Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  Another Borah silence. Osman stood up and waddled to the window, wafting his perfume. I said suddenly:

  “M Street. Across the street from the Weather Bureau. In fifteen minutes.”

  Osman pounced on the phone. He dialed and said: “Suite 211.” Then he said: “Osman. Yes. Across the street from the Weather Bureau on M Street. Fifteen minutes. Yes. I understand.” He hung up and told me: “Colonel Azam as well. He has as much at stake as El Thamad.”

  “I like your odds.”

  “Effendi,” Osman said chidingly, “if what El Thamad wanted was your death I wouldn’t be here now. An assassin would be here in my place. Or rather, he would be oh his way out of Washington. You opened the door for me, didn’t you? You could have opened it as easily to an assassin. He could have shot you down.”

  I had my .44 Magnum in its clam-shell holster below my left armpit. I had Marianne’s Miniphon in my inside right breast pocket. This meeting was my idea. I had conned El Thamad into setting it up, hadn’t I? What I was getting was exactly what I had wanted. I could even take El Thamad’s insistence on a moving car as a hopeful sign: he didn’t want to use my place because it might have been bugged. If there was an element of risk, I was as dry behind the ears as he was.

  “Yallah,” I said in Arabic. Yallah means let’s go.

  Baki Osman led the way downstairs and outside. He had parked his car fifty feet up the street. There was a high fat moon, and in its light I saw a two-door sedan. I wasn’t wild about that. If I sat in back and there was trouble, I’d be in a box. If I sat in front next to Osman I’d have a door at my disposal, but I did not come complete with a set of eyes in the back of my head.

  I decided on the front seat. Baki Osman crowded the steering wheel with his big paunch and started driving. To my surprise, he handled the car with skill and even verve.

  In underworld argot, I realized a little bleakly, he would have made an excellent wheelman.

  26

  I WENT FOR A cigarette and pressed the button of the Miniphon ten minutes after El Thamad and Galib Azam climbed into the back seat of the car.

  “Inside the city limits,” I had told Osman. “And keep it down to twenty-five.”

  We drove on M Street to New Hampshire Avenue, and north to Du Pont Circle, and east off that to Mt. Vernon Square and the long straightaway of New York Avenue. Colonel Azam sat directly behind me and El Thamad sat behind the fat man. Neither of them seemed in any hurry to talk. It wasn’t until we reached New York Avenue that El Thamad said in his deep voice:

  “You are to be congratulated, Mr. Drum. I do not often misjudge a man as completely as I misjudged you.”

  That didn’t seem to call for an answer or the Miniphon. I held my silence and my hand.

  Galib Azam said: “That first night in Al Saydr, I took you for a typical loud-mouthed American who was beginning to regret the fact that he had left God’s Own Country.”

  No more talk for a while. El Thamad with his sepulchral voice and Colonel Azam with his cultivated Oxford accent seemed to be searching for an attitude. The sedan’s engine purred. We pursued our headlights through the dark, almost deserted street. On a week night Washington pulls in its sidewalks early.

  When we passed the turn-off to Griffith Stadium, El Thamad said: “You are working for whom?”

  That was when I reached for my cigarette. “What difference does it make?”

  “We have seen what you can do. We are impressed.”

  “Okay. Then let it go at that.”

  “I can’t. It interests me. Whoever you take your orders from is determined that we don’t testify before the AUC. I wasn’t aware that Motamar had such powerful enemies in your country.”

  “Who said anything about Motamar?” I said. “What the hell did you expect? Love and kisses?’ Three nights ago you sent a gunman to kill me.”

  “Three nights ago I didn’t know about you what I know now. Three nights ago you were a nobody who knew too much. If you are determined, Mr. Drum, please assure yourself I am more so. I have my position in Motamar at stake.”

  “Is that why you killed Dr. Capehart?”

  “I did not kill Dr. Capehart. Indeed, in Motamar he was being held under guard only as a formality. After all he was with Falcon Pasha when the Englishman surrendered.”

  I nudged the fat man. “You might as well drive me home,” I said. “Your pal in the back seat is talking like I’m a one-man press conference. That’s not what I came here for.”

