Assignment Nuclear Nude

by Edward S. Aarons

  "Five minutes," he said to Anna-Lise and Riddle.

  "For what?" Riddle growled.

  "We'll see when Red Rod gets back."

  Just then the gaunt Chinese appeared from the cave and said softly, "It is quite natural. The usual flume for the flood waters of the lake goes off to the right, through a big crack inside the mountain. It can be sealed easily. Then the lake will drain this way."

  "Did you arrange it?"

  "I saw the others coming from the north. I estimated ten minutes, and cut the fuses for that time. I used all the plastic explosive."

  "There's one more problem," Durell said.

  Anna-Lise spoke curtly. "What's that?"

  He looked at her. "We don't want the painting or Denis or Linda to get swept off the mountainside with Madame Hung."

  Time stopped. Ten minutes became ten eternities. A hot wind sprang up out of nowhere and howled down the gorge, bending the trees and rattling the vines along the cliffside. Durell sweated. Dust blew from the temple floor and made a screen between him and the restless men on the ledge trail just beyond the temple entrance. At the most, what Red Rod had done would prove a distraction,

  and this made him stir and he signed to Riddle to follow him with his gun and they climbed carefully up the northern temple wall again.

  The small file of ants he had seen in the mountain pass below now had become people drawing much closer. He though he saw the smoke of a locomotive far off to the north, but he decided it was too soon for that. The approaching climbers would be late, and he felt an agony of impatience. He wished he had cut the plastic bomb fuses himself.

  "Are you a good shot, Riddle?" he asked.

  "Not with this gun. I'm not familiar with it."

  "You just spray it like a hose."

  Riddle sweated. "I'm not a mass murderer."

  "I thought you were anxious to get back Denis's formula. Here it comes."

  "God, we'll be killed," Riddle whispered.

  And Durell knew the tycoon was afraid. He wanted to laugh, but he was afraid too.

  The oncoming line of climbers was only a few hundred yards away now. He saw young Pan run down the path from the temple ruins to greet them, and a small figure in a coolie hat detached itself from the toiUng, armed men, and stepped out to meet the young Chinese girl. There was a brief greeting. Durell lifted his Uzi.

  "You did all sorts of work out West, Mr. Riddle, when you were a young man working on your first million. Ever do any cattle punching?"

  "What? Yes, some."

  "Cutting out dogies from the herd?"

  "Certainly. It was tough work."

  "Let's cut out those two women."

  Riddle lifted his shaggy brows. "Is one of them this fabulous Madame Hung?"

  "I could think of other words to describe her."

  "Does she have the painting?"

  "It's wrapped under her cooUe shirt. The bitch won't stay dead," Durell said.

  Then he threw one of the grenades he had taken from

  the parachute pack in the cave. It was a hundred feet down the slope, and he threw the grenade low, aiming to the left behind the two women and between their armed followers. At the next moment, he fired the Uzi in a preUminary burst over the heads of the men. The grenade burst with a shattering roar that shook the hills. The horizon danced. Smoke burst against the green brush cUnging to the side of the cliff. There was an eruption of human figures, none of them hit, as Durell had planned, and each group divided, separating, jumping in opposite directions.

  "Fire over their heads!" Durell shouted.

  Riddle's gun hammered wildly. The armed Chinese scrambled back down the trail, while the two women, separated from their escort by the grenade explosion, ran hip-swaying and awkward up the slope to the temple. Durell threw another grenade as two of the Chinese paused and started to follow the women. He aimed a little closer this time. One of the Triads spun around and fell off the cliff. The other sprawled flat. The two women vanished behind the crumbled ruins.

  Durell got to his feet and scrambled part of the way down. Riddle did not follow. He cursed, and the nape of his neck prickled as he thought of Riddle's gun behind him. He fired bullets into the dust of the trail, widening the gulf between the two women and their escort. From above and to the right, he heard Red Rod's gun begin hammering.

  He looked back and saw Riddle finally following him.

  When he was fifty feet above the trail, he threw his third grenade toward the Triads scrambling on the ledge. Turning, he felt a bullet scratch the air beside his ear, and saw Madame Hung, her face contorted with a lust for his death; she had a gun in her hand. Beside her was Pan, a younger but equally virulent version of the older woman, transformed as if darkened by the other woman's presence.

