Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish

by Dorothy Gilman

  Rallying, she said crisply, "One khaki bag, one blue, both canvas, and two djellabahs wrapped in newspaper." There would be time enough for explanations later, she told herself, and as she stumbled over the rubble past the threshold she glanced back into the dim room from which she was emerging with her life. This new and second Janko was going through the pockets of the first Janko, bringing out wallet, papers and at last the keys to the blue Renault. / seem to be collecting Jankos, she thought, and admitted to a certain dazed condition following the events of the past half hour. But not shock, she insisted firmly, unless it was a shock to be alive and to have collected another miracle. Nevertheless she found it a little difficult to plunge back into the reality in which she'd been living before she entered the hut; it needed the warmth of the sun on her face as she walked down the hill, and the intense blueness of the sky arching overhead to exorcise the nightmare of those past thirty minutes.

  Now there was another Janko to think about, and work still to be done.

  The car was a Peugeot, and had been well hidden. She climbed inside and sat staring into the seams of the two rocks while she disassembled all of her previous assumptions and tried to arrange them into a different pattern. She could admit to certain possible changes that pleased her but her mind still felt jarred. Aware of this new Janko opening the trunk of the car and slamming it closed she stilled her busy thoughts and waited, but when he joined her in the car she had reached one small decision. Saying "One moment, please," she leaned over, placed a hand on his moustache, dug in her fingers at one end and tugged hard.

  "Ouch!" he gasped. "Damn it, that hurt, have you gone mad?"

  "His moustache fell off—I had to be sure," she told him.

  The new Janko laughed. "So that's what happened . . . Mine is a very small and pathetic moustache now. Obviously he felt obliged to wear one because I'm famous for my eyebrows and moustache—or was," he added, "and damn it I've resented very much sacrificing them, but I trimmed both of them on the plane here from Cairo. It was the only disguise I could manage, and not much of one at that." He backed the Peugeot out from the rocks and as they sped away from the saint's tomb and down the empty highway he gave her a quick shrewd glance. "When I searched him—he didn't get what he wanted from you, did he." It was a statement, not a question.

  "No."

  "You wouldn't be alive if he did." Carefully he asked, "What did he want from your"

  She realized that each of them had begun fencing now, not quite sure of the other yet; she said cautiously, "He was after certain photographs."

  "Photos," he said deliberately, "of seven informants, one of whom may not match his photo and be an imposter?"

  "Yes but he knew that much, too," she reminded him.

  He nodded. "Right . . . Okay, you've had a difficult few days and too many Jankos, I understand that. You need some proof? How about the name Fadwa Ali?" When she shook her head, "Urn al Nil?"

  She was beginning to feel alarmed. "No to both—who are you?"

  "How about the name Carstairs?"

  She expelled her breath in a release of tension. "All right, Carstairs yes."

  "Good. Then maybe you can trust me a little now. I've been following you since Fez in a black car, and since Erfoud in this green one. I'm Maximillian Janko but my friends call me Max and I hope you will, too."

  "Max,", she repeated. "And I'm Emily Pollifax. But the other, the first Janko?"

  He said in a hard voice, "He was my secretary in Cairo and his name is—was—Flavien Bernard, except it's obvious that he was a double agent all the time, which makes even that name suspect."

  "Flavien Bernard," she said, frowning. "But how did he learn about this assignment to identify these seven people?"

  "Oh very cleverly," said Max bitterly. "He was very frank about it before all hell broke loose, very proud of himself when he felt he'd nothing to lose by bragging. It seems he intercepted the initial request from Carstairs for an Arabic-speaking agent to travel in Morocco, extracted my documents and my resume from the file, had his own photograph appended to them—after adding moustache and changing his eyebrows to roughly match my appearance—and wired it all to Langley, Virginia. When detailed instructions from Virginia were sent back he intercepted those, too, except that by the sheerest luck I stumbled across a copy of those just before he was about to leave, and confronted him with it."

  "And how did he deal with that?" she asked.

