Assignment Unicorn (11 page)

“Maggie?”

Her voice sounded stifled. “
Here.
”

“Wolfe?”

No answer.

He saw lights high above. Flashlights, the beams of the car
that had followed them from Gstaad. Dark figures moved around the
Mercedes, tearing it apart, ripping out the back seat. He heard shots. He saw
one figure clearly, peering down from the edge of the slope, looking for them.

Maggie came crawling toward him over the snow.

In the starlight, she looked as if she were crying.

“Sam? Sam?”

“I’m all right. I think.”

“I’m going to be sick,” she whimpered.

“Do you good. But don’t make too much noise.”

The cold Alpine wind soughed through the evergreens above
them. The snow had carried them almost through the little wood. Moonlight
touched the other side of the valley. He saw a few lights, the crawling beams of
a car.

“Come along,” he said.

“Where is Wolfe?”

“Come on.”

But something loomed up suddenly among the trees, staggering,
floundering about in the hip-deep snow. Wolfe’s bearlike figure was
unmistakable. He held his head in both hands and wobbled about as if blind.
Maggie got up and thrashed toward him. Durell kept watching the men high up on
the lip of the road. They had gotten the back seat out of the Mercedes and
removed the steel case with the money in it. Maybe it would satisfy them. He
hoped so. Maybe they thought he and Maggie and Wolfe were dead down here. There
were still one or two of them peering down from the edge of the road. He shivered
suddenly, thinking of Rasmussen’s incredible strength, the man’s single-minded
purpose and drive. He had felt fear then, of a sort that was unreasoning and almost
beyond control. It was as if he had brushed against something beyond the norm,
almost supernatural, reducing him to a kind of helpless being, incapable of
coping with abnormal forces bent on his destruction.

Wolfe and Maggie staggered back through the snow under the
trees.

“Are you all right?” Durell asked.

“No thanks to you, you son of a bitch,” Wolfe growled. One
side of his face was abraded and bloody. “What do we do now?”

“We wait,” Durell said,

“We’ll freeze to death standing here.”

“Better that than being torn apart,” Durell said.

Wolfe looked thoughtful. “Yeah, there’s that. Can we slip
down through these trees and get to that road over there?”

“The moonlight will show us up.” Durell looked down over the
snowy expanse of the mountain slope below. “We’ll have to wait until they’re
gone.”

“They’re taking the money,” Wolfe objected.

“Let them have it.”

Wolfe sighed. His breath made a cloud of vapor in the
crystalline air.

The wind blew a little harder through the trees. The snow
was quiet now, not moving. Below them, it was untracked, unmarred. It would be
another hour before the moon was fully hidden behind Les Diablerets. Except for
the soughing of the wind, the occasional thud of snow falling from the
evergreen branches in soft clods, there was no sound. There was a ringing in
Durell’s ears, and he ascribed it to the altitude. He estimated it would be a three-hour
descent into the valley and up the other side, where the small road wound
through a cluster of chalets.

Up above they were carrying Rasmussen’s body away, toward
the Rolls Royce. He looked at Wolfe’s broad back. Wolfe did not turn his gaze
from watching the men on the road.

Maggie moved closer to Durell. Her face was as cold as the
white, tumbled drifts around them. “You shot him. Just like that.”

“I shot him,” said Durell. “But hardly just like that. It
was him or me. Or you.”

Maggie said, “I don’t really know you, do I?”

After a pause, she said, “What did you mean, he was after
you and me?”

“Me, to kill. You, to take away. The other part of their
target, aside from the money. You, Maggie.”

“Why me?”

“Can’t you tell me’!

“It doesn’t make sense,” Maggie said.

“It must,” Durell said.

“Nothing makes sense.”

“It will.”

22

AT MIDNIGHT the
Banque
Jacques
Eaux-Vives on the little side street off the Rue de
Monthoux
,
halfway between Cornavin Station and the Quai du Mont-Blanc, was wrapped in an
exclusive silence and security. It was a private establishment, next to an
equally exclusive apartment house that towered over the bank building by four
floors. The institution served as a drop and payout station for K Section
funds fed into various strings of agents scattered through Central Europe
behind the Curtain. The upper floors, above the subterranean vaults, served
as control centers for the agency’s mandated activities.

