Assignment Unicorn (22 page)

Wolfe looked tired. Deep fissures marked his face, running
from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth; his cheeks were hollow and he
had a gray look to his skin. Only half dressed, he had obviously been asleep on
the big couch in front of the hearth, and his voice was raspy when he spoke.

“Mr. Wilderman isn’t here. He’s on the other side of the
island.” Wolfe coughed. “It’s good to see you. We thought you’d been given the
deep six.”

“What about Maggie?”

“She’s here. Upstairs asleep.”

“She’s all right?”

“Fine. Don’t ask me why, but she’s been worried sick about
you,” Wolfe said.

“Why did Wilderman order you both to come here?” Durell
asked.

“He said it would be safer. And if you came back—
if
—this is where you’d be needed.” Wolfe
coughed again.

“You look like hell. Want a drink?”

“No. Have you been drinking?”

“I don’t use liquor,” Wolfe said.

“Popping speed?”

“A little. I have to stay awake.”

“Any international guests arrive yet?”

“Four came in yesterday.
Achmed
Mussarib
, Paolo
Lumbaba
, Diem
Xu
, Colonel Ko—all heads of security in their states. The
hotel was opened up for them.”

“What about the President?"

“He’s paying a brief visit this afternoon,” Wolfe said.
“He’s stopping off on his way to Canada.” Wolfe looked at his watch. “Are we in
for a storm?”

“More than that,” Durell said somberly. “You say Maggie is
upstairs?”

Wolfe jerked a thumb. “Up there, right.” Wolfe paused. His
hulking figure cast a huge shadow on the wall opposite the
fireplace. “Durell?”

Durell paused on the stairs.

“Durell, Maggie’s all right.”

“Yes?”

“She reminds me of my daughter.”

“So?” Durell asked.

“So you go easy with her, understand?”

Durell smiled. “You’re getting soft, Wolfe.”

45

THE SKY was a heavy, leaden gray. The rain had stopped, and
there still was no wind: the ocean was calm, oily, brooding.

No cars had ever been permitted on Mattatuck Island, and the
only roads were footpaths cut through the spruce and pine forests that covered
most of the land. There were two high points, with a saddle between each end,
running roughly east and west to two coves behind high, granitic cliffs and tumbled
boulders, where the wash and drive of the Labrador Current splashed high spume and
spray. Each cove had a beach, and there was a hotel on the northern point,
designed for wealthy families from Boston and the North Shore, when ladies in
Gibson hairdos and gentlemen in bowlers had taken the sea air to cool off from
the city’s hot summers. A little steamer had once plied back and forth from
Preble Cove, where a branch of the Boston & Maine railroad had a station. But
most of the island was still virginal, and the scars of the early resort days
were mostly overgrown.

Durell braced himself against a giant spruce and leveled his
binoculars on the hotel. The binoculars pierced the gray morning light clearly.
There was a helicopter pad near the hotel and a new beach area beyond the
hotel’s broad verandas, tennis courts and a swimming pool, although the pool
was now drained and boarded over for the winter.

Durell studied the scene for a long time from his vantage
point. The second hill to the west blocked out his view of the calm, oily sea
under the heavy overcast. The spruce trees dripped from the night’s rain. An
ominous feeling of waiting filled the atmosphere, as if the storm to come
could bide its time and strike when it chose. The binoculars showed him four or
five Secret Service men moving casually around the hotel. Two men walked rhythmically
up and down the hotel veranda, exercising; one of them wore an African costume,
all bright colors and challenging stripes, and Durell judged they were among
the early guests.

“Sam?”

He turned to look at Wolfe.

Wolfe said, “How much more do you want?” He held a long coil
of wire, a detonator and several packages wrapped in oil-yellow paper.
“Gelignite. And what in hell were you doing with all this stuff down in the
cellar?”

“Some of it is experimental,” said Durell. “I used to come
here now and then for K Section and try it out.”

“You’re a demolition expert, are you?”

“In a small way.” Durell looked beyond Wolfe’s hulk. “Is
Maggie being careful?”

“I only let her string the wires. We’ve made a pretty decent
perimeter, so tar, through the trees.”

