Assignment - Lowlands

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Johnny here.”

  “This is Sam. Are you clear?”

  “All clear, Cajun. You’re in Amsterdam?”

  “I need some help,” Durell said bluntly. “Piet is out of the picture. All the way out.”

  O’Keefe was shocked. “What happened to him? Cassandra?”

  “I think so. Maybe an accident, but I’m not sure about it. There’s a girl involved, and I had to leave the body. You know what that means. There’s a lot at stake—maybe the whole city.”

  O’Keefe sucked in a thin breath. “Good God, Sam—”

  “I want you here tonight. You’ll have to dispose of him.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “I don’t know,” Durell said flatly. “I had to expose myself. If you don’t want to take the chance, someone else will have to do it.”

  “No, it isn’t that. But if we only knew more about it—”

  “We don’t know anything about it. Piet died too fast. In less than twenty-four hours, I suspect. So we have a time limit. We’ll know how much he carried in a day or two, if anyone else gets hit—I’ll have to watch myself, too— but we may not be sure, even then. The medical reports will be puzzling, I’m sure. It didn’t look to me like anything more than a coronary, perhaps massive.”

  “Maybe it was just that,” O’Keefe began.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Durell said.

  “Yes. You’re right. It’s my Irish optimism. All right, Sam, I’ll come right over.” He laughed thinly. “And I just rewrote my last will and testament, to make sure Claire and the kids have rights to the flat and the farm in Devon and some stock I recently bought for our old age—”

  “Claire and the kids may not have an old age, either, if we don’t choke this off fast,” Durell said grimly.

  “Right you are. Is Piet in his own house?”

  “In the bedroom, top floor. I locked the door. You’ll have to get it out, weight it down, take it out to sea and drop it into deep water. You’ll have to do this in a way that means he’ll not come up too soon, understand? Either that, or use an incinerator. Which can you manage?”

  “It will be the sea, I think.”

  “Whatever you do, keep the police, the local neighbors, and everyone else out of it. Nobody is to touch him but you. Understand?”

  “Thanks for nothing,” O’Keefe said. “Expendable Johnny, that’s me.”

  “You bought it when you signed into the business,” Durell said.

  “Don’t remind me of my follies, Sam. Listen. . . O’Keefe paused, and Durell waited, watching the girl in the restaurant across the street. O’Keefe went on: “Sam, what happens if we can’t cork up this bottle right away?” “You know your medieval history, Johnny. You’ve heard of the Black Death, the plagues, and so forth. This will be quicker, broader, much more efficient. After all, the people who worked on Cassandra were thoroughly trained biochemical technicians.”

  “It should have been kept buried,” O’Keefe whispered. “Well, it wasn’t. Have you got everything straight now?”

  “I’ll be there by midnight. . . . Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “It doesn’t work that fast,” Durell said quietly.

  “But you were with Piet. You could have got it from him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you scared? Honestly?”

  “Yes,” Durell said. “I’m damned scared.”

  He hung up.

  Four

  Operation Cassandra had been in the files a long time.

  It was only a nightmare rumor, a poisonous old-wives’ tale, a relic of World War II.

  Along with unnamed and unimagined secret weapons, along with the V-l and V-2 rockets and the Peenemunde research base of the Nazi High Command, there was Operation Cassandra.

  Routine checking in Washington of crates of war records, the clerical residue of shiploads of material seized by the speeding spearheads of General Patton’s Third Army, uncovered Operation Cassandra.

  But it was still a rumored nightmare, a hint only of the unmentionable. It was death waiting to be unleashed, in a manner not seen since the Middle Ages. It was to be a grotesque and silent Götterdämmerung, a quiet ending to all that mankind cherished.

  Cassandra was biological, germ warfare. Nothing new. It had existed for a long time in laboratories, in biological test tubes, a warping of the ultimate excuses for war, a negation of every normal and decent instinct in man, a representation of the Nazi philosophy. Cassandra should have been killed in the laboratory. Instead, she was nurtured and perfected. The deadly ampoules and vials were ready to be dropped on Great Britain’s cities and fields when the Allied spearheads sped into Holland and forced a wild and panicked retreat by the Germans.