  He said in a savage voice, "By throwing me down an empty elevator shaft in Cairo after which he assumed, quite reasonably, that I was dead."

  "Good God," she gasped, and remembering the strange reaction of Janko to the face in the window she understood his shock at seeing a man he'd believed dead. "Yet it didn't kill you," she marveled, "because here you are."

  He nodded. "I was lucky. I hate to even remember what happened—" He shivered. "But he gave me such a push that I flew out and down—"

  "Don't," she begged, seeing the expression on his face.

  "No it's all right," he said with a twisted smile. "It may help the nightmares to talk about it. Of course it should have been curtains for me but he'd given me such a push that I was propelled away from the center of the shaft and along the outer wall. Two stories down I hit a beam, managed to grab it and hang there for longer than I care to remember, until finally I was able to pull myself up and lie across the beam. I was there for two ghastly hours, ten stories above the basement, before workmen came back from a damnably long lunch and heard my shouts."

  She said soberly, "You were very lucky."

  "By that time," he went on, "Flavien must have been already on a plane for Casablanca and then Fez. I took time only to sound a general alarm and to have my ribs taped—two of them got cracked when I hit that beam—and then I chartered a plane to fly me directly to Fez. All I knew was that at the last minute a Mrs. Pollifax had been assigned to join me—" He gave her the flash of a wry smile and added, "It certainly entertained me all the way to Fez as to what Flavien would think of that—but of course it also put you in very real danger. I was told that you'd both be found that first night at the Palais Jamai, and that's where I spotted the two of you in the bar late that afternoon—"

  She nodded . . , when she had stopped for a brandy to steady her nerves and to tell him of Hamid ou Azu's murder in the souk.

  "—and have been on your trail ever since."

  She smiled. "Explaining Koran boxes to me in Er-Rachidia."

  "Yes, I wanted to know what you were like," he admitted. "I had a fair idea of his plans for you and I wanted to get your measure." With an amused glance at her he said, "I decided you

  might be tougher than you looked, under that innocent facade,

  , and that it would take a lot to scare you. I hoped so, anyway."

  "Nevertheless he had begun to alarm me very much," she conceded. "But who was Janko—or Flavien—working for?"

  He glanced into the rearview mirror and then at his watch. "There's not a car on the road, so nobody's following us, obviously, and do you realize I don't know where we head next? I think we've put enough distance behind us. There's a thermos of coffee in the back and I feel we could both use some. Shall we stop?"

  "I appreciate your asking," she told him. "With coffee I just may survive this morning."

  He drew off the road and they climbed out, finding themselves now on a vast plain of dull yellow sand and gravel that stretched flat for a great distance until it met with low, dun-colored mountains that exactly matched the earth. But the sun was shining and the sky was a vivid cloudless blue, and curls of steam rose from the coffee when he poured it into a cup and handed it to her.

  "Bliss," she told him, smiling. "No breakfast."

  He lifted his cup, looking grave. "A toast to the two of us, and a successful mission ahead."

  "I'll drink to that," and as her first profession of faith she told him, "we head for Tinehir and informant number four, a man who sells fossils named Omar Mahbuba, and I ask again,
who was the other Janko—this Flavien—working for?"

  And standing there on the great sweep of flat and pebbly desert, empty except for telephone poles marching across its space, he told her.

  "For Moroccan Intelligence."

  "Moroccan?" she gasped. The knowledge stunned her; she had assumed many possibilities but not that he belonged to this country and that all the time he had possessed a network entirely his own here. Now she could understand why he'd sat calmly in a bar at the Palais Jamai while Hamid ou Azu was being murdered. He needed only to have picked up a phone as he entered the hotel; it would have taken only a minute, she could even picture him, receiver in hand, saying curtly, "The man is Hamid ou Azu, he can be found in the Fès el Bali selling brass-work. He is there now. Go."