  “No? Then for what?” Colonel Azam asked softly.

  “Drive me home,” I told the fat man again. “If you don’t lay your cards on the table, how can you expect me to?”

  I waited. I could almost feel the little spools winding in my pocket and the tape going around and around. El Thamad said:

  “If I killed Dr. Capehart, it was because he had to die. He knew what I had planned for the operating room in Qasr Tabuk.”

  “And Samia Falcon had to die too?”

  “The bomb plot. She also knew too much.”

  “So you hired a guy named Sailor Costain to do your dirty work for you. A punk named Greer to blast me with a shotgun, another punk to tamper with Dr. Capehart’s car, another to push Samia Falcon out of her hotel room window.”

  “I am speaking in suppositions. I said if.”

  I had almost enough to nail him, both here in the States and in Motamar. But I didn’t want it to sound as if I had put the words in his mouth. “Try talking in actualities,” I suggested.

  He backed off. “Suppositions are enough for tonight. Suppose, for example, that I thought on Monday you were a nobody who knew too much. Of course I would try to have you killed, as you say I did. Then suppose I learned you were not what you seemed. Suppose I learned there was a powerful group whose very existence I never dreamed of and that was determined to see my mission here fail, and that you were a member of that group.”

  “Look,” I said, “let’s get to the point before we reach Baltimore.”

  What we had reached was the overpass where concrete pillars raised New York Avenue above Brentwood Park and the railroad marshalling yards north of Union Station.

  “Powerful enemies can be powerful friends, Mr. Drum. I would offer to buy your friendship. Is it for sale?”

  “Keep playing,” I said after a pause. “I like the music.”

  I heard that odd sighing sound which was the El Thamad equivalent of laughter. He said nothing. Below us a train rumbled slowly by.

  “Make your offer,” I said.

  “That brings us back to where we started. You work for whom?”

  I thought I got what he was after then. He could try to buy me off, but what good would that do if I was just the hired help? As far as El Thamad was concerned, this was a take-me-to-your-leader meeting. I mulled that over and decided we had done too good a job conning him. He’d make his offer only to the big cheese himself—who, of course, didn’t exist.

  All that went through my mind in just a few seconds. I would either nail him or lose him on what I said next, I realized. And that was when I made my mistake. I said:

  “Nobody. I work for myself.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I work for myself.”

  “But I’ve seen the way you made the police, the Federal Bureau and even the State Department jump. Surely one man, a private investigator, couldn’t do that.”

  “It’s easy,” I said, and went on to show him how easy it was. I used to work for the Bureau, I said, and its alumni are scattered all over. Even more important, a guy in my position wouldn’t balk if a legend is built around his name, would he? I’d done a couple of undercover jobs for the State Department and for the CIA when they couldn’t use one of their own agents. I had the ears of a few influential Senators. Thanks to Marianne Baker, whose name I did not mention, I’d made the pages of a big circulation news magazine more than once. Washington is that kind of city: no one knew quite how to figure me and no one was taking any chan
ces. He wasn’t the first one to ask if I put in my time for some super-secret organization the General Accounting Office couldn’t even pin down to a budget in the most budget-conscious city in the world.

  That’s the way I laid it on the line for him—some of it true, some of it half-true and some of it cloud-nine stuff. How convincing it was, I didn’t know. But after all El Thamad had spent his life in a part of the world where my story would make more sense than it did in the States. In fact, in his own way, the commander of the Scourge of Allah was living proof that such things did happen.

  I stopped talking. A long freight rattled the night below us. El Thamad said: “You delight me, Mr. Drum. Then all along it was only you, working alone, wanting to thwart me because of what I did in Motamar?”

  “That’s the size of it. What’s the offer?”

  “I believe you, Mr. Drum,” El Thamad said, and spoke in Arabic to Colonel Azam. The colonel answered him. I smelled Baki Osman’s perfume and waited. El Thamad told me: “I believe you, Mr. Drum. Colonel Azam believes you too.”

  “What’s the offer?” I asked again.

  And he said: “I may not, as you say, be the first one to be fooled by this legend you have allowed to grow about yourself. But I will be the last.”

