And there was nothing. . . .
Chapter 16
Durell was freezing.
The arm that Alegra’s bullet had creased throbbed and stung.
He thought he was back at the monastery, where he’d been entombed in an icy dungeon.
He was fighting off rats, but he knew no matter how many he killed there would be more, and when he fell down exhausted—as sooner or later he must—they would eat him alive.
He dreamed that his arm hurt because one of them had gotten a hold of it with its teeth. He couldn’t shake it loose.
He heard voices, realized it was Caske and Brother Maurice, watching and laughing.
Helpless rage cut at him like jagged glass.
The rats bore him down and were overwhelming him. He felt their teeth cutting into his neck, chewing his muscle, but there were so many of them he couldn’t move. Their snouts were inside his gut, disembowling him.
He couldn’t breathe . . . suffocating!
He cried out!
"Merde! Ou est-il, donc?”
Who was speaking French? Durell came to his senses groggily. His head ached. He started to rub it, but his arm was hard to move, as if he were wrapped in a blanket—or buried. He gave up and lay there, his mind reeling. His mouth was full of something cold. He spat. He could see nothing.
Footsteps squeaked on cold snow nearby.
He felt he would freeze to death. His face was covered with snow. He listened and didn’t move. More voices came to him in muffled French—the police!
“I’m certain he came out through that window.”
“Well, he got away. We’ve lost him.”
“He must’ve had wings. Who could he have been? Surely not the murderer. ”
“Of course not. But why would he run? He knew something he didn’t want us to know. . . .”
The footsteps receded. They were leaving.
Durell shivered uncontrollably. Now he understood what had happened: The fall had knocked him out, and snow he’d dislodged from the roof had buried him in a minor avalanche.
He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious.
He waited a while longer, gritting his teeth. He had enough air to breath; the snow was loose. His face burned and his fingers ached, their tips numb.
He stayed where he was.
He heard nothing more, and still he waited. He had no way of knowing where the police were, or who might see him when he got up. But he dared not stay there too long, or he would freeze.
If he hadn’t tried to force Bernhard Caske’s hand, the police wouldn’t be after him. He could have told them he was one of Biner’s friends, or a relative. But he’d had to do what he’d done to Caske; he’d been compelled to seek whatever advantage he could against the doomsday threat that only he and a handful of others knew about.
The threat could become a horrible reality at any time . . . tomorrow . . . tonight!
He wriggled out of the snowbank, got onto his knees, and peered up and down the alley. The shadows seemed empty. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the window from which he had escaped. A head wearing a policeman’s cap moved across the light.
He brushed the snow out of his face, got his breath, stole quietly away.
His head hurt and his arm burned. He walked fast, trying to warm himself as he looked for a taxi. He was a fugitive from the Swiss and his own countrymen, but at least he’d got something for his efforts.
Mother Mary. If only he understood its significance.
What did it mean?
Of all that Biner might have told him, he’d chosen that. . . in the midst of the trauma of dying.
Had he been delirious? Did it mean anything at all?
What if he’d only been praying? Durell stopped in his tracks, appalled. What if Biner had taken his dying breath to call on the Virgin Mary!
He shook his head and continued to the Hotel Saleve, where he hoped to find Ronald Durso, now that he knew which side Durso was on.
This time he didn’t knock—but he found the door locked. From a small leather case he kept in his jacket pocket he selected a steel pick, inserted it in the keyhole and twisted the knob, pushing the door slowly open. He took out his gun and went in.
The room was a mess: The shattered vase was still scattered on the floor; the lamp table lay where Alegra had thrown it. Angry bullet holes stitched the wall and a sofa.
Durell touched the wound stiffening on his arm and grimaced. He pushed up his sleeve and checked it. He’d had worse.
They were gone. He knew it before he even looked in the closet. Sure enough, it was empty.
They had cleaned up their things and cleared out, Tina willingly or unwillingly.
