Assignment - Karachi (12 page)

Rudi fired once, and the sound was a vast thunderclap in the underground cell. The old man jerked back against the corner and then tried to crawl out of the light. Rudi walked over to him and turned him over and put the muzzle of the gun to the back of the bald skull and pulled the trigger again for the coup de grace.

Then he walked out.

Kou Li waited for him in the office. The boy had heard the shots and came back to lead Rudi through the maze of tunnels and rooms to Kou Li’s establishment. Rudi sat down, unbidden, in a chair and looked at the old Chinese.

“The price for the chart,” he said bluntly, “will be the equivalent of one hundred thousand pounds sterling in used Swiss franc notes to be deposited in account number 552 in the Suisse Internationale Banque de Geneve. I will expect cable confirmation by tomorrow. You know how these arrangements are usually made.

Kou Li nodded, his black eyes touching his grandson. “So Herr Bergmann talked to you? You know where the chart is?” “I can get it.”

“Perhaps we can save you the errand.”

“I am not an exhausted old man,” Rudi said. “I can hold out against your questioning longer than Bergmann. By the time you made me talk, the Americans will be on S-5 and the

Pakistan Frontier Rifles will have a division of troops on the spot.”

Kou Li nodded again. “So it will be as you say.”

“It must be as I say,” Rudi insisted.

“It is a great amount of money you ask, but there is no time for bargaining. It is an agreement, then.”

Rudi paused. “There is one other thing you must do for me.”

“Yes?”

“There is an American agent with the expedition—a man named Sam Durell. A dangerous and competent man. It will go much safer if he is out of the way.”

Kou Li nodded, once again. “It shall be arranged.”

“It must be done tonight.”

“Mr. Durell will not see the sun rise again,” Kou Li promised.

A COOL night wind blew down from the northwest hills and washed away the stifling heat of day. It rattled the fronds of palm trees, rustled in the bougainvillaea vines, made a shutter bang erratically in the bungalow occupied by Sarah Standish and the S-5 expedition.

Durell’s room on the second floor had wide windows and a French doorway open to the veranda that circled three sides of the house. He had checked the door, the veranda with its Bombay chairs, the moonlit lawn below. He had locked the common corridor door, inspected the huge wardrobe closet, locked the connecting door from the bathroom he shared with Colonel K’Ayub.

He had arranged to send out a coded message for K Section’s information. At first he considered transmitting it by telegraph to Donegan in Karachi, then decided not to trust Donegan and used the cable office near the Liaqat Gardens to relay the coded inquiry to Henry Kallinger in Istanbul. Kallinger would get what he wanted by further relay to Washington, if he didn’t have it immediately on hand, although Durell doubted that the information would catch up with him in time to be useful. What he asked for was any information available on Red Oboe.

Sarah, Rudi, Alessa and Hans were playing bridge in the big, open living room below, when Durell returned from the cable office. He went quietly up to his room, made his routine check, and decided that what he needed was sleep. He did not think there would be many opportunities for rest in the days to come.

He slept uneasily, dreaming. The voices of the others downstairs at the card table touched him and set off new dreams of distant places and past times. He was in the bayou again, at Peche Rouge, a boy slipping through the mottled shadows on the old Indian chenieres, those dike-like paths that twisted across the black waterways where cypress knees lifted in abstract forms and the Spanish moss dripped down and brushed the surface of inky pools in supplication. He was running, but he did not know from what. He was afraid. Moonlight shone in patterns of ebony and silver on the gum trees, and the croak of frogs and the splash of fish and the startled cry of a bird accompanied him. He fell from the cheniere and slipped into deep mud that sucked at his feet, his ankles, his knees, dragging him helplessly into black mire. Someone called his name from above. Sam? Sam! It was a girl with Alessa’s face, and her enormous eyes were terrified and he tried to yell to her to run to Bayou Peche Rouge and escape the swamp. He was down to his hips and then his chest in the sucking mud, and something grunted and splashed in the water nearby and terror crawled like cold lice over his face. He tried to hold his chin up, but the mud reached a clammy hand over his lips and pinched his nostrils, and all at once there was an explosive convulsion in his chest as the air was cut off. He couldn’t breathe. He thrashed out—

He awoke with a dacoit strangling cord around his neck.

