“All right,” Durell said. “Can you get me information on those two? I made a mistake about them. I thought they were just from the surveillance arm of the KGB—topol’-shchiki, foot-sloggers. But Kopa must be a code name. Have you got anything on him or the girl, Mara Tirana?”
“I can have it for you. Herr Durell, I thought you should know—” Then Otto paused. “Are you sure you are all right?”
“I’m alone with a headache. What is it?
“Your pardon. I was only being careful. But Harry Hammett is gone. He met Fraulein Padgett and took her with him.”
Durell drew in a sharp, painful breath. “Where?”
“To the rendezvous. I thought you should know.” “Thank you.” Durell scowled, shook his head. “Listen, can you take me to the rendezvous point?”
“Well, I—yes, I can. I think you should go. It is not right for Hammett to take the girl with him. She is only to bring the car back, you understand—this is what Herr Hammett tells me. But she does not belong in the picture and I could not agree, so I thought to tell you.”
“Where can we meet?”
Otto coughed apologetically in the telephone. “I did more. There was an urgent call from Washington about you. You are to speak to General Dickinson McFee at once. The phones here in my safe house are absolutely secure. You had better come here.”
“All right,” Durell said. “In ten minutes.”
“Be most careful, please. There may be more topol'-shchiki on surveillance duty at the hotel.”
“I'll watch it.”
“Good. I shall be waiting for you.”
Durell dropped the French phone on its delicate hooks and drew a deep breath. The room swung in an unsteady circle around him. He shook his head and walked into the bathroom, stripped off his shirt and tie, and ran cold water in the basin, where he had plunged his head under the reviving tap, he felt better. He would have liked a drink, but he had no liquor in the room. He stared at himself in the mirror and saw an unfamiliar pallor in his lean face, a look of alarm that turned his blue eyes dark, almost black. He looked dangerous. He ran cold water methodically over his wrists, looked at his injured elbow and decided it was nothing more than a deep bruise. Dressed again, he searched for the gun that Kopa had knocked from his hand.
It was under the bed, where it had fallen when he lost it. Apparently Otto’s man in the next room had raised such a loud alarm that Kopa hadn’t had time to retrieve it.
He looked at his watch. It was five after ten.
He took every precaution when he left the hotel, doubling and redoubling on his trail to Otto’s “safe house.” He used the stairway instead of the elevator, walked through the kitchen into the back street, crossed over behind the huge Opera House, and mingled with a crowd in front of a cinema. He was not unaware of the danger of assassination now. But his maneuvers were successful. By the time he reached the town house at Steubenstrasse 19, he knew he had not been followed.
Otto quickly let him in. His short-cropped gray hair looked almost white against his pink face and gold-rimmed spectacles. From a vest pocket over his small paunch he took out a folded, typewritten sheet of paper. “You -were not followed, Herr Durell?”
“I was careful. What have you got there?”
“The data on Kopa and Mara Tirana. Do you want it now?”
Durell nodded and took the dossiers from the Austrian. There was a full summary on the man known as Kopa. As he suspected, Kopa was the code name for a Colonel Pavel Yudinov, of the KGB branch of State Security. On the neatly typed sheet was a typical history of such a man: born in 1921, in a remote Ukrainian village, son of peasants who fortunately escaped the classification of “kulaks,” he had been a member of the Young Pioneers and then a Komsomolets until the war, when he became a junior lieutenant political officer assigned to a mortar brigade of the 198th Division. His war record indicated three wounds, two received in the desperate battles before Moscow against the invading Nazis, another at Stalingrad. Party Card No. 4234498, dated May 10, 1946. After the war he was promoted to senior lieutenant and transferred to Moscow to the Personnel Directorate of the KGB, trained at the SMERSH Counter-Intelligence School on Stanislavskaya Street in Moscow, advanced to major in the Second Main Directorate of the Security Office Committee, which dealt with foreign intelligence. From there he had been posted to East Berlin, did a brief tour of duty in London, and another in Vienna in the Spetsburo. No notations had been made on the dossier for the past year, however, except that of his promotion to colonel.
