Assignment - Ceylon

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Not out of personal motives. But it would be the easiest solution to the problem.”

  “Where do you suppose they are keeping him?”

  “We still have jungles and mountains, swamps and caves, in the interior of Ceylon where few men go.” She waved a delicate hand vaguely. Her great eyes regarded him with a new light. Her silk saree changed colors with the lowering sun. Under the silk, her body was ripe and gentle, an offering to him, spoken with her eyes, her hands, the way she leaned forward, and he remembered her with an intimate hunger.

  “Dear Sam Durell-—She checked herself. “I would be devastated if I believed you came to see me only on your— your business. Do stay.”

  “You should be more discreet, Aspara. If your political opponents learned of a liaison with me—”

  “I told you—we are secret here, no one knows.”

  “Don’t count on it,” he said. “My man in Colombo, a Mr. Dhapura, might want to get in touch with me. He’s pretty good at it.”

  “The hotel man?” She laughed softly, dismissing the risk. Her laughter was like the distant tinkling of the monks’ bells in the Angurukaramulla temple. “We will be most discreet, dear Sam.”

  three

  He thought, Aspara in the Sinhala language means heavenly maiden.

  He sat down again.

  There are varying techniques taught at the Farm in Maryland, K Section’s training and refresher school for recruits and old hands. The methods and patterns of shadowing a subject or of shaking oft' a tail are constantly updated, studied, modified, and polished. There are the parallel methods, using two or more agents, the jump-ahead, the close or the distant pursuit, the use of transportation, taxis, buses, private cars, the overt contact, the brush contact. These are used whether the subject is the pursuer or the pursued. Durell knew all the techniques and had refined some of them to his own purposes. He was being trailed. He was a target for assassination. What he did not know in this instance was why he was the objective. Nor did he even remotely suspect the identity of his pursuers.

  The taxi driver followed his instructions when he left the Pettah and headed for the Cinnamon Gardens. Durell told him to go slowly. He offered himself as a target. But nothing happened. At the gardens, in the residential area, he told the driver to circle the big museum. Traffic was

  heavy. The big lumbering buses made splashes of red against the blend of modem and old when he rode back to the commercial fort area of Colombo.

  Nothing happened.

  He could not spot anyone.

  Book technique in this pattern was fine, up to a point. It ignored the personal, the intuitive hunch, the primal sense of pursuit. Like a primitive in the jungle, he could sense in his gut that a predator was after him. It did not make sense. The incidents with the taxi and the angry carter could have been coincidence. He did not think so. He looked at the hawkers and at their wares spread on the sidewalks, at the sleek American cars, the mixture of Western and traditional clothes, the narrow alleys radiating from broad, clean boulevards. He thought of the Arabs, the Persians, the Chinese who first came here to trade for spices; the Portuguese, Dutch, and English who had followed. In the 14th century a Chinese trader named Wang Ta-Youan had first given Colombo her name; fifty years later, Ibn Batuta, a Moor from Morocco, named Ceylon the island of Serendib. Each had left a mark on the timeless island, once a land of elegant kingdoms, of Buddhist worship in conflict with a later flow of Tamil Hindus from India.

  “Driver, I didn’t tell you to go here,” he said suddenly.

  “There is trouble up ahead, mister. A protest march, yes? There have been riots, mister. Are you sight-seeing Colombo? I could take you to the zoo—the elephant circus there is outstanding. Or perhaps you would like to see the Kandyan dancers at the harbor? Mister?”

  “Turn right,” Durell said.

  The taxi driver kept straight ahead. “Nehe, karuna kara. No, please.” He chattered in Sinhalese for a brief spate. Durell looked at the back of his round head. “The Naga is raising a great political disturbance here, mister.”

  “The Naga?”

  “He calls himself the Cobra’s Bow. He heads up the PFM—the People’s Freedom Movement. Tamils, all of them.” The driver spat out the window of the taxi. “You would not want to see this. It gives tourists a bad impression of our country.”

  Durell took out his gun, a snubby-barreled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. He held it on his knee.

  “Turn right,” he said again.