There was no time to think or question what was happening.

It was simple enough. He was being strangled quickly and silently and expertly.

His body, his screaming lungs and shocked nervous system made his muscles writhe and convulse, answering everything for him.

But the only answer was to get air into his lungs again. In that instant, all his thousands of reflexes, memory cells, habit patterns, likes and dislikes, past regrets and future hopes, became nothing. He had to breathe. Nothing else. He was a dying organism, and he responded with blind instinct, flailing, struggling, aware of the swift and terrible outflow of strength and life in him, that could end everything in a few more seconds.

He clawed at the cord around his throat. Through eyes that rapidly lost focus, he saw the moonlit room, heard the efficient silence of the deed against the explosive thunder of his heart, saw the dim loom of the thin figure garbed in black, belted robe and dirty tunic, arching over him on the bed.

The cord cut deep into his flesh. He could not even get a fingernail under it. Wrong technique, he thought dimly. Like following the hand of a carnie pitchman to divert the eye from the pea in the shell game. Check. Useless to fight the cord. Impossible to reach the hands that twisted and held it. Waste of time. Then try what they taught you at the Farm, in Maryland—that murderous school where friend turned to foe with a smile and handshake that landed you mercilessly on the hard ground, to teach you to trust nobody. Where you were taught anatomy, the secrets of the neutral centers, the use of hand and finger, edge of palm, rolled newspaper, making these innocent objects into lethal weapons to stun, paralyze, kill.

He arched his body, belly up, fell down, flexed his legs and kicked at the dark form bending over him. His naked foot caught the side of the man’s neck, but not quite right; the turbaned head snapped aside, an instant too soon, making the blow of his heel glance off.

There wasn’t much time left now. Nor much strength, either.

His lungs shrieked, his muscles trembled. There was a roaring in his ears. Once more. The turbaned head had retreated a little in caution. But not quite far enough. It could be done.

Now.

He flexed, arched, doubled, kicked. He knew at once his heel had caught the right spot in the man’s neck, behind the maxillaries, under the ear. With that blow you could dislocate the jaw, rupture arteries, permanently deafen, and kill.

The cord around his neck fell loose.

He heard the man stumbling away, and there was a wild whistle of air sucked into his chest, and he rolled aside to the left, fell off the bed, hit the floor on hands and knees. The carpet rocked and heaved under him. Another breath. He heard a noise that didn’t sound human and he tried to crawl around the bed where the strangler lay. The other man was trying to drag himself out through the open French doors to the veranda where the night darkness waited.

Durell pushed himself around the bed. The other man was halfway to the veranda, sobbing. He paused, the air in his throat like molten brass, then lurched and stumbled forward and fell on the black-robed man.

A hissing sound came from the gaping mouth, a fragment of Urdu. “A mistake—sahib—in Allah’s mercy—”

Under the long tunic was a
khukri
knife, curved, wickedly sharp. Durell pulled it free. He rolled away from the man and held the knife at his throat and said, “Be quiet, dog.”

The room smelled of the man’s fear.

Durell stood up and leaned against the wall and sucked in air in long, measured breaths, waiting for the room to stop spinning. The man’s route of access was easy—from within the grounds. A clever and careful man, dressed in black, could scale the compound wall, drop into the shadowed garden, climb the bougainvillaea to the second-floor veranda— But how had he chosen the right room?

He looked at the man who shuddered on the floor, still halfparalyzed by Durell’s blow. It might pass soon—or the damage could be permanent. Durell felt no sympathy. He rubbed his throat and walked back to the bed and got his gun, sat down and put on his shoes, trousers and shirt. The house was quiet. The bridge game and iced drinks and quiet conversation downstairs had ended. They had all gone to sleep. Maybe.

Perhaps someone was waiting to come into this room soon, to find him dead with his black tongue sticking out, his eyes like plums in a congested face. Someone who had told the strangler which room to choose, which way was easiest over the compound wall. . . .

Even as he thought of it, staring dully at the figure that twitched on the floor, someone knocked softly on the door.

