The south terrace of the palace was open to the hillside, above the winding road that climbed beyond to the soaring white cube of the Palingpon International. A wall protected the lower lawns and shrubbery from passing traffic, and the wall was over twelve feet high and topped with spikes and barbs and electronic warning devices. Still, the terrace was open to the sun and the cooling breeze that blew eastward from the Straits, shaded by umbrellas and a line of tall bamboo on one side, with a giant old rubber tree just between the terrace and the highway wall.
Hugh Donaldson was an old Far East hand. There had been a time, during the Cold War, when he had run a string of networks up through British Malaysia, when the Communists there first began sharpening their tactics for guerrilla warfare; he had run his people out of Kuala Lumpur, in the days when anything went and cash was unlimited. His cover then had been as a rubber planter, the odd man out among the colonial British who had been in the plantation business for several generations before. His other networks later ran through Indonesia during the Sukarno years, and finally into French Indo-China, where he was covered as an import-export man and also handled foreign aid. When the French left after Dien Bien Phu and turmoil followed, before the U.S. blundered into its own agony in South Vietnam, Donaldson had quite properly headed detachments of Green Berets among the hill people and afterward enjoyed certain privileges as adviser to Saigon’s GGK, the intelligence apparatus designed to help check the tide of matériel flowing south along Uncle Ho’s jungle trail from Hanoi.
Donaldson had grown old in the business.
The dossiers that Durell had seen back at No. 20 Annapolis Street, headquarters for K Section in D.C., also indicated that Hugh Donaldson had grown rich.
K Section was still troubleshooting Donaldson’s varied missions, but because Donaldson was now like a weary old bull buffalo, he was given the job of K Section Central officer at Palingpon, which seemed peaceful and cooperative enough.
But maybe Donaldson, shaggy and near extinction like the buffalo he resembled, was doing more than just keeping books on his coconut plantation over at Jikram Bo.
Maybe he was just an incidental victim of the premier’s assassination. Or maybe he was doing something that made someone want very much to kill him. In any case, he had been killed.
They came over the wall from the highway like a band of Malays running amok. What they did was incredible. With effortless ease they scaled the twelve-foot wall, barbed wire, spikes and all, and screamed up the bright-green lawn toward the terrace table, set for luncheon for Premier Shang and Hugh Donaldson, in the golden sunshine and restless breeze off the Straits. Their bloodiness made the red hibiscus shrubs look anemic. The two Palingpon Marine guards were cut down without a chance. A gardener, who was working on his knees at a flower bed near the wall, and who was probably one of Colonel Ko’s people, had his head lopped off with one stroke of a flashing parang. A maidservant coming toward the terrace was literally run over and trampled and kicked to death, her throat crushed, her ribs smashed. Some said there were a dozen assassins. Durell thought it unlikely. That many men debouching on the far side of the wall would have been noticed in time for a warning to be given.
However few their numbers, they made up for it in ferocity. They did not use their long knives on Shang or Donaldson. They literally tore both men apart at the luncheon table. The whole affair took place in an unbelievably short space of time. Shang and the bearded Donaldson were killed with bare hands and left as bloody, dismembered carcasses sprawled in the gentle shade of the bamboo hedge on the terrace.
There was a certain amount of screaming and shouting. One Palingpon Marine came to an upper window of the palace, saw what was happening, and fired a single shot that knocked down one of the attackers. The man fell, got up, and ran on again. On a broken leg. But he was unable to scale the wall, which the others did with extraordinary rapidity to make good their escape.
The wounded man was captured and subdued by eight Marines, who almost had to kill him to control his thrashing body.
Colonel Ko had the suspect in custody.
What had not yet reached the eager press was the fact that at the same time the assassinations had taken place, another attack had been launched at Donaldson’s coconut plantation at Jikram Bo, twelve miles south of the city.