  “They talk—the PFM—of discovering the Buddha Stone. Have you heard of this?”

  “No.”

  “It is disturbing. A most precious religious relic! In their hands! It is not to be tolerated.”

  Durell put the muzzle of his gun to the driver’s right ear. “Stop the car. Prevasimin. Be careful.”

  The man turned his head, just a little. Durell could see only the curve of his brown cheek, the pouting mouth, the gleam of a dark brown eye.

  “You’re not Sinhalese,” Durell said.

  “No, sir. I am part Portuguese, part Tamil. I come from Trincomalee. My family, my wife and children, five there. Please, mister?”

  “Stop the car. Who hired you?”

  “You did, sir.”

  “Who told you to wait for me at the Pettah and pick me up if I looked for a cab?”

  “I do not know who the gentleman was.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “American or Hong Kong?”

  “American, sir. Please. Your gun—”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was black, mister.”

  “African black or American?”

  “How can I tell you that, mister? He spoke in good English.”

  “British or American accent?”

  “American, sir.”

  It still didn’t make sense. He smelled the sweat of sudden fear from the taxi driver. The sophisticated techniques taught by K Section were suddenly scrubbed from his mind. Anger touched him, and he pushed it away. Anger never helped. He kept his gun at the driver’s head until they halted in a slot between bullock carts and stalls, somewhere near Dematagoda Road. There was a clash of brazen noise nearby, the mindless roar of an inflamed crowd. He smelled smoke in the humid afternoon air. He thought of making for the US embassy at 44 Galle Road, in the Kolluitiya district. Too late for that.

  The mob poured down the narrow street like a flood released from a bursting dam. As riots go, it would scarcely make the local headlines. But Durell sensed an immediate and personal danger in it. He saw the red banners fluttering, with Sinhalese, Tamil, and Arabic script, heard the chanting of “Naga! Naga! Naga!” and saw several streams of men pour toward him like the reaching pseudopods of some elemental beast.

  He jumped from the taxi behind the bullock cart. The driver slid out on the other side and vanished. Durell let him go. He put his gun away and pressed back against a fruit stall. The pungent smell of ripe melons touched him, along with the smell of the crowd. There were smashing sounds, yells. More smoke drifted across the narrow street. A woman screamed, making a high ululating sound in the steamy air. People ran everywhere, jostling and striking each other in an effort to escape. Some stalls were smashed. A window was shattered, a crystalline sound above the yelling.

  Durell felt the presence of someone near him. A wildeyed man with a red rag tied around his head edged around the bullock cart. The man was wiry, dressed in a worn Western shirt and stained slacks. There was blood on his left arm. He was bald, brown-skinned. Black, Durell thought. A black American. Not this one.

  The man screamed at him. A knife flickered. Hired help. Durell hit the man with the edge of his hand against the neck, not hard enough to kill him. The man went down, strangling; rage faded from his dimming eyes. Durell moved around to the front of the cart. The narrow lane was a flood of shouting, struggling men. He kept close to the buildings, felt himself bumped and shoved, backed into a doorway.
The killer was nearby. He could feel it. He recognized none of the congested faces around him. He felt for the doorknob behind him, turned it. He smelled stale cooking, the effluvium of poor sanitation, and stepped backward. His heel touched the lowest tread of stairs behind him. Carts and stalls were being overturned by the angry mob. A torch was thrown at the bullock cart he had just quit.

  He backed up two steps, heard a sound above and behind him, felt dismay at the tall dark figure looming at the head of the dingy steps above him.

  A professional job, Durell thought.

  A press of ragged men blocked the street door. He could not get out that way. He had been neatly boxed, first by the taxi driver who’d dropped him in this special spot, then by the rioter’s halfhearted attack that backed him into this doorway. The thoughts flicked through his mind in split seconds.

  “Hello, Cajun.”

  The voice echoed in the steep, dark staircase. He could not see the face above him. But the dim light ran a liquid finger along the barrel of a Luger in the man’s hand.

  “Sorry, old man.”

  “Why?” Durell called up to him.

  “It’s my job.”

  “To kill me?”

