“You’re going home. Stateside. Back for reassignment by McFee.”
“No, sir.”
“We can’t afford to have a field agent like you jumped on by the press, Sam. If the newspapers got to you—"
“You could cover that.”
“I must tell you that I’ve given definite orders covering the sort of work you’re to be permitted to do with Internal Security. Last night could have been a disaster. General McFee considers you too valuable in your field to be exposed to the public in these matters. I know how you feel, Cajun. It’s never pleasant to know you’ve been working with men ready to betray you. Wilderman seems unaffected by this sort of thing—he seems to expect it, in this business—but it bothers me as much as it bothers you. But it’s my field, and it can’t be denied. You’re out of the ballgame.”
“Then I’ll do it myself,” Durell said.
“You can’t.”
“I’ve got the girl.”
“We can handle her.”
“She knows something. Something about the unicorns. They know she knows it, but she herself isn’t aware of her knowledge.” Durell’s words were quiet but urgent.
“You’ll never get it out of her. I think I can. Maybe I’m the only one who can.”
Meecham looked at him. “Is your relationship with Maggie Donaldson such a personal one?”
“Somewhat. We—”
“You’ve made love to her already?”
“In Rome, yes. She’s alienated now because she thinks I killed Rasmussen needlessly. Recklessly. She knew him once, back in college. I can bring her out of that, now that you’ve told me about LeChaux.”
Meecham said dubiously, “She’s a drug addict, or she was. Which indicates a rather large area of irresponsibility. She cannot be trusted. She could even be a plant.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve thought of that, too.”
“You’ve grown attached to her?”
“No. Yes. Maybe.”
Meecham did not smile. “Someone is out to destroy us, deliberately choosing K Section as the target. They’re aiming for our heart, Cajun. It cannot rest simply on your amorous relationship with Maggie Donaldson.”
“It’s not—” Durell checked himself. He suddenly felt the strength in Meecham, the knowledge that John Meecham was one of the most powerful men in Washington. “It’s not just the girl.”
“Then what is it?”
“There is the drug. I am sure they’re using a drug. I want to check that out. And there is the medallion. The unicorn coin they were wearing, as if it were a badge of identification. All these men are trained as expert killers, assassins, bank robbers, drivers, you name it. Their skills seem to be heightened abnormally. It’s not natural. It seems to make them—”
“Supermen?” Meecham interrupted wryly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Nonsense.”
“They’ve performed seemingly impossible feats.”
Meecham said, “They are elite, highly trained mercenaries. Employed by someone. Someone who knows all about K Section and the ISB. Someone who wants to destroy us. Experts. Honed to a fine efficiency. Nothing more.”
“They behave abnormally,” Durell insisted.
Meecham was silent. They had walked back across the Rhone River and had taken small side streets to the Rue des Alpes and Cornavin Railroad Station. Meecham turned right, then right again. Durell watched the traffic. No one was following them. He did not see the gray Porsche. No one and no other car had appeared near them with any consistency. The wind was stronger, blowing the length of the lake, from Lausanne. The rain had stopped. The cold wind had blown away the mists hanging over the ancient city, this city of international money and politics and Swiss conservatism.
“There’s another avenue to investigate,” Durell began. “Aside from the way they’ve avoided hitting at our agency strings and instead struck directly at our Centrals, stolen our funds in transfer, killed several of our people. In every instance, there have been innocent bystanders killed.
Meecham swung his umbrella and did not reply.
Durell said, “I’d like to have the computers run down dossiers, if any, on all of these innocent victims.”
“Do you think there is a connection?”
“Everything that has happened has been carefully planned. To an extreme detail. Maybe the bystanders were included in the plan.”
“Far out,” said Meecham.
“May I use the computer files and check the read-outs?”
A passerby bumped into Meecham. Durell’s hand dropped into his pocket, wrapped itself around his gun. The passerby muttered apologies in Schweitzerdeutsch and hurried on. Durell’s hand felt sweaty on the gun.
“You’re jumpy, Cajun.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can rest and sleep on the plane.”
“You’re sending me back to the States?”