  The base where Cassandra had grown in her molds and flats of slime was reported as destroyed.

  But there was a question.

  Destroyed?

  The records unearthed by Washington were vague. One suggested the deliberate sealing of a bunker that contained all the records, and the heavy waterproof safes racked with vials of Cassandra cultures. The virus had no enemy, could not be seen or counted, and caused death from apparent massive coronary constrictions in twenty-four hours. But other records implied that the underground laboratory had been flooded when the retreating Germans sabotaged Holland’s dikes and vengefully let in the tides of the cold North Sea.

  The northern coasts of Germany and Holland, the West and East Frisian Islands, and the drowned polders of Groningen and Friesland were scoured quietly and efficiently. Nothing was found. No bunkers. No laboratory. No hint of the germ-warfare research the records showed during the Nazi Occupation.

  Then file it and forget it. It was only a rumor and a nightmare, a ragtag end of terror propaganda.

  If the place was destroyed, so was the virus.

  It doesn’t exist.

  So code it, file it, forget it.

  And nothing happened for another ten years.

  A week before the K Section alert, an anonymous letter arrived at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, offering six test vials of the Cassandra virus for sale to the United States, or to the NATO defense organization, for the sum of five million dollars in a cash deposit in an anonymously numbered account in the Banque Populaire Suisse in Geneva. Further details of this first letter were lost because the aide who opened it in routine fashion labeled it for the crank file, where it was dropped into the incinerator forty-eight hours later.

  The next note included the news clipping from the provincial Dutch newspaper that Durell had seen, mentioning a small but serious outbreak of extremely virulent infection in the fishing village of Doorn on the island of Scheersplaat in the East Frisians. A copy of the demand went to the State Department in Washington.

  The file on Cassandra was reopened.

  Dutch, British and American intelligence records were scoured. The West German authorities were enlisted in a desperate attempt to locate the laboratory and personnel indicated by the writer.

  Negative.

  Nothing was turned up.

  Then a warning letter came to K Section, threatening to turn the secret over to the enemies of the West (the Cold War having suddenly entered a virulent phase all its own just then), unless immediate action were forthcoming on the demands. An agent to treat with the writer of the note was named—Piet Van Horn. This last was cause for considerable discomfiture at Number 20 Annapolis Street, K. Section’s HQ. How did the writer know that Van Horn was on the CIA payroll? The signature caused confusion, too: the note was signed Cassandra. How could anyone not originally familiar with the Nazi project know its secret code name?

  It could mean that someone among the German biochemists had waited all these years to strike for personal profit.

  Or it could mean there was a leak from within the ranks of the CIA.

  Piet Van Horn was questioned. His house was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Everything
he owned and everything he did, every single uneventful, unimportant detail of his life was picked up, turned over, examined microscopically, analyzed, and finally dismissed. Negative again. Piet was innocent. Since he was the agent specifically named to negotiate the matter of Cassandra, Piet would have to be used.

  It was at this point that Durell was called in.

  One more effort was made to run down those who were trying to blackmail the West by threat and terror. No, not just trying, Durell thought grimly. People had died. Innocent Dutch fishermen in the north country had been exposed to the virus. It showed the sort of temperament of the men they were up against—or women, he corrected himself, since you could take nothing for granted in this business— who had somehow stumbled upon or deliberately uncovered the buried laboratory of the Nazi virologists who had been seeking an ultimate weapon with which to force a victorious end to their lost war.

  They might be up against madmen; but Durell doubted it. There was a breed of hard-bitten international adventurers who owed allegiance to no one and possessed no principles. They were a group apart, socially amoral. Their detachment from normal social responsibility was marked in their manner and moods, in the sense of feral strength and jungle individuality among them.