“I want more,” Durell said. “Let’s get to it."

It was ten o’clock before he was satisfied, and then he
had no choice, since his cache of explosives in the root cellar under the house
was exhausted. Wolfe was ingenious about arranging trip wires, snares,
boobytraps
, all arranged with three central points. Durell
held off the final hookups until he had personally checked each trap.
Wolfe considered it a waste when he placed three of the explosive caches above
the high cliffs to the east, but Durell, a vision of the unicorns in his mind,
with the remembrance of his own experience still in his muscles and nerves, insisted
that the cliffs were just as vulnerable as the beach down by the cove.

Afterward, Durell was able to reconstruct the timing of the
mornings events:

10:15—-First helicopter landing on Presidential pad, eight
passengers, all foreign police and security officials.

10:42—Second landing, ten passengers.

10:46—Coast Guard patrol begun, one circuit of the island
every 28 minutes.

10:58—Barometer dropping, 29.56.

11:02—Presidential helicopter lands.

11:20-Coast Guard patrol boat CG-94965 replaced.

11:37—Unicorns arrive.

46

IT WAS a few minutes past eleven o’clock that morning when
Durell slipped aboard the rented cruiser with Maggie. He held her hand tightly,
although she was as quick and sure-footed as he. Beyond the entrance to the
cove, he saw not one, but two Coast Guard patrol boats, proceeding northerly
side by side. He stared at the two vessels for a moment, grunted, and urged
Maggie ahead of him.

“Get below,” he told her. “Please, Maggie.”

“But what are you going to do, Sam?”

“I intend to keep you safe. All hell is going to pop loose,
any moment.”

“I don’t want to be safe. I want to be with you.”

“Never mind. Do as I say.”

“I wish I knew what you had in mind,” she objected.

“You’ll find out later. When it’s all over.”

The cabin was roomy, fitted with two long cushioned benches
that could be changed into bunks. Forward was a small, tidy galley, and beyond
that, a narrow hatch and three steps down led to the sail locker. Durell pushed
the girl ahead, through the galley, but at the bulkhead door to the locker she
suddenly balked.

“Where the devil are you taking me?” She turned in his grip,
startled and angry.

Durell said, “Sweetheart, I’m putting you out of action. No
one will come aboard looking for you. Certainly not in the sail locker. And
I’ll have the keys, anyway.”

“You’re locking me in there?” She sounded appalled.

“To keep you safe, yes.”

“You work me like a damned slave, setting your
boobytraps
, and then expect me to hide while you—while you—while
you risk your life? I will not.”

“Maggie, please.”

She drew a deep breath, staring at him. “Listen, Sam. It was
my
father they killed in Palingpon.
I’ve gone along pretty meekly with you, all this time, hoping it would be ended
before now. But I owe it to Hugh, to Daddy, to help end it. I’m not going to
hide in the cubbyhole like a scared rabbit—”

“Keep your voice down,” Durell said.

“I will
not!
You
can’t cheat me like this. You can’t lock me in here to hide while you go oil
somewhere, risking your neck against these madmen. I’m going with you.”

“No."

“Well, I won’t hide here. Where are you going?”

“To the hotel,” he said.

“And how do you expect to get through the security screen?”

“Maggie, I know what I’m doing.”

“So you can slip through, somehow?”

“I have no question about it.”

Maggie drew another deep breath. Suddenly she took Durell’s
face in her hands, as they stood in the tiny, cramped companionway, and kissed
him.

“Sam, I’m pretty good at playing Indian, too. I’m going with
you. If you shove me in there, I’ll just scream.”

He looked at her carefully for a long moment. Her defiance
surprised him. Her anger and determination could not be denied. He had not
expected her to rebel, and it somehow pleased him, in a way he had no time to define,
at the moment.

“All right. Come along. We’re wasting time.”

47

THE STORM waited.