4
DURELL RENTED a car from the hotel agency and drove with Charley Lee to the plantation. They arrived a few minutes after two o’clock that afternoon.
A gray atmosphere shadowed the place. Durell took the trail that followed the coast, with its superb white beaches drenched in sunshine, crossing small wooden bridges over lazy, muddy streams that cut through the sandy level stretches. They passed several fishing villages, stilt houses built high above the muck along the river banks, thatched huts with roofs tilting up like the prows of the two-masted boats drawn up on the beach. At this hour, most of the boats were offshore, seining the turquoise waters. The sea was calm. Inland, the mountains of Palingpon, with tea terraces carved out of the slopes, looked lavender and black in the shadowed upland valleys. Along the shore, the land was flat and swampy for the most part, until it lifted slightly at the coconut plantation. The trees had been planted in long dusky rows that stretched out of sight, away from the quiet, debris-strewn beach. The sun did not penetrate to the ground here, and the earth was spongy and gray under the coconut fronds.
Charley Lee murmured, “Queer thing. Like it’s haunted."
Durell had already smelled the place before it came into sight. The rented car was a small Toyota, and they bounced badly on the rutted plantation trail.
Charley sniffed. “What is it?”
“Charred wood. Wet wood.”
“They didn’t say the place was burned.”
Durell drove over a rattling wooden bridge and the sea came into sight again, beyond a long promontory planted with more coconut palms in mathematically neat rows. On a small knoll was Hugh Donaldson’s plantation house.
One wing had been leveled by fire, but the recent rains must have checked the flames from spreading. The place stank, fouling the clean sea breeze. There were broad tire marks from the police car that had been here, but no sign of life at the moment.
Durell stopped the car fifty yards from the ruins. For a long moment, he simply studied the area. Then he took the .38 from his belt and stepped out and stood still again, smelling the charred wood and the occasional hint of the sea that blew through the miasmic smell. Sunlight flickered, dappling the trail ahead.
“Don’t slam the door,” he told Lee.
“Nobody is here. What’s the matter, Sam?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect something?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I don’t see anything wrong.”
“There’s plenty wrong,” Durell said.
He walked up the trail toward the plantation house. Nothing stirred except an occasional palm frond clacking in the wind. Then he heard the radio, dimly muffled from the interior of the ruined house. The veranda ran the width of the structure, which had a high thatched roof in the native style, almost like the original long houses of the natives who had suffered their tyrannical rajahs and exploiting colonial rulers. A chi-chi, a small red tree squirrel with enormous luminous eyes, suddenly screeched at them and scampered away across the gray shadowed earth. The door to the house, big teak panels with bronze hinges, stood open before him.
Donaldson had lived richly and well in this place. There were animal trophies on the paneled walls, a Malay tiger’s head above a huge fireplace—which obviously was rarely used except to get the damp out during the rainy season and fine Sheraton furniture copied in mahogany from English patterns. There were Khomsan rugs on the teak floor, and a huge mirrored bar against one wall, behind Empress wicker chairs and a long oval wicker table. The bar was well stocked. From the doorway, Durell could see his reflection and most of the room at an angle in the mirror behind the bar. A woman’s brightly c
olored samsur, a kind of scarf, was crumpled on the wicker table. A white cotton bra lay draped over the back of one of the Empress chairs. Durell lifted his gun a bit.
The wet smell of woodsmoke drifted in the wind.
The chi-chi had gone silent.
A tokay lizard moved along one of the rafters of the beamed ceiling, watching him.
He stepped inside.
This room was untouched. The destruction began in the hallway and went on from there.
It was as if a band of wild animals had gone on a rampage. Furniture was smashed, hangings ripped from the walls, mirrors broken, food smeared and hurled to the floor, windows broken. The kitchen was a shambles. The big room, facing the sea, was windowless now. The freezer doors had been left open and defrosted food dripped soggily everywhere.
And there was the blood.
