Assignment- 13th Princess

by Will B Aarons

  This had been squatter country until it filled up some years before, land owned by the government and settled without permission by Anatolian peasants who migrated to the city or laborers returned from Germany with a bit of money and no wish to go back to their dusty villages. Once settled these sprawling slums became blocks of votes for the politicians, who promised to pave the streets and bring in utilities. Shops and cafes sprung up. The place took on an air of permanence. And other gecekondus —the word refers to a house built overnight without permission—kept the tradition alive, spreading from the edge of the city, raw and deprived and dangerous.

  It was late now, nearly midnight. Dogs barked. Stars blazed in the cool sky, above a thin halo of city lights.

  Durell stopped at a small house of whitewashed stone, tapped on its plank door.

  “Who’s there?” Dara’s voice was indistinct, and Durell knew that she had kept a distance between herself and the door.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  There came a clatter at the latch, the door opened a bit, and Durell saw a bare lightbulb beyond her face.

  “You look awful,” she said as he stepped inside.

  “It’s been that kind of evening.” He sighed. “Any problems here?”

  “Only staying awake. I’m so tired.”

  “I may have been followed.”

  “You’re soaking. Take off those clothes.”

  Durell glanced about the one-room dwelling. A neatly made pallet of quilts on a straw mattress filled one corner of the hard-packed dirt floor. A tin pipe rambled from a steel drum-stove across the open-beamed ceiling to vent through the wall. The low sofa and walls were covered with cheap factory rugs.

  “Turn off the light for a moment,” he said.

  The light went out, and he pushed aside a window curtain. A slight noise she made as she came up behind him raised an unexpected welt of anxiety at the back of his mind. He did not turn his head.

  He saw nothing to alarm him beyond the window.

  The lane seemed empty.

  The aimless barking of the dogs continued, fragmenting the eerie silence.

  He pushed the curtain closed and felt Dara tug at his jacket, accommodated her, and the jacket slid down from his shoulders and off his arms.

  He turned to study her face. It was the kind you saw on travel posters for beach resorts, he thought, fun-loving, sunny, and blithe, wholesome in a sexy sort of way. But now, by the waffling glow that came from the open-doored stove, he saw that it was wan and weary, the delicate fabric of her lightly freckled skin tight against flat cheekbones. Some vitality remained in her enormous hazel eyes as they lifted steadily to his gaze. It seemed incredible that she was a professional killer.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” She stood close and held the cold mess of his soggy jacket away from her.

  Durell ignored her question. He shook his gaze loose and crossed the room and stood beside the hot drum of fire. He rubbed his hands together in the warmth of the jerry-built stove. “I suppose we can chance spending the rest of tonight here,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll have to move again.”

  “I’m tired of moving. Let them come to us.”

  “Don’t be so brave,” Durell said with an edge of sarcasm, “or you won’t last in this business.”

  “Volkan found us, and we turned him to our advantage, didn’t we?”

  “Volkan’s dead.”

  Dara looked bewildered. “How . . . ?”

  Durell told her what had happened as she draped his jacket over the back of a chair to dry, undid his tie, and unbuttoned his shirt. He finished and listened through the walls in the momentary silence that followed.

  Then Dara said: “McNamara will be looking for you.”

  “That’s nothing new; just another reason he’s got.”

  She tugged at his shirt, saw the .45 under his belt, and reached to take it out.

  “No!” Durell snapped.

  She went back a step, her big eyes appraising his hard stare. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is it something I’ve done?”

  Durell kept his eyes on her as he nodded toward the rough-board cabinets in the cooking area. “See if you can find a cloth or some rags in there. I have to clean this thing,” he said, and tugged the pistol from his belt and shook water from its barrel.

  He was tired and chilled, although the barrel-stove had begun to warm him, and he was not in a very good humor. It was difficult to assimilate the winds of thought that blew across his mind as he sat heavily on the straw mattress, removed the magazine of the pistol, and inspected the chamber. He unfastened the recoil spring plug and broke down the weapon and began to wipe it clean with a cloth Dara dropped at his side.

