Assignment Tokyo

by Edward S. Aarons

  3

  "THE EMBASSY, again," said Miss Pruett.

  “Let them wait.”

  “It’s on the scrambler phone.”

  Durell shoved the last of the paper work into the lockbox on his desk and sat back in the swivel chair. It was still raining outside. His watch read 9:10. Tokyo’s early night lifers were already on their way home to wife, tatami mat, and a hangover, except for the tourists attracted to flashy cabarets dedicated to plucking the American dollar from their pockets.

  “Melvin Cummings again?” Durell asked.

  “Yes, sir. Urgent. As before.”

  “Never mind that. Did Henry Lamson or Moka report in?”

  “No.”

  “Tried to raise them on the radio?”

  “Yes, sir. Not a peep out of them.” Miss Pruett looked as fresh and tidy as in the morning. “They’re not at their stations, or they’ve lost their GH5 transmitters. I hope it’s not the latter. They’re very expensive to replace.”

  “What do you think about Moka?”

  “He’s a Japanese security man. Major Yamatoya put him on the job with us, and Al—Mr. Charles—knew it, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. We were just careful about Moka.” Miss Pruett paused. “Moka is a fine little man. We have everything about Moka in our files.” Durell scowled at the dark office windows. The rain on the glass made the reflections of neon signs down the street look like amoeba-symbols of scarlet and yellow. “What about Bill Churchill?” he asked.

  “Nothing from him either.”

  “Where is Shinjo?”

  “Joe? Downstairs in the shop. Waiting with the car to take you to the Embassy.”

  “Aside from you, me, and Joe, then, our whole staff has vanished, right?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” said Miss Pruett. “How would you put it, Liz?” He called her that just to annoy her. He wanted to annoy someone, and he knew he was being unfair, but he felt cooped up and anxious, harassed by a job he did not like. “Bill Churchill is up at one of the inns above Hatashima. Hank and Moka got into the village, according to their last signal. They were each supposed to report regularly, every two hours, from up there. Granted, Bill Churchill is more of an amateur than a pro at this business—”

  “Churchill is an old friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Durell said shortly.

  “Sir, the Embassy—”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  Durell was a big man, with heavy musculature and thick, black hair that was turning gray, even silvery, at the temples. His rugged face was burned dark by the jungles of Malaysia and the sands of the Sahara. He had blue eyes that often turned dark when he was angry or dangerous. They were almost black now. He moved with an easy grace, a smooth coordination of nerve and muscle and bone. His body carried scars picked up in various wild places of the world: an alley in Karachi, the Metro in Paris, or the Kalahari wilderness.

  He often thought of himself as having become depersonalized, turned into a smoothly coordinated machine; a tool for that little gray man, General Dickinson McFee, who commanded K Section, that troubleshooting branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Durell had been a field agent for K Section for long enough, so that the psychologists and statistical enumerators at No. 20 Annapolis Street, K Section’s headquarters at Washington, regularly worried, at contract-renewal time, about his survival factor. It was dangerously low, but this did not bother him. He was aware of the red tabs on his dossiers at No. 2 Dzherzhinsky Square, headquarters of the Soviet KGB at Moscow, and in the labyrinths of the Black House, the L-5 intelligence section at Peking for the Chinese People’s Republic. Those files, he thought grimly, were quite thick now.

  But Durell was a gambler with instincts bom and trained in him by his old grandfather, Jonathan, in Louisiana’s hot, humid delta country of Bayou Peche Rouge. He had been raised there by the old man. His home during those early years had been aboard the hulk of the Trois Belles, a Mississippi sidewheeler that the old man, the last of the riverboat gamblers, had won on a throw of the dice and then run up on the mudflats in the shade of Bayou Peche Rouge to establish a home for himself and the boy.

  Durell’s gambling instincts were often the despair of General McFee and the various Centrals of K Section scattered around the world. He preferred to work alone and not with the organization, and so his temporary assignment to Tokyo was distasteful and frustrating to him.