There was one further brief note: “This man is known to have killed two prisoners held for interrogation with one blow of his fist. His nickname among associates is The Sledge.”
Durell looked up at Otto’s pale face.
“This is no ordinary case-officer in the KGB, Otto. Not a usual foot-slogger.”
“No,” Otto said. “He is too important for that.” Durell nodded. “What about the girl?”
There was much less on Mara Tirana. Age 26, bom in Budapest, arrested in the uprising of the Hungarians and transported for a three-month term in the MVD Lefortovo Prison. There was no note about a younger brother named MiMly, but this did not necessarily mean he did not exist. There was a questioned statement about possible training at SMERSH Headquarters, a suggestion that she had been inducted for foreign espionage in the KGB as a result of personal blackmail, not an unusual method for recruiting agents. There was another note that she had been assigned routine case work in Paris under “Kopa.” And nothing more.
Durell returned the dossiers, feeling dissatisfied and more worried about Deirdre than before.
From a room nearby in Otto Hoffner’s house a telephone rang with a peculiar note, and Otto started.
“It is the scramble phone. Washington. It will be for you, Herr Durell.”
“I’ll take it now. Get ready to go as soon as I’m through, Otto.”
“Yes, Herr Durell.”
It was early evening in Washington. General Dickinson McFee’s voice was sharp and crackly, with that slight pause between sentences and words while the electronic coder worked to distort his words.
“Sam? That you, Cajun?”
“Here. I’m with Hoffner.”
“I ought to have your head in a basket, Cajun, except that I’ve had the NASA, Pentagon and State on my back. Even a call from the White House. And I’m due to report to Joint Chiefs in an hour. . . . Where is Hammett?”
“I’m going after him now.”
“And your girl?”
“With Hammett.”
“All right. You’re up for disciplinary action—you know that, of course. But we’ll talk about it when and if you get back. I ordered Hammett to leave Deirdre Padgett in the States, to refuse her request to stay in Vienna under all circumstances. I don’t know what eats at you two idiots, but it’s going to get worse instead of better. You’re going in with Harry, Cajun.”
“But I didn’t—”
“If there was time, I’d have you both in a Federal pen. But we’re running out of time. We want Stepanic. I don’t give a damn about your personal feelings in this, Cajun. And I don’t care about your feud with Hammett. I want Stepanic. And you and Harry are going in to get him.”
Durell was silent. The phone crackled for a moment. “Are you there, Sam?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
McFee’s voice changed. “All right. Listen, Sam—get Deirdre home. I’ll take care of it. You do the job. And watch Hammett.”
“I intend to.”
“This one won’t be simple. We’ve got reports of a regular hornet’s nest stirred up behind the Curtain. Everybody wants Stepanic. The press is on my neck, too. Make it fast and clean and come home with him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s all, then.”
Durell hung up.
Otto was watching him, his eyes worried behind his gold-rimmed glasses. Durell shrugged.
/> “Let’s go, Otto.”
“It is a personal matter between you and Herr Hammett, nein?” Otto asked. He looked small and mild, like a timid middle-aged clerk with his thin face and glasses. He drove his Porsche with expert speed, his pale hands resting lightly on the wheel. They were on the main highway out of Vienna, speeding northeast into the Marchfeld District, where the Danube was over three hundred yards wide and its channel was divided by numerous small islands. The frontier, where the river passed through a narrow gap between the lower spurs of the Carpathians, was thirty miles away. Here, in the night and rain, the countryside of church spires and fertile fields was dark and peaceful. The rain was light and steady. Otto said: “I think Hammett took the fraulein with him only to annoy you. It should not be serious. There may be no danger.”
“There is always danger,” Durell said.
“Of course. But you must remember that Harry, for all his faults, is a very competent man in the profession.”