  She removed his shoes and set them in front of the stove.

  Durell watched her without seeming to.

  She sighed and said: “I want to take back what I said at the hotel last night. I suppose you’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Not much,” Durell said.

  “I have. When I said you didn’t care about anyone else—that was childish of me. I know—I knew then— that you were doing your job; that it came before anything.” She forced a thin laugh. “It’s true of all of us, isn’t it? If we have a small encounter, a moment of happiness or pleasure, then we should be grateful and leave it behind us with some grace. I’m afraid I’m guilty of wanting to hold onto what we had, so briefly, yesterday morning in London.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Was it only yesterday?”

  “Yesterday, long ago and far away,” Durell said. He regarded her with solemn blue eyes.

  “That’s the problem,” she said, and gazed at the earthen floor. “Looking, hoping—for something, someone to hold onto. I don’t think you can understand. I admit it; I’m guilty.”

  “You’ll have to give me some of your spare cartridges,” Durell said. He had reassembled the gun. “I don’t trust mine. That’s the trouble with an automatic—a misfire can finish you.”

  Dara rose from her knees and went to her shoulder bag and withdrew a handful of heavy, clicking cartridges, Durell took them and reloaded the magazine of the .45. Dara had changed since London, he thought. She had softened perceptibly, and he wondered if the shock of Major Rabinovitch’s death had influenced that. Perhaps it was just the continual, deadly pressure.

  He did not know if it was more than superficial, this new tinge of feminine vulnerability that made him want to shelter her in his arms.

  It could be only pretense—he lived in a world of deception and counterdeception, where even the truth, in carefully patterned cuttings, could be a fatal lie.

  He laid his gun on the padded quilt next to his hip and shrugged out of his shirt. Dara hung it before the fireplace and came back with a towel and rubbed down his thick, black hair, then his scarred shoulders and chest.

  She seemed happy to do this, and it felt good, and he did not interfere.

  “Take off your trousers,” she said.

  He looked hesitant. A smile crossed her narrow, delicate lips. “Oh, don’t be such a ninny,” she said, and stooped to unbuckle his belt.

  “You know, Sam,” she said as she tugged at the buckle, “you are acting strange tonight. I can’t see why.”

  Durell regarded her in silence as busily, with a distant objectivity, she gripped the cuffs of his trousers and pulled them off of his legs and carried them to the dry with the rest of his clothing in the warmth of the stove. When she returned, she studied the angry new blood on the bandage of his thigh-wound. “You should have that seen to,” she said.

  Durell took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me of your connection with Mossad?” he said in a stern tone.

  There was no immediate answer, as Dara, kneeling now at his thigh, peeled the bandage slowly away. Blood was crusted around the stitches taken by the ship’s physician in the Persian Gulf. “I hope this isn’t infected. It could be dangerous,” she said.

 
; “Answer me.”

  She looked up at his eyes. “It’s a lie,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I have no connection with Mossad.” She held his gaze with quiet assurance.

  “McNamara said you did.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “In this case, yes. You’ve been all too eager to eliminate Princess Ayla.”

  He flinched as she touched the wound gently. A thin, cherry-colored fluid rose up shining in the gashed flesh. Two of his fingers lifted her chin.

  “There is some truth in it,” she admitted.

  “How much?”

  “I was assigned to a killer team until a year ago, first in Scandinavia, then Vienna, London, and New York.” She shook her golden head. “I lost my taste for it.”

  “Did you really?”

  “Cold-blooded killing, even of those who would exterminate my nation, just wasn’t in me, Sam. I—I was horrified by some of the things. Of course, they were doing the same to us.” Her eyes went sad and distant.

  “You didn’t look horrified when you killed that man in London. You’ve given the impression all along that you can’t wait to do it again.”

