Assignment - Lowlands (3 page)

There was little else. Piet had been careful. Careful, that is, until yesterday, when something—or somebody— reached out and killed him.

Van Horn’s car keys were on the dresser. Durell picked them up and went to the door, took the big, old-fashioned key from the inner latch, and looked back just once at the dead man on the bed. Sooner or later, the body should be autopsied in a morgue. But short of removing the corpse now—an utter impossibility—he could not permit anyone to touch Piet. No one not alerted to the danger should even enter this room.

The alternative could bring death to the entire city. It might already be too late to isolate the thing Van Horn had brought back with him, he thought grimly. Everything might be too late.

He might be carrying the same death with him, now.

He locked the door, pocketed the big key, and started down the steep stairway to the street entrance beside the antique shop. Shadows slanted down ahead of him. He wondered where the housekeeper might be. And on impulse he suddenly paused, halfway down to the second floor.

He trapped the sound of a quick footfall just below him.

It stopped at once. He could not see down there, since the next flight below, leading to the street door, was blocked by the landing. On the other hand, the colored glass panels in the street door were visible, sending shafts of bright light into the tiny, tiled vestibule.

Whoever had paused below him would have to cross that small area of colored light to gain the safety of the street.

He waited.

The other person waited, too.

He tried to remember how the footfall had sounded, fleeing from his descent. It had been light and careful, with a small secondary heel click. A woman, then, on high heels. The housekeeper? She wore heavy oxfords for her massive size, Durell remembered. Someone else, then. Someone light on her feet. A young woman.

No one like that had been mentioned in his briefing.

He waited.

He knew how to be patient. He did not move; he did not make a sound. He wondered if the woman—or girl— below him really knew he was there. He did not recall making any noise when he’d left Piet’s room. Yet something had frightened her, started her on the run. Yes, she knew he was above her. She was waiting, too—

Her patience did not equal his. All at once, Durell saw the flash of honey-colored hair, the foreshortened view of a woman in a print dress of Indonesian design as she ran across the tiled vestibule and wrenched open the street door. He was after her at the same instant. He lost sight of her as he rounded the landing, swinging to the smooth, worn newel post to implement his speed. He wanted a look at her face. But he didn’t make it. She was through the door and outside before he reached ground level.

The street along the canal was quiet, cooler under the shade of the sycamore trees. The canal sparkled in the late sunlight. There were long shadows on the brick sidewalk and on the canal banks. Some of the children were gone. Durell stood on the white stone doorstep beside the antique shop and looked one way, then the other. He did not see the girl in the Indonesian dress. She was gone. But she could not have turned the corner in the time it took him to come down the last few steps. She had to be somewhere nearby.

The doorbell of Piet Van Horn’s antique shop rang with a ching-a-ching sound. The housekeeper stood there in the doorway, hands folded over her ample stomach, and stared stonily at him.

“Mynheer, have you talked with Piet?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “He is all right.”

“All right? But he was terribly ill, he—”

“He’s much better now,” Durell said. “And he does not wish to be disturbed. He said he would sleep through until morning.”

“Without dinner?”

She looked incredulous, and Durell knew he had made a mistake. To Hollanders, food was a most important factor of daily life. Meals in the Netherlands were heavy, hearty, and frequent. It would be inconceivable to the housekeeper for Piet to pass up dinner.

He said quickly, “It is his stomach, you see. It is very upset. He has made some tea to quiet it. He will be all right. Just do not disturb him.”

The big woman shrugged doubtfully. “As you say, mynheer.”

At that moment, Durell saw the girl again. She had been standing hidden behind the broad trunk of an old chestnut tree on the opposite side of the street, near the canal bank. All at once she broke from cover, perhaps assuming his attention was being diverted by Piet’s housekeeper. He saw that she was young, as he had suspected. Her print dress was a bright splash of color under the spreading tree limbs. Her long, honey-colored hair bobbed on her shoulders as she moved, her back held stiffly. Her legs were long and straight and very good. He watched the smooth articulation of thigh and hip with appreciation. But he still could not see her face.

“Do you know that girl?” he asked the housekeeper.

“Who?”

“That one, going down the street to the bridge.”

“No, sir,” the woman replied.