“We all make mistakes,” Durell said grimly. “This one is Harry’s.”
“Yes, I can understand how you feel about that.” They drove on for a few more silent minutes. The road was wide and slick with rain, but Otto handled the speedy little Porsche easily. The Austrian was one of those deceptive little men who could move like a streak of lightning, if necessary. Durell felt better now, with the cold wet wind blowing in his face through the open car window. The road swung sharply east now, then a bit southerly through the Marchfeld, and now beyond the flickering masses of woodland and occasional spur of hill he could see the Danube, reflecting light from the small towns and villages on its banks. It was sixty-seven kilometers to Bratislava, on the Czech frontier, but he did not expect to have to go that far.
Here and there in the darkness was the loom of a turreted, crenellated castle, fairy-like in the dim mist and rain that covered the land, relics of the petty nobility who once ruled along the banks of the ancient river by means of piracy and brigandage. Otto Hoffner, of course, paid no attention to the landscape familiar to him. The Porsche roared smoothly eastward.
In ten minutes, Vienna was far behind. Otto slowed when they passed through a small village and halted at one of the ubiquitous yellow traffic lights in the center of the narrow, cobbled street; then they sped across the intersection. Instead of following the main autobahn, he turned a corner in the old village into a narrower street, bumped over a rough stretch of road, and swung into a narrow lane that went almost due north, directly toward the river.
“You’re sure of the place?” asked Durell.
“The boy, Anton, described it carefully to Harry, before Harry lost patience with him. The meeting was to be at ten o’clock.”
“It’s after that, now.”
“But we have not met Fraulein Padgett coming back in Harry’s car,” Otto pointed out.
There were dense woodlands on either side of the narrow lane, and the car’s headlights bored a bright path through a dripping, leafy tunnel marked by careful fences. Otto slowed down even more, and then the lane angled sharply right again, and they were out of the woods.
Lights made an ochrous pallor on the undersides of low-hanging clouds in the sky to the east.
“Bratislava,” Otto said laconically. “Not far off. There is the river.” He sounded worried. “There should be a field here, and a white farmhouse, a small village just beyond. Harry was to meet this Gija fellow from the Czech barge at the first side road from this point.”
“I’d suggest you turn off your lights, then,” Durell said.
“Of course. Sorry.”
They crawled ahead, easing their way through the gloom. The reflection of city lights in the far distance made things a little easier. Durell could see the Danube now, a broad reach of rain-dimpled water, with the opposite bank, beyond several small islands, probably in Czech territory at this point. To the east was the loom of hills that narrowed the gap for the river to pass through the spurs of the Carpathians. Lights twinkled on the river, and there were moving objects, barges and small steamers chuffing, with diesel engines muttering in the mist, and an occasional glimmer of red or green running lights from the international river traffic.
“Here we are,” Otto said suddenly.
He turned the Porsche abruptly into a high, hedged road. There was a field to the right, a dim collection of farm buildings close to the river bank.
“Harry’s car,” Otto said in a strange voice. “Right ahead.”
Durell saw the dim gleam of wet metal blocking the road. Otto braked and turned off the motor. In the silence, they heard crickets singing disconsolately in the rainswept fields, and the faraway throb of a river barge seemed louder through the darkness.
The car ahead, an American Chevrolet, was dark and silent. Otto drew a long, slow breath. “If Harry is still waiting, he will be angry at our appearance here. It might frighten off the contact man, this Gija that the boy talked about.”
“I’ll go ahead. Stay here, Otto.”
Otto nodded and Durell got out of the Porsche with careful silence. There was no movement in the car ahead. But surely their arrival in the lane directly behind him should have brought Harry Hammett out of his car to meet them.
Nothing happened.
The rain fell with a soft sibilance on the wet fields, dimpling the river, making the night distances wider and echoing to the opposite shore of the vast stream. The crickets sang. A few branches of the trees that lined the lane rattled in a faint wind that came up.
Durell moved toward the parked car. He could see no one inside. A deep feeling of apprehension squeezed inside him.