  Something prodded the back of my neck. I could feel Colonel Azam’s breath there too. What prodded the back of my neck was cold and hard. The only thing I could think of was the muzzle of a gun.

  “You will sit absolutely still,” Colonel Azam told me:

  My arm can be twisted. I sat absolutely still.

  We drove another few hundred yards to where the overpass started down. I saw the bright eye of a shunting engine probing the night. El Thamad’s elbow leaned on the backrest of the front seat. He pointed.

  “I think that will be fine,” he told Baki Osman.

  Where the overpass reached ground level, a two-lane truck exit joined the main road to the freight yard. It was there that El Thamad had pointed.

  Baki Osman braked to make his left turn. The sound of the tires changed as we hit the truck road. We rumbled over tracks and then down across cobblestones. Colonel Azam’s gun jiggled against the back of my neck.

  It would have been funny if I hadn’t talked myself into a box six feet long and two feet wide. I had told one of the most convincing lies of my life. My purpose was to assure El Thamad he could do business with me. Once he was sure of it, I’d thought, he’d open up and I’d have him on the Miniphon. The funny part of it was that he’d wanted to believe me. Because if I was working on my own hook, his troubles could end tonight. All he had to do was kill me.

  I had banked on a safety factor which didn’t exist. El Thamad had outlived the days when he was a hired killer, hadn’t he? Even assuming he had in mind for me a bullet in the base of the skull, he wouldn’t dirty his own hands with it, would he?

  The answer, I knew too late, was that he would. He had hired Sailor Costain, and Costain had sent Greer, and I’d taken Greer out of the play. El Thamad wasn’t going to bow his head and murmur “Insh’allah.” He wanted results, and he’d get them. Now that I had convinced him I was my own man, why wait to find another Sailor Costain and another shotgun specialist who might or might not succeed? He had me here and he had me now. If he reverted to type, his worries were over,

  Mine would be over soon too. I stared out the windshield and saw death as a shunting engine, death in the corrugated metal walls of a truck shed, death in a cloud of steam. I looked at the speedometer. We were doing twenty. Baki Osman could stop the car on a dime. I’d be told to get out. They might let me run—about three paces.

  Or, if I wanted, I could make them do it right here. I could go for my Magnum and die with my hand on its butt-grip.

  “Anywhere along here,” El Thamad said.

  Baki Osman shifted his right shoe from gas pedal to brake. Colonel Azam leaned on his gun. All the time I had in this world had run out. This was the way I was going to get it—in a freight yard at night at the hands of three men who had more at stake than I did, except that they had given me the biggest stake of all, my own life.

  When the speedometer needle hovered at fifteen, I could taste death like bitter gall in my mouth. My breath was fast and shallow. I had nothing to lose that I wouldn’t lose in minutes anyway. When the needle dropped to ten, I hit Osman with an elbow and then dove to my right, clawing for the door-handle. The car swerved. The muzzle of Colonel Azam’s gun left my heck. The gun roared.

  I found the handle, jerked it and tumbled hard on cobblestones on my right shoulder. Rolling over, I clawed for the Magnum. Azam fired again. Sparks flew from the cobbles inches from my face. Stone splinters peppered my cheek.

  The car had stopped ten yards ahead of me. One of them got out: the fat man, his moon-cast shadow bobbing on the cobbles like a balloon. I was crouching at the base of a signal light where tracks crossed the truck road. I stood up quickly and fired and crouched again. The fat man screamed and dove at his shadow and lay there. Another one got out and took cover behind the car’s front fender. The night swallowed the third. There was a quick staccato volley of three shots and the spurt of muzzle-flash from the front of the car. I leaned sideways away from the stanchion of the signal-light and fired twice. Whoever was behind the car returned it. We both had cover. He didn’t worry me, but the third one did. I didn’t know where the third one was. I had to figure he was armed.

  I pulled off another shot to draw fire from behind the car. When it came, I opened my mouth and let go with a scream that made the fat man’s sound like a hiccup. After that there was silence, except for the distant sound of a shunting engine doing its night’s work. I waited. Whether the man behind the car was Colonel Azam or El Thamad, he wouldn’t plan on spending the night there. I went on waiting, letting the silence build.

