Assignment Unicorn

by Edward S. Aarons

  Too late, he saw that Rasmussen had been right. There was a wall of white snow just beyond the barriers where rocks and ice had tumbled down from somewhere high above on the mountainside and blocked the road. Even then, Durell did not think it was either accident or coincidence.

  They hit the barrier with a crash. Boards and pipe stands flew through the air. Something hit the windshield and starred the glass and spread in a quick crackle of small opaque breaks that looked as if the glass had suddenly become wet. The Mercedes jolted, skidded to the right, fishtailed. Durell fought the wheel, went into a long slide sidewise, and the car bounced off the guardrail, slewed toward the rock wall, and slammed forward at the vast tongue of snow and boulders that blocked their way. There was no way to check the car’s forward momentum. Behind them, he thought he heard the crack of a gun and saw the pursuing car’s headlights flare in the rear-vision mirror, bathing the Mercedes’ interior in a sweep of brilliance. The wheel jerked and jumped out of his hands. The slope of loose snow over the road loomed up ahead, and then they plowed into it with a heavy, solid thud.

  The engine died. Durell cut the ignition switch. There were thuds and clunks and rapping noises as small stones and clods of snow fell on the half-buried car. Durell tried to force his door open. It would not budge. Rasmussen grunted and pushed the door outward on his side, far enough to squeeze his bulk through. He vanished, floundering in snow that hissed and flowed down over him. Durell shoved desperately at his door again, gained a few inches, pushed once more, and squeezed out.

  “Maggie? Maggie, are you all right?”

  “Y-yes. I think so. Sam—”

  “Wolfe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Banged my noggin.”

  “Bring your gun,” Durell said.

  It was neatly arranged, Durell thought. The Mercedes could be pushed over the edge of the road, after the cash was removed, and it would go over the precipice and down a thousand feet to bury itself in the tongue of the avalanche below, not to be found until spring came once again to Les Diablerets. He felt a sudden rage and took out his handgun. The air was bitterly cold. The icy wind that blew down from the top of the pass made it worse. The stars were as hard as diamonds. The moon was behind the looming peaks of the Diablerets.

  “Rasmussen?” Durell called.

  There was no answer.

  20

  RASMUSSEN felt good. It was coming through to him now, rippling along his back, spreading outward to his arms and shoulders and legs, surges of power that brought a sense of delight to his purely physical being. He did not feel the cold. After sliding ten feet down through the snow on the slope, away from the Mercedes, his booted feet hit rock and he checked himself. Snow continued to hiss and flow around him, piling up around his shoulders, pushing him downward toward the edge of the precipice. He felt no fear. Exultation leaped in his chest and he drew in deep breaths of the thinly oxygenated air. When he looked back at the car that had been following them—a gray Rolls—and the guards at the smashed barrier, he felt an excitation beyond control. He didn’t need them, really. He could do it all alone. Nothing was impossible.

  The girl, he thought.

  The girl first. Then the money.

  The girl had intrigued him from the moment he had first clapped eyes on her. A shock of surprise, of course. The same old Maggie. A tall woman, a man’s woman. Just what he had been hoping for. Nothing at all like the skinny pig he had been shacked up with in Czecho, while working Faraday’s string in Prague. He couldn’t even remember that one’s name now. Later there had been Corinne, in Paris, who had worked out of Joshua Strawbridge’s Finance Section for K Section. She had talked a lot and had been useful, and because of her he had been moved up and finally made it to this job. He was going to enjoy this. They were all stupid. It was funny how stupid they all were. How slowly they moved, how carelessly, with poor reflexes and puny reaction time and flabby bodies. He was proud of his own physique, of the swelling, powerful biceps, the long pistonlike legs that could run endlessly at top speed, of the power in his big hands. His hands were like hatchets or talons, whichever way he chose to use them.

