Assignmnt - Ceylon (9 page)

Durell said, “Somebody in my department obviously slipped up about you.”

“Please. Madame Aspara is waiting.”

Durell walked away toward the waiting woman.

Aspara drove again, returning part way along the mountain road; then she took a more clearly defined highway that followed a valley, then climbed another slope. The Rolls purred along smoothly. The woman’s face was a pale mask in the moonlight. Durell looked at his watch. He was surprised to find it was not yet ten o’clock.

“Did you ask that man about George?” she inquired.

“No.”

“But you realize I am concerned about my son.”

“George is all right. He’s where he wants to be—with his friends of the PFM. He’s young and a revolutionary like most of the young the world over. He’s just doing his thing. As long as he hasn’t harmed us, we can forget about him.”

“Perhaps you can forget. I cannot.”

“I’m sorry, Aspara.”

“I have never seen or thought about you in the way I saw you act tonight. You killed two men, and you simply forget about it?”

“Only one,” Durell said.

“It does not trouble you?”

“It troubles me.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Aspara—”

She said abruptly, “We are here.”

The
walauwa
was one of the few remaining medieval manor houses going back to the old kingdoms of Kandy. It sat graciously on a terrace cut into the mountainside, and below it in the moonlight were tea terraces, some rubber, and two small villages which lay in the valley along the silvery ribbon of a stream that flowed from the rectangular irrigation tank built at a higher level along the mountain. The house itself, touched with kindness by the night shadows and the moon, looked aristocratic and delicate, but it reflected the strength of the feudal lords who had lived here long ago and ruled the domains below.

One wing of the manor had crumbled, and the white blocks of stones were heaped in a high pile of carved masonry, spilling over the low wall that surrounded the estate. The wind bent the tall trees slightly. The garden was unkempt, gone wild from years of neglect, although flowers still bloomed in the tangled shrubs, vines, and creepers massed on either side of the crushed-stone entrance drive. “Shall I go all the way in?” Aspara asked coolly.

“Stop here. We’ll walk. It might be best if you waited in the car again.”

“No, I’ll feel safer with you—even if you are a murderer. I’m sorry—I’m confused about you.” She said it simply, and her manner remained distant. “I have not known any violent men before. Ceylon is a peaceful land. True, Sri Lanka was cursed with its share of wars, but the Sinhala people want only peace.” She paused, looked at the wide sweep of the
walauwa
. “Ira and I lived here for almost two years, you know, when we were first married. George was bom here. George—”

“I’m sorry I got you involved,” he said.

“I am not. Not about you and what is happening. It is my duty to know what goes on in my country.”

“Is that why you’re with me in this?”

She said quietly, “I thought I was falling in love with you again.”

“Don’t,” he told her.

“You need not worry. I know I would only be a burden to a man like you. Your world is not mine. But I was beginning to dream a little.”

Durell eyed the black, rectangular windows of the manor house- and considered the open, double-leafed doorway that seemed to invite them in. Insects hummed and clicked in the unkempt brush nearby. Somewhere a night bird called out on a querulous note.

“It seems empty,” Aspara murmured.

“Nothing is what it seems to be. Mr. Dhapura is a case in point. I think he’s somewhere about, behind us.”

He went up the steps, paused near the yawning black doorway, returned, and asked Aspara for a flashlight. She had a torch in the square, big trunk of the Rolls. He took it and returned to the door and stepped inside.

No one leaped, shouted, or attacked him.

He waited, pulling Aspara in against the wall beside the door, in a central hallway where moonlight sent fingers of silver down through broken tiles in the high roof. Her fingers were cool in his, but trembling a little.

“It’s been so long .. . I have so many memories . . .

“The past is dead,” Durell said.

King and Thompson had died here, a bullet for each in the back of the head. The place had been an unexpected trap when they came to conduct a routine check on this old mansion where Ira Sanderson escaped his diplomatic duties to conduct the archeological explorations that were his true interests. He drew a deep breath and snapped on the big flashlight. Its beam shot out like a soundless explosion touching dusty marble stairs, wide doors opening to right and left, dusty furniture of antique Kandyan style.

There was no reaction from anyone.

He moved forward silently with Aspara, knowing that if anyone was here, that person was expecting him. It was a chance he had to take. He had no crew of experts from K Section to go in and take this place apart.

