The Weapon of Night (6 page)

Maybe he had better call the fellow’s home.

Then he saw the man who was walking toward him with that curious shambling stride, and he knew it must be Sadek.

But Godalmighty! How
could
Hawk and Carter trust such a man? The description had been accurate, as usual, but it paled beside reality.

The figure that came toward him was tall and slightly hunched, and the face that seemed to hover suspiciously above it would have made an Arab slave-trader look benign by comparison. The flickering, unmatched eyes, the pockmarked, skin, the cruelly curved thin lips, the sidling walk, all added up to a picture of unbelievable depravity.

A clawed hand came toward him and a sibilant voice outraged his ears: “Feelthy peectures, meester?”

Oh, my God, no! thought Eiger. It’s too much.

Although it was a code phrase that he had been expecting to hear, coming from this evil-looking man, this caricature of a purveyor of filth, this epitome of smutty malevolence, it was indeed too much.

“Only if they’re sharp,” said Eiger, “showing all the details.”

Involuntarily he brushed away the hand that reached for his, as if it were as slippery as this man looked. The hand rose and clapped down on his shoulder in a surprisingly crisp and muscular grip.

“Hakim Sadek, at your service,” said the loathsome man before him. The tall, hunched body seemed to straighten, almost to fill out, and the incredibly awful face split sud denly into an even more incredible attractive grin. “And you are — you must be —?”

“Dan Eiger, at yours,” said Eiger, staring. This astounding man seemed to be transforming himself before his very eyes. He was still impossibly ugly, but he was no longer a furtive creature of the back streets; he was now a man who stood upright and foursquare, a man of culture and breeding and intelligence and . . .
wholesomeness,
by God! The change was indefinable, but it was there. Pock marks, thin lips, squint of eyes, none of these had changed. And yet . . .

“Friend of my friend, I greet you,” Hakim said warmly, with one eye on Eiger’s face and the other going off at an almost right-angle tangent. “How good of you to take time out from your trip to visit with me. I see you recognized me without difficulty.”

“Well — ah . . .” Dan hesitated briefly. He had no wish to be offensive to this preposterous man, and he could scarcely tell him that it would have been impossible to find another man so ugly. Nor could he say that he had been so thoroughly repelled, at first sight, that he had thought there must be some mistake. “Yes, I recognized you, all right, but for a moment there you had me a little puzzled. So help me, I can’t help saying it — maybe it was a trick of the light or something, but you did look a bit more villainous than I’d expected.”

Hakim laughed. “Unadulterated villainy is my specialty,” he said cheerfully. “Though sometimes the adulterous kind can be amusing, too. Forgive me, friend. Nicholas did warn me that you might find me not entirely to your liking, so I must confess I was having a little bit of fun at your expense. You are not angry?”

This time it was Eiger who put out his hand and clasped the other’s.

“Of course I’m not,” he said, and smiled.

“I thank you,” Hakim said courteously, and bent his darting head in a courtly bow. Yet, it seemed to Eiger that, even as he bowed, Hakim was swiveling his vagrant eye around the lobby in search of something he did not want to find. “It is not wise for us to stay here,” Hakim said quietly. “I have been followed much today, and my house is being watched. Let us drink together in celebration of our meeting and we will share news of mutual friends. The public bar, perhaps? Although it would be preferable to talk in your own room.” His voice rose and fell in a curious but calculated way, as though there were words for public cars to hear and words for Eiger’s ears alone.

Eiger shook his head. “You were in such a rush when I called that I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but I have no room, I’m sorry to say. This place is booked to the seams, and so are all the others. The Lotus promised me one for ten tonight, but until then I’m on the loose.”

“But what a nuisance for you.” Hakim shook his head and clucked sympathetically. “Then let it be the bar until we decide what we do next. But take all care, please, Mr. Eiger.

It is more than being watched. There was an accident today with my car that I think was not quite . . . How was our friend Nicholas when when you last saw him?”

