Assignment Moon Girl (12 page)

He waited, finally got a few clicks, an operator, and
gave the embassy number and then Hannigan’s extension. The phone rang four
times.

“Economics,” a girl said.

The voice was familiar. “Miss Saajadi?”

“Yes, sir. Who—"

“Get me Hannigan, please.”

“Not here, sir. Who—”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know, sir.
Wh
—”

“Durell. Remember me?”

There was a long silence. She was pretty good. Finally she
said coolly: “Mr. Hannigan‘ is looking for you, Mr. Durell. Where shall I tell
him you can be found, when he comes in?”

“You know where,” Durell said, and hung up.

He estimated he had fifteen or twenty minutes before
visitors arrived. He still wondered why the three goons had vanished. Perhaps
Saajadi liked privacy when he played his games with private prisoners. No
matter. He needed answers, and the cost would he high If he were right, he’d
find out just where his private threshold of pain might be. He grimaced,
put it from his mind, and settled into the tub of gloriously hot water.

There were alternatives to staying here in Saajadi's private
palace. He could return to Teheran somehow, taking the lice with him. He could
find Hannigan, contact the Soviets, even
through
the
net of Har-Buri’s assassins spread around the place. But he didn’t think that
would buy him too much. Tanya was always first priority. She had to be
found—and quickly. The Russians did not know where their girl was. It was up to
him to return her to them, compliments of the U.S.A. Considering what he had
done to Saajadi, and the difficulty of proving that the dead man was a traitor,
he also had to do something to make Iranian Security consider extenuating
circumstances. He didn’t relish the idea of spending the next twenty years in a
Teheran jail. Tanya was the key to everything-Tanya, and the elimination of
Har-Buri from Iranian politics.

The key was not at the Soviet embassy, as he had thought.
But someone might bring it to him right here, if his guess was correct.

But the price would be painful.

Birds trilled in the courtyard, singing as if in
accompaniment to one of Omar Khayyam’s love songs. He got out of the tub, dried
thoroughly, examined every inch of his body for surviving lice. Satisfied,
he checked Colonel Saajadi’s luxurious wardrobe. The shirts were a bit tight in
the chest, but the elegant fawn-colored English slacks were perfect. Durell
never let his hand wander more than a few inches from Saajadi’s gin as he
dressed. He found an electric razor and labored at the stubble he’d acquired in
the desert. When he considered his reflection, he thought he had a hungry
look.

They came as he finished shaving.

He heard them cross the garden court on quick, sliding feet.
A man called a soft order. A door slammed. He chose a necktie from a vast
selection in Saajadi’s closet as they came up the stairs with a feral rush. He
put the gun in his pocket and unlocked the door

Miss Saajadi, her thick black hair a bit unkempt, was ahead
of the others. Close behind her was a slim, very pretty Chinese girl with a
round face and big brown eyes and a rich 'figu.re in an afternoon frock.
The Chinese girl stood to one side to permit an older Chinese woman to come by.
It was a very feminine vanguard.

And behind them came Hung Ta-Po, smiling like the pleasured
lord of a private harem.

Chapter Ten

MISS Saajadi trembled. She looked as if she wanted to tear
Durell to shreds. “You killed the colonel!”

“I don’t apologize.”

“But it’s monstrous—”

“Please, my dear," said Ta-Po. “You’ve gotten carried
away with your role. Saajadi was not in truth your father, but simply a cover
for your agency work.

Please stand aside.”

“He has a gun. He’s not a fool. He’s been waiting for us.
It‘s a trap—”

Hung Ta-Po flicked a hand at the distraught girl.
“Take her away.”

Like twin hounds, two Chinese jumped forward and caught the
girl before she launched herself at Durell. She started to struggle. Hung Ta-Po
made a small click of annoyance and one of the men hit her in the side of the
neck and she went down with a small choking sound. She didn’t look dead, but
she might be, Durell thought. He waited.

“We are moving in,” said Ta-Po genially, “in the event you
are wondering why I have brought my womenfolk. This place has been arranged for
our strictest privacy. We will not be disturbed here. I am happy to see that
you are willing to join me in conference. Do you want money? You shall have it.
Safety? That, too. Any arrangement you wish to make. Or is this truly a trap, after
all?”

