Assignment - Lowlands (20 page)

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“Were you ever in love with anyone?”

“I think not. And as I sit here, it seems I’ve only been half alive all these years. My nature was too conservative.” He smiled. “I noticed that.”

“And it was wrong of me. I should have been more daring. I should have welcomed more personal involvements.”

“Love, you mean.”

“Yes. Love. A man.”

“You couldn’t ever take just any man, though, Trinka,” he said gently. “And the right one just never came along, that’s all.”

“Perhaps he did,” she said solemnly. “But it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

“I’ll never admit that.”

“Sam . . .”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

“Are you in love with someone back home, in America?” 

Deirdre Padgett’s face and form drifted gently through his mind. “Yes, I am.”

“I suppose she is very lovely.”

“Yes. Very.”

“But you have not married?”

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

“It’s a long story. It’s a question of the work I do. It’s better to be alone.” He thought of John O’Keefe and Claire and all the redheaded kids who would never feel John’s strong arms scooping them up and tossing them high in the air in greeting. He thought of Claire O’Keefe, who would never feel John’s love and passion again. And yet— he did not know if John had been wrong or not. It was all over for O’Keefe, but the sum of O’Keefe’s life was the richer for having loved and married and raised children. Better for O'Keefe, yes. He’d had something, Durell thought, of what most ordinary men enjoy in their lifetimes, even while O’Keefe lived in the extraordinary world of K Section. But what of Claire? He wondered if she now would regret the chance she took, when she married John O’Keefe, and chose to live on the knife-edge of danger and disaster for all those years. Now that the knife had slipped and the game was over, would she think it had been worth it, now, with the grief and the accented loneliness and the fatherless children?

He did not know. He could not answer for himself. Trinka’s hand crept into his. Her voice was quiet. “So you chose the lonely way for yourself, didn’t you?”

“I suppose so. I thought it was better,” he said. “Not just for myself, you understand.”

“But suppose it is now over for us? The storm and the tide—in a few hours, it could all be finished for you and me.” 

“Yes.”

“Sam?”

He looked at her. Her eyes were wide and steady.

“Sam, could I be your girl? Just for a little while,” she said quietly. “Just for now.”

“And if it doesn’t end for us?”

“Just for now,” she said again. “Please.”

He took her in his arms and felt the salt slide of her tears as she pressed her cheek to his, and he kissed her. Her mouth, trained to reject passion by her years of discipline, was clumsy and restrained at first. Then she gave a little cry of despair, and he kissed her again, and she turned all at once to liquid fire in his embrace, demanding him and yielding to him, all at once, while the wind blew around the ruins that sheltered them and the sound of the sea became a louder muttering of threats as it lifted steadily to reach out and engulf them. . . .

Now half the island was gone, devoured by the unrelenting sea. A thin rain began to fall. Darkness lay to the east, a haze of gloom shrouding the distant flat coastland of the Friesland province. The air was filled with the sound of combers crashing on shallow flats, and the cries of sea birds fleeing the wind occasionally came to them, shredded by speed and flight. And there was the surge and countersurge of currents pouring in upon the myriad channels and islets and bars of the ocean bottom here.

Durell left Trinka in the shelter of the lighthouse door. He took the rifle with him, and the waterproof matches he had borrowed from her, and climbed around the ruined lighthouse to the top of the bunker ridge. Trinka kept her eyes closed, after telling him to hurry back. She refused to go down into the bunker again.

The wind kicked stinging sand into his eyes as he reached the crest of the ridge. To the west, lightning ribboned and scratched at the gray-and-white sea. The thunder echoed the growling menace of the rising waters. The lagoon was gone, submerged under a welter of whitecaps that reached as far as he could see toward the east. Trinka had been right. No boatman in his right senses would risk crossing this area when the tide was rising.

He paused for a moment outside the bunker entrance, considering the faintly defined shape of the concrete and reinforced steel abutment that still showed dimly under the layers of sand and mud and sea-bottom silt. How long had these ruins been untouched and unexplored? It seemed to Durell the answers might be here; and then he went down the slime-covered steps to the Cassandra bunker again.

