Assignment Unicorn (3 page)

“Killed?”

“Torn to pieces.”

“The bodies?”

“The police took them away,” Durell said.

“It’s crazy.”

“Not quite."

“What do you mean, not quite? It’s insane!”

Durell went through the other rooms on the first floor
of the house. They were all alike with their mad wreckage. Insanity did not
follow a pattern, he thought. He was not an expert on it, but he knew enough
about aberrations to see a pattern in this, a method, however dim and distant
it might be at the moment. He knew danger, too. He could smell it in the quiet,
tropic air that moved through the vandalized house.

“Upstairs,” he said.

“What’s upstairs?” Lee asked.

“Donaldson’s Central office.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Two years ago. At Shang’s inauguration. Hugh Donaldson was
our Control officer here, even then. Before his wife died. But I never met
Mary.”

The upper floor was long and narrow and very hot, with
slanted walls formed by the
Dyak
-style roof, like the
interior beams of a ship’s inverted hull. The same ruinous pattern prevailed up
here. There had been an air-conditioned office where Donaldson did his
paperwork, but the machine was not working and Durell felt the sweat start out
on his chest and back, trickling down across his belly and into his groin.

The wreckage was even worse here. Papers were strewn
everywhere, the desk was overturned, the drawers emptied, the GK-12 transceiver
radio, powerful enough to reach Hong Kong, smashed. More blood was daubed on
the walls.

The safe was open. It was empty.

“Here it is,” Durell said.

“What?”

“This is what they came for,” Durell said.

“You’re giving me riddles now?” Lee complained.

“Donaldson had seventy thousand dollars of the taxpayers’
cash up here. We subsidized Colonel Ko annually. Actually, the cash was part of
a grant, meant to supplement the Palingpon civil service—a small part of the
grant—but we know it actually went to Colonel Ko’s KPK security forces.”

“That’s lousy,” Lee said.

“The Russians put in triple that amount for stability. The
Chinese—well, we don’t know what the CPR gave to Ko. So we don’t know where
Ko’s real loyalty lies. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s still peanuts,” Lee said, with the typical
bureaucrat’s contempt for public funds.

“It’s gone,” Durell said.

“Did Premier Shang have his hand in our pocket, too?”

“No. We’re reasonably sure of that.”

Charley Lee said, “Let’s get out of here. I’m suffocating. I
think I’m going to vomit.”

At that moment, Durell heard the girl scream.

5

“YOU’RE not going out there,” Lee said. “I’ve got my job to
do. You’re staying with me. And I'm not going out there, either. My job is to
keep you in one piece, Sam.”

“I told you, I don‘t need a nursemaid.”

“I didn’t ask for it. The Embassy gave me such and such
orders about you. I’ve got a wife, kids, career and pension to think about. I’m
bringing you back in one piece.”

“You’re getting to be a pain in the ass, Lee,” Durell said
quietly. His dark-blue eyes glowed in the dim interior light of the downstairs
living room. He kept listening for the girl to scream again. But the gray gloom
of the coconut trees outside was not disturbed by another sound. “I don’t want
you with me anymore, Charley.”

“I can’t help that,” Lee said desperately.

“You’re not hearing me,” Durell said.

“Stay here. It’s a trick, that yell out there."

“Maybe.”

“So you’re willing to risk—”

“I have to,” Durell said.

“Not while I’m around.”

“All right.”

Charley Lee would not have had his job if he were not
competent. Despite his short stature and little watermelon belly, he knew all
the tricks of his trade; he was expert with handguns, he had been trained in
every form of infighting, judo, karate and just plain dirty street
brawling. His looks were therefore deceptive, his reactions faster than fast.
Even while Durell swung to disarm him, he started to react, dropping the gun
that appeared in his hand to lessen the effect of the chopping blow Durell
delivered to his wrist. It was not enough, of course. Durell had been trained
in an even dirtier business. He knew that Lee would not seriously damage him, since
Lee was supposed to aid and protect him. But Durell had learned in his long
years with K Section that nothing was to be taken for granted. He had seen too
many men go over the wire, turning suddenly and murdering companions who
trusted them. He wasn’t too sure about Charley Lee.