“In his usual irrepressible good spirits,” said Eiger, watching a tourist couple pass by in the wake of a laden bellhop. “Full of the joys of life and rather bawdy messages for you.” In fact, he had not seen Nick for many months and did not really like him much. Carter was too much of a womanizer — for him, too fond of taking up with the peculiar characters he met in the line of business. And yet this friend of his was oddly appealing. Eiger looked into the wandering eyes and felt a sudden genuine warmth for the incredible Hakim.

“The bar, then,” he said quietly, “But not for long. I hired a car as soon as I got in today. I think it might be best to take a drive and talk in peace.”

“Good,” said Hakim. “That is very good. Perhaps along the Nile, and I can show you some of the sights. Have you been here before?”

They strolled together into the mainstream of the lobby, chatting amiably as they headed for the bar.

Until Eiger slowed and stopped to take a casual look at a carving in a showcase.

“There are two men near the bar door that I don’t quite like the looks of,” he said conversationally. “And they seem to be watching you.”

“So they do,” Hakim said, without apparently looking at them. “And not only watching — get back, my friend, quickly!”

One long, lean arm reached out and struck at Eiger’s chest and the other snaked into an inner jacket recess and came out with a gun. Eiger staggered back slightly but stood his ground.

“No,
you
get back, buddy,” he said crisply. “This one’s on me.” His craggy face was hard and the hand that reached for Hakim and jerked him off his feet was packed with power. Hakim flew through the air and slammed into a heavy chair, and the force of his impact was enough to throw the chair over and pitch him to the carpet on the other side.

For one ear-shattering, mindless moment he thought that he and the falling chair had made the thundering sound that reverberated through the lobby. But as he crawled to his feet and heard the splintering tinkle of glass and the echo of a gunshot and saw the smoky chaos around him, he realized with sudden horror that this time they had come for him with high explosives.

Come for
him —
!

And caught God knows how many other people because he had been fool enough to meet Dan Eiger in a busy hotel lobby.

He was on his knees now and jabbing his gun out from behind the fallen chair.

The lobby was a mess. The glass case was shattered into a million pieces and broken furniture lay scattered about like fragments left in the wake of a hurricane. Several people were lying on the floor. Some of them were moaning. Two or three were silent.

Dan Eiger was one of the silent ones. His torn body lay sprawled, face upward, on the floor, and there wasn’t much left of his face. But he had shot once before dying, and with deadly accuracy. One of the enemy lay dead only feet away from him.

The other . . . ?

There were several people moving in the mess. But only one that was crouching and staring around like an animal searching for its hidden prey; only one with a snub-nosed gun in his hand to finish off the dying.

So. One man with a grenade and one to cover.

Hakim fired twice, with the whiplash speed and pinpoint accuracy that he tried so hard to impart to his students in part one of his course in the Seven Lively Arts.

His first shot smashed the hand that held the probing gun and sent the gun itself flying unreachable yards away. His second slammed into the gunner’s chest. The man lurched backwards, screaming.

Hakim rose. This one would live. This time there would be someone left to question.

He picked his way through shattered furniture and people, grimly noting the number of groaning wounded and the dead cashier near the pulverized showcase. The callousness of the killing clawed at his insides. By Allah, these people — whoever they were — would stop at nothing in their efforts to get him!

And he wondered exactly what it was that he was supposed to know, that he required silencing. Surely there was nothing that he had not already revealed to the Police Department? But he would find out what it was even if he had to stoop to torture.

There were other people moving now. His vagrant gaze swept over them and he identified them for what they were — hall porter, assistant manager, house detective, wounded hotel guests. The gunman lay where Hakim’s shots had felled him, possibly unconscious. But no, it seemed not! The body twitched violently as if in pain.

Hakin rushed to him through the debris and went down on one knee beside him.

Then his heart sank in sickening frustration.

For, it had not been a twitch of life but a spasm of death. And the grin on the man’s face was not a greeting. The lips drawn back tightly against the teeth formed the leering smile of death, the sardonic grimace of a man who has swallowed swift-acting poison.

