Assignment - Quayle Question (18 page)

“Are many brothers living up there now?”

“I got a few in, at first. And a lot of kids. But they got tired of the dust and sun and nothing around here. So I started up the winery again. And then these people flew in here in their private jet and leased the place for a month, couple of a weeks ago.”

“They flew in?”

“One of those company executive jets. It comes and goes, all the time.”

“Where does it land?”

“Oh, the desert’s flat as a billiard table out there. Easy. They signed an agreement to pay me good money, said it was for the Maharanda Brotherhood, they’d heard about me, but they needed it for a big mucky-muck who wanted to meditate. They promised me good money. But I haven’t seen a peso of it yet.”

Durell clucked sympathetically. “Señorita O’Hara—” 

“Wendy.”

“Wendy, did you meet any of these people?”

“Only their Mexican lawyer from the Federal District who came down to close the deal. Twisted my arm a bit. All kinds of laws about wineries and temples and such, they could really pressure me. So I signed. I’m living over in the posada—not the Orient Hotel you’re in. The posa-da is about a mile out of town, where I have my orange trees. Tried to grow an orchard there, but it’s going sour. Again, no water.”

“Have you been back to the monastery since you left?” Wendy O’Hara leaned an ample bosom on the round cantina table. “You are a cop, aren’t you?”

“In a way.”

“In what way?”

“We think they’ve got somebody up there who shouldn’t be there. A young girl. We’d like to get her back.”

Wendy O’Hara seemed to be enjoying herself. “Oh, you’re a private cop. I like detective stories. Paperbacks, mostly. What is it, a snatch? A runaway?”

“We’re not sure.”

The woman stared at him. “Well, you’ll never get her out of there without a small army, I can tell you that.” “How come?”

“Only one road up to the top of the mesa. They’ve put all kinds of contraptions on it, too, so the big mucky-muck won’t have his meditations disturbed. They could swat you like a fly on a wall.”

“I see. What kind of contraptions?”

“I don’t know. Warning devices. I went up there last week about my rent money—tried to get up there—anc before I was halfway, a couple of their kite-flying acolytes politely but firmly sent me back again. I was kind ol annoyed.”

Wendy O’Hara narrowed her eyes against the glare oi the sun on the dusty plaza. An Indian leading a loaded donkey made his way slowly from the grocery store and vanished around the corner. Dogs slept in the dust. A woman with a green parrot leaned out one of the upper windows of a house at the far end of the plaza. Two children played listlessly on an iron-grilled balcony that looked as if it were about to come loose from the crumbling facade of the house. The place was one of the world’s dead ends. Durell didn’t like the thought. He listened to the crashing, repetitive rock from the vans and watched Marcus splash his laundry in the fountain. Marcus had grown a two-day beard, wore patched denims, a Western shirt, and a battered straw sombrero.

Wendy O’Hara said, “Who is the girl?”

“I was hoping you could help me get up there.”

“Can’t do. I told you, even I couldn’t get in, and I own the place.”

“You and the bank.”

“Yes. I can describe the layout inside the winery and the chapel to you.”

Durell said, “That would be helpful.”

“When are you going to try it?”

“There’s plenty of time,” Durell said.

“But will you tell me when?”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

“Hell,” said Wendy O’Hara.

When she was gone, Durell got up and went into the cool interior of the cantina. Vincente came up behind the bar and put a cold bottle of Carta Blanca in front of him.

“You are angry with me, señor, about the recording tape?”

“No. A man must make a living somehow.” “You are indeed a gentleman, señor.”

“How many tapes have you delivered to the winery?” Durell asked.

“One every day, sir. Like a clock. Like the Señora O’Hara.”

“How and when?”

Vincente hesitated. “I cannot tell you that. I am afraid of them.”

“I’ll pay you enough to make you forget your fear.” Vincente coughed. “Fifty American dollars?”

“It’s plenty.” Durell gave him the cash. Vincente stuffed it into his pants pocket and Durell said, “Where do you keep the recorder?”

“Here. It is a little thing.”

The device was concealed in a package of king-sized Camel cigarettes, a trim and efficient Japanese model operating on 1.5 batteries, miniaturized to perfection. Durell opened it and took out the small spool of very fine mylar tape and pocketed the tape and kept the recorder, too. Vincente looked very troubled.

