Assignment Unicorn (12 page)

The apartment was one of K Section’s security bases. It was
always well stocked with food, a variety of clothing, both men’s and women’s,
and an assortment of spare weapons. Durell went into the kitchen and cooked
breakfast, making bacon and eggs, finding fresh croissants in the
refrigerator, fresh sweet butter, coffee. Wolfe went into the bathroom and
washed the clotted blood from his abraded face. Wolfe’s eyes under his thick
brows were deep-sunk and red-rimmed. When he came out of the bathroom he
checked the doors, front and back, jammed chairs under the knobs, and leaned against
the wall in the living room, his arms folded across his thick chest, glowering
at Durell and the girl. Durell came out of the kitchen with the breakfast.
Wolfe shook his head slightly; he didn’t want it. Maggie took one look at the
tray and went into the bathroom and was sick. Durell followed her, pushed the
door open, stood watching her. When she went into the bedroom and sank down on
the edge of the bed, he went with her.

He saw himself in the mirror, tall and dark and a bit
ragged, his eyes strange even to himself.

“Maggie.”

“Go away.”

“Why are you afraid of me?”

“Because of what you did to Rasmussen. You killed him. You
blew his chest wide open.”

“He was no friend of mine,” Durell said. “Do you feel badly
because he kept winking and making passes at you before it happened?”

“Jesus, Sam, leave me alone. Can’t you see how sick I am? I
should have stayed in New Haven.”

“Stop talking nonsense, Maggie. Be a good girl and tell me
why the unicorns want you.”

She covered her face with her hands. He stood in the
doorway, watching silently, not moving to touch her or offer solace.

“Try to remember, Maggie.”

“What?”

“Anything that might be useful. Anything to give us an idea
of why they wanted to grab you.”

She took her hands from her face. Her eyes were dry. “I
don’t know who ‘they’ are. How can I remember something I don’t know? I’m not
at all sure that Rasmussen was trying to grab me. Maybe he was trying to help
me from those other people. How can I know which is which?”

“There is something you know that makes them want to
question you, Maggie.”

“Oh, no.”

“How long were you in Palingpon?” Durell asked.

She looked blank. “What?”

“How long?”

“Three months, maybe. I’m not sure of the time or where it
all went. It was a bad time for me, you know. Drying out. There was plenty of
the stuff around, you know, in town. Daddy had to lock me up in my room a few
times. I needed a kick so bad, I was half crazy some days.” She sniffed and
rubbed the inner elbow of her left arm, then looked up at him with a sudden
slyness. “Maybe if I got a fix I could remember better.”

“No, Maggie.”

“Please, Sam!”

“No. Your father talked a little to you about his K Section
business, didn’t he?”

“Not much. Nothing important. Nothing I can remember. l can
remember the days when he ran his strings of operatives out of Kuala Lumpur
better than I can what just happened. I was only a kid then, too. I think he
sometimes worked with Wilderman in those days."

“Yes?”

"That s all.’

“You’re sure?”

“What more do you want? He was put out to pasture, poor old
Hughie Donaldson, and still something—or someone caught up with him and tore
him to pieces while he was having that nice luncheon with that nice old premier
of Palingpon on that nice sunny day.”

“The same day they came after you at the plantation,” Durell
said. “You were out among the trees, hiding from them, when Charley Lee and I
got there. You were scared half to death. You knew they were after you even then.
What do you know that they want to know?”

Snow hissed against the window. He heard Wolfe cough from
his post at the living-room door. The girl was sitting tailor-fashion on the
bed. Her long hair was straggly, hanging down on each side of her face. It seemed
to Durell that he had never felt so tired or discouraged.

The day was brightening; the windows were pale gray.

“Maggie, where did you first get hooked on the stuff?”
he asked quietly.

She looked at him with a witch’s smile. “Are you still
interrogating me? Is that why you dragged me along here, to Rome and then
here?”

He didn’t remind her that it was she who had insisted on
coming with him. He said, “You can answer that question, can’t you, Maggie?”

