you expect?"
"I truly regret that Colonel Agosto gave you the most difficult route to follow. He enjoys his little games."
"And he has his own brand of humor."
"I also regret the violence that caused your injuries. It was your fault, the colonel says. A gallant but foolish gesture to keep an assistant of yours from harm. Do you feel better now?"
"A bit."
"You are prepared to join the others?"
"I'm curious. How high has the bidding gone?"
"Only eight million in the equivalent of your American dollars. We will certainly accept not less than one hundred million, and we expect much, much more. The colonel and I will not allow you to conspire with the others to hold down the bidding. If necessary, we are ready with other demonstrations of the Zero Formula, to convince your various governments that we are indeed in earnest. I told the colonel that all the rigmarole of your arrival here was unnecessary. But as I said, he enjoys his somewhat devious amusements.”
"Yes," Durell said. "You are from Prague?"
"Ah. You have an ear for accents."
"The Russians took you away over ten years ago. How did you get to this place?"
"I escaped. I was 'more physically active, then."
"Then you are Professor Anton Tovachek. You've won several prizes for biological engineering."
"Ah. That was a long time ago." There was a sad, small smile on the man's face, "Will you have more coffee? More food? We are all lost here in this wild land, but we do manage some amenities."
"Thank you, no."
"You need not fear poison or hypnotics, or anything like that."
Durell shook his head. There was a box of thin Brazilian cigars on the steel desk. He didn't ordinarily smoke, but he took one and lit it in order to have a moment in which to listen and look around him. The room smelled as decayed as his small, weary host. It had been rebuilt within the ruined shell of the plantation house, but in the brief glimpse he'd had when escorted in here, he realized that much of the hacienda was still only a hollow frame, filled with dust and broken furniture that had withstood the termites and a half-century of Amazon rain and heat. The natural vermin had been cleaned out, only to be replaced by this small man whose once-brilliant mind now threatened to crush the fragile ecology of the world. Some men existed and thrived only amid violence and disorder. Colonel Paolo de Santana was such a man, a parasite feeding on death. Durell was not sure about this quiet-spoken little Czech, however. There could be only one explanation about their strange, symbiotic relationship. Professor Tovachek was not a predator like Agosto. They were worlds apart.
He smoked his cigar carefully.
"How long have you been working here, professor?"
"Eight years, Mr. Durell."
"With Agosto, all this time?"
"No, no. Agosto, as you call him, appeared only two years ago. I had been hiding, you understand, since my escape from the Soviet Unio
n. I killed a man, you see. No, that is not true. I killed three men. And killed myself, and my hopes, in doing so, one might say. Are you sure you will not have more coffee? We have ten minutes left."
"Are the police after you?"
The small man nodded. His glasses glinted in the light of his desk lamp. Durell settled back in a large rattan chair. The professor said, "I was utterly desperate. One of the men I had to kill to escape the KGB, who wanted me back, was a Brazilian police officer who recognized me. I could not afford to be discovered. I wished to be thought of as dead and beyond the reach of the men who rule this world. So I became a fugitive. Behind the Iron Curtain, they hold alive my wife and two children as hostages against my return." The man's hands made despairing arabesques in the hot, midnight air. A great moth began to flutter in circles around the desk lamp. Its iridescent wings flickered and flashed around the Czech's bald head. He paid it no attention. "Mine is a familiar tale, I fear. I wished only to continue my work, to find some way to stem the growth of human population that threatens to cause desperate eruptions on this earth, sooner than most of us realize. Some unexpected benefits began to turn up out of my experiments in controlling undesirable crop and foliage growths. I found this place where no man comes, you see, and finished my work on the Zero Formula."
"Who discovered you here and took care of you?"
"It was O'Hara."
"O'Hara brought you here?"
"For a certain sum of money. I managed to bank a maintenance sum m Manaus, and another in Belem. As long as I could pay O'Hara, I was safe here. The Indians, especially, were very kind to me."
"But your money ran out," Durell suggested.
"Yes."
"So then O'Hara brought Agosto here."
"Yes."
"And you have been Agosto's prisoner ever since?"
"In a sense. Yes."
"And your whole scheme to auction off the formula is really Agosto's idea?"
"I am not innocent. I will not pretend to be. I want the money. A vast fortune can be turned into a fortress. Agosto promises he can buy my wife and children out to safety." The small man was agitated now. He took off his glasses and wiped them. The big circling moth made wildly flickering shadows on the walls of the room. Its great wings were purple and gold flecked with bright oculi of red. It was coming dangerously close to the lamp. Professor Tovachek's hands, stained indelibly by chemicals, shook as he replaced his silver-rimmed glasses. Durell was aware of the big armed Indian who stood impassively in the doorway at his back. A bell rang somewhere within the ruined house, and he heard distant footsteps, a low murmur of masculine voices. The professor stood up jerkily. "We must go. Agosto is angry with the bidding, so far."
Durell said, "Professor, we can make a deal."
"No, no."
"Just between us."
"The guard understands English, Senhor Durell."
"He can be bought."
"Please, I—no, no, it is impossible."
"You can have your millions. As many as you need. Royalties, subsidiary rights in patents to your device. All legitimate. If you accept our protection, you will find that the United States is a large, free country."
"Wherever I tried to hide, I would be found. The colonel would find me. He would kill my wife and children first. He could arrange it. He can arrange anything. You do not know him. Then he would find me and kill me, too."