  He had never married, but women were never a problem. He had known many and loved many, and some had tried to kill him. There was always Deirdre, who had wished for a normal life with him, but who in despair had joined K Section herself. Now they rarely saw each other. He could not risk the vulnerability of a permanent liaison and was reasonably satisfied with their arrangement now.

  Sometimes, in his lonely and solitary life, where danger lurked around every comer, he wished for the normality of a suburban home and a commuter’s routine job. He knew it would never be that way for him. It was too late. K Section would never let him go. He did not delude himself about that. He was chained to his way of life, and no longer regretted the only alternative, death, as a way out.

  He was often cleared to act “with extreme prejudice,” as the government bureaucrats put it. He could kill with a gun, a knife, his hands—long, fine, sensitive hands, adept and blinding with their speed. He could use a pin, a skewer, a roll of coins, or just the hard edge of his palm, smashing at vital neural centers, to maim or slay. He tried not to think about the occasions when his long periods of training at the Maryland “Farm” came to be used like this.

  He was at home in Tokyo, as he was in many other places in the world. His Japanese was better than fair. He spoke six European languages, Arabic, and some Mandarin Chinese, as well as half a dozen dialects from Punjabi to Swahili. As he sat at his desk, aware of Miss Pruett’s plaintive patience because he kept postponing the inevitable call to the Embassy, he reflected dryly that he was a machine who hated paper work, routine, and all the other necessary components of bureaucratic contrivance.

  “Mr. Durell—?” Miss Pruett began again.

  “My name is Sam, Liz.”

  “I think it’s better to retain a formal status, don’t you? Since you’ll only be here for a few weeks?”

  He looked at Miss Pruett carefully, noting her fine figure under the shapeless dress. He wondered what she would look like without her glasses and with her hair shaken loose. Then he told himself he had other things to think about at the moment.

  In the office of the Japanese Premier there would be long, anxious conferences around the clock. Fear would be riding the American Embassy too—hence the anxiety of Melvin Cummings’ calls. Cummings, the bland public relations officer for State, always managed to say a great many words without saying anything at all. Maybe the Russians were also on to it all and gloating. Or the Chinese. Peking’s Black House had an elaborate apparatus of sleeper agents in Japan. The world balanced on tenterhooks, and as far as he knew, he had lost three of the men under his command at Tokyo Central. He did not object to risks for himself. But to remain at a desk while others died on assignments was intolerable.

  “Please, Sam—”

  “That’s better.”

  “You said you’d call back to the Embassy.”

  “Right.”

  But he got up from the desk and went to a mounted kakemono panel to his right, framing three scrolls, and pressed the lower left corner of the red laquered frame. The panel slid aside and he stepped into the private, secret room beyond.

  The chamber represented the heart of K Section’s Tokyo Central. There were Class V filing cabinets, a narrow metal desk, a powerful radio transceiver, an oscilloscope and sound-detecting devices, an HG-Mark HI, a cabinet full of bugging gadgets that looked relatively unused, and a small arsenal of weapons ranging from a Russian AK-47 and an Israeli Uzi automatic rifle down to revolvers, knives, grenades, picklock kits and several Thermit bombs and plastic explosives. Durell pref
erred his own snubby-barreled S&W .38.

  There was also an encoding machine labeled ramba type j as well as the terminal telephones to the Embassy and the IT&T cable office.

  Behind the kakemono panel, the room had no windows, and presumably the walls were solid and soundproof. Just the same, he picked up an electronic sensor, a device like a bell-mouthed pistol, and scanned the walls with it, then the floor and ceiling, which had a hatch leading to the roof. The building was archaic, ugly, and gray—and serviceable.

  Finally he sat at the radio and began calling Bill Churchill’s frequency up in Hatashima. The radio was duly registered as a ham outfit, and all the messages sent and received were encoded in the form of the usual amateur operator’s technical and gossipy chatter.

  There was no reply.

  He called Churchill’s code letters again, and then once more; switched to Henry Lamson’s call; and then he tried Moka’s.

  No answer.