“No trap,” Durell said.

“I am pleased now that we did not catch up with you in the
desert. This is much better. Oh, certainly, much better.”

"I'm glad you’re pleased.”

Ta-Po snapped his fingers. “Lotus?”

The young Chinese girl slipped past Durell and checked the
bedroom and the bath and the windows, looked out at the garden, called down to
someone there, came back and bowed her sleek, dark head to the huge Chinese.

“Everything is in order."

“Go, then.”

The older woman had said nothing, done nothing. But Durell
was aware of her as he would have been aware of a deadly snake slithering into
the room. Something about her made the flesh tingle at the nape of his
neck. She looked at him with utter impersonality, as if he might be a rabbit
impaled on a stake, waiting for her to dine on him. She had been beautiful
once, and there was something in that shadow of past beauty that was faintly
familiar.

“Madame Hung,” he said,

“Yes.” The sound was sibilant.

“The former Madame Ouspanaya?”

“Yes.” .

“Mother of Tanya?"

“You belabor the obvious, Mr. Durell. I am puzzled.” She did
not look in the least puzzled. “Are you here to make a deal, as Ta-Po thinks?
Or do you have something else in mind?”

Durell irritated her by turning to Ta-Po. The Chinese looked
even bigger, fatter, and more bland than before. He wore his Russian-style blue
serge double-breasted suit as if it were a tent, and even then his enormous
belly strained at the girth of his trousers. His round head looked absurdly
small on those fat shoulders.

“I am willing to make a trade,” Durell said.

“So. What do you have to bargain with?”

“Your life.”

Ta-Po laughed softly. “But I am in no danger.”

“If you are declared
persona
non grata
here in Iran and a great deal of publicity is published in the
local newspapers about how you disagree with the Maoist Cultural Revolution,
will you be happy to go back to Peking?”

“Ah. And how will you do that?”

“The process is in the works,” Durell said.

“You are bluffing."

“Are you sure?”

“You had no time to set it up. But it is clever of you to
suggest that it might be so. Let us assume you have such cards. What do you
want from me?”

“Tanya Ouspanaya.”

The woman hissed. Ta-Po quieted her with a lifted finger.
His smile was gone. “But this is precisely what we want from you. My adopted
daughter, my wife’s dearest child, long an exile and prisoner of the
reactionary Soviet imperialist technology. We long to have her back with us
again. And you know where she is. You see how honest I am with you? We do not
have her. We look everywhere for her. It is so difficult, I admit, since so
many others search, too. But you have injected yourself gratuitously into this
affair. It does not concern the U.S.A. None of the principals involved are
citizens of your decadent society. Iran is not your country or your concern.
You seek to build credit for yourself, I suppose, with the Iranians and the
Russians. It would seem to betray a weakness, a need for such credit if I did not
know as much about you as I do, Cajun. I understand your true motives.
Information of any kind, piled grain upon grain, assumes impressive
proportions, after a time. Nothing is too minor to be ignored. The dear child
has been on the moon.
Ergo
, she has
inestimably valuable information to give to your NASA space program. So you
want her long enough to dehydrate the poor child’s mind and soul of anything to
your power-seeking monopoly. Well, you shall not have her. And you do not fool
me for a moment. You know where she is.”

We have no basis for bargaining, if you think so,"
Durell said quietly. “But I have another objective."

“Har-Buri.”

“Ah, yes.”

Lotus came back and whispered something to Madame Hung. The
young Chinese girl’s eyes regarded Durell with singular interest as she cupped
her hand over her mouth to deliver her message. Durell smiled at her. She was a
very pretty girl. Her glossy black hair was done in straight bangs over lovely
eyes that shone with vitality. She smiled fleetingly in return. Her
luscious lower lip was very red.

“Har-Buri,” Ta-Po said, “is a close and precious friend of
the Chinese People’s Republic. You may wonder how this relationship involves my
dear, adopted daughter. Har-Buri seeks to rectify social injustice and
capitalist crimes against his countrymen. We would aid him in these goals,
naturally. It is not a secret.
 
return
for our aid, he promises us Tanya. Our prior bargain must be kept, Mr. Durell.
I would not betray him.”

