Assignment- 13th Princess Read online

  Chapter 1

  Durell thought he must be dreaming.

  “To the window, please.”

  “The—window?” Durell stared at the olive-skinned man through lusterless eyes.

  “There’s a good fellow.”

  The man’s voice came softly as the hiss of a snake; a sound of arrow feathers; the purr of a razor through silk. Durell could not accept that the sound was yellow, the words coming out like sulphur smoke.

  He would wake up and it would be all right, he told himself.

  The color of the words mingled and merged into the hair of a dimly remembered freckle-faced blonde who had sat beside him on the airplane, and his dream became mixed like the colors of oil on water. Something deep in his mind wondered about that girl. He did not know if there was a connection between her and this tormentor.

  Somewhere in the roots of Durell’s consciousness the will to live struggled against blind obedience—and he found himself moving tentatively, crabwise, toward the open window. His feet weighed a thousand pounds, but his head floated ethereally without weight or substance. He was aware of his surroundings, but as from a distance, vaguely, a disembodied shade in a fog through which came neither feeling nor reason.

  But he would awaken, and it would end.

  The man gestured impatiently with a Beretta automatic that was aimed at Durell’s chest. Durell had no fear of the gun.

  Nor of the open window, seven stories above a London street.

  Not even of the note he had compliantly written, which stated simply: “I can’t go on.”

  Ordinarily Durell saw himself as a small cog in the machinery that kept the earth turning a spin or two ahead of the madmen and zealots whose schemes could leave it a nuclear cinder. Training and retraining at the Farm operated by K Section in the Maryland countryside and more years than he cared to think about in the shadow land of international intrigue had prepared him for self-sacrifice.

  But now he was a vital cog.

  If he died in this sedate Oxford Street hotel room, the Western world literally could spin to a halt. Commerce and industry might wither, cities die. Nations would lie enfeebled, an invitation to the conqueror’s rape and sword.

  All because of greed and parochial politics.

  Because of oil.

  Such thoughts now were melted like lead filings in his chemical-numbed brain, run together in a solid lump that his reasoning could not digest.

  The breeze that blew through the window chilled the room even though it was summer. The window was big in its old-fashioned, beige-painted frame and fully opened to the late-aftemoon sky. Durell saw the view with abrupt clarity, as in a perfectly focused snapshot. Sporadic rain-showers had littered diamond beads of water across the sill and darkened the carpet with moisture. Beyond the umber drapes oozy clouds whirled a shattered puzzle across the heavens. The weak, filtered sunlight glazed high-rise windows with pewter and deepened the gray of weathered Portland stone and turned bricks to blood. Treetops tossed in Grosvenor Square, site of the American embassy, and the mist blew against St. Paul’s burnished dome and the spires of Parliament in the distance.

  Durell wanted to go no closer.

  But something said go ahead. Make it easy. It’s only a dream.

  You can’t stop a dream.

  His gaze turned dully toward the gun muzzle and then the man’s face, a viper’s visage of long, broad nose and bright, black eyes, and he felt a disquieting affinity for him. After all, they both were professionals.

  The man’s loose, alert stance; the relaxed but ready manner in which he held his weapon; even the mask of his sinister smile—all bespoke a calm competence that only training and experience could buy. He might have been a stockbroker in his expensive pinstripe suit and vest. He wore a pale yellow tie with a tastefully muted pattern of woven silk flowers. The flowers blossomed larger, coming alive under Durell’s dreamlike vision. He saw a gold band set with a pink pearl that shone on the little finger of the man’s left hand.

  Over the smell of carpet shampoo and fresh linens came the scents of oak leaves from Hyde Park and rain and automobile exhaust, all mixed and meaningless.

  Durell was aware of the cool breeze from the window as it blew directly on his back now, the muted rumble of vehicles coming from a great distance. Without concept of time his mind wandered through a torturous labyrinth of thought and dwelt on space.

  He had come far to meet the Israelis.

  Where were they?