  There were no more dangerous men in the world than Durell thought. They recognized no code, legal or moral, except that which served their own interests.

  Life was cheap: a matter of getting and holding, by strength, cunning, or force, every material thing the world had to offer. You lived and died by a set of primitive rules the world had almost forgotten.

  The last effort to uncover the site of the old bunker-laboratory had been made by Piet Van Horn yesterday. He had been sent up to Amschellig to sit and wait for those who wanted to sell Virus Cassandra. After all, something had to be done. You couldn’t sit still and let a plague grow wild in the world.

  The effort had killed Piet.

  Perhaps he himself had contracted the virus, too, Durell thought. He knew nothing about it, how it was spread or how it might affect him. Piet had told him much too little.

  But Piet’s steps now had to be retraced, with care and caution, to keep the fragile contact alive. Perhaps a different ending to Piet’s trip might be managed.

  And this was Durell’s job.

  He didn’t like it. He preferred an enemy he could see and feel, in the shape of a man. The shadow that hung over an unsuspecting world was too big and formless to combat rationally.

  He waited now, and watched the girl in the restaurant window. . . .

  It was dark when she left. Durell had seen no one near her except the waiter. She hadn’t gone to a telephone or sent any messages as far as he could tell. She picked up her gold purse and walked quickly from ’T Oude Schaap, checked her watch, and went to the taxi stand at the corner. Durell followed. Her path was no longer indirect. She headed for Thorbeckeplein, an area of cheap bars and honkytonk cafes notorious in Amsterdam for its women, gin, thieves’ nests, and its danger to unwary tourists. The girl got out of the cab presently and dismissed it to walk alone down a narrow street of red-light houses. Women sat on the steps in the shadowed heat of evening and looked in dull-eyed resentment at the girl’s passage, then perked up as Durell went by and solicited him in a number of overt ways. When the girl turned into a passageway entrance beside a souvenir shop on the edge of an old, baroque apartment house, he paused, gave her a certain amount of time, and then went in, too.

  Just inside the doorway he stopped, considering his next move. The girl in the bright Indonesian dress did not belong here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Her poise and looks all indicated a class and status far above this place. Yet she seemed familiar enough with the environment.

  He went on through the entryway.

  A flight of dark stairs led up toward a buttery radiance. The woodwork was dark, greasy to the touch. Durell mounted the steps silently. He heard a radio playing loudly somewhere. A man said something dim and indistinct from behind a closed door up ahead. At the top of the first flight, Durell halted again. He felt he was being led up into a crude and deliberate trap. But he was ready for it when it happened.

  The girl’s voice drifted down to him from the landing above. “Mynheer, you have been following me?”

  He looked up as she leaned over the balustrade of this tenement house above a souvenir shop. She was smiling.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Come up, please. We can do business, I think.”

  He had a sudden misgiving that perhaps the girl belonged to Amsterdam’s red-light district, after all. It could have been an innocent coincidence that had taken her into Piet Van Horn’s house earlier. But Durell tended to discount coincidence. He went up to meet her.

  She seemed to be alone. There were other doors in the corridor, brown and shabby, but they were all tightly closed, and no sounds came from behind them. The door directly behind the blonde girl stood ajar, however, and he glimpsed a dingy room with a big Dutch brass bed, an angular dresser, and a window with a black shade drawn down tightly to the sill. There was a smell of coffee, of cooking, of stale perfume and stale love affairs. A single garish electric bulb shed a harsh light behind the girl, outlining the sensual, exaggerated pose of her hip as she waited for him. It served to keep her face in the shadow as she stood with her back to the light, and all he could see was the hint of a mocking smile, the gleam of moisture in her long eyes. He had a sudden impression of the Orient, somehow, perhaps brought to him by a large brass Balinese idol that stood out against the shabby decor of the girl’s bedroom. But Holland was full of Indonesian art, relics of a lost island empire in the Far East. He could have been mistaken about the slight hint of it in the girl’s face. It seemed to him, when she spoke in Dutch, that there were accents of German in it; but he wasn’t sure. And she quickly switched to English after her first words.