  A second and third grenade exploded from Red Rod's position as he dropped for cover. There were yells and screams. Above him, the ruins of the temple wept its vines and mossy tears, soaring high over the trail he lay on. He looked for Deakin and Linda, worried about them. How much time was left? Five minutes, maybe less. He ran forward, firing the Uzi deliberately high, and turned a comer of the trail where Hung and the girl had disappeared.

  Red Rod shouted dimly. He couldn't see the Chinese because of the ruined wall that abutted the narrow path. But he flattened against it and heard the whine of bullets go above him. Smoke drifted in the air, torn by a gust of hot wind. He edged around the comer of the trail.

  Another bullet snickered overhead. Chips of stone stung his face. He saw some of the Triads who had murdered Han and Von Golz clotted at the temple entrance. Madame Hung and Pan hadn't joined them yet. The older woman's hair had come undone, and she'd lost the cooUe hat. Her mouth was open and she screamed something

  The mountain shook. The trail heaved under Durell's feet. He fell to his knees as sound roared and screamed about his ears. He thought, Thafs a hell of a charge Red Rod set by the underground lake, and he saw part of the temple wall slowly crumble and fall. Pan screamed. She tentatively moved toward him, looking backward, and there came another vast sound as if a rushing, gurgling water main had burst. As indeed it had, he thought grimly. Mingled with the sound of water came a mmble of falling rock and stone. The path behind him dissolved in an avalanche of rubble and uprooted trees that dropped slowly, sohdly, into the gorge.

  Over the sound of dislodged earth and rock came the heavier rumbling of water, released and free, rushing, chuckling, spouting from its long imprisonment in the mountain's belly.

  A foaming jet suddenly spurted from the temple gate as if from a sluiceway, arched high between the two women and the remaining Triads behind them, and suddenly tripled in force, a small Niagara, awesome, irresistible, sweeping everything from its path as it gushed and tumbled and fell in a white glitter of diamond-drops and spume, arching in the air and then curving down, down into the ravine.

  Madame Hung stared in dismay at the barrier between herself and the men who might have helped her. Pan shrank back, twisting back and forth like a young trapped animal.

  Durell ran forward. He heard Riddle behind him, but he didn't look back. At the last moment, Hung heard him and twisted and fired at him, and something hit his arm and flung him sideways and he stumbled, almost falling from the ledge, with everything a confusion of mud landslides and spouting water, screams and shots. Then he was on the woman, hurling her back against the cliff that abutted the path.

  Now at last he grappled with the mistress of Satan. He smelled the evil of her hatred, and her lust for his hfe.

  She was abnormally strong, inviolate in her madness. His left arm was numb and slippery with blood, but he got her gun from her, twitching it aside, and it fell from the path. He was aware of Pan, like a miniature harpy, her face congested with hate and frustration, trying to circle him. Riddle caught her and flung her aside. Durell felt something crackle when he threw Madame Hung against the ruined temple wall.

  She breathed with a long hissing sound.

  "You cannot have i
t," she whispered.

  "Give it to me."

  "It is mine! Mine!"

  "Not now. Not ever." Durell was shaking. He put out his bloody left hand. "Pass it to me."

  Behind him, the water released from the lake roared and thundered in a great gushing stream in the air above the gorge. Nothing could pass through it. He wondered about Linda and Deakin—

  Madame Hung suddenly threw herself at him, dodged his arm, fell to one knee. Durell caught the front of her peasant blouse and ripped it open. Around her waist was a long folded sash of canvas. It came free as he caught her and it twisted around her legs and made her stumble. She screamed and fell. Durell dropped flat on the edge of the canvas that unrolled from her frantic body. It sHpped and he caught an elbow on it and Madame Hung was suddenly free of it and plunged over the Up of the trail and vanished.

  For a long moment afterwards, he lay in the dust on the ledge and heard the echoes of the falling woman's scream. It was finally drowned in the roar of the water tumbling into space behind him.

  "Durell?"