  “Drum?” he called finally. It was Colonel Azam’s voice. “If you can still move, crawl out of there. You’re covered. Crawl out or I’ll come after you—shooting.”

  I was as quiet as a flea living it up on a mouse’s belly. Then in the moonlight I saw Azam’s head appear over the fender of the car. Still I waited. His head rose higher. I saw his shoulders. He could have waited for El Thamad, but apparently the little gray man was letting Azam do his dirty work for him. Azam must have known it. He stood up, and then crouched away from the car and came stalking toward me, gun in hand.

  When he had taken five steps I said: “All right, stand still and drop it. You’re covered.”

  He neither stood still nor dropped his gun. He could have made a break back for the car. He didn’t do that either. He came toward me running hard, firing as he ran. I shot once, missing. I shot again, and the big .44 Magnum slug took him in the middle. It jackknifed him and slammed him back ten yards against the side of the car. He fell there.

  Just as I told myself that left one, a shot rang out. I felt the bullet tug at my sleeve. Then I saw El Thamad twenty yards to my left, his face and bald head reflecting moonlight. My lips pulled apart in a tight, grim smile. What was the matter with him? He was out in the open. He had no cover.

  I turned toward him and squeezed the trigger of the Magnum. The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber. If there is a more terrible sound when you’re facing an armed and desperate man, I don’t know what it is. There was nothing the matter with El Thamad. He had simply waited, counting my shots, until I had fired six times. Now he was coming in for the kill.

  I got to my feet and started running. He came after me, firing twice on the run, missing.

  I followed tracks away from the car. The tracks crossed other tracks. I stumbled, got up, turned and saw El Thamad silhouetted in the moonlight. He was too far for accurate pistol-fire now. I was out-distancing him.

  Two steps and I was down again. Stumbling, I’d twisted my left ankle. It wouldn’t hold my weight. I staggered along the tracks, a one-legged man fleeing death.

  Death had two legs and a gun, and death was gaining.

  There wa
s a labyrinth of tracks, branching, criss-crossing, converging. I passed a red signal light, and then an amber one, and then a green. Their colors gleamed on the iron of the tracks. After that for a stretch there was darkness. Ahead of me I heard a shunting engine laboring. The big baleful eye of its headlamp impaled me.

  I staggered left onto another pair of tracks. The eye pursued me. I ran right—two sets of tracks, three. The eye was still there, directly ahead of me and closer. I heard the hissing roar of the engine. There was that—and El Thamad. He would see me silhouetted against the headlamp. I threw myself flat. No ties under me. Tracks on either side. I saw El Thamad. He was close now. He darted right and then darted back left and then right again. The big engine came on. It passed close enough for me to feel the scalding breath of its steam. I had a final glimpse of El Thamad, standing straddle-legged, his arms flung high. For me there was an instant of clear and unexpected empathy: he had come four thousand miles to meet the fate that had been ordained at his birth. It was written on his forehead.

  The huge engine reached him and passed over him.

  27

  LIEUTENANT BORAH’S SILENCE grew. He had snapped off the Miniphon. We had listened to it in his office. It was morning now. I was reminded of our last long meeting.

  “Okay,” he said at last. He sat and stared at his big hands. He didn’t look at me.

  “Okay what? That all you have to say?”

  He tapped the white leather cover of the Miniphon. “There’ll be an investigation. This will clear you. They took you for a ride. You shot two of them dead in self-defense. The third one got run over by a train. You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said bitterly.

  I said nothing, and another of his silences built, and finally he said slowly: “I don’t like being played for a sucker. You played me for a sucker, you son of a bitch.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You wanted to back him against the wall, you said. You wanted to maneuver him to the breaking point. It sounded like a swell idea. I gave you what help I could. The goddam thing is, maybe I’d do it again. I don’t know.” Borah was still staring at his hands. “I wasn’t the only one. A couple of pretty good boys from State and the FBI were in there pitching too. You played us all for suckers. Brother, the next time you want something in this office, try our branch in Outer Mongolia.”