The hermetically sealed door yielded easily this time. He struck a match and stepped inside, orienting himself by the flickering light, and saw again the tables, shelves, and lab equipment. Then the match went out.

The darkness was almost absolute except for the gray, rainy light filtering down the stairs behind him. He struck another match and searched for the door he had noticed just before he carried Trinka out the last time. In the tiny, bomblike flare, he saw it to his left. Opening it, he stared into a bunkroom still equipped with tiered bunks. A series of matches carried him into another laboratory, a corridor, and then a storage room. Julian Wilde had been here, too. Broken cases indicated where S.S. General von Uittal’s looted art had been stored, and he wondered how much Julian had actually taken with him. Only about half the cases were opened.

The air was dry and musty, smelling of the rubbery seal. He found a broken case of culture vials and picked up one of the sealed tubes. The control number was stamped on the seal, and the culture medium still fitted the vial. He pocketed it as evidence, although he wondered if he would survive to show this to anyone.

Beyond this room was another sealed door. He had only four matches left. He struck one and studied the lock mechanism, then had to use another match before he got the ponderous door open. It hadn’t been used in almost twenty years, and the stainless-steel hinges had shifted balance slightly. The match burned his fingers and he dropped it. He did not light a third. He used both hands to haul back on the door.

A surge of cold, clammy air poured into the dryness of the lab bunker. Water dripped and splashed and echoed cavernously. He struck the third match now.

He was in a gun-battery chamber of concrete and steel. There was a fourteen-inch coastal rifle standing in the monumental, echoing dome of the chamber in several feet of brackish water left by the ebbing tide. A glimmer of daylight came through the gun slot. Steel ladders and catwalks led to other corridors and arched tunnels to right and left that served other pieces in the battery. An air of gloom, disuse, and forgotten military power filled the chamber. He lowered himself into the water and found it came to his knees. Before moving on, he checked the current and the watermarks on the barnacle-encrusted walls. At high tide, the sea filled everything.

He followed a straight tunnel, guided by the occasional glimmer of light from the gun ports. He saw that the openings were protected by steel fire flanges overgrown with barnacles and weeds that perfectly camouflaged their artificiality from anyone viewing the area at sea. It was raining outside. When he paused to look out, he saw only the wind-whipped surf battering the island, and the air that poured against his face was cold and biting.

Finally he returned to the Cassandra bunker and used his fourth match to find his way out to the top of the ridge. He was uneasy about leaving Trinka alone this long.

Rain slashed at him. He squinted into the wind, turned toward the lighthouse—and the sound of a gunshot made a spiteful crack behind him.

The bullet slammed past his head with a sound like a thunderclap.

He threw himself flat, clinging to the rifle he had taken from the
Suzanne
. A second shot smacked into the sand beside him. He rolled over down the dune, not daring to look around yet. The weapon sounded like a rifle equal to his own. He slid down in a small avalanche of wet sand, rolled over twice more, got to his feet and scrambled to the left, nearer the lighthouse. A third shot sang overhead. He ran, crouching, threw himself flat again, then twisted around.

A man’s tall shape was outlined against the rainy sky.

“Durell! ”

His shouted name was a fragment of rage whipped by the sea wind. It was Julian Wilde.

“Durell, drop it!”

There was no time to wonder at Wilde’s appearance here. He had assumed that Wilde had long reached the town of Amschellig to make his deal with Inspector Flaas for safe passage to Switzerland. But there had to be a reason for his return to the island. Durell knew he would learn it soon enough. For the moment, he only wanted to keep alive.

He raised his rifle, and Wilde promptly vanished behind the crest of the dune. “Durell, give it up! Throw out your gun.”

“Will you do the same?”

“Listen, there’s been an accident—”

“Why did you come back here?”

“I’ve been double-crossed!” The man’s words were torn to shreds by the wind. “The Swiss—I’m going to show them—they won’t let me in! Do you hear that? Nobody in the world will let me in!”

Durell kept silent.

“The whole deal is off!” Wilde cried. “They won’t get me the money. Do you hear me?”

Durell said nothing.

“Durell?”