  He closed his fingers on the Uzi and sat up. Riddle had his gun pointed at him. Pan lay unconscious on the path, a bruise mottling the side of her young face.

  "Give me the painting, Durell," Riddle whispered.

  "You'll have to take it from me."

  "Don't make me kill you," Riddle pleaded.

  "You can try. You'll have to."

  "Please, Durell "

  Durell stood up. "Put away that gun."

  Riddle's blazing eyes faded into apathy as Durell walked toward him. "I don't understand what's happening. I don't know how you did it."

  "Come on. Pick up that girl. We have to climb to get back the other way."

  Riddle lowered his gun and nodded slowly, then repeatedly, and muttered something to himself. He slung his weapon over his shoulder and knelt to pick up Pan's slight figure in his arms. Durell followed, flicking blood from his fingers.

  Red Rod sat with his legs crossed, Buddha fashion, in the center of the mossy temple floor. His PPS-41 lay across his knees. From the fissure behind him in the cliff, the water of the underground lake had almost stopped flowing.

  "Hello, Denis," Durell said.

  The young scientist sprawled with his head in Linda's lap. He'd gotten a crack on the head somehow, and there was still a Httle blood from a cut on his forehead, but his eyes were bright and angry with the anger that had taken him out of the laboratory into the active world.

  "I'm fine, Mr. Durell," said Denis.

  "You look it."

  Linda smiled and went on comforting. "Denis was marvelous. He saved my life."

  "Good for Denis. Where is Anna-Lise?"

  "She chose the wrong side at the last moment." Linda sounded disappointed. "She ran away with the other Triads. They must be on the trail to Duphonong by now. I don't know what will happen to her."

  "With the Von Golz fortune, she'll take care of herself."

  "Mr. Durell " She paused and bit her lip.

  Durell spoke gently. "It was all a hoax. I mean, about you girls working for international peace, all of you together against your greedy, imperialist, selfish fathers. Pan arranged it from the start, even to the sunburst necklaces you wore. It was her big mistake. She used the insignia Madame Hung devised for her private airline, which brought international secrets, via art items, for Peking, via Singapore."

  "Pan was really working with Madame Hung?"

  Durell looked at the young Chinese girl. Pan sat with her back to the temple wall. She looked innocent and lovable again, even to the dust across her doll-like cheek. Her jet hair, as black as night, was arranged in the neat bangs across her forehead. But her almond eyes were fathomless, blank, and only in them did Durell suddenly see a reflection of the woman who had caused it all.

  "Was Hung your mother?" he asked Pan quietly.

  She nodded. "And someday, I shall do what she failed to do. I shall kill you. Wait. Someday."

  "You'll need nine lives. Like your mother."

  The sound of a train whistle lifted through the gorge. Durell slowly got to his feet. Nobody had bothered to help him with his wounded arm. He wrapped a handkerchief around it, using his teeth, and gestured everyone to their feet.

  "That's the four-forty and we have to catch it," he said. "It won't wait forever, even when it comes to the trees we knocked down across the tracks."

  22

  Jasmine Jones looked like a surgical nurse, with tape and gauze across her mouth like a sterile mask for the operating room. She wore a dark red robe with silver dragons embroidered on it, and black slippers, and she walked with steady confidence back from the wall. She had pinned up the canvas of the "Nuclear Nude" and now she stepped back to survey the painting. Her almond eyes, alive and sane again, were mildly puzzled, even shocked, and although her wounded mouth prohibited speech, she made it plain she didn't like it. Durell said, "What do you think of it. Levy?" "Beautiful," Liscomb said. But he was watching Jasmine.

  It was comfortably air-conditioned in the hospital room at the Halsey Clinic in Singapore. Liscomb's leg was still in traction, but he seemed comfortable, almost happy, with Jasmine for company. Levy said he planned to hire her for the new Control office when the wrecked Great China Bazaar was cleaned up.

  The painting glowed on the antiseptic white wall. Durell thought it was quite good. The nude, who looked as if Linda Riddle had posed for it, seemed as alive and vibrant as the real thing; but he quickly pushed the memory of Madame Hung's art gallery from his mind.