  She stammered, "But I had assumed the informants—"

  He shook his head. "All seven informants are Polisarios, every one of them . . , the nomad people, Saharans, fighting in the desert for their land, which used to be Western Sahara until Morocco moved in to occupy it."

  Her instant and passionate reaction surprised her, and certainly it startled Max Janko. "I'm so relieved—"

  "Relieved?"

  "I had to come on trust," she explained earnestly. "Oh, I'm so glad I did. Because when Bishop told me, oh so sketchily about this war, I refused the assignment at first, my sympathies entirely with the—" She stopped and frowned. "But I was also told the United States gives support and weapons and money to Morocco against the Polisarios."

  He said cautiously, "You have to understand that the CIA's not all of one piece, it has departments and sub-departments ... In the mid-seventies Atlas was set up as a small unit entirely independent of the mainstream CIA." He stopped and then said abruptly, "Look here, didn't they tell you what you're up against, that this assignment is Atlas?"

  She shook her head, puzzled. "Bishop only told me that very few people know about this department, that it's—separate, somehow."

  "Separate!" he exploded. "You and I wouldn't have a leg to stand on even if caught by bona fide CIA people here in Morocco, and they're here, I can assure you."

  She said tartly, "Then it seems time for me to learn what you're talking about. What it Atlas?"

  More calmly, he explained. "All right, this is how it happened. Back in the mid-seventies the CIA was found to be running some pretty cold-blooded covert operations and a good many scandals erupted. It was a bad time—I hear that your Congress very seriously considered outlawing CIA covert actions entirely."

  "They've not exactly stopped," she put in dryly.

  He ignored this. "Out of this grew Atlas, a small, very discreet group set up to research the precise opposite of the policies being pursued by any current administration so that if policies abruptly changed we'd be ready."

  "How very intelligent," she commented. "Surprisingly so!"

  He smiled appreciatively. "A little cynicism there? It's certainly intelligent in this particular case because now that Morocco and Algeria have established connections again, the United Nations just may be able to hold that plebiscite after all, the vote promised Western Sahara years ago. Damn late, of course, because Morocco's King has flooded Western Sahara with Moroccans in the meantime, but nevertheless it may happen at last." He smiled. "It should be added that in Washington there have always been doubts about this war between Morocco and the Polisarios. It's clearly understood—admitted publicly, too—that neither side can win, and that eventually there'll have to be negotiations and the Saharans will probably be given back at least some of their country.

  "When that happens," he went on, "the question bothering a number of people is: to whom will the Polisarios turn once they achieve their Saharan Arab Democratic Republic? To Iran? to Libya? to the Soviet Union? Will they be open to friendship with the U.S., or remember instead that it was the U.S, who supported the King who claimed their land? We feel it vital to keep in touch—although I might add," he said dryly, "that in the greedy scheme of things this is not entirely philanthropy. Western Sahara also happens to have phosphate mines second only to Morocco's, which could lead to quite a cartel. Those mines are a vital key for the Saharans in that bleak desert country they fight for, it brings them added attention."

  "But the Polisarios are Moslems? You mean Moslems are fighting Moslems in this war?"

  He nodded.

  "And strangest of all," she mused, "a network of Polisario informants running like a thread through Morocco!"

  "And terribly, terribly dangerous for each of them," he said grimly. "In this country anyone sympathizing in the slightest degree with the Polisarios is clapped into prison at once. Amnesty International has been rather upset about this for some time, and about rumors of torture."

  Torture, she thought with a shiver, remembering what had happened to her in Hong Kong. "Oh these small forgotten wars," she said angrily. There were questions still to ask. She didn't, for instance, see why on earth these Polisario informants would trust Atlas, given the circumstances, but as she felt the full impact of what he'd told her she glanced anxiously at the expanse of road behind them.

  "But we shouldn't be stopping for so long," she said uneasily. "We'd better drive on now, surely? If the police are involved—if they've been watching, if they're looking for the blue Renault—they'll soon wonder where it is, won't they?"

