Assignment - Black Viking

BRUGES

The city of Bruges in Belgium, like several other cities in northern Europe that take pride in the beauty of their canals, calls itself the “Venice of the North.” It has no need for comparisons, for Bruges has a singular beauty of its own.

Bruges was founded in the seventh century as a Viking settlement and named “Brucken,” which means The Landing Place. It was fortified in the ninth century and three hundred years later became the greatest port of northern Europe, the chief entrepot of the Hanseatic League. Today it is the capital of West Flanders. Its port is silted up and it is nine miles from the North Sea coast. Its charm now is due to its baroque Flemish houses, quiet canals, the Minne-water, called the “Lake of Love,” and its medieval Gothic buildings that include the Cloth Hall, with its famous carillon, the Baguinage convent, and the art collections that attract daily busloads of tourists.

Here and there one can still spot the strain of Viking blood from the wild Norsemen who roared down from Scandinavia with bloody swords, screaming oaths, for arson, robbery, and rape.

This spring there were very few tourists. The weather was most unseasonable. It was cold. Ice remained in the canals. Some gloomily said that summer would never come. . . .

DURELL crossed the deck of the
Vesper
with a long, impatient stride, nodded to the bored Sicilian crewmen lounging and watching the guests turn blue in their bikinis, and went below. His eyes were angry. His mouth was stubborn. He went through the luxurious main salon like a gust of cold wind, forged down the corridor to his stateroom, and yanked open the door and looked at the girl on his bunk.

“Get out of there,” Durell said.

“Sam, darling—”

“I won’t ask you again.”

“Sweetest man, I was doing nothing!”

“So you say.”

“Why are you so suspicious and unfriendly?”

“Why are you so interested in my gear?”

“But I wasn’t, angelic man—”

“Sigrid, where did you get my gun?”

“I found it.”

“Don’t point it at me, or—”

“Darling, you are so intriguing!”

The gun went off.

Its blast was shattering in the narrow confines of the cabin. A hair to the left, and Durell would have dropped with a bullet in his brain.

The girl’s mouth made a circle of dismay. She held the weapon in both hands and pretended to keep her blue eyes squeezed tightly shut when she fired at him, but he caught the glint of mischief in her eyes—or was it a gleam of exultation?—when she squeezed the trigger.

He dived across the cabin at her. She wore only a vestigial black bikini laced at the sides, and her long,

wheat-white hair swung heavily as she tried to avoid him. But she did not try very hard. His shoulder slammed across her flat belly and bowled her backward into the bunk again, and his gun rattled on the teakwood deck and slid away toward the door. Her arms and legs snaked up and pinioned him in a sudden, lustful embrace.

“Sam, darling . . .”

“Sigrid, you bitch.”

“I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Oh, no, not really!”

She laughed in his face. He put his forearm across her throat and squeezed a little, leaning his weight on her. He had to check himself to keep from going all the way. His reflexes in the face of attack were too quick, too instinctive.

The laughter and the smile faded from her lovely face. She made a little gurgling sound and tried to escape. She was strong, and he wanted her to try. She gave herself away by the expertise of her struggle. She almost succeeded, and she was professional about it. A darkness clouded her Viking eyes. Sigrid Bjornson was not just a girl having fun. She was in the business.

Satisfied, he eased up a little, and she drew a great shuddering breath that lifted her proud breasts in challenge toward him. He drew back. She could be more dangerous that way, Durell decided.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s all right.”

“No, I didn’t mean—I was just joking—”

“So was I,” he said.

“Yes, of course.” She rubbed her throat and looked upward, where footsteps ran along the deck and someone yelled to find out who had fired a shot and why. A hubbub of voices came from the main salon of the schooner
Vesper
. “Oh, dear. Shall we say it was an accident?”

“Of course.” His dark eyes mocked her.

“But it
was
, darling!”

“If you insist.”

“You are the most aggravating man!”

“I’m glad.”

“And such a—a Puritan.”

“My acquired heritage."

“And I thought you were French—”

“Not French. Cajun. From the Louisiana bayous, where the Acadians came when they were chased out of Canada by the English. But I went to school in New England, anyway, and so I became a Puritan, too.”

“You Americans,” Sigrid sighed, and she rubbed her throat with a strong and shaking hand.

The schooner
Vesper
, home port Palermo, Sicily, was named after that island’s twelfth-century rebels, who fought against foreign rule and later fled to the hills for a life of banditry that has its echoes still. The
Vesper
was a hundred and twenty feet of pleasure yacht, all white and teak and shining brass, owned by Baron Ugo Uccelatti, who owed Durell a favor or two. They had been two weeks cruising out of the Mediterranean through the Gibraltar straits toward the famous yachting waters off the Netherlands. She carried a competent crew of ten, including a new captain named Olaf Jannsen, flown across the Channel from London when the former captain took ill and failed to show up for his duties at Ostend. The guest passengers were a mixed bag, a collection of bored Riviera loungers with their consorts of long-limbed, shapely, and complaisant girls whose wardrobes consisted mainly of abbreviated swimsuits or, often enough, nothing at all.

It was late in May, but the weather failed to keep the promise of the season. It was miserable.

Durell still did not know how Sigrid Bjornson happened to come aboard, shortly after the arrival of the new captain, Jannsen. Baron Uccelatti was more than casual about his guests, particularly when they looked like Sigrid.

She was different in one respect from the others. She was tall and shapely, but not as free as the other girls, and she had a quiet, mischievous intelligence and competence that immediately impressed Durell. It was his business to notice someone like Sigrid. In Durell’s work, you never took anything for granted or at face value. It could cost you your life. And a few moments ago, it almost had.