Blood had been daubed on the table and lay in pools on the floor and was painted on the walls.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Charley Lee murmured.
“There were two servants,” Durell said.
“Killed?”
“Torn to pieces.”
“The bodies?”
“The police took them away,” Durell said.
“It’s crazy.”
“Not quite."
“What do you mean, not quite? It’s insane!”
Durell went through the other rooms on the first floor of the house. They were all alike with their mad wreckage. Insanity did not follow a pattern, he thought. He was not an expert on it, but he knew enough about aberrations to see a pattern in this, a method, however dim and distant it might be at the moment. He knew danger, too. He could smell it in the quiet, tropic air that moved through the vandalized house.
“Upstairs,” he said.
“What’s upstairs?” Lee asked.
“Donaldson’s Central office.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Two years ago. At Shang’s inauguration. Hugh Donaldson was our Control officer here, even then. Before his wife died. But I never met Mary.”
The upper floor was long and narrow and very hot, with slanted walls formed by the Dyak-style roof, like the interior beams of a ship’s inverted hull. The same ruinous pattern prevailed up here. There had been an air-conditioned office where Donaldson did his paperwork, but the machine was not working and Durell felt the sweat start out on his chest and back, trickling down across his belly and into his groin.
The wreckage was even worse here. Papers were strewn everywhere, the desk was overturned, the drawers emptied, the GK-12 transceiver radio, powerful enough to reach Hong Kong, smashed. More blood was daubed on the walls.
The safe was open. It was empty.
“Here it is,” Durell said.
“What?”
“This is what they came for,” Durell said.
“You’re giving me riddles now?” Lee complained.
“Donaldson had seventy thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ cash up here. We subsidized Colonel Ko annually. Actually, the cash was part of a grant, meant to supplement the Palingpon civil service—a small part of the grant—but we know it actually went to Colonel Ko’s KPK security forces.”
“That’s lousy,” Lee said.
“The Russians put in triple that amount for stability. The Chinese—well, we don’t know what the CPR gave to Ko. So we don’t know where Ko’s real loyalty lies. It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s still peanuts,” Lee said, with the typical bureaucrat’s contempt for public funds.
“It’s gone,” Durell said.
“Did Premier Shang have his hand in our pocket, too?”
“No. We’re reasonably sure of that.”
Charley Lee said, “Let’s get out of here. I’m suffocating. I think I’m going to vomit.”
At that moment, Durell heard the girl scream.
5
“YOU’RE not going out there,” Lee said. “I’ve got my job to do. You’re staying with me. And I'm not going out there, either. My job is to keep you in one piece, Sam.”
“I told you, I don‘t need a nursemaid.”
“I didn’t ask for it. The Embassy gave me such and such orders about you. I’ve got a wife, kids, career and pension to think about. I’m bringing you back in one piece.”
“You’re getting to be a pain in the ass, Lee,” Durell said quietly. His dark-blue eyes glowed in the dim interior light of the downstairs living room. He kept listening for the girl to scream again. But the gray gloom of the coconut trees outside was not disturbed by another sound. “I don’t want you with me anymore, Charley.”
“I can’t help that,” Lee said desperately.
“You’re not hearing me,” Durell said.
“Stay here. It’s a trick, that yell out there."
“Maybe.”
“So you’re willing to risk—”
“I have to,” Durell said.
“Not while I’m around.”
“All right.”
Charley Lee would not have had his job if he were not competent. Despite his short stature and little watermelon belly, he knew all the tricks of his trade; he was expert with handguns, he had been trained in every form of infighting, judo, karate and just plain dirty street brawling. His looks were therefore deceptive, his reactions faster than fast. Even while Durell swung to disarm him, he started to react, dropping the gun that appeared in his hand to lessen the effect of the chopping blow Durell delivered to his wrist. It was not enough, of course. Durell had been trained in an even dirtier business. He knew that Lee would not seriously damage him, since Lee was supposed to aid and protect him. But Durell had learned in his long years with K Section that nothing was to be taken for granted. He had seen too many men go over the wire, turning suddenly and murdering companions who trusted them. He wasn’t too sure about Charley Lee.