The bank was a simple, slab-sided building with very little
architectural adornment. The front entrance was protected by a steel grill and
detection devices, as were the tall, narrow, barred windows. All of the windows
on all four floors were similarly barred and protected. The underground
vault and Record Room, for M. Eaux-Vive’s clients, was as electronically
burglar-proof as man’s ingenuity and sophistication could make them.

The banker lived in the fourth-floor penthouse. At midnight
he was entertaining Mr. Sulaki Madragaffi, the Deputy Minister of his African
country’s mission to the United Nations functioning in the old League of
Nations Palace set in its grand park off the Lake of Geneva. They were drinking
brandy and bitter coffee grown on the mountainsides of Madragaffi’s small
black nation. Sulaki wore his national costume even now, although he really
preferred Western clothes for comfort; he felt that the gaudy striped robe and
ornate headdress was a badge of independence from the white man’s culture, and
it had to be exhibited on every possible occasion, especially one like this,
when he was tentatively beginning to bargain for a private loan from the
Banque
Jacques Eaux-Vives for his country’s security
forces.

M. Eaux-Vives was aware of the time. He knew the payments were
due from Zurich this night, and he was ready to press the buttons that would
roll up the underground doors for the car to enter the building.

They came down from the apartment tower’s roof, four floors
above the bank. There were four of them. They used grappling hooks and
half-inch steel and nylon lines, and they were swift and silent, making their
descent with an expertise that any Alpine climber would have envied. Their
actions seemed to be without effort. They wore identical jumpsuits and sneakers
and had short-barreled Swiss automatic rifles slung over their backs. Their
faces were anonymous, shadowed by the night. Beyond the west shore of the lake
and the steamer docks, the clear night sky that now prevailed gave a distant glimpse
of Mont Blanc and a clear view of the hill of the old city, once dominated by a
Roman fortress and now crowned by the spires of St. Peter’s cathedral. None of the
four men was interested in the view of John Calvin’s city, with its narrow
cobblestoned streets and ramps leading up from the Pont de
l’Isle
in the Rhone River. There was a predatory quality in the way the quartet moved,
a single-minded purpose. Their teamwork was impeccable. The subsequent swings
outward from the apartment building to the bank’s roof, across the mews, were nothing
short of Olympic. One by one they made it, clinging to the steel fence with its
downward-curving spikes like flies. No security man would have thought it
possible. The leader took a small box from the capacious pockets of his
jumpsuit and set about negating the alarm triggers on the fence. The others
clung there, motionless, for an interval beyond human endurance. There were small
clicks, snapping sounds. The wave of an arm. Then they swarmed over and onto
the roof.

M. Jacques Eaux-Vives was anything but careless. He was a
banker bred and born to the tenets of security. He had installed infrared heat
detectors, cameras triggered by reflective bars, sound instruments built
into the terrace rail that flanked his penthouse apartment.

The leader of the quartet of raiders knew his way; knew
where every device had been posted. The others followed him as he threaded his
way among the ventilators and the TV antennas. Soft lights glowed from
Eaux-Vives’ den, where he entertained Sulaki Madragaffi. They had not
quite finished draining their brandy.

The raiders on the roof had gathered on the terrace at one
of the darkened bedroom windows. The window was barred, like all the others,
but the leader lifted an arm in signal and one of the four men gripped the bars
and began to spread them, grunting a little with the effort as he pressured the
steel. The stars twinkled in the velvet sky. An occasional car slid along the
quai by the lake. The steel bars opened. The leader reached in a hand and
clipped wires. In forty seconds, they were all inside, out of the cool night
wind blowing off Lac Leman.

From there, they went unerringly to the banker’s den.

It was swift and bloody.