Hakim swore softly to himself in several languages. There would be no questioning now. And yet it was most interesting that his would-be killer had been equipped with a suicide pill and had chosen to take it. It was not gangland’s last resort; it was the spy’s way out.

There were uniformed policemen coming in at the door and he would have to make himself known to them.

He showed them his identification and went with them to their Chief of Police, with whom he had spent most of the day on the baffling case of von Kluge. It was even more baffling now. Or maybe it was not.

He must dig, and deeply. And he must stay alive. Which meant that he must make a radical change in his approach to the problem, and that if he must pass information on to AXE he must do it in some other way.

But what could he know that might be dangerous to them? He sat in Chief Fouad’s V.I .P. chair and explained how he had been meeting a friend of a friend when the attack had occurred, all the while mulling over in his mind what it was that he might know. Everything — but everything — he knew was known to the police.

With the possible exception of one tiny little thing. Or maybe two, the second even tinier. They had the guest list of the party von Kluge had attended. But he and he alone knew exactly who had been in the room at the time when he was listening to von Kluge. Accounts differed, partly because of the consumption of alcohol and partly because party-goers are not particularly observant and partly because no one there had known everybody else. Neither had he. But he was observant, and he had a photographic memory for faces. He was known for it. And then, too, he was the only one who had heard each nuance of von Kluge’s voice and seen his eyes dart nervously about the room when he had realized that he had said too much.

Thin, Sadek, very thin, said Hakim to himself. But maybe something . . . ?

“We must look for secret files,” said Hakim. “There is no evidence of anything missing even though von Kluge’s office was quite thoroughly ransacked. He might have records elsewhere. We must continue checking missing persons, for there are faces, if not people, missing from Cairo. We must redouble our efforts with embassies, with immigrations, with the Passport Department. We must make people think of faces. Von Kluge’s associates. His friends. His housekeeper. His assistants. All must think of faces that haye come — and gone. We must . . .”

He went on talking, for there was still much investigating to be done in regard to the murder of von Kluge. But with the death of AXE’s Eiger he had an even deeper personal motive than before to unravel this puzzle, and he himself was thinking of one face he had seen . . . .

The square-shouldered man at the head of the boardroom table looked up and nodded a greeting.

“Ah, good to see you, BP.,” he said in a thin-toned voice that seemed to be inappropriately fragile for such a barrel-chested man. “You are late — I was beginning to think you were unable to come.”

B.P. put his briefcase on the table and drew up a chair. It was unusually cool, even for late fall, and yet there were beads of sweat on his brow and he was puffing slightly.

“So was I! he said, flinging himself down beside a tall dark man with an open folder in front of him. “This is a busy time for me. But I thought it best to come at this stage, before things get even busier. I see I am not the last one here, though,” he added, glancing around at his half-dozen colleagues.

“Ah, but I am afraid you are,” the chairman said regretfully. “Jones and Meister are both away on business and will not be back until tomorrow. However, I shall see that they have copies of our minutes and I, of course, will go through their reports myself. In the meantime we have a quorum. So. gentlemen, let us call to order this meeting of Canadian Ceramics, Ltd. We will commence at once with item one on the agenda.” As he spoke he reached for the compact black box on the table near him and flicked a switch. “Market trends continue to favor the expansion of our enterprise,” his high, reedy voice went on. But his pale, almost bloodless lips were motionless. One after the other, the men with him at the table slid sheets of paper across to him and he read them without comment.

Another, deeper voice filled the room, to be followed by yet another. It was a typical enough board meeting; each member spoke in turn and then the voices joined together in a round-table discussion. Yet, none of the men at the table spoke a single word.

“By nineteen-seventy-two, then, we should have eight factories in complete operation,” the thin voice piped confidently. But the face of the man at the head of the table mirrored the man’s displeasure. He leaned across the table and spoke for the first time since he had switched on the tape-recorded meeting, but his voice was a low, hissing whisper that reached only the ears for which it was intended.