  Was this man one of them? he thought absurdly. Anger pinched him through the befuddled layers of his dream. He wanted to speak, but the concepts would not come together. He decided he would discover what he had wanted to say when he awakened. Meanwhile this man would lead him through the nightmare, tell him what to do. He must rely on him. Submit.

  He felt each second as it slipped away in a tenuous drool.

  He did not know how long ago the man had ordered him to the window, but now his tapered gambler’s fingers rested lightly on its damp sill, and the traffic noise took on a regular beat in rhythm with his heart. The beat increased in tempo and volume as he looked down, down, his eyes seeming to fall through the air, and saw red double-decker buses and tiny MGs, motorbikes and Bentleys crowding the streets of fashionable Mayfair seven stories below.

  Then his flat, lifeless eyes turned back over his shoulder toward the man.

  The man’s grin showed a great spread of flashing fire.

  Yellow words came out of the fire:

  “Quickly, now. Jump!”

  Lights had burned most of the previous night in the executive wing of the White House, the Pentagon, and the gray stone Georgian house at No. 20 Annapolis Street that was headquarters for K Section, trouble-shooting arm of the CIA.

  The ring of a telephone had awakened Durell at 3:41 A.M.

  “You’ll be traveling, Sam,” he had been told. But not where. Or why.

  He had not taken time to brew the chicory-laced Louisiana coffee with which he preferred to greet the day. He had shaved quickly, thrown a few things into a suitcase. Twenty minutes later a motor-pool driver in a black government Chevrolet had picked him up at his apartment, located in a red-brick, marble-trimmed building on a shady street near Rock Creek Park.

  General Dickinson McFee, the small, gray chief of K Section, sat rigidly behind his desk, shoulders squared. He seemed never to relax, Durell thought.

  “The old emir of Dhubar, Sheik Yusuf, bought it last night, Samuel. Like a bolt out of nowhere. Assassinated. The country’s going crazy.”

  “Who’s behind it, sir?”

  “We don’t know—but that isn’t our first concern. You’ve heard of the Thirteenth Princess?”

  Durell nodded. “Princess Ayla—descendant of the Ottoman Turks—wife of Sheik Zeid. He’ll be ascending his father’s throne.”

  “He may keep it if he’s lucky. Mobs are roaming the streets, demanding his wife’s head—you know how the Arabs hated the Turks under the Ottoman Empire.”

  “They didn’t complain when Sheik Zeid married her.”

  McFee’s slight flip of the hand was disparaging. “He was just a playboy, Sam. They had given up caring what he did. But now he’s their ruler. We may be able to put a cap on this thing before it blows sky high, but it means getting Princess Ayla out of there until Sheik Zeid can put his house in order.”

  Durell spoke quietly. “You think the same people who engineered the assassination are using her presence to keep the civil disturbances going?”

  “I have little doubt of it—they’re keeping the mobs at a fury pitch.”

  “She may not wish to go.”

  “That could be a problem. But you will convince her.”

  “There mu
st be others better suited to coddle a princess. Why me?”

  “You’re a friend of her mother, the former Nadine Carroll?”

  “Friendship of a sort that goes only so far, sir.” Durell’s tone was dubious.

  “Oh?” McFee lifted a gray brow. “The lady seems to think you would go all the way for her. She sent for you. She says her husband, Prince Tahir, and Sheik Zeid have refused her pleas to send Princess Ayla out of danger. Zeid loves his wife too much to be without her, the mother says, and God only knows why Tahir would expose Ayla to such threats.”

  “I’d say Prince Tahir doesn’t care to risk her not returning to Dhubar. Any throne for her would be better than none in his view.”

  “In any case, you’re the only one who will do, Samuel. The mother will help you, intercede for you with her daughter, pave the way. But you have to get her out on your own.” McFee bent forward, an angular little man in a light gray suit and charcoal tie. Durell noted with discomfort that his blackthorn walking stick leaned against his desk. It was lethal with a dozen hidden gimmicks dreamed up by the lab boys. “Keep in mind,” McFee continued, “that if the radicals take over, they could turn off the spigot of the world’s sixth largest oil producer at any whim—the use of oil for political blackmail would rise to unprecedented and intolerable levels.”