  “All in the day’s work, old man.”

  The voice was garbled by the echoing walls of the narrow, dingy staircase. It tickled something in the back of Durell’s memory. He could not place it. The straddlelegged man above raised the long-barreled gun a few millimeters. Outside, the crowd roared and smashed things and chanted slogans, as crowds did everywhere in the world. He smelled curry cooking. He thought of Aspara and the beach and the placid Indian Ocean. He cursed his failure to rate his shadow as important, from the first.

  “So long, old man.”

  It was the other’s mistake. The warning gave Durell time to move. There was a dark-painted brown door to his left. He spun, smashed at it as the Luger suddenly crashed. The door panel was flimsy. He felt the bullet tug at his shirt sleeve. A professional, up there, but not armed well enough. To ensure a killing, you use automatic rapid fire. He felt the second slug graze his right arm, then he was through the broken door, stumbling into shadows, the smell of cooking, and the rapid rattle of the other’s heels coming down the stairs. He glimpsed a sparsely furnished

  room, a large Chinese bed, a Grand Rapids dresser, a portrait of the lady prime minister on the wall. A woman stood there, frightened by his sudden assault on her home. A small child in a white dress hugged the skirt of her saree. Durell had his gun in his hand now. He leaped for the opposite door. The steps on the stairway suddenly halted. In the street outside, the chanting and burning and smashing went on. He halted in the doorway, drew a deep breath, leveled his gun at the empty entrance he had smashed through. The woman whimpered. The child stared at him with great, liquid eyes. The woman had a Hindu caste mark on her forehead.

  For a count of three breaths, he waited.

  The woman whispered, “Please go. The back way.”

  He shook his head, watching the stairway door. The man on the stairs was careful. The game was even now.

  Durell was a tall man, with a heavy musculature, which belied his speed. His black hair was touched with gray at the temples. His gun hand was steady. All of his being was spent on listening now for a telltale sound from the creaky steps out there. He heard nothing, except for the woman’s breathing in the heavy heat of the room. She had clamped a -thin brown hand over the child’s mouth. No one crossed the opening of the broken doorway. It was a stalemate. Either could retreat. But Durell no longer looked for escape. As a boy, brought up by his Grandpa Jonathan in the deep recesses of the Louisiana bayous, he had been taught the ways of the hunter and the hunted. He knew the silent patience of wild things when trapped, the silent waiting for time to present a way out.

  Shadows flickered as people in the street rushed by. Smoke drifted into the room. A man screamed, close to the building entrance. Durell breathed lightly. He could have waited forever; but he knew the woman and the child might break at any moment. He took a step forward. The woman shuddered. The man with the Luger would be waiting for this move, balancing his patience against Durell’s. Durell was three steps from the sill. Silently he started down to his knees, reaching forward for the doorjamb that tilted inward toward him.

  The child broke away from his mother and began to screech in a high, thin falsetto.

  Too late.

  He heard the scrape -of feet on the steps and charged forward through the opening to spin around and turn to the stairs. Footsteps whispered. He raised the gun, held his fire, went up the stairs two at a time. Nothing to be seen. The building had three floors, and the landing above was empty. A door was swinging slowly shut. He flattened against the wall, considered the IDE techniques taught at the Maryland Farm. This man with the Luger knew them all. He wished he’d seen more of him than just the brief silhouette of blackness he’d glimpsed from the foot of the ramshackle stairway. The sounds of the mob were muted now. He slid toward the closing door, sniffed the air, exercising all his senses for a clue. Tobacco. American cigarettes. He looked for the butt of the cigarette the man must have smoked while waiting up here. Nothing. He had pocketed the evidence, but he hadn’t been able to dispel the trace of tobacco smoke.

  He went through the door in a rush, crouching low, jumped to one side in the shadowed darkness. Two terrified old men were on their haunches against the wall.

  “Which way?”