  "What will you do with it, Cajun?" Levy asked.

  "It's too big to stuff into the files."

  "You've excerpted it?"

  "Infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and a bit of careful paint remover," Durell said.

  "Was Denis's work really on it?"

  "Yes. I had everything microphotographed three times and sent by different routes to Number Twenty Annapolis Street. It's home safe." Durell sighed.

  "Did it make much sense?"

  "Not to me," Durell said. "I don't believe in neutrinos. I don't think Denis does, either."

  Young Deakin smiled shyly through his glasses. He had kept Linda from being snatched by the retreating Triads, and he wore his wounds like medals. Linda had obviously revised her entire opinion of him.

  "It will take years of research to learn if neutrinos can really give us a new power source," Deakin said.

  "Did you get a contract from NSA?" Durell asked.

  "They cabled me. I've accepted."

  "What about your work for Mr. Riddle?"

  "It will have to go to court, I suppose." Denis wasn't really interested. "It's a curious legal tangle. My work belongs to Mr. Riddle, but the government will claim it in the interests of national security. There will have to be some compensation to both of us."

  "Spoken like a true future son-in-law of C. C. B. Riddle," Durell said. He smiled when he said it.

  Linda looked radiant. "That's right, Cajun. We're going to be married."

  Durell looked at them. "I think you'd better."

  They burned the painting in the clinic's incinerator. It didn't take long to turn into a pile of useless ashes. Durell was fussed over by the Indian doctor, his wounded arm was stitched and bandaged, and he was told to take two weeks to rest. Afterward, he visited the British M.I.6 oflSce in Singapore. It was a cool afternoon. The M.I.6 officer in charge was remote and disinterested when Durell asked about Pan.

  "We couldn't make anything stick, old boy," he said. "What have you done with her?" "Released her, naturally. What else could we do?" Durell looked oyer his shoulder instinctively. "Where is she now?"

  The M.I.6 man spread his hands, stroked his thick moustache, then put his hands flat on the desk. He was amused.

  "She's just a child. What does she matter?"

  "Did anyone find Madame Hung's body?" Durell asked.

  "Not yet, old boy. It's a matter of cooperation with Kuala Lumpur authorities. We're more concerned with round
ing up the Five Rubies people." M.I.6 sighed. "We're grateful for your help in smashing them. They did a lot of dirty work here. Rather nasty lot, the Five Rubies."

  "You're sure she wasn't found?"

  "Why worry about it?"

  "I'd like to close our files," Durell said. M.I.6 had no air-conditioners, but it was not warm enough to account for the sweat he felt on his hands. "So they've both vanished?"

  "Both?"

  "The girl and the mother."

  "Oh. Quite."

  "The girl was responsible for several murders, you know."

  "Not in our jurisdiction, sir. You'll have to take that up with the civil authorities. Interpol may help."

  "Thanks a lot," Durell said.

  He was careful returning to his hotel suite. He took all the usual precautions letting himself in. With his back to the door, he studied the sunlight coming through the slats over the balcony windows that faced the waterfront. He paused for ten seconds in the sitting room, then took his gun from under his coat and walked to the bedroom door. Red Rod unfolded himself from the bed. The Chinese looked very tall and thin and respectable in a seersucker suit. His smile was just as ghastly as ever. He waved away Durell's gun.

  "Hello, old friend."

  "Is everything all right with you, Red Rod?" "My wife asked where I'd been for two days. My children did not miss me. My clerks in the souvenir shop I own stole most of the receipts. Everything is normal."

  "Do you know that Pan has vanished? And that Hung's body wasn't recovered?"

  "You seem disturbed by it, Durell. Pan is at the Seven Isles. She is filing a claim as heir to her mother's estate. Meanwhile, she continues to operate the place for the recreation of Singapore's bored businessmen." Durell asked, "Can we pry her out of there?" "No. The police are raiding it tonight and closing it down."

  "Can we go along?"

  "We had best not," said Red Rod. "My wife would be very angry." "Why?"

  "I have told her so much about you and the old days, and she suspects I've been with you recently. You are invited to dinner, and you would honor my humble house if you accepted."