“Sure. It was two years ago, while I was studying

for my master’s. So what?”

“How did it begin?”

“I wanted attention. I thought I was too tall, too outsize.
I was mixed up. I was lonely. Maybe I was scared. So I got hooked. It was kind
of nice, at first. I stopped worrying about myself so much, you see. I
relaxed. I figured I could be as attractive as any other girl.”

“You are,” Durell said. “More so.”

“I kept hoping my stupid schoolgirl dream would come true. I
just wanted somebody to come along and take care of me and love me, so I could
love him back with all my heart, that‘s all I wanted.”

“Who first hooked you on the stuff?” Durell asked.

She still looked at him with the bland face that told him
nothing, still watching him with her witch’s smile.

“That was a fellow student. Handsome devil, he was. Very
persuasive. In all sorts of ways. Actually . . . ” She paused and leaned
forward, her arms thrust down against the edge of the mattress. “Actually, he
turned out to be a recruiter for your agency, Durell—for K Section and then, as
I later learned, the Internal Security Bureau.”

Durell felt a surge of anger. “Tell me who introduced you to
heroin.”

“Rodney Rasmussen. The man you blew apart on the mountain
road back there.”

24

THE SNOW changed to rain by midmorning, and a heavy fog
settled over Lake Leman, obscuring the view of the mountains, and the Palais
des Nations, now European headquarters for the UN. The Old Town was wreathed in
slowly drifting mists. The air grew warmer, more seasonable. Durell slept for
four hours, made an omelet for an early lunch, and then Wolfe turned in. Durell
didn’t know whether the girl slept during that time of waiting or not.

At eleven o’clock the telephone rang. Wolfe stirred, his
bulk asleep on the couch, but he did not wake up. Durell let it ring three
times, after which it went silent. One hour later he found his coat and went
down the staircase of the small apartment house and walked through the drizzle
toward the grayness of the lake. John Meecham waited for him on the broad
sidewalk of the Quai du Mont Blanc. He wore a tweed cap that looked too small
for his big froglike head, and a shabby old gray raincoat. He carried an
umbrella against the light rain, but he kept it furled and swung it like a
cane. His popping hyperthyroid eyes were bloodshot.

“Thank you for coming, Cajun,” he said. “You have the girl?”

“Wolfe is watching her, sir. I thought I’d be meeting Enoch
Wilderman here.”

“I’ve sent Wilderman hack to the States.” Meecham sounded
short. “We can’t let every operation sag into neglect because of this one. Is
the apartment safe?”

“No,” Durell said. “I think we’ve been blown wide open just
about everywhere.”

“But the girl?”

“At least the apartment has security devices. I don’t think
it can be breached,” Durell said.

Meecham touched his elbow and guided him down the wide
sidewalk. “Let me tell you about the bank. You haven’t seen it in the
newspapers?”

“No."

They walked slowly along the Quai des
Bergues
beside the rushing flow of the Rhone River, where it poured out of the
lake to begin its long snake-dance down through France to the Mediterranean.
They crossed the river on the Pont de
l’Isle
and went
around the park with its floral clock, the Grand Theater and the
Conservatory of Music. From there they chose a narrow street of cobbled ramps
and climbed to the old city. The Grand-Rue brought them to the old Roman
crossroads, the Bourg-de-Four, a charming square where the narrow streets twisted
oil in every direction. If anyone were following them, it was difficult to
tell. Passersby hurried along under umbrellas. The rain was not hard, but
persistent, a drifting
mizzle
that came at them from
every point of the compass. Durell was hardly aware of it as he listened to Meecham.

“You must have had a bad time of it last night, Cajun,”
Meecham said.

“Bad enough. We didn’t
boobytrap
them. They got the money, and now they’ve wrecked our Geneva Central. They have
papers, files, more cash, more than enough to blow K Section’s data
collection and processing wide open, if it ever gets to the media.”

Meecham nodded. “You don’t look too well, Cajun.”

“I don’t feel very happy about it,” Durell said. “I shot Rod
Rasmussen back there at Les Diablerets. Maybe I moved too fast.”