  One of them pointed a skinny, shaking hand toward painted windows that gave no view of the outside. One of the windows, was open. A flight of wooden steps led down to an alley below, cluttered with crates and boxes. Any number of hiding places. Durell stood well back from the window. The man could move fast. And quietly. He turned, ran back down the inner steps. The woman from -the room below stood in her broken doorway. Durell plunged out into the street. The bulk of the mob had passed, leaving a wreckage of carts and stalls, a few trampled banners on the pavement. He ran through the stragglers to the alley entrance. He saw no one who remotely fitted the looks of his assailant. The alley was empty. Perhaps the -other end. He moved forward, watching the broken crates and junk in the narrow passage. The suffocating heat hammered at the back of his neck. He was bathed in sweat. He was halfway through the alley when he heard the police sirens, late as usual, dispelling the mob. He halted. His opponent was gone. He felt the sudden lift of oppressive intuition; the weight and pressure of danger had vanished.

  He came out the other end of the alley. The woman and the old men in the house would rush to tell the police about him. He hoped their descriptions would be as vague as the usual amateur’s. In the business, you avoided publicity, shunned the news, made no contact with local police. His opponent would feel the same way.

  Durell pocketed the gun and looked for a taxi.

  four

  Mr. H. K. D. Dhapura fluttered his hands.

  “Nothing, sir. I have nothing on it. I am so sorry, sir. I have done my best in this job, I have been happy with the employment, it is certainly in a good cause, I am sure of that. But at the moment, I fear I am a failure.”

  Durell said, “You received no signal at all from King or Thompson?”

  “I have told you, Mr. Durell—”

  “All right. There hasn’t been any trouble up at Kandy, has there?”

  “No, sir. Of course, the telephone does not reply at Mr. Sanderson’s house there, but naturally, no one would answer, since the time he has been kidnapped—”

  “No servants in the house?”

  “I would not know, sir.”

  Durell said, “You’re supposed to know, Mr. Dhapura.” The Sinhala looked anguished. “About this man whom you say is trying to kill you—” He paused and swallowed. “Is it safe for you here?”

  “It’s supposed to be.”

  “I have done everything I could, I assure you on my honor, everything, everything; I have thought and thought and considered all eventualities.”

  “I’ll want to
code a message to Washington in about an hour,” Durell said. “Make certain the transceiver is working.”

  “Yes, sir, I am very good at electronics.”

  “In an hour,” Durell repeated.

  The Royal Lanka Hotel did not quite live up to its resplendent title; but it was not meant to, and had been chosen by K Section, along with Mr. Dhapura, because it was shabby, seedy, and more than rundown. It was across the channel from Beira Lake, not far from Galle Road that ran south through the city toward Dehiwala Zoo and eventually to the posh old-style colonial resort of Mt. Lavinia on the beaches. The Royal Lanka was favored by third-rate salesmen from India, Japan, and the Mideast, and its lobby was flavored by Arab burnooses, and a Sikh’s tall turban, the toothy chatter of Tokyo Honda dealers. Big wooden fans turned idly in the tiled ceilings of the public rooms. The hotel served K Section as a safe house, a Ceylon Central, and a place for industrious young men from Washington to formulate their analyses of economic and political and foreign influences in the newly renamed nation of Sri Lanka. Until now, Mr. Dhapura had functioned with efficiency in the job of running the Central, but at the moment, Durell was not so certain.

  The elevator was an open-cage affair. He avoided it and took the broad staircase to the second floor. Whoever was after him surely knew about Royal Lanka. He went up to the third floor, moved down the wide corridor, stood under a slowly rotating fan, then returned down the wooden staircase to the second level. No one was in sight. The hotel was built in pre-airconditioning Victorian days, and the ceilings were high. There was a sand urn for cigarettes at the open bird-cage elevator. An American filter cigarette had been stuck into the urn. He pulled it out carefully. The end was cold. It didn’t have to mean anything.

  His room was at the other end of the hall. He heard a radio playing next door. A man talked urgently in a room he passed. He heard a woman loose a spate of Urdu on a companion behind another door. Everything seemed normal.

  He took out his gun, tried the old lever handle very slowly, pressing down on it. The door was not locked. He had left it with the latch on. His gun felt solid and reassuring in his hand—and then he suddenly backed off, kicked the door open, and sprang inside.