He cursed, put away his revolver, and cursed again.
If Mother Mary meant anything, maybe Muncie would know. She was his last hope.
“Sam! He got away!” It was the first thing Muncie said.
“Wilson? How?”
Her eyes were apologetic. “The sheet must’ve been rotten. Look, he tore it right in two. I feel so stupid and useless.”
“You couldn’t have stopped him,” he told her.
“He just walked out. Laughed at me!”
“He’ll be back. How long ago?” He looked out the window.
“Five minutes, maybe ten. I don’t know.” She wrung her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Get your things,” he said. He was in a hurry to leave.
“I didn’t know whether to stay here or not, but I knew if I didn’t, you wouldn’t know where to find me.” She pulled on her coat.
“Let’s go,” he said. He glanced outside. “Uh-oh. He’s back with the troops.”
A black Mercedes had parked at the curb.
“Are you sure that’s him?” She was looking over his shoulder.
“Who else?” Durell suddenly felt very tired. Muncie looked at him with wide eyes, waiting to be told what to do. What could he say—run? They’d have her before she’d gone a block—she was too slow, too awkward in her high heels—and there was no place to hide.
He’d have to run and leave her. She’d spend a long time in jail—the U.S. government wouldn’t help her. But his mission came before any personal consideration.
“Muncie . . .” he began.
“Go ahead, Sam. Get out while you can.” She’d known what he was thinking.
He started to kiss her, but the noise of a car door closing drew his eyes outside again. His mouth tensed, and his hand went under his coat, bringing out the .38.
“Sam, you can’t use that on your own people!” Muncie said.
“Stay back from the door.”
“Isn’t it Wilson?”
“It’s him, all right—but I don’t think he’s with friends.” Wilson was between two men, being half dragged toward the front door. His head hung drunkenly from his shoulders.
Durell heard Russian spoken.
“He’s run afoul of the KGB,” Durell growled. “The sonofabitch told them where the safe house is.”
Muncie gasped. “What are we going to do?”
Before Durell could reply, there was a knock at the door. Speaking in English, a man called, “Mrs. Plettner? Open the door, please. We’re friends of Mr. Durell'. He’s had an accident.”
“They called him Mr. Durell,” Muncie said in bewilderment.
“Looks like somebody’s mixed up. Play along,” he told her. He signaled for her to open the door, but she shook her head in fright.
“Please let us in—you can trust us. Mr. Durell is seriously injured.” Then, in a hushed tone, Durell heard Russian spoken again. “Shall I force the door?”
“Nyet, you fool, you want to wake up the entire street?”
There was another knock, and Durell crossed to Muncie, pushing her to the door and turning the latch for her. He stepped back out of the way. “Speak to them,” he urged.
Nervously, she said, “Come in.”
The door swung back, covering him. He felt a draft of icy air and
heard the same voice. “So! Mrs. Plettner?”
“Yes. What happened?” He couldn’t see her. There came the shuffle of the Russians coming through the door, then the door swung back to close, showing two of them with their backs to him. One was holding Wilson up.
“I’m afraid,” one of them said, “that it was necessary for us to—how shall I say it?—convince Mr. Durell here of the necessity for telling us where to find you, Mrs. Plettner.”
“You beat him?” She sounded horrified.
“Had we known you were here when we picked him up on the street outside, it would have saved us considerable trouble— and him considerable pain. Forgive me. We are of the Komitet Gosudarstvennov Bezopasnosti.” He made a stiff little bow. “Do not be frightened. We have come to take you under Soviet protection.”
Muncie glanced helplessly toward Durell. The Russian saw it and started to turn. “Don’t move,” Durell snapped, but the man reached for a gun, perhaps betting that Durell would be indecisive.
He lost.