The rooms to the right were like museum pieces, filled with court chairs of gilt and mahogany, low tables of both Moorish and Sinhala design, crumbled fragments dug up out of jungle cave-fortresses. He looked for Sanderson’s living quarters. There was a kitchen in the back, with charcoal and oil stoves, a modem table, a gas-run refrigerator. The box had stopped, the fuel emptied, and there were only scraps of food left inside. At least Ira hadn’t expected to be kidnapped. The photographs of the missing man that Durell had seen had shown Sanderson to be tall, stooped, with rather weak eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, and thinning blond hair that was probably more gray than blond. He was still addicted to Ivy League suits, narrow charcoal-gray neckties, a habit of stooping and peering at people less tall than he.

But there was nothing personal of the man downstairs. Durell moved up the broad stone stairs. Aspara’s footsteps were swift whispers as she tried to keep up with his long pace.

“Ira’s bedroom-workshop was up here,” she whispered.

He touched her mouth. “Don’t speak.”

“But no one is here—”

“Wrong,” he said.

He could feel it, that indefinable sense of someone’s presence, somewhere in this ancient house, in the shadows, waiting. He wondered if it was Willie Wells. Aspara gestured to the right, and he moved swiftly and silently down the hall.

A large room, which had once seen medieval dancers perform for the lord of the manor, was directly above the main entrance below. He flicked off the torch. Moonlight came through tall, filigreed windows. He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the pale light. There was a work table strewn with artifacts of stone and bronze, broken pieces of old statues, tools, a microscope, fine brushes, sorting bins, glue, the smell of age-old antiquities. He could see a rumpled bed to the right, where Ira Sanderson had risen one morning a few days ago, and met his kidnappers.

To the left was a small scatter of furniture, new and old, and under an arched doorway leading to another room, was a massive old throne, a regal chair supported by four small trumpeting elephants carved of ivory, with a ragged, faded parasol and canopy above its high, carved back.

The man who sat in the chair smiled and raised his Russian handgun and said, “Ho, Comrade Cajun. Hello, Madame Aspara. I have been waiting for you.”

Durell said, “Put away the gun, Cesar.”

Colonel Cesar Skoll, of the KGB in Moscow, nodded his shaven head. “A moment. Do not shoot, please, old friend.”

“We’re not friends,” Durell said. “Do it now.”

“As you wish.” The big Siberian carefully put his weapon aside. “But I may still have to kill you, Comrade Cajun.”

“Everybody wants to kill me,” Durell said.

“You are not surprised to find me here?”

“Nothing surprises me any more.”

“Ho. True. We have been in the business too long, old friend. And now you are out of it.”

The Russian was enormous, like a Siberian bear, whose habitat was the frozen, icy wasteland that had bred this man. Skoll had a shaven head and slanted eyes that were pale, pale blue, almost white in the uncertain moonlight; his massive body suggested incredible strength and speed.

He wore climbing boots, tucked into the legs of a baggy gray jumpsuit.

“Who else is here?” Durell asked.

“Only myself,
tovarich
.”

“How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

Durell wondered about Mr. Dhapura. “From Kandy?”

“Once, when I was a boy in Siberia, where I lived in a lumber camp, I was with all the grown men in the forest, and when a sudden snowstorm came, they packed up and got into their trucks and drove off, back to the base. They forgot me.” Skoll’s stomach rumbled, and he belched and waved a massive paw. “Forgive me, dear lady. There is no vodka in this house, and I drank some disagreeable English whiskey. For that night and the next day, in Siberia, I walked through the storm, which turned to ice very soon, and I kept on walking, for if I stopped, I would be a very dead lad, very quickly. I made it back to the base camp— obviously.”

“And why are you here, in the middle of Ceylon?” Durell asked.

“My old friend and competitor, I was looking for you and Andrei Kubischev. That bastard.” Skoll waved his big hand again. “Forgive me once more, dear Madame Aspara.”

“And why are you looking for me?” Durell demanded.

“You defected from K Section. Kubischev has also defected from the KGB. He was one of my most trusted men—as I am sure you were once considered, by your General McFee. I was embarrassed. I am enraged. I feel to find him and kill him. And I traced him this far, and no farther.”