  He nodded. "A whole new ballgame now, yes. For you at least. When they find Flavien all hell will break loose, of course." He brought out a map and opened it. "Tinehir's only about a hundred miles away, and I think we're safe for a few hours, but I don't think it sensible to enter Tinehir until dark." He looked her over intently.

  "What's the matter?"

  "We don't match," he pointed out. "I'm in djellabah and turban, and you're in tourist clothes." He began unwinding and removing his turban, revealing a head of curly dark hair and suddenly not looking like an Arab or Berber at all. "If we should be stopped—they do sometimes stop cars looking for drugs, I've been told—they'd recognize you. Have you a kerchief or hat to cover your hair? At this point they don't know me or the car—at least I don't think they do—but they've been seeing you with Flavien ever since Fez, if only from a distance."

  "Say no more," she said, and going to her two canvas bags she delved into them to bring out a blue kerchief to tie around her head, and a white shirt to replace the bright pink one she wore. When she returned to Max he looked as Western as she did, in slacks and shirt. "Are you American?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "Actually I'm English, born in Zambia, grew up in India, and went to college in America. Crazy, what?"

  She laughed. "I do believe I like you already."

  Opening the car door for her he said, "It's all very well to like me—I like you, too, by the way—but what about those photos, do you trust me? Trust me enough to share them now?"

  "I'm afraid you'll have to trust me" she told him, and as they resumed their drive she described her first two days with the man he called Flavien; she told him of Hamid ou Azu's murder, of waking in the night to find Flavien searching her room, her learning of Ibrahim's arrest, her fears and suspicions and the need she felt to destroy the photos. "The names and addresses I can write down for you but unfortunately not the photographs, and without them—"

  He said soberly, "Without them they remain entirely in your head." He nodded and said, "Obviously I'm going to have to guard you with my life, pamper and indulge you—"

  "And feed me, too, I trust," she said with a twinkle.

  He shook his head. "Flippancy aside, you do realize— however reluctantly—that this gives you a value that boggles the mind? How they'd love to find you!"

  She gave him a startled glance. She supposed he was right but it had a certain jarring effect; she had not realized until now that she was the only person in the country who knew the appearance of the remaining informants, and this was information that the authorities of this country wanted very much. She was also the only person who could identify an imposter, which
made her even more dangerous.

  8

  Carstairs was at his desk studying a memo when Bishop buzzed him on the intercom to say cheerfully, "Cairo's on line 3, sir, Fadwa Ali calling."

  Carstairs frowned but not at the interruption; he frowned because communication among members of the Atlas group was kept rigidly minimal and this suggested trouble. "Scramble this call and come in, Bishop, I may need you." He picked up line 3 and said, "Carstairs here, how are you, Fadwa."

  "Good morning yes," said Fadwa Ali. "You will scramble this please?"

  "It's being done," Carstairs told him, and lifted an eyebrow at Bishop as he joined him.

  "All taken care of," said Bishop, and sat down and picked up a phone to eavesdrop.

  "There is trouble here," began Fadwa Ali, and Carstairs nodded. "We recommended to you most heartily a man by name of Max Janko, you are following me?"

  "Yes," Carstairs said, his lips tightening. "And something's gone wrong?"

  "Very," said Fadwa Ali. "The photo wired to you had been substituted by a double agent and was not that of Max Janko . . ."

  Oh God, thought Carstairs, and said grimly, "Go on."

  "Our man Janko had a secretary by name of Flavien Bernard. It is he who intercepted the request for an Arabic-speaking agent, all of which came through quickly, as you know, on an emergency basis and just before I left for Tunis. It is he who flew off to Morocco to meet your agent."

  Carstairs drew in his breath sharply, his face turning into stone. Bishop, listening, thought but our agent is Mrs. Pollifax, he means Emily . . .

  "You mean Mrs. Pollifax," Carstairs said, echoing Bishop's thought and only his face betraying his shock.

  Fadwa said, "We've still not uncovered Flavien's real identity—fabricated, obviously, despite every security check, but what matters, of course—"