Assignment - Lowlands (6 page)

“Yes, I expected that,” Durell said.

Flaas took from his pocket severed small, folded sheets of bluish stationery. “These are the notes received by the Defense Ministry today. Quite ordinary, as you see. I understand duplicates were received by your Consul General’s office here in Amsterdam. The instructions are specific. I have been in touch with Washington, Heer Durell. I am empowered to suggest that you carry out the instructions contained in this note.”

“What are they?” Durell asked.

“This man Wilde requests that a new emissary be sent to treat with him on receiving the virus culture, when payment is made in Switzerland for them. You are to drive to Friesland tomorrow, past Leeuwarden, to a town called Amschellig, a small village. The hotel there, the Gunderhof, is plain, but clean and neat. You will be comfortable. In Amschellig you will be contacted by this—Julian Wilde.”

“I see.”

“You will be retracing Piet’s steps. It is a dangerous thing to do. Piet, I think, was careless, since he is missing now. Perhaps he is dead.”

“I’ll go, of course,” Durell said.

“We suggest that you check in and simply wait to be contacted by this Wilde. You are authorized to deal with him and exchange the bank credits in Switzerland for full information on the virus, all the data and material and cultures. However, it is suggested that, in the event something goes wrong, you should have some field for maneuver. Therefore you are to go to the waterfront in Amschellig and inquire about renting a boat to cruise, as a tourist, among the Frisian Islands; but you are not to rent a vessel until you are contacted by our people. We will have a boat and crew ready for you, and they will make themselves known to you at the proper time.”

Flaas reached in his coat pocket, took out a plain brown envelope, and handed it to Durell. It was sealed with wax. “Here are the Swiss credits for the American dollars, made out as directed by my government to pay this—this unholy ransom. You will be careful with it, naturally.” He smiled tightly. “We are a thrifty people.”

“I’ll be careful,” Durell said, putting the envelope in the same pocket with the auto map that had interested Cassandra.

Flaas sighed. “It is rather a hopeless task, trying to find a submerged bunker that has been lost under the sea for over fifteen years. A laboratory of that sort—which must be airtight and watertight for the virus still to be potent—could be almost anywhere. We have no official records of it, even after a desperate search made among old war documents. However, we know the bunker was reached, and it was reopened, and one of the virus cultures taken out and used to kill the fishermen at Doorn. So it can be found again. And if anything goes wrong with your deal, it is your job to find it—quickly.” Flaas drew a deep sharp breath. “Quickly, mynheer, do you understand?” 

“Since the wartime flooding,” Durell said, “everything has changed up there, geographically.”

“True. And the land has not yet been recovered from the sea. That is why the job is so difficult.”

“How much time do I have, if my contact with Wilde goes wrong?”

Inspector Flaas stood up and stubbed out his crooked cigar.

“As I said, there are some in the government who want defiant action. They claim the threat is from a small group of madmen—perhaps only one or two, after all. This faction cannot be held off forever. We Dutch have a history of resistance, as you know, to threats, tyranny and blackmail. The tradition will be preserved. You have forty-eight hours to conclude the deal, Heer Durell. Either get the virus in exchange for that envelope of Swiss bank credits, .or you must give up trying on your own. We know you want to keep this out of other hands, and we understand this. But we cannot risk Dutch lives indefinitely.” 

“What will you do after forty-eight hours?”

“You will be asked to leave the Netherlands?”

“And then?”

“A manhunt will be conducted in the north provinces to clean out this nest of madmen, once and for all.”

“At the risk of the plague?”

Inspector Flaas nodded slowly.

“I am afraid so, yes. At risk of the plague.”

Durell waited, without moving, for a full hour after Flaas was gone. He sat in darkness, so that any watchers outside the hotel might think he had turned in for the night, and he sipped the strong, smooth Dutch gin and hoped that O’Keefe would call him soon to assure him about Piet’s body. But no call came and the gin was no help. After an hour he got up and used the service stairs instead of the elevator and left the hotel by the back door.

This area of Amsterdam was peaceful, dark, and quiet at this post-midnight hour. He walked easily through the cooling summer night, in the deep shadow of the beech trees lining the canals, heading toward the center of the city. Once he thought he heard the quiet footfall of a surveillance operative behind him, and he sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette and waited twenty minutes, but no one appeared, and he didn’t think Flaas had put a watcher on him. None had been watching the back door of the Spaanjager Hotel, anyway. He went on.