The roar of Durell’s gun shocked the ears in the confinement of the room. He felt the buck of the revolver and saw the Russian jerk up on his toes at the same instant. Everything seemed to stop for a lucid moment and he saw the man’s hard, sharp-beaked face, like that of a turtle, the jaw dropping with a hiss as the bullet splintered breastbone and shattered the heart.
The other agent released his grip on Wilson and spun toward Durell half a beat after the first, reaching behind him toward a belt holster. His face had the unhealthy blue pallor that spoke of bad lungs or a heart condition, and yellow tar coated his teeth as lips skinned back in a snarl.
Durell squeezed the trigger a second time.
The KGB man’s hateful eyes bulged with shock as the impacting slug smacked him over the left eyebrow and the back of his skull burst, spraying pink fluid and tissue.
A sound of revulsion came from deep in Muncie’s throat. Her tweed suit was splattered with gore.
Wilson lay on the floor looking around in a daze. His face was a mask of welts and bruises, his swollen lips crusted with blood, eyes nearly closed.
Durell remembered a third Russian when he heard the sound of glass breaking at the rear door.
He skipped to the kitchen entrance, from which he saw the man’s gloved hand reach through a broken pane and fumble with the latch. The Russian saw him, too—another pane spat shards of glass as snapped off a shot that missed.
Durell fired quickly, drilling the door, and saw a dark form slide down the glass and out of sight.
The gloved hand went limp in the broken pane, snagged above the doorknob.
Durell soaked a towel in hot water and sponged off Wilson’s face. He heard Muncie running water in the bathroom. “Wilson? Do you know who I am?”
Wilson hesitated. “Durell?”
“What happened?” He propped him up, still toweling the cuts and bruises.
“They thought I was you,” Wilson mumbled.
“Why?”
“Nuri—he told them where the safe house was. They were looking . . . for Mrs. Plettner. Knew she was with you somewhere.”
Durell was dubious. “Nuri wouldn’t tell them—where is he?”
Wilson nodded feebly. “He told them. They made him. Picked him up after following him from your hotel. They’d staked it out . . . looking for you. ” He took a couple of long breaths. “They bragged about it to me—killed him and threw him in the lake. They said they’d do the same to me.”
Durell threw the towel down, feeling sick and sad. Nuri had been a survivor; he’d thought Nuri would make it to retirement.
Wilson continued, his voice edged with pain. “They wouldn’t believe I wasn’t you,” he said. “They got here just as I was walking away. They threw me into the car and took me someplace . . . and beat me until I told them what they wanted to know. Really worked me over—I couldn’t take any more of that. I told them where to find Mrs. Plettner.”
“Calm down. We’ll get you medical attention. Muncie?” Durell guessed that a couple of minutes had passed since all the shooting. He reloaded his revolver, waiting for Muncie to come.
Her face was waxen beneath the tumbled curls of her hair, and there was an expression of self-imposed calm on her mouth. Her eyes shone like glass against the frosty pale of her skin. Patches of dark dampness splotched the places where she’d tried to clean her clothing.
He said, “They thought Wilson was me, because they caught him coming out of here—Nuri told them this was the safe house.”
She looked worried. “Is he—?”
“There’s nothing we can do for him.” Durell lowered his voice. “Put it out of your mind.”
“Is that so easy for you to do?” There was subdued anger in her reply.
“We’d better get out of here before the police come,” he told her. “We’ll drop Wilson off at the Cantonal Hospital.” He lifted Wilson, helping him off the floor.
“Ow! My shoulder!” Wilson whined.
Durell helped him down the steps to the Russian’s Mercedes. “Did they leave the keys in it?” he asked Muncie.
She checked. “We’re in luck,” she said.
He helped Wilson into the car. He could smell coal smoke in the crisp air, and the cold sunk icy teeth into his nose. No sign of police. Maybe the shots hadn't been heard. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was ten after two, dead of night. None of the windows in adjacent buildings had been turned on.
As they drove away, Wilson, sitting between him and Muncie, said, “You’re still out of line, Durell.”