Durell stared at the man on the ancient Lanka throne. The house was quiet. Outside, crickets fiddled in the tall weeds. He truly felt beyond surprise. Through his years of walking the lonely paths of the world, watching every corner, every face, he had crossed Colonel Skoll several times, in the Moroccan desert and in Japan, on Malta and in Malaysia. It was difficult to say which had scored the most in this silent war for information, a war where no medals were handed out for success. He knew—and Skoll knew—about the red tab on his dossier in KGB headquarters. One day, he supposed, one or the other might be forced to kill. He did not want to be the victim. He remained careful. Survival went to the quick and the cautious in this business.

He said suddenly, “Cesar, does your man Kubischev look like me?”

Skoll scowled. “No. Yes. In a general way. Yes, one might say so.”

Durell said, “I’d like to find him too.”

Very carefully, the Russian leaned forward on the big chair. The old ivory elephants that served as feet creaked under his massive weight. Skoll’s pale eyes gleamed white as Siberian ice in the tropical moonlight.

“Now. May I ask you why?”

“He’s working for somebody. I don’t know who it is, but it’s the somebody who used Kubischev to frame me.” “Ho!”

“Do you think your man is in Sri Lanka?”

“I am sure of it,” Skoll said.

“And who did he defect to?”

Skoll said, “Cajun, my comrade,  you puzzle me. Either you are very good at lying, which of course you are, or you are in a very disastrous situation. I was hoping you could lead me to Kubischev—and thence to Sanderson and the group that seems to be stealing the best minds and best men in the intelligence business. The KGB is not alone in its loss. The Polish, British, even the Peking Black House, have men who vanished, who are working for someone else. I should have known better.” Skoll’s rumbling voice was rueful. “I should have known you are not a man who can be bought.”

Durell said, “My boss in Washington ought to know that too. You’ve been sent after Kubischev. I have a man on my trail too, a former mercenary, a black named Wells.” The Russian nodded. “I have heard of him. You have a problem.”

Skoll got up from the thronelike chair, picked up his gun, and put it away, looking at Aspara with some curiosity. The Sinhala woman had not said a word. Now her large, liquid eyes swung from Durell to the Russian and back again.

“Dear Sam, have I misjudged you?”

“No matter.”

“You are both trained killers, are you not? That is your function?”

“Only incidentally. Our primary job is to get data, facts. The world in its rivalry depends on it.”

“True,” Skoll grumbled.

“And all this takes place in my country?”

Durell said, “We’ll find the reason for it.”

“Ho,” said Skoll. “You assume we are comrades now?” Durell said, “You know the usual terms, Cesar.”

“Yes. Yes I know you, Cajun. We worked together before, against that Madame Hung’s private organization. That dreadful, evil woman. And then, in Malta, you cheated me of all the fruits of that labor. Did you know that Hung is active again? Did you?”

Durell stared. “She’s dead. We were both there when she was killed. She’s dead.”

“No.”

“Dead,” Durell repeated. He felt suddenly chilly, as if something that was much colder than the mountain wind had blown through the filigreed windows of the
walauwa
. Based in Singapore, and with a network like a dozen spider webs throughout the world, the Hung outfit had peddled information to the highest bidder, some of it false, some tainted—fishing in the troubled waters of a difficult world, often creating crises to suit its purpose. He had no wish to think of the woman, Madame Hung, ever.

Skoll said, “Yes, dead. I agree. But her people and her work still live, my Cajun.”

“We smashed her outfit.”

“Not all of it. And someone is picking up the pieces. Buying men. The best men, because Kubischev was one of my best, and you are one of the best too. Buying data, using computers, with a headquarters somewhere—” Skoll waved his paw—somewhere near here.”

Aspara’s breath made a whispering sound. “I find it difficult to accept the things you men talk about. If you are enemies—rivals—you do not behave as such. You speak of troublemakers in this world, of a private spy network? I cannot accept it.”

Skoll grinned. “Dear lady, read the newspapers. Are the hijackings, the ransom demands, the senseless massacres unbelievable? Yes. What is so difficult to accept that a man—or woman—with money and a desire to manipulate world events out of megalomania, perhaps—cannot do what we discuss?”