  Yes, he felt good. There would be no problems. Afterward, he would enjoy getting to know Maggie all over again. LeChaux’s wife had been a hot enough number, well versed in the arts and tricks of love. Lily had been eager, even rapacious, in her perversions. He had enjoyed special twists of pleasure in turning tricks with her in LeChaux’s own bed. Poor LeChaux. A comic. A stumblebum from the bayous. The cuckold. Lily had given him the key to LeChaux’s apartment, of course. It was easy enough to wait for LeChaux there, to wait in the predawn dark, with Lily sleeping restlessly, never sated, claiming to be not quite satisfied, always moaning for more, more and more. LeChaux came in innocently enough. He had headed straight for the bathroom. LeChaux’s kidneys were giving him trouble, and he had kept that from K Section’s medical officer at Zurich Central; but Lily had mentioned it, the frequency and burning LeChaux complained of so often, so Rasmussen had given him the case of “ptomaine” right there in the bathroom. The knife had gone into LeChaux’s gut like cheese. Then he had ripped it sideways and upward. The stink was quite impressive. LeChaux had folded over the toilet with a single low moan of surprise, of denial that this was his own blood and guts and crap spilling into the toilet bowl.

  All this went through Rasmussen’s mind with the speed of electronic computer relays.

  Maggie, he thought again.

  With Maggie Donaldson it would be different.

  Strength flowed down his back, his belly, into his groin. His booted feet gripped the snowbank, drove him upward toward the half-buried car. The tail car had stopped at the barricades, headlights flaring. The others were spilling out of it and running forward with the peculiar speed and drive that Rasmussen knew well. He felt wonderful. Durell was on the other side of the Mercedes, struggling for secure footing in the avalanche snow. Wolfe had gotten out of the back and was helping the girl. They were on this side of the car. Wolfe turned and looked at him as he came back up the snowy edge of the road; the man’s head seemed to sink into his shoulders, swinging from side to side slightly like a cornered bear seeking his enemies. Rasmussen swiped him with his arm and drove Wolfe aside like a straw man. Wolfe grunted and went down, his face bleeding. The blood looked black in the headlight glare of the car behind them. The girl was just getting out of the back of the Mercedes, her long right leg extended from the doorway. Rasmussen’s lips skinned back against his teeth. The cold air was like tonic to his lungs. He saw the girl’s face change when she looked at him, and at the last moment she gave a short cry and tried to draw back into the car. He caught her gloved hand and pulled hard. He used too much strength. The girl screamed in pain.

  “Maggie, come on,” he said.

  “Get away from me!"

  "Maggie—"

  She was too big a girl to be handled easily. But Rasmussen felt he could do anything. He pulled her out of the car with a single yank and she stumbled past him to fall into the snowbank. He heard the other men shouting, but paid no attention to them. Durell was coming around the back of the wrecked Mercedes; he seemed to be moving as if under water, in slow motion. Durell shouted something, calling to him to let the girl go. He saw the .38 in Durell’s hand, coming up. Plenty of time. Nothing could hurt him. Maggie floundered, trying to get to her feet. He still kept his grip on her. He swung her up lightly, without feeling the effort that cracked the muscles of his shoulders and back. Her fists were feathers on his chest. He grinned at her. They were all so slow, so slow.

  “Don’t worry, Maggie. It’s for your own good, baby. Your own good.”

  He had to turn away from her then because Durell had finally come around the back of the car and was within reach. Rasmussen dumped the girl, laughed, and grabbed for him. But Durell’s gun was up now, and Rasmussen saw the spurt of flame from the muzzle, felt the shock as the bullet tore into his arm. He felt no
pain. He knew now, however, that he had waited too long. The bullet smashed bone and muscle and tore away half his shoulder, but he did not feel it. He reached again for Durell, caught his free hand, pulled savagely. Durell went spinning off to his right, into the thick fluffy snow. At the same time, in slow motion, Rasmussen felt himself turning, knew it was the impact of the bullet he had taken. His feet went out from under him. Durell fired again. This time the .38 S&W was pointed directly at Rasmussen’s heart. Rasmussen’s chest blew apart from the heavy bullet, he heard a faraway roaring in his ears, saw his chest cavity open, and went down, denying the fact, denying everything in a tidal wave of blood and surprise, and floated away somewhere, watching the stars go out one by one.

  He felt betrayed.

  21

  "MAGGIE?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Help Wolfe.”

  “Was he—was Rasmussen one of them?”

  “Yes. Hurry, please.”

