Assignment - Quayle Question (3 page)

“But you worked with Eli Plowman,” McFee stated.

“If you can call it that. He fouled us up.”

“Tomash’ta was one of Eli’s hit men.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“No. But he is here in the States, on business. His own peculiar business.” McFee looked quietly at Dierdre, but did not address her directly. “He still works for Plowman.”

“But I thought—”

“That we laundered Plowman? He got away from us in Singapore.”

“I’m not in that end of the business,” Durell said. “I have no sympathy for Plowman’s ‘sanitation squad.’ He’s an assassin, and even if he does fight fire with fire for our side, I’ve never subscribed to it and don’t do so now. He referred to his work as a garbage detail, cleaning the world of killers, terrorists, and it all became an excuse in his mind for selective murder. We didn’t get along in Sumatra. If he got away from you in Singapore, send someone else after him.”

“I’m sending you,” McFee said flatly. “You and Deirdre. It’s more important that simply changing our policy and eliminating Plowman’s performances. He’s working against us now, in a sense.”

“In a sense, sir? Either he is, or he isn’t.”

“Do not be flip with me, Samuel.”

“No, sir. I simply want to be clear about it. If the job is to find Plowman and kill him, then send someone else. It’s not my line of work.”

McFee said, “It’s to keep Plowman from killing someone else. Since you worked with Eli in Sumatra, presumably you know something of his methods which, frankly, have been too distasteful and incriminating for us to document. He is a dangerous man. You may not be able to cope with him.”

Durell smiled. “Then send someone else.”

“I’m sending you, and a man from the FBI, and two others from DIA, since this will be a domestic assignment.”

“And Deirdre?”

“I include Deirdre because I think the safest place for her to be, in the next few days, is with you.”

“Why so?”

“Because she may well be on Eli Plowman’s list for elimination,” McFee said softly.

The thing you always fear the most rarely comes to pass, Durell thought. He ran up the road from the wrecked Porsche at a long, easy stride that ate up the distance to the White Spring Spa Hotel. Behind him, the fire from the car’s ruptured gas tank had died down. Franklin had stayed with the decoy driver, the hired youth from Jackson Station. The first stars began to shine in the eastern sky, far off over the Shenandoah, and there was no longer any direct light from the setting sun. The shadows across the road in the depths of the valley were cold and dark.

Marcus and Henley kept pace with him. They were professionals, and wasted no time asking questions. They knew what they had to do.

There was a high brick wall topped by flat concrete slabs with shards of glass embedded in diem, surrounding the cottage compound of the White Spring Spa. Even in today’s relative austerity, there were a number of cars visible through the ornate iron gate to the left. Most of the cottages had wood-burning fireplaces, laid and set by the Jamaican attendants, and many of them were working. The pungent smell of wood-smoke made Marcus sneeze.

“Keep it quiet,” Durell said.

“Sorry.”

Marcus was short and stocky, with the immense musculature of a circus acrobat, which he had once been. His brown face was contrite. In contrast, Henley of the DIA was an ascetic-looking man with remarkably brilliant blue eyes; he had a professional air, and also a look of helplessness that was immensely appealing to women. Both men were experts in the business. They had scouted ahead like bird dogs, fanning out along the rutted trail where Deirdre’s van should have been waiting. They found it half a mile up the mountainside, driven into the thick brush overlooking the Spa. The battered vehicle seemed innocuous, the whorls of wild paint that decorated its panels artfully similar to dozens of other vans and campers that plagued the Federal Forest Preserve.

Deirdre was not in the van.

Durell checked for the keys, found them still in the ignition, and opened the back doors to search further. Old sleeping bags were arranged on the floor in a mare’s-nest to allay any local official’s suspicion. The radio, which had been incorporated into a commercial frame, was not operative. There was no sign of violence. Henley checked the leafy, spongy ground around the van, sniffing like an old Indian tracker.

“Anything?” Durell asked.

“She went down to the Spa, Cajun.”

“Alone?”

“Can’t see anything else in this light. Can I use a flash?”

“No,” Durell said.

“Don’t get tight about it, Cajun. The transceiver probably conked out on its own initiative.”

“I think not.”

“What do you think, then?”