  “You’d think Princess Ayla would be more than happy to take a holiday.”

  “She may be—or she may refuse to leave her husband. But the only chance of saving that country lies in getting her out of the spotlight and off the stage. Expect the radicals to try to prevent that—hatred of her is all that holds their brewing street revolution together. But get her out, Sam.” McFee’s voice was severe. “Get her out any way it takes.”

  Durell gave a grim thought to his chances. “I’ll do what I can, sir.”

  “One thing: don’t let Sheik Zeid catch you at it. He’ll never forgive. We will lose either way.”

  Durell breakfasted on bacon, and eggs in the final moments before his flight was announced over the public address system at Dalles International Airport. Servicemen, sharply attired businessmen, entertainers in unlikely getups, each seeming purposeful and aloof, converged on the gate of the London-bound BOAC 747.

  More out of habit than necessity here, Durell regarded them all with suspicion.

  Beyond the window of the restaurant the morning had turned hot and muggy, the woods and fields hazed with a bright humidity. He did not care to think what the climate had to offer in Dhubar on the sizzling Persian Gulf.

  His practiced eye swept the faces of passengers as they joined him in first class, then floated briefly over the girl seated next to him. She might have looked callow with her sunny blond hair and faint facial dusting of copper freckles, but something in her hazel eyes said she had seen too much for that. Her carriage of straight back, high bust, and long, elegant legs was almost military. She was tall, at least five feet ten. Her slender height conveyed the delicacy of a column of smoke on a breathless morning, but Durell decided that impression was not to be trusted. There was a cool self-assurance in her stylishly understated costume: denim slacks, copper-buttoned denim safari jacket, red scarf tucked into her pale blue collar, and a pink beret.

  “I feel like we’re old friends,” she said and smiled.

  “Do you?” A prompt apprehension crossed Durell’s mind. The opposition in his business could come in any form—a child, a dwarf, a beautiful woman.

  She ignored his tone. “Let’s pretend we are, anyway. Shall we?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dara. Dara Allon.”

  It rang no bells, sounded no alarms. She wore a wedding ring. She did not ask his name.

  Durell rolled onto his shoulder, his nostrils sweetened by her summery cologne, and gazed across the empty sky. He would try to ignore her, he decided. As chief field agent for K Section he long ago had narrowed the circle of those he trusted almost to the vanishing point. He had become accustomed to a solitary life spent grappling with danger and the unknown.

  The wrong word to a stranger, he had learned, could be as deadly as a bullet.

  He turned his mind to the Thirteenth Princess, remembered that she had been an embarrassment to the old emir. Nowhere had hatred for the Ottoman Turks been as visceral as among the fiercely proud Arabs, who, from Baghdad to Cairo, had been under the yoke of Istanbul for hundreds of years. And Princess Ayla was descended from the very sultans who had so despotically ruled them.

  The Turks had lost their empire in World War I, and that humiliation, plus the Turkish people’s resentment of the threatened dismemberment of their Anatolian homeland, had led to civil war and the proclamation of a republic. Durell recalled that the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI Vahideddin, thirty-sixth sultan of the line, had been ousted in 1922. He stole out of Istanbul aboard a British battleship bound for San Remo. The Ottoman ruling family was expelled in its entirety two years later.

  Prince Tahir was born into one of its branches that very year. He became a shrewd and ruthless businessman and multiplied a tidy inheritance into a sprawling fortune. He had an affinity with the international set, favored the Riviera, Rio, and chemin de fer. He married film actress Nadine Carroll, known to Hollywood as the Platinum Brat. To the best of Durell’s knowledge, she had made an excellent wife and mother.

  Princess Ayla’s childhood had been one of quiet, sheltering luxury such as only the very rich can afford and only nobility can command. Before the child was grown, she had seen most of the world from the most exclusive vantage points.

  She had been raised to be a queen.