  There was only a dry, crackling static that filled the air from the northeast coast of Honshu.

  “Mr. Durell? S-Sam?” said Miss Pruett.

  “Five more minutes. Tell him so.”

  “Thank the Lord.”

  He went down a hall and descended the back stairs into the shop that served as a front for Tokyo Central. It catered mostly to tourists wandering the narrow streets of the Asakusa district, and was devoted to the shibui fad, although Al Charles had been a man of taste before being hit by his malaria. There were a number of genuine art objects and some decent reproductions in the cluttered shop. One comer was devoted to camera equipment from Leitz and Zeiss as well as Japanese Canons and Nikons; they stood cheek-by-jowl with decorative woodblock prints, Chinese ceramics and old books more or less filched from Isseido and Charles E. Tuttle. Opposite was a case of shippo, Japanese cloisonne enamel featuring bees, flowers, and birds in the old-fashioned style. China teapots hung from the ceiling beams. Incense tickled the air. One wall near the stairs was shelved for Hakata dolls from Kyushu and the wooden folk dolls known as kokeshi. A woman clerk, ready to leave for the evening, was putting the finishing touches to some ikebana, the traditional flower arrangements. In addition to these gimcracks were ivory netsuke ornaments, obi and zori, sashes and sandals, a rack of cotton kimonos, Noh masks, a panel of swords with their menuki ornaments on the hilts, and the inevitable heaps of happi coats, worn by workmen with their company insignia on the back, purchased happily by tourists who unwittingly advertised a carpenter’s shop, a Santory bar, or a garbage collector at their suburban barbecues.

  “Shinjo-san,” Durell said quietly.

  The burly Japanese was putting up the night shutters. His smile was toothy. “Hai, Durell-san?”

  “The car. Where is it?”

  “You want it now? To go somewhere?”

  “In fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Okay. We have dinner together? I know good place; fine hostess there. She like me. Get friend for you?”

  Durell sighed. It was always this way with Shinjo. “It’s business, Shinjo.”

  “Oh. Hai. Yes,” Shinjo agreed. “Always business with you, Durell-san. Not like Charles-san. Charles-san like good times; he a good-time Charley, ha-ha! Very good to me. I buy a bar soon, on money I save. No Westerners inside, though. They not civilized, begging your pardon, Durell-san.”

  “Just get the car, Shinjo.”

  “Check.”

  Durell went back upstairs. Miss Pruett still dithered and seemed to collapse with relief when he said, “All right, get the Embassy on the telephone. I’ll talk to Cummings, he who speaks with forked tongue for State.”

  4

  "IT TOOK you long enough, DurelI.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “But this is an emergency! Are we scrambled?”

  “Don’t shout. We’re always scrambled. Of course, Yamatoya’s boys may have decoded our wires. So speak softly. I thought all of State’s P.R. assistants were trained to speak in dulcet, tranquilizing tones.”

  “Listen, you son of a bitch—”

  “You listen.” Durell’s voice changed slightly. It was enough to make Melvin Cummings, just arrived from his plush Washington office, stop abruptly and swallow what he was about to say. Durell went on, “I’m missing three of my people. All I have left is a chauffeur and a female secretary. And I haven’t received a report from anyone at Hatashima. They’re dying up there. Whose fault is it?”

  “Well, we’re not quite certain of that. We’re trying to determine—”

  “Is it Washington’s?” Durell asked.

  “We’re investigating. That is, you are supposed to be investigating.”

  “Whose bug is it? Whose virus?”

  “The Pearl Q-27 was recalled directly by Presidential Executive order—”

  “When?”

  “Months ago.”

  “Is it positively identified as Pearl Q?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Do you expect it to be?”

  “I surely hope to God it’s not,” Cummings said fervently. His voice became placating. “Listen, I just want to know what in hell is going on up there at Hatashima. White House is waiting. So is General Mark Durant, head of CBW IV. What kind of place is it, anyway?”

  “A small and beautiful fishing village.”

  “How many casualties so far?”