“You and Wolfe and the girl. God help me, you can operate out of the Fort. I think that would be best. Perhaps safest. I’ve cleared it with General McFee.” Meecham paused on the sidewalk outside the small stone apartment building that constituted the safe house. He looked up at the blank curtained windows. Then he reached into an inner pocket and took out an airline envelope. “Here. Tickets for all three of you.”
“You knew all along, sir?”
“I wanted you to persuade me. You have.”
Meecham’s mouth twitched. “Wilderman will have orders to accommodate you. You look angry. I wasn’t toying with you. I wanted to hear your thoughts. You have the privilege of calling me whatever you wish.”
“Bastard,” Durell said.
They shook hands and parted.
26
No. 20 ANNAPOLIS STREET, headquarters for K Section of the CIA, was located in a modest graystone building whose brass address plates announced various import-export offices, several lobby firms, and governmental services of an innocuous nature. An innocent intruder would get as far as the main lobby, simple and rather shabby-looking, and be turned back with one excuse or another parrying his inquiries.
From one window in General Dickinson McFee’s office—den, you could see Pennsylvania Avenue and a corner of the White House. Washington was enjoying a bland Indian-summer day. Everything looked soft and misty in the golden autumnal light. The thin night, compounded of Potomac fog and smog, quietly nibbled with acid and moisture at the nation’s precious monuments. The White House, known to K Section as Sugar Cube, lay in quiet enthrallment to Washington’s web of bureaucracies, captive to the system that, like the proverbial juggernaut, kept rolling on toward undefined goals with a momentum and self-serving life of its own.
McFee‘s small den was in shadows. There was a red brick fireplace whose chimney was laddered on the inside and offered an escape hatch to the roofs. The place was scented with leather and the dim fragrance of cigar smoke, although McFee did not smoke. Durell listened to the elevator hiss softly shut at the end of the corridor and Dickinson McFee said, “Come in, Samuel, come in. How are you?”
“Fine, sir. Same as always.”
“No problems?”
“No, sir.”
“Any results with Miss Donaldson?”
“Some, sir.”
“Sit down, Samuel.”
Durell chose a small leather easy chair on the opposite side of McFee’s desk. There were scatterings of foreign newspaper cuttings, Russian, Chinese, French, Egyptian—Durell did not know how many languages the General read and spoke.
Dickinson McFee was a small man whose presence in any room or group of other men always seemed enormous. He had a predilection for grays that went with his hair and eyes; his conservative suit, shirt and necktie were gray of various shades. Durell sometimes thought that if a man’s soul had a color, McFee’s soul would be gray, too.
“Meecham says you have been handling yourself very well. Wilderman is not so enthusiastic. You seem to have ticked Wilderman off. But then, no one cares much for Internal Security, including m
yself. A necessary evil, they say. A result of Congressional watchdog wisdom. Well, perhaps so. One’s attitude toward the ISB is a direct result of one’s conscience. They are rather annoyingly independent of control, however.”
“Yes, sir,” Durell said, and waited.
McFee’s neat gray head turned aside toward the window which gave upon the view of Pennsylvania Avenue. “We have a problem, of course. You and I and perhaps two others are fully aware of its scope. K Section’s defenses have been infiltrated. Breached. Broken. Without intelligence, this nation is like a blind giant staggering about in a locked room full of sly, quick assassins.”
Durell waited again. He knew that McFee would get around to making his point soon.
McFee said, “I have been accused of being too powerful and independent here in Washington. Not quite so. The Internal Security Bureau is too big. In the years since it was established by the preceding Secretary, it has superseded every other intelligence agency in the country, including the FBI. The very nature of its mandate gave it options for independent activity that have grown much too dangerously. Its name is a contradiction. ‘Internal Security’ refers not to domestic intelligence, but to security within every other data-gathering agency that’s been established.”
McFee swung about in his swivel chair in the quiet den and picked up his blackthorn stick, waggled it slightly. “Your first loyalty, above all, is to me, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
McFee sighed. “I knew Hugh Donaldson a long time ago. Back in the old days of the OSS. Before your time, I really think. What is his daughter like?”