  Durell helped the girl as Wolfe climbed to his feet. Everything had happened fast; the others at the barricade and the men from the pursuing car were still some fifty yards away. There were at least half a dozen of them. They were coming on fast, running along the hard-packed snow on the road that remained between the broken barriers and the avalanche snow. Wolfe’s eyes under his beetling brows were dazed. Durell caught the girl’s hand, pulling her toward the edge of the road. In the starlight and the white reflection of the other car’s head beams, he saw the sharp, precipitous drop, the tumbled jumble of the snowfall going down the incline into the valley. A dark mass of conifers had broken the avalanche’s slide, about two hundred feet down. There was no other place to go.

  “Come on.”

  Wolfe’s heavy Magnum hammered as the big man squeezed off two shots at the oncoming men. One of them went down and stayed down. Another spun about, fell, called something, got up and came running forward again, on a leg that was surely broken. Durell jumped off the side of the road into the snow, holding Maggie’s hand. They both landed deeply, with a thudding impact, and then slid downward, on and on, in a swift, thundering rush of snow that carried them with it. Wolfe followed. Durell heard their pursuers shouting to one another. The sound was drowned out by the rumbling thunder of their slide. The mass of dark trees below came rushing upward with terrifying speed. Durell kept his grip on the gun with one hand, on Maggie with the other. The trees rushed toward them. There were broken limbs mixed with the snow now, branches and trunks that had been snapped off with the first impact of the avalanche. Something hit Durell in the chest, knocked the breath out of him; he lost his grip on Maggie, lost his sense of orientation as the wave of snow he rode downward turned him over. He could not tell up from down. Everything went dark. He knew he was still falling with the snow, and felt a jolting pain in his shoulder as he struck a tree, felt another one across his left thigh. The rumbling, hissing roar of the snowfall began to ease. Durell struggled and thrashed about. He still could see nothing. Finally he felt himself come to a halt with his back against a tree, his legs upward in the air. He fought his way erect, flailing his arms. Snow was in his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He dashed it away. He could still see nothing. He struggled some more, feeling one leg pinioned under a heavy, wet weight. At last there was a glimmer of light. Stars. He opened his mouth to shout.

  “Maggie?”

  Her voice sounded stifled. “Here.”

  “Wolfe?”

  No answer.

  He saw lights high above. Flashlights, the beams of the car that had followed them from Gstaad. Dark figures moved around the Mercedes, tearing it apart, ripping out the back seat. He heard shots. He saw one figure clearly, peering down from the edge of the slope, looking for them.

  Maggie came crawling toward him over the snow.

  In the starlight, she looked as if she were crying.

  “Sam? Sam?”

  “I’m all right. I think.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” she whimpered.

  “Do you good. But don’t make too much noise.”

  The cold Alpine wind soughed through the evergreens above them. The snow had carried them almost through the little wood. Moonlight touched the other side of the valley. He saw a few lights, the crawling beams of a car.

  “Come along,” he said.

  “Where is Wolfe?”

  “Come on.”

  But something loomed up suddenly among the trees, staggering, floundering about in the hip-deep snow. Wolfe’s bearlike figure was unmistakable. He held his head in both hands and wobbled about as if blind. Maggie got up and thrashed toward him. Durell kept watching the men high up on the lip of the road. They had gotten the back seat out of the Mercedes and removed the steel case with the money in it. Maybe it would satisfy them. He hoped so. Maybe they thought he and Maggie and Wolfe were dead down here. There were still one or two of them peering down from the edge of the road. He shivered suddenly, thinking of Rasmussen’s incredible strength, the man’s single-minded purpose and drive. He had felt fear then, of a sort that was unreasoning and almost beyond control. It was as if he had brushed against something beyond the norm, almost supernatural, reducing him to a kind of helpless being, incapable of coping with abnormal forces bent on his destruction.

  Wolfe and Maggie staggered back through the snow under the trees.

  “Are you all right?” Durell asked.

  “No thanks to you, you son of a bitch,” Wolfe growled. One side of his face was abraded and bloody. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” Durell said,

  “We’ll freeze to death standing here.”

  “Better that than being torn apart,” Durell said.

  Wolfe looked thoughtful. “Yeah, there’s that. Can we slip down through these trees and get to that road over there?”

  “The moonlight will show us up.” Durell looked down over the snowy expanse of the mountain slope below. “We’ll have to wait until they’re gone.”

  “They’re taking the money,” Wolfe objected.

  “Let them have it.”

  Wolfe sighed. His breath made a cloud of vapor in the crystalline air.