The leader pointed a gloved hand at Madragaffi and two
of his men gripped the African while another cut his throat, almost
decapitating him. The brandy glass fell from Sulaki’s long fingers and
struck the
Sarouk
rug, making a small, gentle
tinkling sound as it broke. M. Jacques Eaux-Vives reached for the alarm buttons
on the table beside his wing-chair. His mouth was open in a silent scream as he
looked, unbelieving, at the blood
gouting
from
Madragafi’s
neck. Gristle and bone gleamed yellowish-white
through the red. Eaux-Vives’ fingers never touched a button. He was a
small man, rather plump, with thin black hair that he brushed carefully from
left to right in hopeless strands that did not hide his gleaming scalp.
Something smashed down on his fingers, breaking four of them. His scream
was clapped off by a hand over his mouth, pulling at the flesh of his cheeks.
The strength of their violence was like a savage storm. The banker was lifted
bodily from his chair and slammed against the wall. A Picasso sketch fell from
its hook.

“Your keys,” the leader said in French.

Eaux-Vives could not answer. His heart was bursting in his
chest. He pointed a shuddering, broken hand.

“Go get them, Hamlet,” the leader said in English.

One of the men went into the bedroom. He came back only
moments later, holding the small ring of keys.

“And the vault? M. Eaux-Vives? Do you hear?” the leader
asked.

“Time lock,” the banker gasped. “Cannot be opened.” His face
was purple. He was already dying. “Cannot be opened,” he repeated. “I swear to
you.” His eyes bulged.

Softly, “You can open it.”

"Can—not.”

“Come.”

They had to carry the banker to the stairway. There were
elevators, but they were ignored as potential booby-traps. On each lower
floor, where quarters for various K Section operations had been
established, including several transceiver radios, files, records, coding
machines, scramblers, arsenals of weapons, the quartet engaged in a storm of
destruction. Several fires were started; thermite bombs were tossed at
the filing cases. Eaux-Vives was dragged down level after level. His
short legs
spraddled
. The leader carried him as if he
were a child.

The main floor of the bank was not like the open, inviting
spaces of a commercially licensed establishment. There was a small circular
foyer with a tiled marble floor, with long corridors radiating from it
like the spokes of a wheel. Off the corridors were discreet, comfortable paneled
offices. Everything at this hour was dark and shadowed. The quartet knew their
way around. They made for the rear elevator, an old-fashioned open cage of
rococo ironwork. The banker was casually hurled inside as they descended to the
vaults. A fire alarm went off. Nobody paid any attention to the ringing
bells.

“Countermand the lock,” the leader ordered. He spoke in
English this time.

M. Jacques Eaux-Vives opened his mouth to speak, shook his
head in denial.

“I—cannot.”

“Hamlet?”

The man called by that name moved forward, his feet dancing,
an energy in him that kept his body constantly in motion, twitching, jerking,
his face grimacing, his head bobbing and weaving like a boxer’s. The
fire-alarm bells rang on and on. The leader looked at Hamlet with
distaste.

“Blow it,” he said.

Hamlet was quick. They moved back down the corridors to
shelter from the explosion. Smoke began to curl in the quiet air, drifting down
the elevator shaft. When the blast came, it was a dull, rumbling roar. The
plastique
did its work.

The master keys did the rest of the work. Only selected
boxes were opened. Money poured out, spilling on the marble floor.
Securities vanished. Jewels were ignored. Gold bars went into capacious
pockets. They worked as a well-coordinated team.

“All right," said the leader. “Finish him.”

Hamlet hit the paunchy banker in the chest. The man’s heart,
already laboring far beyond its normal capacity, exploded. He sagged to the
floor of the vault.

“Let’s go,” said the leader. “I believe the car is waiting.”

23

THE APARTMENT near the Hotel Beau-
Rivage
on the Quai du Mont Blanc was quiet in the predawn grayness. A light premature
snowfall had started an hour ago. Most of the snow melted as it hit the
boulevards and narrow streets of Geneva. The lake was dark and silent. The
overcast smothered the dim early-morning lights of the old city, across the
water. The snow that drifted down gave everything a sense of hushed, silent peace.

The drive from the innkeeper’s house near Les Diablerets had
seemed endless, even though Durell had taken the wide National Route E-4
through the vineyards of
Vevey
, around Lausanne and
the lake toward Geneva. The innkeeper had rented them his little Peugeot for an
exorbitant amount.