Durell inclined his head in thanks, then turned to go. He started off easily, his long stride casually deceptive, covering ground with remarkable speed. He did not want to overtake the girl at once. She had been snooping in Piet’s house, perhaps listening at Piet’s bedroom door while he’d been talking to the dying man. Why? What had she heard, and who was she? He had to take time to probe for the answers.

The girl turned the comer and got on a trolley. As she climbed aboard, she turned her head slightly to look back deliberately at Durell, and he glimpsed her face. She looked pale and frightened. He got an impression of enormous eyes, slightly uptilted, a pink mouth, an elfin beauty. Then she swung aboard and mingled with the press of other passengers.

He was lucky. There are no cruising taxis in Amsterdam, but there was a taxi stand nearby, where a glass-domed tourist canal boat was docked. Otherwise, he would have been out of luck. He climbed into the first cab and told the driver what to do.

He was kept busy for the next hour. The girl got off the trolley at Dam Square, went into a department store, strolled down Nieuwen Dijk toward Central Station; then she changed her mind and retraced her steps to Kalver-straat, where she bought a pair of white leather gloves, a small leather overnight case, sun glasses, suntan lotion, and a lipstick. She looked back twice only, searching for Durell, apparently unable to resist the impulse. He did not think she saw him, but he couldn’t be sure. He was an expert at shadowing, and patient at it, when it was not easy to be patient. He kept thinking about Ret Van Horn’s body behind the locked door of his bedroom. Something had to be done about it, quickly. The housekeeper would have closed up the antique shop by now—it was almost six o’clock, and the Dutch were habitually early diners. His admonition to the woman not to disturb Piet’s “sleep” might or might not be obeyed. He did not know how much the woman knew about Piet’s employment with K Section.

But even more urgent was the need to establish some kind of quarantine there. He felt the urgency of settling this at once. On the other hand, the girl’s evasive behavior, her presence in the house, and her obvious attempts to shake free of him had to be explained.

He found an opportunity at last when she turned into a restaurant called ’T Oude Schaap, “The Old Sheep,” near Rembrandtplein. She seated herself at a window table, in plain view. There was a phone booth across the broad, clean avenue, and he could observe her from there. Durell changed a twenty-guilder note at a confectioner’s shop redolent of kopjes coffee candy, borrowed an envelope from the proprietor, and stuffed the Michelin map he had taken from Piet’s room into it, then addressed it to himself at the Spaanjager Hotel. The proprietor promised to mail it on his way home on the trolley in an hour. Then Durell dodged the streams of bicycles on the street and a tourist sightseeing bus to return to the phone booth.

The operators were quick and efficient. He asked for overseas service and gave the London number that John O’Keefe maintained for urgent contact. He knew O’Keefe would be waiting for him. He watched the girl in the window across the street being served by an elderly waiter, and then he heard O’Keefe’s quick, lilting voice.

“Johnny here.”

“This is Sam. Are you clear?”

“All clear, Cajun. You’re in Amsterdam?”

“I need some help,” Durell said bluntly. “Piet is out of the picture. All the way out.”

O’Keefe was shocked. “What happened to him? Cassandra?”

“I think so. Maybe an accident, but I’m not sure about it. There’s a girl involved, and I had to leave the body. You know what that means. There’s a lot at stake—maybe the whole city.”

O’Keefe sucked in a thin breath. “Good God, Sam—”

“I want you here tonight. You’ll have to dispose of him.”

“Is it safe?”

“I don’t know,” Durell said flatly. “I had to expose myself. If you don’t want to take the chance, someone else will have to do it.”

“No, it isn’t that. But if we only knew more about it—”

“We don’t know anything about it. Piet died too fast. In less than twenty-four hours, I suspect. So we have a time limit. We’ll know how much he carried in a day or two, if anyone else gets hit—I’ll have to watch myself, too— but we may not be sure, even then. The medical reports will be puzzling, I’m sure. It didn’t look to me like anything more than a coronary, perhaps massive.”

“Maybe it was just that,” O’Keefe began.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Durell said.