“Deirdre?” he called softly.
Only the rain replied.
The car ahead was empty.
He looked at the dark hedges and saw nothing to catch his attention, then opened the door to the Chevrolet. The smell of stale cigarette smoke touched him, and with it was mingled the unmistakable essence of Deirdre’s particular perfume. So Otto’s information had been correct. Deirdre had come here with Hammett. But where was she? And where was Harry? Something had happened here. He wasn’t sure what it was, but obviously things hadn’t gone along with Hammett’s confident plans.
Something glistened in a long thin smear on the driver’s wheel. It was blood. He went around the car to that side, and in the dim yellow light reflected from the low-scudding clouds, he saw that the lane had been scuffed, as if by struggling or dragging feet. He lifted his head sharply. His apprehension increased abruptly, as he thought of what might have happened to Deirdre in this lonely place. He told himself that nothing had ever hurt her, that he had always kept her safe and out of this dirty, murderous business—but this time he had been too late, had not argued forcefully enough, or done any of a dozen things to prevent her from coming here.
“Herr Durell?”
He turned. It was Otto. The man’s gold-rimmed glasses shone as he turned his pale face to the right and left.
“They’re gone, Otto.”
“There is a barn over there.”
“All right,” Durell said. “Let’s look.”
“Take it easy, my friend. You sound strange. I know how you feel about the Fraulein Padgett—”
“Shut up, Otto,” Durell said, not unkindly.
They found Harry Hammett halfway across the field to the barn.
The big blond man lay face down in the stubble of the harvested field, a few paces to one side of the footpath Durell and Otto Hoffner followed. He was just a dark, shapeless mass against the wet earth, arms outflung, legs sprawled. His raincoat was twisted around his thighs. His curly, yellow hail looked dark in the wet.
Durell knelt quickly beside him. The back of Hammett’s head was clotted with blood where the bone had been crushed. He turned the man slightly and saw the look of utter surprise stamped forever on Harry’s handsome, arrogant face.
They’re all surprised, Durell thought. None of them thinks it can happen to him. I’ll probably be surprised, too, one of these days.<
br />
Harry Hammett’s body was still warm.
But he was quite dead.
The barn was fifty yards away, and the river bank a short distance beyond. The land sloped down in neat, tidy
Austrian fields, with a copse of woodland to the west, a little cluster of whitewashed houses to the east. Beyond the barn, at the river bank, Durell could see a small boat landing, two wooden piers and a narrow shed. Red and green running lights on the Danube barges moved a half mile across the water, close to the Czechoslovakian shore. Over there was unknown territory, the Iron Curtain, a different way of life that brooded over the dark foothills of the mountains beyond the glow of lights downriver from Bratislava’s factories and busy shipping wharves.
Durell walked with Otto toward the barn.
“What do you suppose happened?” the Viennese asked.
“Harry was smart,” Durell said. “So smart he died of it.”
“There is no sign of the contact man who was to take Herr Hammett down the river.”
“He’s around.”
“You think it was this Gija who killed him?”
“I’m not thinking anything about it, yet,” Durell said. “And the girl? Fraulein Padgett?”
Durell did not answer. He felt an anger in him that wanted to tear down the dark curtains of the night. He wanted to smash and break something. He knew this anger was dangerous, just as he knew there was danger waiting in the rain all around them. They were not alone. Whatever had happened back there in Harry’s car had happened not too many minutes ago. It wasn’t over yet.
The growl of a Czech patrol boat on the river came distinctly, across the far reach of the Danube. A streak of white showed in the speedboat’s wake. A barge hooted in melancholy fashion. The rain hissed.
“It will be awkward, about Herr Hammett,” Otto murmured. “The police must be notified. We cannot hide this, of course.”
“You can handle it, Otto. You know how.”
“And some report must be made about Fraulein Padgett—”
“We’ll see. Come on.”
Assignment - Mara Tirana Page 7