He made no reply, concentrating instead on driving through the snowy streets.
“You’ll never get out of the country,” Wilson said. “If you don’t surrender to the consulate, Caske and the Swiss will have you for lunch.”
Durell said, “Didn’t tonight tell you anything?”
“Like what?”
“There’s more to this than Caske’s hurt feelings.”
“All I know is I was told to bring you back to the consulate several hours ago, and I still haven’t gone there with you. But I’m still trying.”
Muncie spoke up. “He saved your life.”
“I’m just following orders,” Wilson said.
Durell snorted, his eyes on the road. “A true bureaucrat. You’ll go far, Wilson.”
“What else should I do?”
Muncie said: “You could try to help us.”
“The two of you have embarrassed your country,” Wilson said. “I wouldn’t have been beat up in the first place, if it hadn’t been for you.” He sounded self-righteous.
They had arrived at the emergency entrance. White light shone through glass doors; a nurse walked past. “Let Mr. Wilson out, Muncie,” Durell said.
She got out and held the door of the car open, her breath shining in puffs.
Wilson said, “This is your last chance, Durell. If you don’t return to the consulate, you’re in real big trouble.”
Durell put his hand against the man’s shoulder and straightened his arm sharply, tumbling him out. “Goodbye, Wilson,” he said.
The last he saw as he drove away with Muncie, Wilson was reeling toward the emergency exit, holding his side. . . .
Chapter 17
“He had a point,” Muncie said.
“He was a pain in the ass,” Durell replied.
A brief smile played at the corners of her lips. “How are we going to get out of Switzerland without getting caught?” she asked.
“Just as important, where are we going?” Durell countered. He glanced into the rearview mirror.
“Back to America? What else can we do?”
Durell let it drop for the moment. He drove on, passing Renaissance-style buildings and a bluff that overlooked the university. They entered the picture-book Grand Rue, where buildings still remained that might have been visited by Calvin or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Turning left, he followed a dark side street where cobblestones made the Mercedes wriggle comfortably, like a
fat man having his back scratched.
He parked in front of a shuttered shop. A sign shaped like a clock hung over the entrance. The sidewalk was empty; the snow showed no footprints. In the street, two, maybe three cars had left curving trails since the snow had begun piling up.
Muncie came closely behind him as he climbed steps to the door and picked the lock.
Inside, he did not turn on the lights. He’d been here before. There was a narrow hallway with a W.C. on the left, stairs on the right, a closed door at the end. He stumbled over a pile of boxes, making his way to the door. Muncie was quiet, as if afraid someone would hear them. “Nuri lived alone,” he told her.
“So this is Nuri’s shop,” she said.
He got her through the door, closed it, then turned on a light. They were in a windowless space that led to descending stairs. “What are you going to do?” she wondered.
“You’ll see,” he told her. The cellar was stuffed with every kind of clock, all of them ticking at once. He turned on a fluorescent light. It flickered and hummed over a messy workbench covered with the clutter of a watchmaker’s trade.
He sat on the edge of the workbench and faced Muncie. “I need your help,” he said.
“I’ve tried . . .”
He waved for silence. “I don’t have to tell you again how important it is that I find Dr. Plettner, do I?”
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “What did Tina tell you?”
“She sent me to Theodore Biner. Ever hear of him?”
Muncie looked away nervously. “I—I may have. I don’t know. . . .”
“That's strange,” Durell said, “because he told Tina he was one of your husband’s best friends.”
“Why are you looking at me that way? Why have you changed?”
“Because I found you haven’t been leveling with me, and I don’t know what to do about it.” He looked at her with solemn eyes. “I need your help—you may be my last hope.”
“I’ve been helping,” she protested.
“But now you claim not to know a man who’s a close friend of your husband.” Durell crossed his legs, holding a knee and staring at her.
Her pretty chin jutted out. “If he’s such a good friend, what did he want with you?”
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