“I’m afraid of these foreigners, señor.”

“How do they pick it up?”

“Each evening, one of the monks with the black kites comes here for it. At six o’clock.”

“How does he arrive?”

Vincente shrugged. “He walks.”

“It is over three miles, Vincente, to the winery.”

“He walks, señor.”

“At six o’clock?”

“Punctually.”

“Vincente . . .”

“Yes, señor?” The man had begun to sweat. “Vincente, if you give them warning, you will be killed.” Durell’s voice was quiet, but there was an abrupt hardness in it that made Vincente tremble suddenly. Durell said, “I will be here at six o’clock to meet the man with the black kite. You will make yourself absent for the moment. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly,
si
, of course.”

“You’re very agreeable, Vincente.” “I am a man of peace,” Vincente said.

“And you have much greed. You will be paid another fifty American dollars when the kite man arrives.”

“Yes, I am a greedy man. I belong to you, heart and soul, Señor Durell.”

He made slow, quiet love to Deirdre during the hot, dusty afternoon, Loving her, holding her dearness close to him, he did not want six o’clock to come. He knew that what had to be done was something from which he might not return. He was accustomed to taking risks. He had done so many times in the past. The scars on his body bore testimony to the times he had escaped from enemies in almost all the dark corners of the world. He remembered Dr. Mouquerana Sinn, and the jungled island in the Andamans in the Indian Ocean, and how he had been hunted like an animal, for sport, as a game to amuse the man. He had hoped, after it was over, that the man was dead. Dr. Sinn had the cunning of perverted genius. If Sinn was mad, it was the madness of brilliance, made all the more dangerous by his personal hallucinations. He knew that what he had to do would not be easy, and the long hours of this afternoon with Deirdre were made all the more precious by this knowledge.

The Orient Hotel was a low, stone building with a scraggly lawn turned gray by the desert sun. The lobby had once been pretentious, with Spanish tiling on the floor and walls, and a small fountain in the center court that no longer seemed to work. Through the slatted shades of Durell’s bedroom window, he could see across a mile or more of desert to the abrupt rise of the mesa, on top of which was the former monastery and winery. He thought about Wendy O’Hara and felt concern for the woman for a time, and then decided she could be trusted in the information she had given him. He was not sure about Vincente.

“Sam?” Deirdre said softly.

“Yo.”

“You seem worried.”

“I’m always worried. Dr. Sinn worries me.”

“I don’t want you to do it.”

“I have to, Dee.”

“That’s what you always say. It’s your job. It must be done. Someone has to do it, so you go in. And I wait here and wonder if you’ll come back.”

“I’ll come back. With Deborah.”

“You’re not even sure this is the right place.”

“It must be.”

“I wish we were home, back in Prince John.”

“So do I. We’ll be there, soon. There’s a little town on the coast here, though, maybe fifty miles from here, that hasn’t been spoiled by tourists yet. We’ll go there first, spend a few days together, like this.” He smiled at her lovely, oval face, touched her eyebrows with his fingertips. “Don’t worry about me, Dee.”

“I do, darling. Come back here.”

But Marcus knocked on the hotel room door, and after Deirdre put on a robe, Durell let him in.

Marcus moved to the window and stared out at the distant mesa, at the empty, blinding gray desert, and turned a scowling face at Durell.

“You saw the O’Hara woman. So what now?”

Durell told him about Vincente’s tape recorder and the monk with the kite who came regularly at six o’clock to collect the tape.

“So what does that do for us?” Marcus argued. “The guys in the vans are restless. Andy and Roger are ready to go. The girl we picked up doesn’t know anything about anything. Lou has been banging her all day. He won’t be worth a damn tonight. Harry and Dave are okay, but I don’t see how we can go up there and crash in unless we call on the
Federales
.”

“No cops,” Durell said. “I’m going in alone.” He paused. “The rest of you can follow me after an interval. But I’ll want you to stay close behind.”

“How can we get past their detection devices?”

Durell said, “There’s a way—if it works.”

“If.”

“After I’m in, the rest of you follow like you were going to blow the place apart.”

“I know the technique,” Marcus growled.

“Then just be patient.”