Van Horn’s antique shop at Cuypplein 45 was closed and shuttered. The canal where the children had been playing that afternoon was now dark and deserted. Durell walked to the far corner, crossed, and walked back again on the other side of the narrow street. All the houses were wrapped in their medieval dreams. There was no traffic on the canal, none on Cuypplein Straat. The upper windows of Van Horn’s house were all in darkness. There was nothing to tell him if O’Keefe had been here yet. Durell found a bench near the canal landing where the tourist boats stopped, and sat in deep shadow, considering Van Horn’s house.

Whatever virtues a man might practice to perfect himself in the business, Durell knew with a gambler’s instinct that only too often luck played a decisive role in the solution. He never counted on it; but he was never surprised by fortuitous turns of events. He accepted what came along and tried to use it, good or bad. You could be patient, you could be highly skilled in all the black arts of espionage, you could be brilliant—but if the luck of gamblers failed to come your way, the work could be plodding, dull, and often too late in resolution to be of any use to K Section.

But he was lucky now.

Piet Van Horn’s house was shuttered for the night, but he had been on watch less than five minutes when he saw the side door next to the shop suddenly open and close and a dim figure move onto the sidewalk. Immediately Durell was on his feet.

It was the housekeeper, Lina Huysing. The stout, grim-looking woman paused on the brick sidewalk, as if in indecision. Then she turned left, crossing the street under the sycamore trees, and walked quickly in a path that took her very near to where Durell waited in the shadows. She carried a small overnight case in her left hand, and a black straw hat sat primly on her middle-aged gray head. Her flat-heeled shoes made determined raps on the brick sidewalk as she walked.

Durell moved quickly around the bench, grateful that he had not arrived here ten minutes later.

“Lina,” he said quietly. “Miss Huysing.”

The woman halted as if struck by lightning. In the dim street light that filtered under the shade trees, her face looked pale. Terror touched and twisted her mouth. Then she saw it was Durell, and she shrank back with a quick intake of breath.

“Oh! It is you, Heer Durell.”

“Of course. Don’t be afraid.”

“Do not come near me I Please! I beg of you—”

“All right,” he said. “I won’t.”

“Are you—are you ill, too?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t feel anything yet. But how do you know about that?”

Her voice was flat and bitter. “Your friend, Heer O’Keefe, was here an hour ago and took Piet away.” Her eyes were big, swimming with sudden tears. “Piet was dead when you left him, is it not so?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “I’m sorry.” They spoke across the width of the sidewalk, and he looked both ways to make sure they were alone on the canal bank. He thought he saw a couple strolling in the shadows near the far corner, but he turned his attention back to the woman. “Did O’Keefe leave a message for me, Lina?”

She hesitated. “What is there to say? Piet is dead. I warned him what might happen. But to die of a disease like that—”

“O’Keefe told you this?” Durell asked sharply.

She held up her hands as if to thrust him away when he took a step toward her. “I am not a fool! It was plain to see that your associate was being very careful of infection.”

“Just what did O’Keefe say to you?”

“He said everything was being taken care of. He said you were to go on up to Amschellig, as Inspector Flaas directed. It has been cleared with your superiors.” The stout woman bit her lip. “You are to check into the Hotel Gunderhof and wait for O’Keefe there. He will join you tomorrow.”

“Anything else?”

“What more can there be? It is your fault that Piet is dead.” The woman began to cry, burying her face in a handkerchief, her heavy body wracked by silent, stifled sorrow. Durell wished he could comfort her. But he knew that if he touched her, her latent hysteria might get out of control. She said, “Piet loved his shop and all the lovely things he bought and sold. Why did you have to talk him into such ugly work, mynheer? What good did it do him?” “Piet was a brave man. He died for Holland,” Durell said, knowing how inadequate the words were for this grieving woman. “He didn’t do these special errands just for us. He worked for Holland, too.”

She shook her head. “But why did he die?”

“He tried to save others,” he said.

“And you? You will die, too?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

“You were with Piet for an hour—and you knew what might happen, being with him?”