Its center was about fifty miles off Prince Edward Island,
and inland it was dumping heavy rain. It moved very slowly south-southwest,
stalking the Maine coast like some wild predator. Far south of the center, there
was an area of calm where the low—pressure center winds had not yet reached.
The turbulence seemed tightly controlled. Southward, the sea was relatively
calm, although long, ominous swells had begun to move into Casco Bay and along
the rocky coast beyond. The swells reached the rocky shore and burst in
increasing violence against the stone breakwaters of Maine’s innumerable little
coves and island groups. The fishermen stayed in harbor.

At Mattatuck, a fog still persisted offshore, hanging less
than twenty feet above the smooth surface of the ocean. Now and then, the
island seemed to reverberate with the thunder of an especially strong swell
breaking against the gray granite rocks.

The Coast Guard patrol boat was surprised to see a companion
vessel loom out of the fog bank and take up a position alongside. The skipper,
a young lieutenant, assumed the new vessel was an additional security measure pending
the President’s arrival. He did not deny the other vessel’s signal requesting
permission to come aboard, although he did signal by radio to Preble Cove
Station that he had company on his patrol. It was far too late when the skipper
saw the launch alongside and noted that the men who swarmed over his port rail
all wore gray jumpsuits and were heavily armed.

The Coast Guardsmen never knew exactly what hit them.

The storm began to move.

48

ENOCH WILDERMAN was making a welcoming speech to the ISCOPP
delegations. He promised lectures on mob control, riot prevention, the
surveillance of subversives, the training of security forces, the arms they

needed, the methods best suited to swift and accurate reaction
to public disorders. The security heads in the audience listened with
appreciation. Wilderman spoke with certainty and confidence. His voice, a
bit too thin, carried authoritative conviction. He seemed pleased by his
position on the dais; his gaunt figure slouched a bit behind the lectern,
at ease, his gray hair tumbled, his Franklin glasses shoved on top of his head.

“What is it?” Maggie whispered behind Durell. They were
hurrying down an aging corridor, unevenly floored under worn carpeting,
in the hotel. Durell carried a long-barreled .357 Magnum; remembering the
incredible vitality of the unicorns, he had put aside his stubby .38.

“One more chore to do.”

“Where is the President?”

“He’ll probably have lunch with the security
representatives, and make a brief welcoming speech to them.”

“And then?”

“We’ll see.”

The government had installed a radio station in what had
once been a row of bath-house lockers at the east end of the hotel. A
sixty-foot steel tower, securely guyed against the Maine coast winds, kept it
steady. The bath house had been connected to one wing of the old hotel, so that
guests could change their clothes there before venturing onto the beach. Durell
moved quickly down the long third-floor corridor, with Maggie half a pace
behind him. A rusting fire-escape ladder led down to the ground again.
Durell opened the door carefully and looked outside. The fog bank seemed to
have receded from the island’s coast. He noted the length and intervals between
the big swells coming in from the north. The air felt a bit colder. Below were
the tennis courts, but no one was in sight. Most of the guards would be inside
the hotel, with the President, or patrolling the beach perimeters. Durell led
the way down, glancing up only once at Maggie’s bottom as she followed him on
the ladder. A side door to the bath house was locked. He tried one of the small
square windows. It yielded with a creak of

rotted wood. He waited, listening. There was no alarm. In a
moment he was inside, helping Maggie through.

A hallway, flanked by locked doors, led straight to the
radio shack, at the base of the steel transmission tower. Durell
flattened against the plank wall of the corridor, raised his Magnum, and
listened. There was no sound from inside. He looked at Maggie. Her eyes were pale
gray in the dim light. She nodded, managed a thin smile. Durell backed oil, kicked
stiff-legged at the door just below the lock, and burst in.

The wiry little man seated with earphones over his head at
the bank of transceiver equipment started to swivel in his metal chair.

He wore a gray jumpsuit.

The unicorns were already here.

Fast as the man was, Durell leveled the big .357 Magnum at
his head and breathed, “Hold it, Marcus. Just like that. And don’t be a fool.”

The man named Marcus froze. He was not, after all, a mental
robot. He looked bug-eyed at the gun, then at Durell’s face.

“It’s you? But you’re dead—”

“Not quite. Get up out of the chair. Slowly. Very carefully.
Hands on top of your head.”