“Yes. You’re right. It’s my Irish optimism. All right, Sam, I’ll come right over.” He laughed thinly. “And I just rewrote my last will and testament, to make sure Claire and the kids have rights to the flat and the farm in Devon and some stock I recently bought for our old age—”

“Claire and the kids may not have an old age, either, if we don’t choke this off fast,” Durell said grimly.

“Right you are. Is Piet in his own house?”

“In the bedroom, top floor. I locked the door. You’ll have to get it out, weight it down, take it out to sea and drop it into deep water. You’ll have to do this in a way that means he’ll not come up too soon, understand? Either that, or use an incinerator. Which can you manage?”

“It will be the sea, I think.”

“Whatever you do, keep the police, the local neighbors, and everyone else out of it. Nobody is to touch him but you. Understand?”

“Thanks for nothing,” O’Keefe said. “Expendable Johnny, that’s me.”

“You bought it when you signed into the business,” Durell said.

“Don’t remind me of my follies, Sam. Listen. . . O’Keefe paused, and Durell waited, watching the girl in the restaurant across the street. O’Keefe went on: “Sam, what happens if we can’t cork up this bottle right away?” “You know your medieval history, Johnny. You’ve heard of the Black Death, the plagues, and so forth. This will be quicker, broader, much more efficient. After all, the people who worked on Cassandra were thoroughly trained biochemical technicians.”

“It should have been kept buried,” O’Keefe whispered. “Well, it wasn’t. Have you got everything straight now?”

“I’ll be there by midnight. . . . Sam?”

“Yes?”

“How do you feel?”

“It doesn’t work that fast,” Durell said quietly.

“But you were with Piet. You could have got it from him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared? Honestly?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “I’m damned scared.”

He hung up.

Operation Cassandra had been in the files a long time.

It was only a nightmare rumor, a poisonous old-wives’ tale, a relic of World War II.

Along with unnamed and unimagined secret weapons, along with the V-l and V-2 rockets and the Peenemunde research base of the Nazi High Command, there was Operation Cassandra.

Routine checking in Washington of crates of war records, the clerical residue of shiploads of material seized by the speeding spearheads of General Patton’s Third Army, uncovered Operation Cassandra.

But it was still a rumored nightmare, a hint only of the unmentionable. It was death waiting to be unleashed, in a manner not seen since the Middle Ages. It was to be a grotesque and silent 
Götterdämmerung
, a quiet ending to all that mankind cherished.

Cassandra was biological, germ warfare. Nothing new. It had existed for a long time in laboratories, in biological test tubes, a warping of the ultimate excuses for war, a negation of every normal and decent instinct in man, a representation of the Nazi philosophy. Cassandra should have been killed in the laboratory. Instead, she was nurtured and perfected. The deadly ampoules and vials were ready to be dropped on Great Britain’s cities and fields when the Allied spearheads sped into Holland and forced a wild and panicked retreat by the Germans.

The base where Cassandra had grown in her molds and flats of slime was reported as destroyed.

But there was a question.

Destroyed?

The records unearthed by Washington were vague. One suggested the deliberate sealing of a bunker that contained all the records, and the heavy waterproof safes racked with vials of Cassandra cultures. The virus had no enemy, could not be seen or counted, and caused death from apparent massive coronary constrictions in twenty-four hours. But other records implied that the underground laboratory had been flooded when the retreating Germans sabotaged Holland’s dikes and vengefully let in the tides of the cold North Sea.

The northern coasts of Germany and Holland, the West and East Frisian Islands, and the drowned polders of Groningen and Friesland were scoured quietly and efficiently. Nothing was found. No bunkers. No laboratory. No hint of the germ-warfare research the records showed during the Nazi Occupation.

Then file it and forget it. It was only a rumor and a nightmare, a ragtag end of terror propaganda.

If the place was destroyed, so was the virus.

It doesn’t exist.

So code it, file it, forget it.

And nothing happened for another ten years.

A week before the K Section alert, an anonymous letter arrived at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, offering six test vials of the Cassandra virus for sale to the United States, or to the NATO defense organization, for the sum of five million dollars in a cash deposit in an anonymously numbered account in the Banque Populaire Suisse in Geneva. Further details of this first letter were lost because the aide who opened it in routine fashion labeled it for the crank file, where it was dropped into the incinerator forty-eight hours later.