  Durell replied, “I told you, I can’t get any reports. I think I’ve lost my three men.”

  Cummings became assertive again. “Well, it’s your job to find out these things, right? That’s your business, right? You’re supposed to be good at it, right?”

  “Right,” said Durell.

  He was aware of Miss Pruett watching him, wide-eyed. Over her head, on the wall over the entrance to the shop stairway, a red light began to blink, and a small buzzer made a sound like an angry rattlesnake.

  Melvin Cummings was saying, “. . . in any case, I want a full report, in person, right here at the Embassy—I’ll be in the old War Room, the Ambassador may be with me too—no later than 2200 tonight.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Durell said.

  He hung up. He looked at Miss Pruett. She seemed pale. “What is it?”

  “Shinjo has pushed the alarm,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose that’s happened before either.”

  “No, it hasn’t,” she said. “Not ever.”

  Durell smiled at her. “Just what we need.”

  From the window of the office he could see the street and both comers in either direction. A black Toyota was parked at each end of the lane. The clerks from the shop below, having left by the front door, were being stopped and questioned, and allowed to go on. Four men, all Japanese, walked with purposeful strides toward the shop entrance.

  It was a security raid.

  Durell moved quickly, and Miss Pruett matched his actions, punching small, inconspicuous buttons that armed Thermit bombs in the inner, secret office. The control button that would blow up, bum, and destroy every incriminating and classified item in Tokyo Central was located at Miss Pruett’s desk. Durell told her to sit there.

  “Don’t move. Don’t get up, even if they point a weapon at you, understand?”

  “I’ve practiced this drill often enough,” she said resentfully. Her glossy black hair gleamed with an electric readiness; her shoulders were straight; her brown eyes were angry with him. “I suppose it’s Major Yamatoya.”

  “It is,” Durell said.

  He lit one of his rare cigarettes and sighed.

  In precisely three minutes a small Japanese in a neat gray suit entered the room, bobbed his cropped head and smiled.

  “Durell-san? You must come with me. Major Yamatoya says it is most urgent.”

  5

  DURELL was accustomed to waiting. It was a part of the business, like the long stagnant periods of military inactivity interrupted by sudden bursts of deadly action. In this business it took weeks of patient effort to amass data, pinpoint the target, plan the
details, and then move in. Major Tern Yamatoya knew the technique. He kept Durell waiting for half an hour.

  The small room had a single window that looked out on an alley and the back wall of a massive government building in the Hibaya Park district. The room was Japanese. As often happened in Tokyo, modern buildings shouldered the traditional. From the window Durell could see a taxi parked at the end of the alley, identifiable by its yellow license tag, and he wondered why it was there.

  The room was heated only by a hibachi charcoal fire. There was a collection of mingei on shelves, Japanese folk-craft with a rough, peasant look. From what Durell recalled of Major Yamatoya’s background, the intelligence officer came from a small farm not far from the Five Lakes district, and Yamatoya, pretending to be modern, nevertheless took pride in his ancestry of petty nobility. There were samurai swords and bamboo replicas with masks and padded costumes for kendo, the Japanese art of fencing. All the furniture was Japanese except for a steel green desk and swivel chair and a strong spotlight that emphasized the emptiness of the desk.

  “Durell-san? A thousand apologies for keeping you here. You are very patient, for an American. You do not fidget or pace. You accept time for what it is, a road that may be long or short, but which must be traveled according to the dictates of fate.”

  Teru Yamatoya was a slender, elegant little man with a black hairline moustache and gray hair in a brush cut. He did not look like a policeman. He wore a dark red yakuta, which was too thin for the chilly room. His black eyes were alive with intelligence; his everted lips curved downward with perplexity. His hands betrayed an impatience that made his remarks about Durell envious.

  Durell stood up. “I’d like an explanation for being dragged here in a police raid. I’m sure you know that I’m handling Charles-san’s business temporarily, and I’ve been properly licensed by the appropriate government bureaus. There is nothing illegal about my work. I’ve been given no explanation and no opportunity to contact the American authorities about this arrest.”