The other’s pistol clattered to the plank floor. Lee
tried to twist away, and Durell hit him in the side of the neck and then drove
him head first into the wall. Lee groaned and tried to screech a protest,
and Durell hit him once more. The man slid to the floor, mouth agape,
blood coming from his saddle nose.

“For God’s sake, Cajun—!”

“I don’t want you to get in my way again,” Durell said
softly. “I’m sorry, Charley.”

Lee’s face changed. His normally bland, even naive,
expression became one of sudden, undiluted hatred. His black almond eyes
glittered with a lust for murder. Saliva and blood drooled from a corner of his
mouth. His round glasses had been broken in the brief scuffle, but he
didn't seem to need them.

“You murdering bastard—”

“I’ll send the police and a doctor for you," Durell
said coldly.

“You’re as crazy as the bastards who came in here and
chopped up this house,” Lee groaned.

Durell heard the girl scream again.

6

THE GLOOM beneath the neat rows of palm trees stretching to
an infinite point made everything gray and colorless. The soil between
the rows was soft and spongy, absorbing sound. Durell moved swiftly about a
hundred paces inland from the plantation house, then paused in the deeper
shadow next to the curved bole of one of the coconut palms. He held his .38 at
waist level. He took a moment to shrug out of his white shirt, fold it, and put
it on the soft ground. The earlier rain had made puddles here and there, and he
used his left hand to daub his cheeks and forehead with mud. He removed his
sunglasses to prevent any warning reflection to whomever was out here.
The gray light was sullen and oppressive. The sea wind did not penetrate this
far inland from the beach, and he felt the humid heat like a sodden blanket
over him.

He had no idea where the girl was. He was not even certain
it was a girl who had called for help. He tried to bring to mind the exact
sounds, recalling the high pitch, trying to syllabize the voice into words. His
impression was that the voice had called for help in English.

Two
chi-chis
watched him with their big luminous eyes, busily nibbling on some rotted
vegetation under the coconut palms. Durell breathed smoothly and easily. When
he was ready, he moved quietly down between the rows of trees, following what
seemed to be a trail that proceeded to the promontory beyond the house. There
was a processing shed there, as he remembered from his last visit, where the
nut meat was cut and chopped and canned. A donkey engine had provided the power
then, and the Palingponese laborers who worked the plantation lived in a
village just beyond the point, out of sight of the main house. He oriented
himself in the gray gloom and headed that way.

Something moved through the shadows ahead of him, a ghost in
the dimness, never quite clearly visible.

Durell followed.

He did not hear another scream.

The processing shed had a tin roof turned red with rust.
Through wide double doors a narrow-gauge track led across the promontory to a
pier where the product was shipped out by barge to the port of Palingpon for
the freighters moored there. The coastal road was unfit for heavy truck
transport. The narrow-gauge line was serviced by a tiny WDT shifter diesel,
whose striped nose was thrust out between the doors that opened into the
cavernous interior of the shed. Nobody was in sight. It was as if the attack on
the plantation house the day before had driven every native worker into
invisibility. A half-loaded flatcar stood on die tracks that ran
lumpily
across a jerry-built roadbed to the village pier,
out of sight on the other side of the promontory. Donaldson’s business here,
along with the other businesses he maintained, had been thriving.

The shadowy figure Durell had seen moments earlier had
disappeared through the open double doors of the processing plant. Durell
paused in the last aisle of trees. Whoever had drawn him here had done so
deliberately; he had no doubt about it.

Nothing else happened.

He wondered if he had made a mistake putting Lee out of action.

Then he remembered the momentary transformation in the man’s
face, and felt no regrets.

He stepped out from between the coconut palms, into the
bright sunshine, and walked along the rusting narrow-gauge tracks toward the
shed doors.

No screaming maniacs came tearing toward him.

All that happened was that someone inside the big shed shot
at him.