The other’s pistol clattered to the plank floor. Lee tried to twist away, and Durell hit him in the side of the neck and then drove him head first into the wall. Lee groaned and tried to screech a protest, and Durell hit him once more. The man slid to the floor, mouth agape, blood coming from his saddle nose.
“For God’s sake, Cajun—!”
“I don’t want you to get in my way again,” Durell said softly. “I’m sorry, Charley.”
Lee’s face changed. His normally bland, even naive, expression became one of sudden, undiluted hatred. His black almond eyes glittered with a lust for murder. Saliva and blood drooled from a corner of his mouth. His round glasses had been broken in the brief scuffle, but he didn't seem to need them.
“You murdering bastard—”
“I’ll send the police and a doctor for you," Durell said coldly.
“You’re as crazy as the bastards who came in here and chopped up this house,” Lee groaned.
Durell heard the girl scream again.
6
THE GLOOM beneath the neat rows of palm trees stretching to an infinite point made everything gray and colorless. The soil between the rows was soft and spongy, absorbing sound. Durell moved swiftly about a hundred paces inland from the plantation house, then paused in the deeper shadow next to the curved bole of one of the coconut palms. He held his .38 at waist level. He took a moment to shrug out of his white shirt, fold it, and put it on the soft ground. The earlier rain had made puddles here and there, and he used his left hand to daub his cheeks and forehead with mud. He removed his sunglasses to prevent any warning reflection to whomever was out here. The gray light was sullen and oppressive. The sea wind did not penetrate this far inland from the beach, and he felt the humid heat like a sodden blanket over him.
He had no idea where the girl was. He was not even certain it was a girl who had called for help. He tried to bring to mind the exact sounds, recalling the high pitch, trying to syllabize the voice into words. His impression was that the voice had called for help in English.
Two chi-chis watched him with their big luminous eyes, busily nibbling on some rotted vegetation under the coconut palms. D
urell breathed smoothly and easily. When he was ready, he moved quietly down between the rows of trees, following what seemed to be a trail that proceeded to the promontory beyond the house. There was a processing shed there, as he remembered from his last visit, where the nut meat was cut and chopped and canned. A donkey engine had provided the power then, and the Palingponese laborers who worked the plantation lived in a village just beyond the point, out of sight of the main house. He oriented himself in the gray gloom and headed that way.
Something moved through the shadows ahead of him, a ghost in the dimness, never quite clearly visible.
Durell followed.
He did not hear another scream.
The processing shed had a tin roof turned red with rust. Through wide double doors a narrow-gauge track led across the promontory to a pier where the product was shipped out by barge to the port of Palingpon for the freighters moored there. The coastal road was unfit for heavy truck transport. The narrow-gauge line was serviced by a tiny WDT shifter diesel, whose striped nose was thrust out between the doors that opened into the cavernous interior of the shed. Nobody was in sight. It was as if the attack on the plantation house the day before had driven every native worker into invisibility. A half-loaded flatcar stood on die tracks that ran lumpily across a jerry-built roadbed to the village pier, out of sight on the other side of the promontory. Donaldson’s business here, along with the other businesses he maintained, had been thriving.
The shadowy figure Durell had seen moments earlier had disappeared through the open double doors of the processing plant. Durell paused in the last aisle of trees. Whoever had drawn him here had done so deliberately; he had no doubt about it.
Nothing else happened.
He wondered if he had made a mistake putting Lee out of action.
Then he remembered the momentary transformation in the man’s face, and felt no regrets.
He stepped out from between the coconut palms, into the bright sunshine, and walked along the rusting narrow-gauge tracks toward the shed doors.
No screaming maniacs came tearing toward him.
Assignment Unicorn Page 2