  She replied in a low, earnest voice. “There is something that should be explained to you. You have such a monumental reputation, you see—did it ever occur to you that an agent assigned to work with you might feel inadequate by comparison? I bent over backwards to impress you,

  to show you how tough and determined and competent I was.” She smiled forlornly. “I wanted your approval desperately. Perhaps I tried too hard—you said as much in London, when you told Ethan I was too eager, but I was so intent on earning your admiration that I couldn’t see what was right under my nose. You were right. I was acting like a freshman.”

  “It makes a good story,” Durell said.

  “You don’t believe me, then?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  Dara’s face went blank, as if he had thrown a switch, and she took a kettle from the top of the steel drum-stove and made tea.

  He thought how she had been trained to dissimulate.

  A good agent was capable of creating an almost impenetrable cover story from loose scraps of truth and fiction on a moment’s notice.

  The dogs had stopped barking.

  Firewood snapped and fizzed in the stove. The air smelled lightly of woodsmoke and steaming clothes as he drank the strong, sweet tea from a hot cup and admired the feminine stride and twist of her body. She was pouring the rest of the scalding water over a wash cloth that lay in a chipped enameled basin. She came back to him in the dusky light and bathed his wound with the soothing cloth.

  She broke the silence abruptly, her eyes on the task of cleaning his wound. “You must understand that my father and mother, and my brother, all my family, were killed by the Arabs. Revenge was all I thought about, really. I was crazy with it by the time I was recruited. Naturally, my superiors keyed on that—that aspect of my personality.” She wiped tenderly at the angry wound, wrung the cloth into the basin. “I was finished and polished, taught how to walk and dress and kill, and then they sent me to take up duties under deep cover as a roving employee of a multinational hotel chain whose chief officers were sympathetic to our struggle. The life looked gay and glamorous, but. . . She shrugged. “You know what went on beneath the surface.”

  “And you requested transfer to more conventional intelligence operations?”

  “I had met Ethan—Major Rabinovitch. He interceded for me, took responsibility for me. I don’t think they would have allowed me to transfer otherwise.” She looked up at him for the first time. “Do you believe me, Sam?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  She tossed the soiled bandage into the fire, tore a strip from a sheet, and made a fresh bandage for his thigh. With a last neat tug at a knot, she said: “You should stay off this leg for a while.”

  “Sure,” Durell said dryly.

  “That wound could incapacitate you.”

  “I’ve worked with worse.”

  “I see the scars.” She ran a cool hand over the old injuries. “If your leg gets worse, I may have to finish this assignment for both of us,” she said. “Could you trust me to do that?”

  Durell regarded her briefly, then said: “Tomorrow, leave here early and post yourself outside Sheik Zeid’s hotel. You’ll tail him, while I make another try at winning Nadine’s cooperation.”

  “Then you do trust me?”

  “We’ll try one step at a time.”

  She was close to him in the wavering light of the stove, her eyes wide and vulnerable, lips parted. Her presence was a palpitating, hypnotizing aura that enveloped him. They kissed, and he tasted the tea-sugared point of her tongue. Her trembling hand slid down the hard ridges of his belly as she murmured: “Love me, Sam, darling. Pretend, if you must. Just for a little while.”

  Durell studied the tender glow of her eyes, his fingers mingled in the fine blond hair behind her neck.

  Suddenly he cocked an ear to the outdoors.

  Her soft palm brought his cheek back around, and she smiled. “Forget the outside,” she whispered. “Forget all but this room—this bed—us. . . .”

  Durell embraced her.

  It seemed a good moment for forgetting.

  Chapter 19

  The black Mercedes had been parked since midnight down the narrow lane from the safe house.

  Dew beaded the dark polish of its body, and the man who sat behind its wheel had become cramped and querulous, wondering when the others would arrive. He understood the need for clearance—one did nothing without authorization from the top. And he recognized that additional men must be brought from a distance. Still, it seemed that they should have been here by now. It was four-thirty.

  He fretted over his decision to allow the woman to leave unmolested.