The wind blew harder.

“I’ll kill you, Durell!”

There was an insane violence in the man’s voice. From where he lay hugging the wet sand, Durell was between Wilde and the lighthouse. He wondered about Trinka. Had she heard the shots? He looked back through the rain. Perhanc she was sheltering inside the ruin. Better that way, he decided It would be disastrous if Wilde reached her.

He looked the other way, uneasy over Wilde’s abrupt silence. He lifted his head carefully over the ridge. To the north, the sea was a froth of whitecaps, but there was the
Suzanne
again. plunging at anchor in the tidal current where the lagoon had been. The island itself had shrunk to half its size, eroded by the sea. In the gloom, the sea seemed to have swallowed up all the other islets around. There was only this left, and its life couldn’t be more than another hour or two.

Something burned across his neck; the sound of the gunshot came an instant later, and he felt himself fall, stumbling. Water slashed across his legs. He had been outflanked, and he knew he was wounded, but he did not know how badly. He got to his knees as a small comber smashed into his back and fired at a dim shape running in a crouch across the top of the ridge. The shape disappeared. But Julian Wilde hadn’t been hit. His leap out of sight had been powerful and deliberate, bringing him on to the same plane as Durell in relation to the lighthouse. Durell retreated, stumbling through the reedy surf below the bunker ridge He felt warm blood run down his neck and across his chest, and he touched the wound gingerly. It was just a crease.

His alarm for Trinka drove him on. He was perhaps twenty yards closer to the lighthouse than Wilde. He floundered through the surf, turned at the end of the ridge, and saw the barnacle-encrusted wall and abutment of the lighthouse. “Trinka!”

She stood in the doorway facing the rain.

“Get back inside!” he shouted.

She immediately stepped into the shadows of the doorway. He ran toward her. He did not see Wilde now. Perhaps Wilde had gone into the Cassandra bunker, thinking she was still a prisoner there. He threw himself into the shelter of the lighthouse door and dropped to his knees. Trinka’s arms supported him, her face stunned with worry.

“What is it? What happened?”

“Wilde came back.”

“
Here?
But why?”

“I’m not sure. Something must have gone wrong with his plans.”

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Let me help you.”

“Wait a moment.”

He turned to face the outer world from the gloomy shelter of the lighthouse ruin. He did not like his position.

He could see only a small segment of the island, and his field of fire was limited. Wilde could circle around behind them and trap them here—

“Hold still,” Trinka said firmly.

She tore a strip from his shirt, made a compress, and applied it to the wound on Ms neck. Her hands were firm; her manner was now impersonal. He found it hard to believe that only minutes ago he had held her violently impassioned in his arms.

“Didn’t you see the
Suzanne
return?” he asked.

“I—I wasn’t looking,” she said briefly. “I was thinking —after we made love—and you wanted to explore the bunker. I just sat here waiting for the tide to come and finish everything. . . .”    i

“How much time do we have?”

“When it grows dark,” she said. “That will be the end.”

“If Wilde doesn’t get us first,” he said grimly.

He wished he had a drink. The wind was cold, and the rain had an icy touch when the wind blew it into the entrance to the ruin. He listened for any warning sounds above the crash of the sea, but it was impossible to hear anything as light as a footfall outside. He felt trapped, as much by the unanswered questions that plagued him as by the present situation. He said to Trinka: “I think that what happened with Wilde was that when he went to deal with Inspector Flaas, he learned that word had come from Switzerland that he would not be able to enter there, bank credits or not. I don’t blame the Swiss. It’s something Wilde should have anticipated—the Swiss getting wind of all this, somehow. Who would want a man like Wilde within their borders? He’s like a plague himself. He carries the virus with him. Whatever the Swiss suspect, it’s enough to make them refuse to go along with the deal.”

“But where does that leave us?” Trinka whispered. “We have Wilde on our hands.”

“And the plague.”

“Yes.” Durell nodded. “If Wilde is running now, if Flaas ordered him to give up, maybe he tried to sail all the way to England and the storm stopped him. I don’t think he considers the
Suzanne
safe enough to sail across the North Sea tonight.”