  Durell guessed that Prince Tahir must have spent sleepless nights as he quested for the domain he wanted her to have. And now she was Princess of Dhubar. Surly and headstrong, Tahir would not be pleased if she stepped aside now, even temporarily.

  Sheik Zeid had been reared in the tradition of desert warriors, then schooled at Yale, Durell’s alma mater. He could pilot a Phantom or recite Leaves of Grass with equal ease. He had gravitated away from the old Moslem ways and joined the Grand Prix racing crowd and lavished his money on formula cars and glamorous women. He had married perhaps the most glamorous of the lot, with her royal blood and oriental beauty: Princess Ayla.

  The Arabs of Dhubar disdained to have her Turkish name in their mouths. She was the thirteenth child born to the Turkish royal line since the family’s expulsion, and to them she would remain the Thirteenth Princess.

  Last month, in London, she had given birth to Sheik Zeid’s first son, the new crown prince. Now there was Ottoman blood in the succession to the throne.

  The populace of Dhubar had just exploded in a frenzy, and all its anger and suspicion over the brutal slaying of the old emir had been focused on Princess Ayla. Someone was using the event to engineer a power play against her husband, the best sources said.

  “An insider is orchestrating it, mark my word,” McFee had said, “someone the radicals have touched with money or the lure of power.”

  One thing about the situation, Durell thought as he declined coffee from the stewardess: it had taken guts for the Thirteenth Princess to return to Dhubar. To stay there after the riots of last night simply was reckless, unless she had no choice.

  In which case his job would be all the harder.

  The 747 settled over the green geometry of the English countryside and bumped down at Heathrow Airport twenty miles from central London.

  The blonde, who was nearer the aisle, arose first, and Durell became aware that the movement of deplaning passengers had halted. He looked up. Dara Allon stood straight and tall in the aisle, arms crossed beneath her breasts, feet planted in a wide stance. She did not move. Those behind her waited politely, suitbags over shoulders, small valises and packages resting on chair arms. Cool air thrummed through the ducts of the airplane, but the passengers looked hot and harried. They stared at him. Dara smiled, beckoned him into the aisle.

  “After you,” he said, in hopes of dismissing her.


  “I won’t hear of it.” Her smile was determined.

  Durell’s thank-you was somewhat irritable. Going down the aisle, the skin at the nape of his neck started to tingle. He did not like her back there behind him, he realized. Not at all.

  She stuck close, too close, a beautiful, summery-scented, strangely steely presence, but he broke out of line, moved fast, and gave her the slip in the crowd going through customs.

  The drizzling sky above the ultramodern terminal building wheeled with gulls, and a faint sharpness of salt water braced the air. Bright green coaches of the London Country Bus Service were parked nearby.

  He looked right and left. No one seemed to await him.

  Then he saw her again, now in enormous dark glasses despite the soggy weather. Her head jerked in recognition, short, yellow hair swaying across a cheek, and she took a step in his direction. He buried himself in a crowd demanding taxis, pushed to the curb and ordered a driver to take him to the Hertford Hotel on Oxford Street. A glance through the rear window showed Dara’s dismayed face as she watched his departing cab.

  She might have wished only for a date—or for his head on a platter.

  In his business, Durell could never tell.

  His cab rolled through dreary suburbs on a flood of noisy traffic. He could not be certain about the vehicles that clogged the street behind but saw nothing to allay or intensify suspicion. Still,, he had a sense of being followed. Maybe it was only the girl and her strange behavior that were on his mind. He had a hunch she was like cloth of fine silk—folded around a sword.

  He could not see that he was followed, but he switched from the taxi to the Underground, just in case. An enormous escalator fed him down beneath the street, where he bought a ticket from a vending machine. None of the other riders caught his eye. They were just faces. He left the Tube at Marble Arch, surrendered his punched ticket, and took the lift to the street. Not far down Park Lane was Speaker’s Corner, where anyone could speak—and be jeered—on any subject. It was in the Knightsbridge angle of Hyde Park, once a favorite hunting ground of Henry VIII.