Durell was silent, then signaled the two men to follow him down to the compound wall. Marcus swung himself up into the limbs of a white oak and vanished into the gloom. It was growing totally dark now. The stars and a rising new moon offered little help. Durell heard the hooting of a small owl in the forested slopes that formed the north side of the notch. The clock in the Town Hall belfry of the village, half a mile north, sent out mellow chiming sounds. It was just seven o’clock. High on the crest of the ridge, a few lights shone from a building or a house situated up there. Durell looked at the faint yellow twinkling through the leaves, then looked up into the big oak tree.

“Marcus?”

“In a minute, Cajun. No sweat.”

There was a faint crackling of broken twigs, a sly creaking in the tree, a few fallen leaves, betraying Marcus’s movements up there. Beyond the wall, a brook chuckled and rippled in its chilly movement.

“Cajun?”

It was Marcus’s whisper.

“Cajun, they have security men and guard dogs. Coming this way. Shall I take them?”

Durell sent a whispered order upward. “No. The dogs would bark. Come on down.”

“How do we get over the wall, then?”

“We’ll go under. Henley, the brook you hear has to have an exit culvert. Can you find it?”

“Sure thing.”

Marcus leaped soundlessly down out of the tree. They moved north along the high wall, came to the circular culvert where the brook came out of the hotel grounds. A web of iron rods blocked the way in. Durell tested them, kneeling in the icy water, and found that the grill had been removed and then carefully replaced to look untouched. It took only a moment for them all to crawl through.

According to McFee’s briefing, the cottage he wanted was the third one up a steep walking path beside the little brook. He waited until the watchman with the guard dog had turned behind the massive building that housed the indoor swimming-pool and gone up the other side toward the Spa’s main building. Then he was up, moving fast, the sense of urgency within him stronger than ever.

FILE KAPPA 2375/GB AS DEPT.

FOR: McF.
Eyes Only
 

FROM: MAGDA 1001 

Sections 2290/Zed 5, 18/Sigma.66 

COLLATOR: A. Mitstein 

COMMENTS AS FOLLOWS:

On Friday the 15th, in the high cordilleras of the Bolivian mountains near the village of Tacuiba, the Argentine industrialist Señor Roberto Gomez da Ucuman was kidnapped from bis private ski lodge by a group of six or possibly seven men equipped with submachine guns and rushed away in >a high-powered car.

The local Indian servants and family of Señor Roberto Ucuman were unable to give more than a confused and garbled version of the affair. They seemed terrorized. Their statements were contradictory.

Ucuman had had his usual breakfast and stepped out on the terrace to enjoy the cold dawn over the spurs of the snow-capped Andes. The authorities under the district minister believed this was yet another terrorist move aimed at wealthy businessmen, foreign executives, and industrialists, designed to extract a large ransom to finance the outlaw groups, following the pattern of such events in South America. Señor  Ucuman was president and major stockholder of Partigas Industriales, S.A., a multi-million dollar complex of tin mines, shoe factories, sheep ranches, department stores, a small railroad, a fish cannery in Venezuela, two oil tankers, and a number of small newspaper chains including the well-known L’Assuncion.

On the following Sunday, Señor Roberto Ucuman was released unharmed on a remote mountain airstrip and the police returned him to his wife and six eager children.

The industrialist could give no description of the terrorists, nor could he describe the places to which he had been taken during his captivity. No ransom had been demanded. No ransom was paid.

Señor  Ucuman insisted the affair was a tragic mistake.

On the 22nd of that month, the transfer of controlling stock in L’Assuncion and all the other minor newspaper chains was effected by a sale of seventy-two percent of outstanding issues to I. Shumata & Company, a Japanese
zaibatsu
or trading company.

It was discovered later, but considered to have no connection, that the youngest son of Ucuman, Rudolfo, the apple of his father’s eye, had encountered an unhappy accident three hours after his father’s return, and was killed in a fall on one of the mountain paths near the ski lodge.

On the 22nd of the same month, Herr Ignatius Klocke, chairman of the board of a West German steel firm, was reported missing for twenty-two hours while in Zurich to meet representatives of the Union Bank of Switzerland to discuss rising commodity prices. Herr Klocke was an authoritative, arbitrary industrialist who brooked no opposition to the expansion of his firm, which included an interlock with the American company, D.F. Agro-Chemicals, a heavy soybean exporter, and the Hamburg import firm of U.T.B. Weksteen, which owned, among other industrials, a network of sorghum farms in Australia. A minor holding of Herr Ignatius Klocke was the Bamberger
Zeitung
and its affiliated network of small television and radio stations scattered through West Germany.

