Assignment Maltese Maiden

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Amerikanski?”

  Durell said in Russian, “Get up. Where are the others? We don’t want to hurt anyone. We just want the girl.”

  “There is no girl here.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “She was here. But she is gone.”

  “When?”

  “She was not here. We came last night.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Durell picked up the man’s gun and walked quickly back into the villa. The sea was blinding, reflecting morning sunlight. Through the open door on the other side of the house, facing the road, came a blast of hot wind and a scouring puff of sand. From upstairs came the thudding of feet, more shouts, the quick rattle of Keefe’s gun. Durell took the marble steps three at a time. There was a long hallway bisecting the villa, dividing six bedrooms and the door to the sun roof. The guard who had been posted there was draped over the balustrade, his body visible through the double glass doors. Keefe came through an open door at the far end of the upper corridor. He was grinning. “Caught ’em all with their pants down, Cajun.”

  “The girl?”

  “No girl.”

  Durell swore softly. “All right, search the whole house. Tie up the prisoners. Don’t hurt any of them unless it’s necessary. Use a fine-tooth comb. I want the girl.”

  “Cajun—”

  “Hop to it. Send Damon and Mills here.”

  “They’re still outside. Cajun, I think—”

  “Get going. We haven’t much time. Perozzo?”

  The gray-haired Italian came out of the room. He had a bad bruise across his left temple, and blood was on his right hand. His dark brown eyes were calm.

  “Seven prisoners, Sam. All male.”

  “I know. How much do you remember of the house?” “What are you looking for?”

  “A safe. A hiding place for papers, maybe.”

  Perozzo frowned. “I remember the old Contessa. She always paid Papa in cash, in liras, when we delivered the vegetables from the Tripoli market. She took the money from a safe, all right.”

  “Where?”

  “The drawing room. Behind a painting. It had a combination, though.”

  “Get Charley Mills to open it.”

  “We can’t stay here long, Sam. There’s no phone, but one of them had a radio. He was using it, right in the bed where we caught him, when we got to the bedroom.”

  “Make it ten minutes, then,” Durell said.

  “Sam, they’re all Russians. So-called military advisors to the revolutionary Libyan government. There’s going to be hell to pay.”

  “I don’t think so. They have their own reasons for keeping quiet.”

  “One of them is a KGB colonel. A Cesar Skoll. Isn’t he—?”

  Durell stopped in mid-stride. “Skoll?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s KGB, yes. I know him.”

  “I know you know him,” Perozzo said calmly. His tone of voice didn’t have to mean anything, but it did.

  Durell said, “Go with Charley. Open that safe.”

  Chapter 3

  In all his years in the business, Durell had never known K Section to call a Q alarm before. He had known crises in the past, in his work as field agent for the trouble-shooting branch of the CIA, but nothing like this. It had begun two days ago, when he was recalled from Bangkok where he had been setting up a new Central to replace one blown by the former Control there. Such routine work made him chafe with impatience to get back into the field again.

  The recall order came directly from Sugar Cube, not from General Dickinson McFee, who was head of K Section’s Washington headquarters at No. 20 Annapolis Street.

  Flying back to D.C., he hadn’t thought much about it.

  Durell was a tall man, with thick black hair going gray at the temples, with dark blue eyes that seemed darker when he was moved to thought or anger. He did not allow himself to grow angry very often. Emotion had no place in the business. It was dangerous. His was a lonely world, with no personal commitments that might cause him to yield to that one fatal moment of inattention. Already his survival factor was dangerously low. He had been in the business long enough for his dossier to be on file at No. 2 Dzherzhinsky Square in Moscow, KGB headquarters, and at the Black House in Peking. In both cases, there were red tabs on his file—as good as an epitaph, he sometimes thought. He was hunted, even while he worked as a hunter, and no place on the face of the globe was truly safe for him. No corner was secure, whether it was on the London Underground or a jungle mountain in Thailand. He never opened a door without caution, never turned a corner without considering what might be lying in wait beyond. He had grown accustomed to this way of life and even enjoyed it. There would never be a return to the patterns of ordinary men, never a suburban house or a commuter’s schedule to follow. He could afford no permanent liaisons with women, although he enjoyed them thoroughly; it would not be fan either to the woman or to himself, he often thought, to make himself vulnerable through committed love or domesticity.

  He worked directly under Dickinson McFee, that singular little gray man who ruled K Section with military and objective care. No one knew much about McFee. His address, his family, if any, his roots and background, did not exist in any dossier or file. His name was never mentioned in the newspapers. There was a small apartment on the top floor of the graystone building at No. 20 Annapolis Street, where various offices of K Section were maintained under the usual commercial covers. Sometimes McFee slept there. Sometimes he did not. He was a wisp of cloud, a sometime myth. Not even Durell, who often worked between assignments in Analysis and Synthesis with McFee, knew much about the little gray man. Some days he thought the general had almost grown fond of him; on other occasions, he knew that McFee would sacrifice him for any goal without a second’s hesitation.

  And now McFee was missing.