“An ex-junkie.”
“You lack compassion. Are you taking good care of her? Got her in one of your safe houses now?”
“No, sir. We don’t have any safe houses any more. I have to operate under the assumption that K Section has been blown sky-high. No place is safe. But Wolfe is with her.”
McFee almost smiled. “Have you laid this girl, Samuel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“True Durell tradition. But you haven’t gotten what you want from her, as yet?"
“I’m getting there, General.”
“I gather from John Meecham that you have several excellent ideas as to what should be done, Samuel.”
“Some leads, yes.”
“I have others working on it, of course.” McFee looked thoughtful. “I told you, we are blind until we find out who is worming into K Section. And even the ISB. We can’t afford to be blind among the assassins out there.”
McFee looked again at the window, and his voice was deeper, showing anxiety for one of the rare moments since Durell had known him. “I want it stopped. As of now. Immediately, if not sooner. We can trust no one. Not even me. Not even yourself. I’ll clear the decks for you. Ostensibly, you will be working in Internal Security for a time. Under Meecham’s and Wilderman’s orders. But you will be my man, mine only, in that mare’s nest of hypocrisy, double-dealing, hypochondria, murder and mayhem. Use the girl. Use anyone. Watch Wolfe, of course. A strange man. We have a big scene coming up, a conference on an international scale to be held on Mattatuck Island off the coast of Maine. You know it, of course.”
Durell’s face was without expression. “Yes sir, very “Yes. Well, that’s for the future. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be blind then.”
“How long are you giving me, sir? How much time?”
“None at all.”
“Do I have a free hand?”
“Yes, but don‘t show it. Not unless you absolutely have to. The silvery-haired head turned sharply back to Durell, then tilted to rest against the back of the leather desk chair.
“Yes, sir,” Durell said.
27
THE FORT, from outward appearances, was merely a collection of rather shabby beachside cottages on the Atlantic side of the Eastern Shore. Weatherbeaten, tilted on stilts, surrounded by a wilderness of dunes and marsh grasses, it seemed singularly unattractive. No more than a score of the cottages existed, connected by ill-kept paths and dune-buggy roads, and the for-rent and for-sale signs were faded by sun, wind, and scouring of the blowing sand until they were all but illegible.
Although it could not be noticed from the landward side or the air, an elaborate system of barbed-wire fences, electrified wires, heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision scopes and trigger alarms surrounded the perimeter of the desolate little colony in triple depth. An old wooden lighthouse served as command headquarters for the defenses. There were guards and dogs posted around the clock, although the guards seemed like sluggish vacationers idling about the dunes or surf-casting fishermen who never had any luck.
The road that approached from the west, branching inconspicuously from the main highways that pipelined tourists north and south, seemed to die in the dunes some distance from the nearest visible cottage. There were a few warning signs. Private. No Trespassing. Keep Out.
The Fort really existed underground. From certain of the cottages, hatchways in the floor led to concrete steps going down into a hidden labyrinth of corridors, offices, filing compartments, laboratories, and the computer known as the Beast. Because of the low elevation of the land above sea level, pumps were constantly needed and air conditioning was mandatory to keep the atmosphere reasonably dry. No expense had been spared. Everything was aimed to make the Fort a viable, hidden underground community of at least fifty times more people than had been assigned to occupy the above-ground cottages. There were living quarters, garages whose exit ramps came up through the rickety attachments to the cottages, and vehicles camouflaged as milk, bread and telephone trucks. There were soft lights, pastel colors, fine wood paneling on office walls and doors. There was a canteen, a rather elegant executive dining room, private conference offices, briefing halls. Microphotographic files kept the need for space to a minimum. The worldwide radio network operated through the tall wooden lighthouse on the beach, which in turn relayed through Andrews Air Force Base. For most of those who labored in ISB‘s Fort, time was artificially controlled by the dimming of lights to simulate sunrise and sunset. The Internal Security Bureau under Enoch Wilderman’s original guidance had done itself proud, making reasonably efficient use of its yearly growing budget.
