Assignment - Quayle Question (4 page)

“Aside from his daughter Deborah, you are his only other living blood relation, are you not?”

Durell sat back, a sudden unease in him. He looked at Deirdre as if he had never seen her before. He watched her nod slowly. She did not glance at him.

Durell said, “Sir?”

“Yes, Samuel.”

“Are you talking about the Rufus Quayle?”

“Yes. The man who created a myth out of himself in his own lifetime. The billionaire several times over. The recluse, the mysterious figure who owns, wholly and completely, banks, shipping fleets, oil interests, and the Quayle system of radio and TV stations, and, of course, the famous—or infamous—network of small dailies and weeklies that cover this country like a blanket, flooding the population with his personal editorials which, while strange and off-beat, nevertheless have defeated senators, voted in congressmen, interfered with various government bureaus and agencies, effected new policies and directions, caused a reshuffling of our lower courts, and in general represents the greatest lobbying industry in the U.S. A patriot, but not a crackpot, Samuel. His efforts have been all to the good. But he is too powerful a man. If his empire should fall, let us say, to I. Shumata
zaibatsu
, we don’t know how the editorial policies of his media chain might change. Or what directions he might urge the American people into taking. It would be effective. I could prove this to you, Samuel, with data and readouts from Madga 1001’s computer efforts, but you may take my word for it.”

Durell looked again at Deirdre. “Rufus Quayle is really your uncle, Dee?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t know the General knew it, either. I’m not particularly impressed by it. It’s a connection that does not really exist in my life.”

Durell looked at McFee with anger tinged by respect. “You knew this when you hired Dee for K Section?”

“Of course, Samuel.”

“And you want her on this assignment because she might be personally involved?”

McFee nodded. “Under the circumstances, I thought you might prefer to work with her.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“Rufus Quayle has disappeared. Permanently this time, it seems. Last week in New York, the general manager of his Q.P.I. also vanished. He flew from Zurich to Manhattan to meet his estranged wife, Deborah Quayle—your cousin, Deirdre, Quayle’s only child—and they both vanished. Deborah Quayle’s apartment was ransacked in the process. There are no clues. Nothing to identify the kidnappers or tell what they wanted. No ransom notes. No publicity. It was a hard, clean, very professional job. We have tried to contact Rufus Quayle. No success. And while Deirdre disclaims any emotional tie between her uncle and herself, she may yet be another target.”

“You think the I. Shumata organization is now trying to pick up Q.P.I. to add to their other strings of worldwide media chains?”

“Most likely,” McFee said. He picked up his blackthorn stick and waggled it at Durell. It made Durell distinctly uneasy to have that multiple weapon pointed at him. “Coincidentally with Deborah Quayle’s vanishment, and her estranged husband’s, we picked up word that a man answering to Kokui Tomash’ta’s description showed up in New York and was seen in the Park Avenue apartment building the day before the kidnapping. Tomash’ta works for Eli Plowman, who has turned into a rogue agent. We want Plowman. We can’t afford to have him and his killer crew turned loose against Quayle. Do you follow?”

Plowman was no mean adversary. The man was dedicated to ruthless assassinations. He had operated almost independently of K Section for years, mainly in Southeast Asia, and his resources were private and mostly unknown. It was not the first time an agent turned rogue and went independent, to sell data commodities for personal gain. It was not a question of going over the wire to work for the other side. In a sense, Plowman’s defection was worse. There were few files, fewer dossiers, with which to work on him. He could vanish at will, do as he chose, work wherever and for whomever he wished.

Durell flicked more pages of the file McFee had handed him. Every job was professional, every incident of extra violence seemed gratuitous. Most of his victims could have been spared. But that would not be Plowman’s m.o. Eli had been a “sanitation man” too long to change.

He felt chagrined that he had not known the item about Deirdre’s relationship to Rufus Quayle. He thought, with anger at himself, that where McFee had dug out everything about her before taking her into K Section, he himself had allowed affection and love to blind him.