“Fast enough," Meecham said quietly. He paused to stare
into the window of an antique jeweler’s shop. “Rasmussen killed LeChaux back in
Zurich. Gut-knifed him, left him draped over his own toilet.”

“I see,” Durell said.

“I know you don’t like Internal Security, but perhaps you
also see now the purpose we serve,” Meecham said.

“We seem to have been infiltrated everywhere.”

“Rasmussen is an example. A longtime agent who had to be
killed when he went bad.”

“I wish I hadn’t had to kill him,” Durell said. “We could
have learned a lot from him if I could have taken him alive.”

Meecham pointed with the ferrule of his umbrella into the
shop window. “I like that Victorian brooch.”

“Is anyone following us?”

“I’m not certain.”

“Let’s walk,” Durell said. “Look for a gray Porsche.

I’ve seen it twice now.”

But they didn’t spot the suspect car again.

25

THEY romp down the cobblestone ramps from the Old City to
the Rue de la
Corraterie
. Meecham’s ugly face was
compressed in a tight, furious line. He swung his furled umbrella like a short
pendulum. The snow on the sidewalks from the fall at dawn had vanished, but the
air was still filled with ice crystals.

“You were right back in Rome, Sam,” Meecham said heavily. “K
Section’s security has been breached. It’s a deliberate, specialized attack on
K Section. Aimed to destroy us and perhaps all our intelligence defenses.”

“The unicorns seem to know everything about us,” Durell
said. “Sir?”

Meecham waited.

“This has to be someone fairly high up. Someone who knows
every transfer of funds we’re about to make.”

“I’ve canceled all future transactions for an
indefinite time,” Meecham said. “I cleared it with your Finance officer,
Strawbridge, and General McFee.”

“That doesn’t solve it.”

“We’ve had a few resignations from the Finance Section
lately. Fairly high-up security people. They’ll have to be checked out. Enoch
Wilderman went back to the States to take care of that.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“I want to do it.”

“You’re going home. Stateside. Back for reassignment by McFee.”

“No, sir.”

“We can’t afford to have a field agent like you jumped
on by the press, Sam. If the newspapers got to you—"

“You could cover that.”

“I must tell you that I’ve given definite orders covering
the sort of work you’re to be permitted to do with Internal Security. Last
night could have been a disaster. General McFee considers you too valuable in
your field to be exposed to the public in these matters. I know how you
feel, Cajun. It’s never pleasant to know you’ve been working with men ready to
betray you. Wilderman seems unaffected by this sort of thing—he seems to expect
it, in this business—but it bothers me as much as it bothers you. But it’s my
field, and it can’t be denied. You’re out of the ballgame.”

“Then I’ll do it myself,” Durell said.

“You can’t.”

“I’ve got the girl.”

“We can handle her.”

“She knows something. Something about the unicorns. They
know she knows it, but she herself isn’t aware of her knowledge.” Durell’s
words were quiet but urgent.

“You’ll never get it out of her. I think I can. Maybe I’m the
only one who can.”

Meecham looked at him. “Is your relationship with Maggie
Donaldson such a personal one?”

“Somewhat. We—”

“You’ve made love to her already?”

“In Rome, yes. She’s alienated now because she thinks I
killed Rasmussen needlessly. Recklessly. She knew him once, back in college. I
can bring her out of that, now that you’ve told me about LeChaux.”

Meecham said dubiously, “She’s a drug addict, or she was.
Which indicates a rather large area of irresponsibility. She cannot be trusted.
She could even be a plant.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve thought of that, too.”

“You’ve grown attached to her?”

“No. Yes. Maybe.”

Meecham did not smile. “Someone is out to destroy us,
deliberately choosing K Section as the target. They’re aiming for our heart,
Cajun. It cannot rest simply on your amorous relationship with Maggie
Donaldson.”

“It’s not—” Durell checked himself. He suddenly felt the
strength in Meecham, the knowledge that John Meecham was one of the most
powerful men in Washington. “It’s not just the girl.”