The place had all the comforts of home.
Durell’s plastic pass, slid into a slot in an ID device, gave him access to most of the Fort’s combinations. His fingerprints were matched, his picture was taken, and the door slid aside at the foot of the concrete steps leading from a hatchway in the cottage kitchen where Maggie and Wolfe slept. Durell made his way along the corridors and down the elevators to the medical laboratories.
Dr. Saul Sinberg was relatively young, small and slender, but with a sedentary belly hung over his loose slacks. Although prematurely bald, he sported a Rudolph Rassendale waxed mustache that curled up ferociously. His eyebrows were also luxuriously thick, coming to a point above brilliant dark eyes that regarded Durell with skeptical amusement. He wore a white medical coat over his undershirt and he kept shaking his head, getting up from behind his desk, pacing back and forth, and sitting down again.
“Impossible,” Dr. Sinberg said.
“But I saw them myself, Saul,” Durell insisted.
“It’s true that men under stress or panic or psychotic motivation can perform extraordinary feats of physical strength and stamina. But such men are wild and undisciplined and violently irrational.”
“These men were disciplined and rational,” Durell said.
“And you think they were under the influence of some kind of superdrug?”
“Yes.”
“No such thing.”
“I’m certain of it,” Durell insisted.
Saul Sinberg scrubbed fingers through his bristly eyebrows. He looked suspiciously at Durell with bright black eyes. There was nothing stupid or dull about him. “Did Wilderman send you to quiz me, Sam?”
“No, it’s my own hunch.”
“That son of a bitch.”
&nb
sp; “Is he here at the Fort?” Durell asked.
“He’s here. He left word with Nancy that as soon as you’re finished with me, you’re to go see him.”
“About the drug,” Durell urged.
“No such thing. Believe me, Sam.”
“But is it a possibility?”
Dr. Sinberg flung himself into his chair. Under his white medical coat, thick wiry hair pushed up above his undershirt. “Well, let’s see. There’s dopamine, of course. Trade name is Inotropin. This chemical is the immediate forerunner of norepinephrine, which in turn is the immediate precursor of epinephrine, which is adrenalin. Found in the peripheral nerves and in the adrenal gland, of course, as well as in the central nervous system—the brain and brainstem and spinal cord. There appear to be specific receptor sites for dopamine in the brain, brainstem, heart, blood vessels—with particular effects on the renal blood supply. It has the ability to increase cardiac output without increasing cardiac oxygen consumption. The significance of that is obvious.”
“You’re on the right track,” Durell said.
“Don’t get your hopes up. This effect is related to the dosage, and with increasing doses, the increase in peripheral resistance caused by blood-vessel constriction nullifies the effect. In short, the more you administer the stuff to the subject, the quicker the curve of cardiac efficiency descends. Its basic use is in shock treatment. Toxic, hemorrhagic, or traumatic. It seems to be superior to other catecholamines—epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine are labeled as catecholamines, Sam—in certain situations, primarily because it increases blood flow to the kidneys and viscera preferentially to the patient in shock. These assassins of yours with such splendid and extraordinary superpowers were hardly in shock, hey?”
“No,” Durell said.
“Well.” Saul Sinberg clicked his tongue and yawned.
“The central nervous system physiology of dopamine is not clearly elucidated, I’m afraid. We have a medication called L-dopa used extensively in Parkinsonism, a neurological disease of the aged. The L-dopa effects changes in the metabolism of the basal ganglia, the area of apparent malfunction in this disease. But that’s not very helpful to you, Cajun. One could hypothesize a new catecholamine, however; or a false metabolic precursor of these substances which, when administered, caused a new catecholamine to be produced. This could have wide effects on central nervous system activity—reasoning, co-ordination, acuity, perception, et cetera—as well as peripheral effects on the life-supporting viscera, which might increase strength and endurance far beyond the norm. Ergo, a superdrug. But your options are myriad. I’m sorry, Sam. I never heard of such a development anywhere. There just ain’t no such critter.”
Assignment Unicorn Page 10