  The heart, the core, the brain was gone.

  The man who held numberless top-secret, confidential intelligence items locked in his cool, calculating and impersonal mind, was gone.

  It was a Q crisis.

  “It’s been sixty hours, so far,” Randolph said.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. He’s vanished.”

  “It must be a mistake.”

  “I wish it were, Cajun.”

  Randolph was nominally head of Analysis and Synthesis. As a headquarters chief reporting directly to General Dickinson McFee, he worked closest with the head of K Section, often accompanying the little gray man to conferences with the Joint Chiefs and the National Security people at the White House and at the CIA headquarters across the Potomac in Virginia. Randolph was a tall, spare man with a gentle Southern manner, an aristocratic mane of silvery hah, an inevitable charcoal suit and thin string tie. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and had pale brown eyes.

  “What about the Blue System?”

  “It failed.”

  “It can’t fail,” Durell said.

  “We monitored the general in his apartment upstairs.” Randolph moved a pale hand upward, indicating the topmost levels of the graystone building. “It still shows him up there. But he isn’t there. We don’t know when he left.” The electronic gadgetry devised by the lab boys down in the sub-basement was supposed to keep key personnel constantly located on screens and tapes. Durell looked at the bank of telemetry equipment and for the first time felt a squeeze of alarm in the pit of his belly. Randolph looked pale and tired; he obviously had not slept since the alarm was given.

  “There is only one way this could have happened,” Durell said. “McFee deliberately short-circuited the system. For reasons of his own, obviously.”

  “We don’t know that, Samuel.”

  “There’s been no word from him at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you check Sugar Cube?”

  “Very cautiously. The White House does not wish to become too involved in our activities. All Sugar Cube wants are our reports, our summations and recom
mendations, and critical analyses. No direct or intimate details of our assignments. You can understand why.”

  “Who first discovered that McFee was missing?”

  “I did, I’m afraid.” Randolph coughed. “We had an appointment for a conference at the Pentagon over the Mideast situation again. The Navy Secretary was there, arguing about the danger of Russian moves to open the Suez Canal. For reasons of its own, State wants the Israelis to pull even farther back and let Cairo dig out the sand again. The navy is concerned that this just plays into Soviet hands, letting them run their war vessels into the Indian Ocean to establish and maintain a controlling military and political presence in Ceylon, India, and eventually Southeast Asia. True, it would contain Peking’s expansionist ambitions, but it would also, through our lack of presence, throw us out of the whole Southern Asia area and seriously jeopardize Australia and New Zealand security. The navy is strongly opposed to any Russian moves through the canal. But State, I suppose, has to play along with pressure from oil interests, national economics, God knows what.”

  “McFee didn’t show up for the appointment?”

  “He never came downstairs.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten out of the building without being checked and monitored.”

  Randolph said, “But he did. We don’t know how. We’re looking into every possibility.”

  “So you went up to get him?”

  “I did. The door was locked. It’s steel, you know. The locks are impregnable to ordinary keys and any combination of keys. We had to blow it open, finally.” Randolph was harassed. “It wasn’t easy.”

  “And the apartment was empty?”

  “True.”

  “No signs of violence?”

  “None.”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Durell said.

  He had never been in McFee’s living quarters at No. 20 Annapolis Street. Durell stood without moving, his eyes covering every inch of the study-sitting room, his feet slightly apart, deep lines suddenly graven on his darkly tanned face. His blue eyes looked black. The heavy door had indeed been blown off, and it had damaged the single elevator and the landing outside. They’d had to climb over the wreckage in order to get in.

  The apartment was solidly masculine, equipped with a brick colonial fireplace, bookshelves carrying ranks of texts on history, economics, military strategy, philosophy, classic literature in worn leather bindings. Yet there was little in the main room to give evidence of the man’s true personal life. If there was any, Durell thought grimly. He noted that Randolph was nervous, shifting his lanky aristocratic weight from one foot to the other. He ignored the man and went to the big leather-topped desk and looked at the shining, tidy emptiness of the blotter, the brass calendar, the open drawers.

  “Who made the preliminary search?”

  “I did,” Randolph said. “I’ve taken no one else in here. I’ve given word to all hands to stand clear.”

  “What was in the desk?”

  “A few current dossiers. Some of my last reports on the economic viability of several African and Asian nations. A folder of satellite photographs of Russian fleet maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean. A map of Malta and Gozo. A diary of appointments. He was to see the President, by the way, this morning.”

  “What have you told the White House?”

  Randolph gnawed his lip. “I had to tell the truth.”

  “That McFee is missing?”

  “Of course.”

  Durell smiled without humor. “I’ll bet that pushed a few panic buttons.”

  “Yes. One of them brought you here, of course. By the way, Dr. Stein wants to see you for a physical. Abe says your annual contract is coming up.”

  “I’m fine. Plenty of time for that. What else is there up here?”

  “A bedroom, a bath, a kitchenette. He did his own cooking, did you know that? Was he worried about poison?”

  “I think he was careful about everything,” Durell said. “Not worried. Just cautious.”