  But they had said Sam Durell was the prize.

  Nothing else mattered half so much.

  So, being only two men—he glanced sullenly at his sleeping partner—they had chosen not to chance losing Durell by taking the woman, who might have raised enough of an alarm to allow him to escape.

  A repeat of his getaway from the hotel would be un-permissible. There would be severe penalties.

  Something stirred in the heavy darkness of the slum, and the man glanced nervously about, his hand loosening the knot of his tie. A goat or chickens, he told himself. The gecekondu smelled like a latrine in a barnyard, he thought. He sat still in the darkness, and his strained red eyes watched the door of Durell’s hideout.

  Then two more cars parked behind the first, and a dozen men stood in the chill night, whispering. Not a light shone in either direction along the stony lane. Nothing stirred in this last hour before dawn.

  “Which one is it?” Sadettin asked. He spoke importantly. He was in charge now.

  The driver who had spent the night on the lane pointed. “That one up there with the lopsided door.”

  “How do you know?”

  The driver did not wish to admit that he had allowed Dara to pass, but there was no way around it. He shrugged and said: “Ablond woman came out of there.”

  “You allowed her to leave?”

  “She went the other way. It did not seem—” He was slapped and kicked on the shin. He did not object to that as particularly cruel. Discipline was discipline.

  “Let’s go and get him,” someone said.

  Another spoke up. “Be careful—remember what happened to Volkan.”

  “Volkan double-crossed us. He got what he deserved,” Sadettin growled.

  The black shadows moved quietly up either side of the lane. The men were nervous, excited. When Sadettin had stationed them to his satisfaction, he beckoned to one who carried a tin of gasoline. “Çok iyiim, very well, Adnan. Up on the roof. Pour it all over. Quickly.”

  “What if he doesn’t come out? He could be overcome by the smoke,” someone said.

  “Then he dies,” said Sadettin. />
  Dara had slipped out about four o’clock.

  Durell had been dimly aware of the warm lobe of her breast beneath a nylon slip as she had dragged herself with reluctant slowness from his chest. A faint shuffling of fabric came from across the room where she slipped into her clothing, her lithe movements quick to avoid the cold. The click of the doorlatch had snapped the dreamy fog of Durell’s dozing. He looked and she was gone. They had said nothing.

  Dead embers lay in the cold stove.

  Durell lay against a fading ghost of Dara’s slender warmth, not quite awake.

  Some time later he became aware of a sense of change. For a few long seconds he tossed irritably under the covers, his mind full of sleep. Then a waspish reek stung his nose, and alarms flared through him.

  Smoke!

  He lifted his eyes through a mist of searing fumes, comprehended the glare of fire that licked across the ceiling rafters, and his feet thudded against the floorboards. Sparks and flaming embers plummeted about him as he struggled into clothing that had dried and stiffened before the steel drum fireplace.

  He suspected the fire was no accident. There was no time to consider it further, if he wished to get out alive. The bed was ablaze now, and its straw mattress sent up suffocating clouds of dense gray smoke that stopped his breath and singed his lungs. The place threatened to go up like kindling, floor, ceiling, and cabinets bursting into flame as the torrid air screamed and crackled.

  Durell choked and coughed, sweated and stung in the hard, fierce glare as he held back another instant to toe into his shoes. And then he burst into the shock of cold night, pistol raised and ready.

  He glimpsed a dark motion to his left, cut the other way, heard a cry.

  Sadettin and another blocked his way.

  Sadettin died in a heap, his brains scrambled by a slug from the .45.

  A flicker of urgent footsteps, the flare of a yell, and heels slammed into Durell from above. He went down without seeing the man who had jumped him, his gun spinning through the air, his right shoulder numb. His knees struck the earth, and others piled on. He tried to say something about surrender, but it came out a pained gurgling as a forearm crossed his throat and crushed back his voice. He twisted, reached back, clutched a handful of greasy hair. Then something exploded behind his eyes, and he was sucked into darkness.