Wyman got to his hands and knees and lurched away to one side. His hands were empty; he had lost his gun. His face streamed blood. Durell drove after him, a lust to kill burning in him. He struck once more and Wyman went down, sprawling on his face in the frozen mud. Durell felt Ilona’s hands on him, holding him back. He shook her off, saw her fall, and suddenly the wild anger in him against the man on the ground began to fade. He straightened, drawing in great, deep breaths of the freezing night air. Slowly, the roaring of his pulses began to ease. He saw the Austrian border patrolman help Ilona to stand, and there were other people running toward him now from the farmhouse. He saw McFee and Dr. Tagy. They had made it. His anger ebbed still farther.
“Are you all right, Ilona?”
“Yes. It is just my leg.” He saw her wavering smile. “My return to Hungary will have to be delayed.”
Durell touched her cheek with his fingers. He drew another deep, steadying breath and looked backward at the frontier. The searchlights in the Hungarian watch tower were going out, one by one. He heard the dogs barking for another moment, and then they, too, were silent.
It was over.
McFee came walking across the field toward him. The small, gray man had deep lines of exhaustion engraved on his face. He looked at Durell and then at Roger Wyman, seated on the cold ground.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him, Cajun. We want him back in Washington. He’ll have a lot to tell us.”
Durell awoke to bright sunlight streaming through the windows of his apartment. He had slept for almost twenty-four hours after the plane landed at the National Airport in Washington, with Wyman in handcuffs and Dr. Tagy and his family checked into the Mayflower pending his return to his laboratories in California with his wife and son. Ilona had insisted on remaining in Vienna, in the hospital there after the bullet was removed from her leg. Thinking about her, Durell could understand why she was adamant about returning to fight in Hungary’s underground for the freedoms and liberties she was sure would be won eventually. He remembered the night they shared in the farmhouse attic with a twist of nostalgic pain that surprised him. He knew he would probably never see her again. And he remembered Matyas, driving the bus through that wild ride, and Maria’s tenderness toward him—and her sacrifice that none of them had witnessed in the swamps around the frontier watch tower.
Durell got out of bed and showered slowly and gratefully, the hot water soaking the aches and bruises from his long, lean body. A fresh dressing had been put on his wounded shoulder, but it was healing well now, and he had no trouble with it. The telephone rang while he was in the shower, and he didn’t bother to answer it. From the windows of his apartment, he could see the top of the Capitol dome and the thin spire of the Washington Monument. This was his home. It was a clear, bright winter day, and the pale sky looked as if it had been scoured clean and new and fresh.
He had never felt so lonely before.
He made his own breakfast, with a pot of Louisiana coffee, and smoked a cigarette and when the telephone rang again, he got up and answered it.
Sidonie Osbourn spoke to him. “Sam? Sam, dear, I’m sorry if I wakened you . . .”
“I’m not coming into the office today,” he said.
“There’s no need for that. Summerfield got everything we need out of Roger Wyman. The list has been turned over to the FBI. It’s within their jurisdiction now. They’ll round up the people Wyman let slip into the country. Dr. Tagy and his family have been shipped back to California on this morning’s plane . . . Sam, are you listening?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m tired.”
“You didn’t call Deirdre. I’m phoning from the hospital, by the way.”
“I doubt if Deirdre wants me to call her,” Durell said.
“Why not come over and see for yourself? McFee has been here. He talked to her for half an hour, told her where you’d been and what you’ve done. He spoke to her like a Dutch uncle, Sam, dear.”
“He had no right—”
“Are you going to be stubborn now, too? She understands now, Sam. She wants to see you, truly. She’s being released from the hospital this afternoon, and she wants you to drive her home.”
Durell was silent. He looked out through the window at the bright sunlight, and it suddenly seemed brighter, more cheerful. He felt immeasurably better.
He was no longer lonely.
“I’ll be right over, Sidonie. And thanks.”
“Hurry, dear,” she said.
She didn’t have to tell him.
THE END
of an Original Gold Medal Novel by
Edward S. Aarons
Assignment - Budapest Page 20