  The wind blew a little harder through the trees. The snow was quiet now, not moving. Below them, it was untracked, unmarred. It would be another hour before the moon was fully hidden behind Les Diablerets. Except for the soughing of the wind, the occasional thud of snow falling from the evergreen branches in soft clods, there was no sound. There was a ringing in Durell’s ears, and he ascribed it to the altitude. He estimated it would be a three-hour descent into the valley and up the other side, where the small road wound through a cluster of chalets.

  Up above they were carrying Rasmussen’s body away, toward the Rolls Royce. He looked at Wolfe’s broad back. Wolfe did not turn his gaze from watching the men on the road.

  Maggie moved closer to Durell. Her face was as cold as the white, tumbled drifts around them. “You shot him. Just like that.”

  “I shot him,” said Durell. “But hardly just like that. It was him or me. Or you.”

  Maggie said, “I don’t really know you, do I?”

  After a pause, she said, “What did you mean, he was after you and me?”

  “Me, to kill. You, to take away. The other part of their target, aside from the money. You, Maggie.”

  “Why me?”

  “Can’t you tell me’!

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Maggie said.

  “It must,” Durell said.

  “Nothing makes sense.”

  “It will.”

  22

  AT MIDNIGHT the Banque Jacques Eaux-Vives on the little side street off the Rue de Monthoux, halfway between Cornavin Station and the Quai du Mont-Blanc, was wrapped in an exclusive silence and security. It was a private establishment, next to an equally exclusive apartment house that towered over the bank building by four floors. The institution served as a drop and payout station for K Section funds fed into various strings of agents scattered through Central Europe behin
d the Curtain. The upper floors, above the subterranean vaults, served as control centers for the agency’s mandated activities.

  The bank was a simple, slab-sided building with very little architectural adornment. The front entrance was protected by a steel grill and detection devices, as were the tall, narrow, barred windows. All of the windows on all four floors were similarly barred and protected. The underground vault and Record Room, for M. Eaux-Vive’s clients, was as electronically burglar-proof as man’s ingenuity and sophistication could make them.

  The banker lived in the fourth-floor penthouse. At midnight he was entertaining Mr. Sulaki Madragaffi, the Deputy Minister of his African country’s mission to the United Nations functioning in the old League of Nations Palace set in its grand park off the Lake of Geneva. They were drinking brandy and bitter coffee grown on the mountainsides of Madragaffi’s small black nation. Sulaki wore his national costume even now, although he really preferred Western clothes for comfort; he felt that the gaudy striped robe and ornate headdress was a badge of independence from the white man’s culture, and it had to be exhibited on every possible occasion, especially one like this, when he was tentatively beginning to bargain for a private loan from the Banque Jacques Eaux-Vives for his country’s security forces.

  M. Eaux-Vives was aware of the time. He knew the payments were due from Zurich this night, and he was ready to press the buttons that would roll up the underground doors for the car to enter the building.

  They came down from the apartment tower’s roof, four floors above the bank. There were four of them. They used grappling hooks and half-inch steel and nylon lines, and they were swift and silent, making their descent with an expertise that any Alpine climber would have envied. Their actions seemed to be without effort. They wore identical jumpsuits and sneakers and had short-barreled Swiss automatic rifles slung over their backs. Their faces were anonymous, shadowed by the night. Beyond the west shore of the lake and the steamer docks, the clear night sky that now prevailed gave a distant glimpse of Mont Blanc and a clear view of the hill of the old city, once dominated by a Roman fortress and now crowned by the spires of St. Peter’s cathedral. None of the four men was interested in the view of John Calvin’s city, with its narrow cobblestoned streets and ramps leading up from the Pont de l’Isle in the Rhone River. There was a predatory quality in the way the quartet moved, a single-minded purpose. Their teamwork was impeccable. The subsequent swings outward from the apartment building to the bank’s roof, across the mews, were nothing short of Olympic. One by one they made it, clinging to the steel fence with its downward-curving spikes like flies. No security man would have thought it possible. The leader took a small box from the capacious pockets of his jumpsuit and set about negating the alarm triggers on the fence. The others clung there, motionless, for an interval beyond human endurance. There were small clicks, snapping sounds. The wave of an arm. Then they swarmed over and onto the roof.