Herr Klöcke, who was a bachelor with no known relatives, was found floating in Lake Zurich the next day.

The Klöcke firm did not falter in its operations because of Klocke’s death, which Swiss police authorities described as a suicide, with no known motives. Two weeks later, the next in command, a dedicated industrial executive named Herr Walther Grubner, authorized the sale of the Bamberger Zeitung and its media affiliates to a French combine, which in turn yielded its majority stock holdings to the I. Shumata
zaibatsu
of Japan.

M. L. Swannson, of Stockholm, Sweden, corporate manager of the Tannborg Pulp & Paper Co., with interests in Canada’s Alberta province and affiliated through minor subsidiaries to various lumbering and electronic-manufacturing companies in Scandinavia, sold his interest in his chain of smalltown newspapers in Norway and Denmark, one day after his actress-wife was badly disfigured in an auto accident some fifty kilometers north of Stockholm.

The buyers were a small conglomerate of Italian tractor manufacturers. Among their commercial interests was a strong tie to the trading company known as I. Shumata of Tokyo.

Maurice K. Tang, chairman of the Hong Kong Sulu Sea Electronic Manufacturing Co., Ltd, was kidnapped, presumably by Communists from the mainland, and dropped out of sight. Mr. Tang’s interests included banking affiliates throughout Southeast Asia and spread as far as the Banco Popacario SA of San Gionanna Mula of Honduras. The Banco Popacario owned a chain of small newspapers scattered throughout Central America, as well as a number of minor radio stations in that part of the world. After Maurice K. Tang’s disappearance, the Banco Popacario divested itself of its media interests to C.P. Dillers, Ltd, a chain of housing developers in Great Britain. Dillers was majority-owned by the I. Shumata
zaibatsu
.

“Had enough?” McFee asked.

File Kappa 2375/GB AS Dept, was fat and heavy. Durell had put it down on General McFee’s desk and watched Deirdre finish leafing through her copy.

Durell said, “Who is this collator, A. Mitstein, who wrote these comments?”

“He works with Magda 1001, our computer down in the basement.”

“How did he stumble on I. Shumata’s activities?”

“His uncle’s shoe store. It was a forced sale, and Alfred wondered about it. The shoe store was taken over by an Italian firm, Falba Shoes, based in Torino. Mostly manufacturing for export to the U.S. Alfred’s uncle was squeezed by his local bank in Alexandria, received a good offer to bail him out by Falba, and accepted, retired to Miami Beach. Alfred had lived with his uncle and resented having to find quarters for himself. Magda 1001 is his baby. He traced Falba Shoes to an Austrian firm in Vienna, T.P.D. Inc., and from there to the Freilich Bank in Luxembourg, which owns mortgages and investment loans of T.P.D.’s. Freilich Bank is financed out of Lebanon, Saudi oil money. But T.P.D. was originally set up as a subsidiary of the Schilling Furniture people, who have interests in Montreal and Ottawa, as well as the Fukui Tomura Bank in Nagasaki. It’s the way the world works, Samuel. Behind Tomura is I. Shumata and Japanese and Korean media enterprises.”

McFee paused. “None of the major world radio, TV, or newspaper chains are affected. But you see the relationship, of course. Buried in shipping, banking, food-processing, electronics, you-name-it, are hundreds and hundreds of outlets for the formation, shaping, and influence of public opinion. We wonder why. Every one of the outfits was taken over by violence. Sometimes overt, sometimes quite well-hidden.

“Albert couldn’t get Magda 1001 to go beyond the
zaibatsu
in Japan. We’re at a dead end.”

Durell said, “And?”

“There is method in this apparent web of commercial coincidence, Samuel. Governments rise and fall, go to war or make peace, frame inhibiting trade policies or form alliances, based mainly on strong public opinion. The opinion of the small-town masses, Samuel. Deirdre?”

“Yes, sir,” she said quietly.

“Do you see why you are involved?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You
are
related to Rufus Quayle, are you not?” McFee asked softly.

“I’m his niece. It doesn’t mean anything. I saw him only once, when I was a child. He is not a man who cares for poor relations.”