Rufus Quayle had indeed made himself a myth in his own time. His monthly editorials in his TV, radio, and newspaper media were devastating, down-to-earth, harsh, and uncompromising. He was a legend. His gravelly voice, taped for broadcast but without his image permitted for viewing by the public, was almost a trademark. He advocated a strict Federalism, a return to the virtues of an earlier America that seemed lost forever in this technological age. His psychology was marked by a haunting nostalgia for the past century, a nation illustrated by Currier & Ives, in which self-reliance, home rule, Bible precepts were the rules by which Americans should live. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” he insisted.

Quayle’s enemies insisted that the man, one of the world’s wealthiest, could hardly five according to these simple virtues. They pointed to the incredible mansion he had built in the salt marshes of the South Jersey coast, set amid hundreds of acres of inlets, tidewater swamps, sand dimes, and islands. Quayle’s personal taste in earlier years had run to a kind of Venetian Gothic. Amid the channels and tidal flats of the shore, he had built a vulgar imitation of a Venetian palazzo, which he called Ca’d’Orizon. No one knew why. It was rumored that he had a priceless art collection there for his private edification, an army of retainers and guards, and a harem of gorgeous women to appease his appetites.

Rufus Quayle was never seen there. Indeed, he was never seen at any of the penthouse apartments and villas he kept in London, Rio, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, or Beirut. He had a house in Bermuda, another in California. In view of his refusal to appear publicly, it was rumored that no such man really existed. That he was, indeed, only a myth. That he had died years ago and that Q.P.I., as a robot organization, kept going of its own momentum. Quayle never appeared to refute such rumors. But his editorials and his angry, pervasive voice continued to be heard—until two months ago.

Quayle’s right-hand man, Martin Pentecost, who had married Quayle’s daughter, denied regularly that Quayle was ill, dead, or insane. On the other hand, he had offered no explanation for the cessation of Quayle’s editorials. Q.P.I. rolled on, in all its intricate corporate devices.

Now Martin Pentecost had vanished, too.

And his wife, who was Quayle’s daughter.

And Q.P.I. was threatened by a shadow
zaibatsu
, a vast mercantile corporation that had devoured, by threat, coercion, and violence, a number of similar media chains all over the world.

The dagger point of the movement was one Kokui Tomash’ta, the Red Lotus assassin. And Tomash’ta worked for Eh Plowman, a renegade from K Section.

Durell said, “It’s too big for Plowman, sir. I don’t believe he could handle it. He’s very good at specifics, but to tackle a conspiracy of this size is just too complicated for him. What do we really know about this I. Shumata outfit?”

“The Japanese government is usually clannish about protecting the
zaibatsu
. They include the Mitsubishi, the Mitsui, and any number of other trading corporations. I. Shumata does exist, but as far as we can determine, it is all a paper tiger.”

Durell watched McFee tap on the desk with his walking stick. McFee said, “However, we have a place for you to start. A Mr. Yoshi Akuro, his wife, and three children, are in the States. Mr. Akuro is the nominal head of the I. Shumata Company.”

“Hell,” Durell said. “Where?”

McFee tapped the desk again. “He was in San Francisco to start with. It should be noted that Yoshi Akuro has only recently inherited the I. Shumata
zaibatsu
. Shumata himself was killed in an auto accident near Kobe two weeks ago.”

“A legitimate accident?” Durell asked.

“As far as we can tell. A trick of fate, perhaps. Akuro inherited control of the Shumata outfit—which, by the way, began last year as a very minor trading corporation with few assets and financing borrowed at usurious rates. Everything that happened to I. Shumata enterprises happened within the past six months.”

“Why did Yoshi Akuro and his family come here?”

“We don’t know. We think he meant to ask us for help. We think he innocently inherited the mantle of control of I. Shumata, discovered its enormous and peculiar aggrandizement, dug into it, and refused to operate as a simple figurehead. Maybe he’s a man of honor. If so, he represents a crack in the enemy’s armor, Samuel. He asked for police protection as soon as he arrived with his family at San Francisco.”

“Then we give it to him, of course.”

“Akuro changed his mind. Maybe he was finally terrorized by whoever is really behind the
zaibatsu
. He suddenly rejected police help and flew to New York, where he conducted some routine business and then, yesterday, flew by private plane to White Springs Spa in Virginia. Do you know the place?”