“I wasn’t sure, at first. Later, I knew. But I had to talk to Piet and find out what he had learned.”

She said, “Your friend O’Keefe disinfected the room, but he seemed to doubt he could do much. What will he do with—with Piet?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked gently. “What O’Keefe took away with him was not really Piet at all, now.”

She was silent. Then she sighed, a long exhalation of exhausted emotion, and she straightened and looked directly at Durell’s tall, shadowed figure on the sidewalk.

“You are brave, too. I can be no less.”

“Where are you going?”

“To my sister’s house, in Gravenhage. Is it safe?”

“I think so, if you stayed out of Piet’s room.”

“Yes, I did.”

“If the police question you, will you tell them about O’Keefe?” Durell asked. “He should have time to do— what must be done.”

“I understand. I will vanish for a day.”

Durell nodded. “That will be time enough.”

“I should hate you,” she whispered. “And yet—and yet—” She looked at him in wonder. “By tomorrow you may be as Piet, and still you go on. . . .”

“There’s nothing else to do,” Durell said.

After the woman left, he walked around the shuttered house to the back alley and found the little red Caravelle that Piet had driven in to get to Friesland. With the keys he had taken from Piet’s room, Durell started the car and drove back to his hotel. For twenty minutes he pored minutely over the road map he had taken from Piet’s room, but it still yielded nothing. As far as he could see without the aid of a microscopic lab examination, there were no marks on it.

He slept for four hours, and at dawn he checked out and drove north out of Amsterdam. In the cool early hours the land was flat and misty, broken only by the occasional loom of a windmill or the long, straight line of a sea dike to the west, and the rows of beech trees across the countryside that marked the canals. He drove through Volendam, where the Dutch still wore old peasant cosumes for the tourists; but at this hour there were no sightseers about.

At six o’clock he paused for a Dutch breakfast of crisp hot rolls, butter, and cheese, bacon and eggs, and steaming coffee. He was surprisingly hungry. By the time he returned to the red Caravelle, the sun was shining through the morning mist.

He took the wide, straight road along the top of the huge dike that crossed the Ijsselmeer and drove for eighteen miles with the sea on either hand. The land was shining, immaculate; the countryside green and flat, laced with its blue lakes and beech-bordered roads and canals. The white cloth sails of windmills ceaselessly pumping water shone in the dawn sun. The little car drummed speedily along the road, handling with ease. Now and then the wide road deck changed from brick to concrete and back to brick again.

He made good progress through the snug little villages that seemed to be waiting only for Hobbema’s brush and canvas. This was the land of Cuyp and Pieter de Hooch and Terborch, illuminated in all the museums of the world. It was a small country, easily crossed in a matter of hours. He reached Amschellig before nine o’clock.

A room had been reserved for him at the Gunderhof. It was a big, rambling, wooden hotel, designed for family vacations, and it was crowded to capacity with holiday-goers. Listening to the babel of Dutch, French, Italian and English voices from the dining room when he checked in, he heard no hint of panic or rumor. The clerk acknowledged his signature with a nod, tapped the bell for a boy, and Durell was led up to the third floor.

His room faced the North Sea. Beyond the white curve of beaches and the blue water he could see the low, sandy outlines of Terschelling and Schiermonnikoog, the nearest Frisian Islands in the Wadden Zee. The air was clear and crisp, smelling of salt and tidal flats. Down on the beach in front of the hotel were bathers and swimmers. On the tennis courts, determined Dutch couples were already perspiring in the morning sun. And the inevitable bicyclists were busy at the cycle rack, selecting their vehicles for a spin along the brick-paved dike road.

Southward was the village of Amschellig, tidy and crisp in the morning sunlight. Fishing boats were moored at the dock, their bluff, blunt bows unchanged in design for centuries. At the municipal pier was a collection of private yachts, sloops and cruisers. Already a few sails sparkled and bent before the wind offshore.

Durell ordered coffee and rolls, lit a cigarette, and considered his next move. He had been told to rendezvous here with the mysterious men who were literally blackmailing all of civilization. But impatience touched him. He knew that waiting was part of the business, but it never came easily. He was rarely content to leave the initiative to the other side. But now he had no choice.