  “From the equipment, I’d say he was a gourmet cook. Odd, you know. People like to cook for other people. I was never invited up here to dine. And to my knowledge, no one ever was.”

  Durell walked with quiet, lithe grace through the rest of the apartment. Although he was a big man, with heavy shoulders, he was light of foot, silent in all his movements. His boyhood had been spent in the Louisiana bayous, at Bayou Peche Rouge, where his old Grandfather Jonathan had raised him aboard the moldering hulk of the old Trois Belles—one of the last of the Mississippi sidewheelers, a gambling ship that the old gentleman had won decades ago on the turn of a card. Old Jonathan had taught him how to hunt, how to move with care, how to weigh and judge men and women, both the hunters and the hunted. Later, at Yale, Durell lost his Cajun accent. He spoke a dozen languages fluently, a score of dialects, knew international law, geopolitics, economics, history. He could kill with his hands in several different, silent ways and had done so out of necessity, with no regrets. He was a lonely man. He preferred it that way.

  He did not want to ask the one question that troubled him the most, and he put it off for the moment while he examined the apartment.

  The kitchen was indeed equipped for gourmet French cooking. There was a rack of recipe cards in McFee’s fine, typographical script, copper saucepans, whisks, French knives, an eye-level broiler, a built-in brick charcoal pit. The table was arranged with a blue tablecloth and a single place-setting of ironstone plates—antiques, by the look of them.

  “He couldn’t have been forced to leave,” Randolph said, trailing him about.

  “No.”

  “No signs of violence, as I said.”

  “What about his stick?” Durell asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “His blackthorn walking stick. The one the gimmick boys in the basement rigged up for him.”

  “Oh, that. Well, it’s not here.” Randolph looked about helplessly. “There’s nothing here, really. And he didn’t spend every night here, either—remember that. He had another residence somewhere. God knows where he went, when he didn’t turn in up here on the nights he worked late.”

  “You don’t really know?”

  “Nobody really knows anything about General Dickinson McFee,” Randolph said.

  Durell drew a deep breath and asked the question. “Except Deirdre Padgett?”

  “Um.” Randolph smiled. “Your girl, eh?”

  “No.”

  “Everybody says you and Deirdre—”

  Durell wanted to hit his fine, aristocratic face.

  “—are going to get married. Some day.”

  “Answer me, you son of a bitch,” Durell said.

  “Don’t get upset, my dear fellow. Deirdre is fine. Really fine.”

  “McFee used her as his girl Friday. Where is she?”

  “At home today. At Prince John.”

  “Why? Why isn’t she here?”

  “I told her to stay at home.”

  “Why?” Durell insisted.

  “So you could talk to her there,” Randolph said. “She has no explanation for McFee’s disappearance. If she has, she won’t tell me. She denies knowing anything. But you can make her talk, Samuel. If she knows anything. If she can tell you anything.”

  “Do you think she’s under McFee’s personal security orders?” Durell asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Randolph sighed. “Frankly, all this scares me to death. I don’t want to run K Section. I don’t want to send men like you on your jobs abroad. I’m Analysis, remember. I’m not the general. I wish to God he were here right now.”

  “So do I,” Durell said.

  There was only the one door into the apartment, which Randolph had ordered blown open. Each window had bulletproof panes of glass, although from no vantage point of the adjacent buildings or from across Annapolis Street could a sniper draw a proper line of fire into any of the rooms. The roof, Durell remembered, was reinforced steel and concrete, and patrolled constantly. From
the windows, the facade of the building was sheer, six floors down to the sidewalk. There were electronic alarms all through the place, but McFee, of course, would know how to contravene them.

  Durell went into the bedroom. There were only two conservative gray suits in the closet, beyond a sliding door. He looked for the blackthorn stick. The walking stick had contained a poisoned tip ferrule, a handgun in the handle, a small thermite bomb. It was weighted heavily enough to crush a man’s skull, swung properly. McFee had known how to use it. Durell remembered one time, long ago, in Rock Creek Park, when McFee had all but threatened him with that deadly little arsenal. He didn’t like to think about it.

  The stick was gone. Which meant that McFee had taken it with him. Which also meant that McFee had not left the apartment or the building under duress.

  Maybe.

  The Williamsburg chest of drawers contained a few gray and blue and white shirts, black silk socks, one extra pair of small black shoes.

  “Did he keep a suitcase here?” Durell asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Not enough clothes. He had another place where he slept, you’re right about that. Another residence.”

  “Nobody knows anything about it. Maybe Deirdre—”

  “Sure,” Durell said.

  He sighed impatiently. Beside the bed there was a square metal receptacle, a shredder and electronic flash burner in which confidential papers could be completely destroyed. Durell opened it. It looked clean and empty. On the other side of the bed was a small candlestick table of Hitchcock design. His mind touched on years at Yale and picnic trips up through the Litchfield hills, often with various girls but sometimes alone; Durell looked at colonial furniture, Hitchcock chairs and tables. The image flickered through his mind and was gone.

  On the small table was a framed photograph.