He got up and walked to it, keeping his head turned toward the other man. He could be faking, gathering strength to streak like a fleeing snake out to the veranda and over the rail, to escape in the dark shrubbery below.

He faced the door panel. “Yes?” he said quietly.

“Sam, are you all right?”

It was Alessa’s voice, soft but worried.

Alessa? he thought.

He turned the big brass key. “Come in, honey.”

“I heard a noise, a thumping in here. The others are asleep. I couldn’t rest, thinking of all the details of starting tomorrow morning—”

She slipped into the room. Her hair was pale and sleek, a silvery casque around her small, proud head. She wore a dark skirt, a printed silk; blouse. Her hand touched him. He wished there were more light in the room. Was she surprised? Dismayed? Or just mildly worried at a strange sound in the night, as she implied?

Then she saw the man on the floor and she clapped fingers to her open lips. “Oh—”

“I had a visitor,” Durell said. “Keep your voice down, please. I don’t want to waken the others.”

“Your voice sounds—”

“He tried to strangle me. Classic silk cord and all. My throat is a bit sore.”

“Sam, I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I—yet. But we’ll see what he has to say, if he can talk.”

“Shall I call the Colonel? Phone the police?”

“No. I have a feeling this might be something personal.”

“But you can’t just force him—”

“I can do anything with him,” Durell said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him.”

He walked quietly to the shivering man on the floor. The shivering was a nervous reflex, a series of spasms resulting from Durell’s blow. Durell knelt and looked at the man’s dark, ugly face. He put his gun to the man’s ear. It was just a face, he thought, like several millions of other faces on the subcontinent. To be bought and sold, to live and die, to lie and laugh, to spit and swallow and breath.

“Can you hear me?” he whispered in Urdu.

“Yes, Durell sahib—”

“You know my name?”

“I was told.”

“Who told you to kill me?”

There was no answer. And he could not force an answer here. “Get up and walk with me,” he said.

“I cannot. There is a devil shaking my body—”

“Try,” Durell said. “Or you go straight to hell.” He pushed the gun muzzle into the man’s ear. The man got up. His body spasmed, and one arm hung limp, and he dragged one foot. “Outside,” Durell said.

Alessa stepped forward. “Sam—”

“You had better come with me,” he said. “You should watch this. We’ll go to the shed behind the house. It will be private there.”

“I think I ought to call K’Ayub.”

“Come with me,” he said again.

She followed, her face blank as it suddenly was revealed in a slash of moonlight they crossed on the veranda. Durell still felt uncertain on his feet. His throat burned, and there was an ache in his chest. He threw the khukri knife over the railing and heard it drop with a dry rustling in the vines that grew up the side of the bungalow. He pushed the turbaned man toward the wooden stairway that led down to the garden terrace. Lights shone on the lawn from some of the go-downs at the rear of the property, fifty yards away. If any guards patrolled the grounds, he did not see them.

No one was in the warehouse shed. Durell pushed the man in, waited for Alessa, and followed into the gloom. A shaft of moonlight guided him. There were the bulks of the two transport trucks and jeeps loaded with canvas bales of supplies that even included skis in case any snow prevailed in the mountains. In the moonlight, the man sat with his hands flat on the dusty floor behind him. His eyes rolled with fear. “How are you named?” Durell asked.

“Ali, sahib.”

“Everyone is named Ali, dog.”

“It is a good name. My father gave it to me. He was named Ali, too. Ali Hamadourji.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“Shaib, he will cut out my tongue and feed it to the crows.” 

“He is not here, and I am,” Durell pointed out. “You will speak the truth to me.”

“I have not even been paid, sahib!” the man moaned. “I was promised one hundred rupees, but I have not seen one anna yet!”

“Killing is your business?”

“No, sahib, I swear by Allah, I have only killed two idolaters in my life.” He referred to Hindus. “And those were in riots which caused blood to run wild, like a river in flood time—”

“I am waiting for your tongue to run like a river, too,” Durell said. He knelt down and pushed his gun muzzle under man’s jaw and forced his head back until the throat was stretched and corded under the pressure. “Speak to me. Who hired you?”

“I cannot tell!” the man gasped.

“Was it Red Oboe?”