Sigrid remained on his bunk while he calmed down the excited inquiries from the others aboard the
Vesper
. He told them the gunshot was an accident, that no one was hurt. Sigrid wryly rubbed her throat. When all was quiet again, he closed the door and turned back to her, and saw that she had shed her bikini and was waiting for him.

“No dice,” he said.

“Dice?”

“We don’t play.”

“Don
^j
t you like me?”

“I love you, Sigrid.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“But I want to know why you searched my cabin and why you just tried to kill me.”

She pouted. “Oh, Sam.”

“Put on your clothes.”

“Look at me!”

“I’m looking,” he said.

“How can you—?”

“It’s easy. I’m too nervous.”

“Are you a coward?”

“I’m cautious. You live longer that way.”

She grinned. “I could make you die happy.”

“No doubt. But not today.”

When she stood up, she was only inches shorter than he, and Durell was a tall man. She was magnificent. A Norse goddess, pagan and wild, filled with a golden passion. But behind her smooth white brow and great blue eyes, there was a cool brain ticking. Under that gorgeous tawny tan there was a heart as cold as the ice of Lapland. He wasn’t sure of this, and he had to restrain the gambling instincts instilled in him by his old Grandpa Jonathan, who had been one of the last of the Mississippi riverboat gamblers. But he would have bet on it.

He decided to let it go. To push it further would be to reveal too much, perhaps give her what she had come to his cabin to find out.

He picked up his gun and closed his suitcase and watched her wriggle provocatively back into her bikini. The swimsuit didn’t seem to make much difference.

Durell was a sub-chief in field operations for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been in the business for a long time. Sometimes he thought it had been for too long, considering the charts on his lowering survival factor. He did not like to think back to some of the jobs he’d done in various dark and dangerous corners of the world. But his work had become a way of life with him. He could no more fit into the calm normalcy of the everyday world now than he could forget to check every room he entered for hidden microphones, turn a corner and expect the worst, regard every man and woman he met as a potential hazard. He was not altogether happy with what he had become. He had strong, lithe gambler’s hands that could kill with a rolled newspaper, a pin, the pressure of a knuckle on a vital neural center. He had been forced to use these methods on occasion. Now and then he wished for a way out, but even if General Dickinson McFee, head of K Section’s troubleshooting operations, had permitted it, the dossiers held on him at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, at KGB headquarters in Moscow, or in Peiping’s L-5 Group files, promised him neither a long and happy life, nor an easy retirement.

He had been resting since his last assignment, enjoying his status as a guest aboard Baron Uccelatti’s
Vesper
, but his time for relaxation had ended. Yesterday he’d gotten the message. And ten minutes later, Sigrid Bjornson had come aboard.

Durell sighed. His dark blue eyes looked almost black as he regarded Sigrid’s golden figure. He felt a momentary regret, glimpsed his dark hair touched with gray in the cabin mirror, and pushed the thought of her from his mind with reluctant determination. He had only half an hour, and he was already dressed in his usual dark suit, white button-down shirt, and charcoal knitted necktie. He looked tall and big and somehow ominous, but he moved with an easy grace, light on his feet, deft with his hands as he checked his gun, wallet, pen, wristwatch and change. Sigrid, still pouting, watched every move he made.

“You look angry and dangerous, darling.”

“Coming from you, that’s the pot calling the kettle black—to coin a phrase.”

“What is it, Sam? Can’t I come with you?”

“No. Just amuse yourself.”

“How, marvelous man?”

“You can look through my luggage to your heart’s content after I’m gone.”

THE conference was to be held at the chateau of the Count Lemo^ne, off in the hop fields not far from Bruges. Durell did not know the site until, following orders, he checked into the Black Swan Inn overlooking a picturesque canal lined with copper beeches and willows, near the crowds of tourists in the Marktgasse. His room had four small windows with diamond-shaped panes of old violet glass. The walls were whitewashed, the ceilings timbered with black beams. The bed was enormous, with a heavy goose-down quilt neatly folded at its foot. A sight-seeing canal boat puttered by under the medieval windows. Nothing could have seemed more serene.

Then the telephone rang.

“Durell?” a man said.

“Here.”

“Brussels Central. What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. It was just ten o’clock in the morning. He said: “It’s past four.”

“On the dot?”

“Six past four. Why all the spook business? I’ve got the code.”

“Fine. Then here are your directions. Carry them out at once. Priority Red.”

“Red?”

“Nothing less. Here we go.”

So it was serious. More than serious. Durell hung up a moment later, frowning. A car horn blew discreetly in the narrow street below. The light seemed dim in the room, as if the offshore fog had thickened on this May morning. There was a chilly bite to the air. He told himself it was his imagination, and he left the room and the Black Swan Inn, using the small gray Mercedes sedan and silent driver who took him to his destination twenty minutes later.

The flat fields of Flanders stretched in every direction into the mists, crisscrossed precisely by roads and canals. Signs for Stella Artois beer flashed by—the Belgians were great beer-drinkers—and the fields of hops from which the brews were made were neat rectangles of green under a sky that looked stormy now. Durell asked the driver- in English where they were going. The man spoke only Flemish, but he caught the name of Count Lemogne.

“Count Lemogne,” Durell said in French, “lived during the Third Crusade. He was a great butcher.”

“This is his descendant, sir,” the driver returned in his own language. “A most respected businessman.”

“Well, that’s progress,” Durell retorted.

The place was a baroque manor house in the Flemish style, tall and almost spectral against the uncertain skies that lowered above the flat fields. A row of cypress trees bent in the damp wind that blew from the Channel. The sun was altogether gone, and it began to rain as the driver pulled through ornate iron gates and into a cobbled courtyard where a dozen other cars were parked.