“Playground of ailing millionaires,” Durell said. “Remote and exclusive. We tried to get in. We were refused. We tried to put agents in as guests. They were kicked out. Yoshi Akuro wants no part of us now. He’s hiding there. We want him, just to talk to, to shake him down—privately, with no chance for him to complain publicly. Also, we’d like to save his life.”

“From Tomash’ta?”

“After Martin Pentecost and Deborah Quayle disappeared, Tomash’ta showed up en route to White Springs Spa. He made the mistake of applying for passage on the resort’s own airline. Turned down, of course. He purchased a blue Porsche this morning and is on his way by car.”

“Alone?”

“So it seems.”

Durell was silent.

McFee said, “It’s all laid out for you. You and Deirdre 'have thirty minutes to meet your crew and get going.”

On the way to meet Marcus and Henley, Deirdre said softly, “Does it matter, Sam?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what if Rufus Quayle is my uncle? It’s nothing to me. I told you, I only saw him once, as a child.”

“You could become an enormously rich woman, Dee.” 

“Not likely.” She smiled, touched his arm, kissed him. She smelled good. “You’re annoyed because you never dug into my background like McFee did. Would it really make any difference, if by some fluke I inherited Q.P.I.?” She hugged his arm tighter. “After all this time we’ve had?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You’d never lose me, Sam. Never, never.”

Durell's urgency did not override his usual caution. Twenty feet from the screened veranda of Yoshi Akuro’s cottage at White Spring Spa, he checked Marcus’s plunge for the doorway with an outstretched arm.

“Wait.”

“What for? If your girl is in there, or something’s happened inside—” Marcus’s broad face in the shadowed shrubbery was impatient. “The place is all dark—”

“But the fireplace is going,” Durell said.

“Maybe they went to the main house for dinner.”

“Akuro has his own cook, I’d guess. Or he prepares his own meals for himself and his family. Look at the trays on the porch. Waiting to be picked up.”

A wheeled serving cart loaded with china and dim white teapots stood outside the closed door. No lights shone from the windows. The brook nearby made a cold tinkling sound in the chill evening air. The wind was stronger, moving the high branches of a sycamore tree.

He wished he knew what had happened to Deirdre. A quick spasm of fear for her coiled in his stomach. He put it aside, concentrated on the immediate problem. He respected Kokui Tomash’ta’s deadly capacities. He knew Eli Plowman even better, and in any contact with Plowman, caution was the keynote to survival.

Henley said, “Do we stand here all night?”

Durell pointed. “How good are you at explosives?”

“I’m checked out with a triple-A classification,” Henley said. His glasses refracted light from one of the Spa’s distant lamp posts, seen uphill through the landscaped trees and shrubs. “Why?”

“Booby trap,” Durell said. He pointed again. “Over there. Go ahead and get to work on it.”

It was a simple thread run across the approach path to the beckoning veranda steps. Henley moved forward obediently, not touching the thin wire, went to the right, vanished into the shadows. A single flash of light showed from his tiny hand-torch, near an azalea bush. Henley came back and went the other way, following the thin wire; he made busy sounds for two more minutes while Durell and Marcus waited.

Henley returned, pushing his glasses up on his nose. He held two small cans in one hand.

“Treat them politely. They’re like shrapnel. We’d have a hundred holes in each of us if these went off. They’re defused now.”

“Jesus,” Marcus said. “This Tomash’ta is a real worker. Some busboy could have had his head blown off.” “Tomash’ta wouldn’t care,” Durell said. “Let’s go.” There were no other traps.

The cottage door was locked. Marcus used a steel pick and had it open in ten seconds. Durell waved him aside, took his .38 Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, and fingered the door open. He saw the ruddy glow of a dying fire on the hearth. He smelled the pungency of Japanese food.

He smelled death.

Yoshi Akuro had committed hari-kari.

His small figure was clad in Japanese ceremonial robes, crouched on pillows, with a large brass bowl before him. His shaven head touched the rustic rug of the cottage living room. A bowl of incense sent a curl of fragrant smoke into the still air. The ceremonial dagger with which he had disemboweled himself had fallen to one side, still glistening red with the man’s blood. Marcus drew a quick hissing breath. Henley made a clucking sound and knelt beside the dead man with clinical and detached interest. “Never saw this except once before.”