“Unless I delivered Tanya to you?”

Madame Hung said thinly: “You waste time, my husband.
 
know you enjoy such games with this man. You
admire Durell professionally. Such emotions of feudal chivalry do not belong in
the heart of a right-thinking communist man. I think you should begin the
questioning at once.”

“I have a gun,” Durell pointed out.

“And we have men behind you. Lotus just informed me. Very
adept and silent, don’t you think? They climbed the wall from the garden and
came in through the bathroom window. It is not a trick. I would not stoop to
such a childish ruse. Look for yourself.”

Durell did not need to. He felt the cold muzzle of a gun at
the nape of his neck and smelled the fishy breath of a man who had dined
on shrimp and caviar.

Very carefully, he took Saajadi’s gun from his pocket and
placed it on the floor.

“I give up,” he said. . . .

Ta-Po was puzzled. He was irritated, impatient, annoyed, and
angry. But most of all, he was puzzled.

It was some time later. Durell did not know how many hours
had passed. It could still be daylight outside, but there was no way to
determine this. But he guessed it was probably night, by now. He was back in
the cellar room, with its tin-shaded lamp and silence. They had taken Colonel
Saajadi’s body away, but there had been a lot of blood pumped from the dead
man’s severed artery, and only a token of it had been cleaned up.

His hands were bound with leather straps, and his fingers
felt numb from loss of circulation. The cellar room was cold. His bath had done
little good. He tasted the dust of the floor in his mouth, and there was
grit between his teeth, together with clotted blood in his mouth. He thought
one of his ribs might be cracked. Pain was something you learned to live with,
somehow. You endured, or you died. You died physically, or in other ways. The
other ways were the worst. Pain was not a stranger to Durell.

Ta-Po loomed over him, breathing heavily.

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what, comrade?”

“Why did you give yourself to me?”

“Maybe it was out of brotherly love.”

“Your spirits are still high?”

“Why not?”

“What did you hope to gain from me?”

“I’ve already got it,” Durell said.

“I see. It is the question of Tanya?”

Durell nodded. His neck creaked “Yes, poor Tanya. You don’t
have her, and I don’t have her, and—“

“But you know where she is.”

“No.”

“Yes. You do.”

“No."”

“Very well.”

Ta-Po went away. Durell was thirsty and hungry again. The
temperature kept dropping, After all, the villa was quite high up in the
mountains. He decided it was time to go. He thought about it, and made his mind
obsessed with the thought of escape, but nothing happened. No ideas came to
him. He knew now that Ta-Po wanted Tanya for what she might know about the moon
trip. It couldn’t be that the Chinese People’s Republic was technologically
prepared for a similar

venture, Eventually, but not now. The eventuality
fascinated
 
for a time. He tried to
imagine the moon as an adjunct, a province, of Peking. It might come to that,
some day. But Tanya today was a propaganda device, a prop for the confused,
violent power-struggle going on between the factions of command in Peking.
Whoever had her would gain leverage. The price Ta-Po was willing to pay for Tanya
was Chinese aid to Har-Buri. If Har-Buri upset the apple-cart in Iran, that
would merely be an added bonus drawn from the troubled pot of Middle Asia.

He began to shiver. The light glared in his eyes. He began
to imagine all kinds of shapes between the brightness. Faces loomed up, eyes
shifted, floated about, watched him. The silence went on. Sooner or
later, he knew, they would come back with the needle and drug him. He hated the
thought. He could blow too many items of top security for K Section. He touched
his broken tooth with his tongue. If it had been the next molar, he might have
died in ten seconds. That was where the K Section dentist had installed the
poison pill. He hated the thought of the pill. Hunger, pain, filth, and
cold were better than eternity.

“Mr. Sam?”

He thought the whisper was in his imagination. He kept
working at the leather thongs that held his wrists. Perhaps if he could hump
over to the desk and abrade them on a convenient edge of metal . . .