The report echoed flatly against the quiet beat of the surf
on the nearby beach. The bullet winged past Durell’s head and thudded into the
bole
of a tree behind him.

As he dived for the ground beside the tracks, the rifle
slammed again, and the slug hit the rusted rail near his hand and screeched off
into the distance, leaving behind it a scar of bright steel.

He got up and sprinted and found shelter behind the half-loaded
flatcar. The third shot followed him futilely.

“You son of a bitch!”

It was a girl‘s voice, all right.

She sounded fearful and frustrated.

“
Yo
!” he called.

“Come on,” she coaxed. “Come on out where I can see you, you
murderer!”

“Wait a minute,” he called, against her hysteria.

“Come on!”

Sunlight glinted off the rifle barrel thrust through a small
square window in the big shed, just to the right of the doors where the WDT
diesel was parked. Durell swore softly. He was trapped here in the open,
sheltered by the flatcar but too far now from the trees to make a run
backward and too far for a sprint into the shed. The girl wouldn’t miss the
next shot, he thought. He had nowhere to go.

It was possible to drop her—he could see the pale glimmer of
her face in the tiny window, searching for him. He could do it with a single
careful shot from the .38. He had loaded the S&W with cartridges converted
by himself, slit across the nose and partially hollowed out into dum-dums. Any
kind of a hit would blow the girl’s head off. But he didn’t want to do that.

He noticed that the flatcar he crouched against had
its rear wheels chocked to prevent it from rolling backward, and then he saw
that the graded tracks across the point of land slanted toward the tin-roofed
shed. A
pushpole
, like a heavy boat hook, was
fastened to the rusted side of the flatcar. The trucks dripped melting grease.
It was possible, he thought.

The shallow sea glittered with a thousand diamond points
beyond the rust-red roof of the ramshackle building. Behind him, the rows of
palm trees stretched into mathematical infinities. A heap of sea-wrack
had piled up on the beach to his right. White gulls lofted in the wind at the
tip of the promontory. On the horizon, a giant tanker plodded westward before
making the turn north to the hungry ports of Japan.

Durell lowered himself carefully to his knees and moved
toward the front of the flatcar. The chocks behind the wheels were merely palm
logs, jacked between the two wheels of the bolster. Fortunately, only the one
truck had been checked, on his side, and he did not have to crawl under the car
to loosen any others. Even then it was difficult to get leverage to release the
logs. He worked at them for several long minutes, pausing now and then to
listen for the girl with the rifle. When he pulled the last chunk of wood
free, he was drenched with sweat and the flatcar still remained motionless.

He crouched low and lifted the
pushpole
from the hooks on the rusted side of the ear, jammed it into its socket, and
shoved hard.

The car finally moved. There came a creak of rusted
metal, a heavy groan, a rumble from the wheels on the narrow track. Durell
moved with it, keeping down, using the bulk of the car to shield his body. He
thought he heard a cry from the girl in the warehouse. Slowly at first,
then faster as the car gained momentum in its gravity ride, he approached the
structure. In a matter of seconds, he had to trot to keep up with its speed. It
was heading straight for the nose of the diesel loco that poked out of the high
double doors.

With less than twenty feet to go, Durell leaped upon the floor
of the flatcar, keeping low behind the crates and barrels it carried, then
wriggled across to the other side. The car rumbled under him as he lay fiat
on the splintered plank floor. The diesel engine seemed to rush at him. He
could not see the girl with the rifle now, in the small window to his right. At
the last moment, ho rolled off and jumped for the shadows inside the warehouse
door.

The crash when the flatcar hit the nose of the parked
locomotive was thunderous, echoing within the high, shadowed building. The
boxes and crates piled on the floor scattered and flew in every
direction. Durell landed lightly on his feet and raced for the bulky protection
of geared machinery, a shredding table, and then a low partition that divided
one end of the plant. He smelled the dusty odor of coconut fibers and
shredded husks. Sunlight came through a high window on the seaward side of the
structure in a long, slanting beam. Dust motes danced in it. The shattering
echoes of the crash died away. Durell breathed easier. He kept his gun ready.