Vincente shivered in the back room of his cantina, although the heat of the day’s sunshine still lingered here with stifling breathlessness. In an hour, the chill of the desert would settle in. The plaza was already in deep shadow, and some of the young men of the village were gathered about the vans, talking to Marcus and his men, exchanging cigarettes and drinking beer. Durell waited in the back room for Vincente. Time seemed to stop moving. Each minute was an eternity.

Finally he heard the thin tinkling of a small handbell. Vincente stirred. “He comes.”

“Bring him back in here,” Durell said.

“I always give him the tape recorder at the bar. That is where he pays me.”

“Tell him you left it in this room. Tell him you think the tape ran out.”

“Si. You will kill this man?”

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“I change my opinion of you, señor. I think you are a cruel person. I fear you more than I fear the others.” “Good. Keep that thought in mind.”

The tinkling bell stopped. Durell urged Vincente gently toward the doorway and out of the back room. It was dark enough in here, he thought. He took out his gun and listened to Vincente talk to the monk in Spanish. Vincente’s voice was strained and the monk noticed it and asked if anything was wrong.

“The recorder—it may be broken—the tape does not work. Perhaps the batteries—it is not my fault, padre—”

“Give it to me, Vincente.” The man’s voice, which hac been polite at first, revealed a sudden hardness.

“I left it in the back room, sir.”

“Bring it out.”

“I put it down, I cannot remember—”

“Go. Bring it.”

Vincente stumbled through the doorway as if he had been shoved violently inside. The monk’s bell jingled. Vincente’s face was very pale in the gloom. He stood and trembled. Durell, flat against the wall beside the doorway, put the muzzle of his gun to his lips in a signal for silence There were cartons of canned beer, racks for wine, some old furniture gathering dust in the storeroom. Vincente began to shove the cartons around, deliberately making it sound as if he were searching for the tape recorder. But he was trembling too much to make a decent pretense of it.

A shadow seemed to leap from the doorway into the dark room.

“What are you doing, Vincente?”

“I— am sorry, señor. I cannot find it.”

“You had better.”

The man came into the room through the doorway. His little kite dragged unheeded on the plank floor behind him.

Durell slammed his gun into the man’s ribs.

“Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Don’t breathe!”

The man was big, powerfully built. He was also either stupid or desperate. His hands went up, starting to clasp together above his head; one finger reached for a ring or the opposite hand. Durell hit him with the gun on the side of his head and the man staggered, fell against a stack oi wine boxes, tried to clasp his hands again and at the same time kicked at Durell. His robe hampered him. Durell hi1 him again, heard Vincente suck in breath in his terror. The monk fell sidewise and several bottles broke and the pungency of spilled wine filled the shadowed storeroom. A knife flickered from the black-garbed man’s sleeve. Durell caught at it, broke it free. He did not want to fire his gun and arouse the whole village. He struck again, and the big monk went down to his knees. Once more. Durell felt himself begin to sweat. The monk collapsed on his face, lay still.

“Stand back, Vincente,” Durell said.

Vincente nodded. Durell checked the man’s hand, found the ring, saw the small wire leading from it along his palm and up the sleeve. Very carefully, he opened the monk’s robe and took it off, peeling it back by following the tiny wire. The wire was connected to the rope that served as a belt around the man’s waist, and from there it went to the bell and the kite. The kite itself served as an antenna, in turn attached to a small box, no more than four inches long, thrust into the waistband of the man’s denim slacks.

It took time and care to get the man’s costume completely off. Several minutes went by, longer than Durell expected. What it amounted to was a broadcasting monitor that spotted the monk’s movements from a central control, keeping track of the man.

The monk’s outfit was a walking electronic arsenal of detection devices. Within the folds of the black robe was a “blind spotlight,” which looked like an ordinary flashlight. Hand held, its beam was so brilliant as to temporarily blind anyone. There was also a small plate that Durell guessed would respond to alarms triggered by infrared beams. And a tag that, if the activating mechanism were not turned off, would also set off an alarm like that used to outwit shoplifters. Added to that was a microwave receiver that would send a certain signal within an area protected by high-frequency radio beams. Durell had seen similar gadgets in K Section’s basement lab—honeycomb logic circuitry that could detect the difference between birds, small animals, and a man. He was aware of miniaturized sound detectors, barriers of strong, invisible infrared laser beams in which the pulse of radiation is passed from one unit to the next to form a circuit. When broken, alarms went off.