  “Well?” she said. “You stare at me enough, I think. Aren’t you satisfied? Why have you followed me all over town? Or are you one of the shy ones, afraid to do business openly?”

  “That depends on your business,” Durell rejoined.

  She laughed. “Do you have any doubt what it is?” She came toward him in the hallway, hands on hips in an overt invitation. “You will be pleased with me, I am sure. You do like me, no? Otherwise you would not follow me, to be sure. I was very annoyed with you, you know. You could have spoken to me much sooner—perhaps bought my dinner for me. Tell me, are you an American?”

  “Are you German?” Durell asked.

  She looked startled. “Do I sound like a German?”

  “Your accent doesn’t ring true.”

  “But I learned English from Americans. Many years ago, when I was younger, but still in this business, you see. Yes, I was in West Berlin. So many soldiers there! And for so many years I But please, come in. Do not be embarrassed. I have some good jenever, really fine Dutch gin, and we can order some refreshments from the cafe at the corner. We will not be disturbed here.” She tugged at his arm gently, drawing him toward the open bedroom door.

  “You know I didn’t follow you for this,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I want to know what you were doing in Piet Van Horn’s house this afternoon, and why you ran away in such a panic when I came out of his room. Why were you there? Why were you listening to us?”

  Her mouth was delicately doubtful. “Was I there? Oh, I think you are very much mistaken.”

  “You were there. Don’t lie about it.”

  “Why should I lie? Have you very much money?”

  “I can pay a reasonable sum for information.”

  “About what? I do not understand. I am a simple person in a simple business. Do you wish to make love to me, or not? If you are here for other reasons, you might as well go away now. I do not care for perversions, and even less for conversation. I will not tell you the story of my life, either. If you mean to make a disturbance, I shall call for the police. I have a license, you kno
w. What I do is perfectly legal.”

  Her eyes were bold, challenging. He hesitated. Her tone and attitude were convincing, but—

  To gain time, he said, “How do you call yourself— professionally, that is?”

  He saw her eyes widen slightly, and then they crinkled at the comers in what might have been amusement, anger, or slyness. Her laughter was soft. Her smile made her Ups dark, her teeth sharp and white and dangerous.

  “Why, everyone knows me,” she said. “I am Cassandra.”

  Five

  His face did not change. He gave nothing away.

  He knew somehow that if he reacted wrongly, this girl would run, either literally or else behind more subterfuge and lies, until too much time was lost to make her information useful. Yet he was badly jolted. He did not want to frighten her. He doubted if she knew the significance of the word. He had the idea—perhaps only a wishful hunch— that she was not sure what the reaction to her name was supposed to be. He saw that she was watching him with some curiosity, almost expectancy. Perhaps there was even a little fear in the long brown eyes that slanted up at him.

  He managed a shrug and said easily, “It is a rather unusual name.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “ ‘A rose by any other name. . . .’ ”

  She laughed again. “Well, do we do business now?”

  “I am sure of it,” he said.

  She held the door open. “Come in, then.”

  The room was modestly furnished, stripped of unnecessary decor except for the Balinese idol of cheap brass. It looked ready for its evening’s business. When he closed the heavy door behind him, he could hear a dim thud of rhythm from the musicians in the sailor’s bar across the street. The primary piece of furniture was the bed, of course—massive, amply mattressed and cushioned. There was a bidet in one corner, a closet door in another. He saw that the hall door had no lock or bolt. He went to the closet door, opened it, looked at the cheap, perfumed dresses and shabby, ratty-furred winter coat hanging on the rod. It was obvious at once that Cassandra, or whatever her true name might be, did not belong here. The room was borrowed. None of the clothes would fit her, nor did they match in style and taste the Indonesian print linen she was wearing now. He turned slowly, smiling.