The bell rang again. The Indian came forward from the doorway and prodded Durell with his rifle. He stood up and followed Professor Anton from the room. He knew very well that his offer had been monitored and taped somewhere. Perhaps even televised by the tiny camera he had spotted behind one of the dusty Victorian hangings that covered the window.
Agosto was probably thinking about it right now.
He looked back for a moment into the room. The big, beautiful moth had finally grazed the hot electric bulb and singed one of his wings. It lay fluttering in helpless, tormented circles on top of the desk. It would soon be dead.
3
In the rich years of the rubber boom, the Amazon land barons who ruled the wilderness lived in extravagant luxury in this place so remote from civilization. Remnants of the feudal mode of life practiced by the plantation owners had resisted the ravages of time and weather, insect and mold. The room to which Durell was ushered had once been a private theater, an opera house in miniature, where plays and performers had been imported from Europe and the States simply for the personal entertainment of Don Federico and his select neighbors. The hall occupied the central section of the upper level of the sprawling hacienda. There was a stage lighted by garish, naked bulbs that occasionally flickered with the rhythm of the diesel generator; there were boxes and a small row of gilded chairs from which the velvet had long since disintegrated. Draperies hung in dusty, tattered rags, ready to fall apart at a touch. The original paint had been ivory and gold, with cupids whose wings and faces had been eaten away by termites, curlicues of gilt, oil lanterns and a brilliant crystal chandelier which had long ago fallen from the domed ceiling, which still lay in twinkling splinters in the central aisle. Up front, there were about twenty men, formally seated, their backs to Durell.
The stage was empty for the moment.
It was odd, Durell thought, to be in the same room with men who would have been greatly pleased to kill him. Dr. Soo, of Peking, turned a bland, faintly inquiring face toward him as he took a seat up forward. Vladun Vodaniev looked at him with open malevolence, obviously disappointed that Durell had turned up at all. Atimboku grinned, displaying superb confidence. The British and the French, from the DST, sat together and talked in earnest undertones. The West German representative from the BFV stolidly smoked a pipe. There were a Pakistani, a Bulgarian obviously chosen to help the Russians manipulate the bidding, and others whose names and faces flickered in Durell's memory like a spinning card file. Each of these men were among the best in the business, commanding intelligence teams of agents the world over, in the silent, deadly war that avowed no rules, that allowed no mistakes. Their profession had made them a breed apart —dangerous, quick, solitary, trained to conceal and evade, to pursue their way relentlessly toward their various goals. Information was the costliest commodity in the world today, and these men were all experts at obtaining it by subversion, suborning innocent lives, degrading and blackmailing their victims, using people as puppets, as units in some terrible computerized game where the individual's humanity meant nothing, and the data counted for all.
Tension coiled in the room, entrapping all those within as if in the deadly embrace of a giant anaconda. At each door leading into the ghostly theater, the Indian guards stood stolidly with their arms ready. The men in the chairs before the stage were prisoners, willing or not. Nothing could ever be the same in this remote spot, where Professor Anton hoped for so much.
There was a brief wait. No one spoke.
Presently two Indians with sidearms rolled a chart of the world onto the platform. It was similar to the one that Homer Carboyd had displayed back in Maryland, after Durell had seen the damage done at George's Fields. Then Colonel Paolo de Santana entered the stage, smiling his gentle assassin's smile. He placed a heavy target pistol on a small lectern before him and kept his hand on it.
"Gentlemen," he said softly.
No one replied.
"Gentlemen, we all know each other. And every one of you knows that we are most disappointed in the first bidding for Professor Tovachek's Zero Formula. You know that the formula may be used for good or evil. Your governments, without exception, do not make international morality their prime consideration, however. I know that each of you has orders to bid a maximum amount to obtain the formula and return with it to your respective governments. We will tolerate no conspiracies among you to keep the price down. You are under heavy guard. Until this business here is resolved, none of you may leave the plantation alive."
Mr. Soo coughed gently. "On behalf of the People's Republic of China, I protest your stateme
nt regarding the morality of socialist use of your device. I cannot speak for the representatives of Western imperialist, expansionist powers or East European revisionist nations, but—"
"Mr. Soo."
De Santana's voice was soft, like a. sheath of velvet covering cold steel.
"Mr. Soo, dialectical polemics and propaganda have no value here. We are all businessmen in a sense, professionals of the highest order in our craft. That is why each of you was requested specifically to attend this auction. The hour is late. Let us go on with it. Who will pay ten million for the formula? Prince Atimboku?"
"Yes. Ten million."
"Fifteen," said the Bulgarian.
"Sixteen," said Mr. Soo.
"Nonsense," Vodaniev rumbled. "Twenty million."
Colonel de Santana smiled coldly. "Gentlemen, we are still speaking of pin money. If none of you is serious, we will close the bidding for tonight. A good night's sleep, and reflection on your duty to your various employers, may grant you enlightenment in the morning."
Vodaniev stood up. "One moment, please."
"Yes?"
"We have discussed so far only how much you expect for the formula that Professor Tovachek—a defector and a traitor, a scum of a man, I might add—has devised. Impossible sums. True, the effectiveness of the Zero Formula has been demonstrated to us. That is why our governments have sent us here. No one wishes to be among the last generation of life on earth. Such a device must be adequately controlled by sane and reasonable men, acting in the interests of a socialist society. It must not become the property of any expansionist, capitalist nation to use and exploit others. It must not—"
"Tut, tut. Comrade Vodaniev."
Assignment - Amazon Queen Page 14