Assignment- 13th Princess Read online

  Durell had filled Dara in on the rest of his plan by the time they came to a coffeehouse at the corner of the overgrown park. Inside, men sat in a haze of smoke and played cards and backgammon or discussed politics, business, soccer as they sipped endlessly at Turkish coffee or sweet, amber tea. Some passed around the mouthpiece of a bubbling nargile. They stared frankly and without hostility at Durell and especially Dara. Durell remembered that tradition normally closed the doors of coffeehouses to women.

  He asked the proprietor where the telephone was— "Telefon nerededir?”—and got a nod toward a niche in the back of the room.

  He dialed and told the operator to send an ambulance to No. 50 Black Stone Street.

  “General Nezih Abdurrahman,” he said, “is dying of a heart attack.”

  They said nothing as they waited tensely just inside the dark fringe of the park. About five minutes passed, then the low clamor of the ancient city was split by an approaching siren. When the ambulance pulled up at the sentry box, Dara started to move.

  “Not yet,” Durell said, the back of his hand against her shoulder.

  The noise drew men from the coffeehouse, and they hurried over to listen and advise in an argument that raged between the sentries and ambulance personnel.

  Voices rose.

  The crowd grew.

  “Now,” Durell said.

  They stole from the foliage and crossed the street about thirty yards from the commotion, moving casually but efficiently. The guards did not notice them. The wall was not high. They slipped along it in the shadows until they were well away from the street, then pulled themselves over easily, and their feet crunched against a matting of needles and leaves in the compound.

  They did not move for a long second.

  Dara stood close to Durell, her fragrance that of another flower amid the carefully cultivated beds. His breathing was light and easy, his urgency controlled as a clock spring. He felt good, but told himself to be cautious of his leg. The heckling of the bystanders came from the direction of the sentry box, and Durell twisted his face that way. Through a low filament of mingled boughs, he saw a sentry with a phone in his hand, evidently calling the house to determine whether an ambulance had been called for.

  He waved Dara on after him.

  There had been no alarm on crossing the wall, but the signal didn’t have to be audible. Amber lights could be flashing silently all over the house.

  The voices faded as the ambulance left, and Durell twisted through laurel bushes to touch a velvet of moss that grew on the stone wall of Abdurrahman’s home. He saw that it was two stories high, with a main section and short wing. Frogs chirped. Pigeons bubbled and brushed under the eaves.

  The darkness here was like a weight on his eyes.

  He glanced up and saw the sky, just scraps and slices of a softer darkness.

  He reached high, tried a window, found it locked, moved on. His soles grated against the flagstones of a terrace; French doors mirrored the night on his right. Durell worked furiously with penlight and lockpicks, felt the doors give under his push.

  “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  By the low glow of his penflash he moved soundlessly around divan, table, and chairs. The air was still and smelled warmly of heavy fabrics. There was a large desk, somewhat cluttered with bric-a-brac, and fine antique weapons glinted on the walls. It could be a study, he thought gratefully. He located a closet, then thumbed off his penflash and opened the window drapes.

  Back outside, he told Dara: “It’s time for you to go. As a decoy you must make sure the guards see you.”

  She nodded, her face a pale shadow. “I understand.”

  There was a pause. “Don’t be frightened,” Durell said.

  “Would it matter if I said I was?”

  “No.”

  Her lips touched his, quickly and firmly, muffling an inarticulate syllable inside her mouth.

  “Run,” he said. And she was gone.

  Hurriedly he turned on a table lamp and ducked into the closet, leaving the door cracked so that he could see the desk and most of one wall.

  Shouts came from outdoors, the snap of a single rifle shot, tiny in here. Durell’s jaw muscles stood out in ridges; sweat funneled down his neck and chest. The closet was hot and airless. He did not know if Dara had made it, wouldn’t know until he got out himself—if he were so lucky.

  Only one shot. Maybe they were reluctant to fire in this residential neighborhood.

  Or maybe one shot was all it had taken.

  Volkan had been an agent of Turkish Security for seventeen years, and this was only the second crisis he had confronted.

  A man should know what to do, he thought, and slapped the wheel of the Mercedes with his big hand. His grandfather, who had been a sergeant in Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s republican army, would say: “But first, a man must know who he is.”

  Volkan’s face saddened as he peered through the windshield and the lights and shadows flickered past.

  He wished he were with his grandfather, that venerated old warrior. He and most of the clan that remained in and around the small banana-and orange-growing village a mile from the Mediterranean would be camped in the Taurus Mountains at the family yayla, their summer retreat, in their tents of goatskin, hunting and telling the ancient stories around the campfires, the women milking ewes and fetching firewood and water.

  Volkan no longer could bring himself to attend the yayla.

  Even on the rare occasions that Prince Tahir chose to free him from his duties, he felt he had no right to be there with his honorable grandfather.

  Volkan had felt for a long time that he was a traitor.

  Long ago, Prince Tahir had confronted him with irrefutable evidence, photographs that showed the hulking bodyguard’s weakness for pretty young men.

  That had been the other crisis: the decision he must make, either to report the matter to his superiors and take the ruinous consequences, or to allow Prince Tahir to turn him against his agency and his country. He had chosen the latter—as Prince Tahir had known he would —but he had never forgiven himself. It was a shame that he had always to live with. Perhaps it had been made easier by the grand increase in salary that Prince Tahir had bestowed on him—over the years he had accumulated immense wealth for the son of a back-country Turk, over $100,000 in a Swiss bank account.

  But the money had not left his mind at rest.

  There were always the false reports to his superiors to remind him. His agency’s file on Prince Tahir must be three-fourths the work of Volkan’s imagination by now. Turkish Security really knew nothing about Prince Tahir or what he did.

  Volkan knew very little himself.

  Having sold out, he no longer made any attempt to find the hidden motives and meanings behind the prince’s activities, even though he was aware that the Turkish Republic must consider such a man a potential enemy by the nature of his birth.

  Volkan had contented himself with being just what he seemed—a bodyguard. But he had striven, in a quest for pride of some kind, to be the best bodyguard he could be.

  Now he faced another crisis, a crisis this time of even greater magnitude. It had started simply enough. He had followed the woman from the landing expecting that she would lead him to Durell, had courted the hope that he could insinuate himself into the confidence of the both of them. Prince Tahir, who seemed to have ways of finding out anything, had learned in Dhubar that the girl was with Israeli intelligence and the man an operative of America’s K Section.

  Volkan had acted on an axiom of the business.

  The axiom said it was more decisive in the long run to learn your enemy’s plans than to win a battle.

  Volkan paused abruptly and wondered if Durell had operated on the same principle in taking him in so easily. But then other thoughts surged back in, drowning the moment of doubt in his tense mind.

  He had hoped to discover Durell’s battle plan, his allies and the threads of their linkag
es, his strengths and weaknesses. So he had gone along with him.

  But now, he did not know. . . .

  He was confused.

  Why had Prince Tahir gone to General Abdurrahman? The question nettled and itched, and Volkan blew an angry breath as if to clear his frustrated mental processes. In a way he wanted to go back and help Durell now, but he feared* Prince Tahir too much. And the general. What if they were caught? Worse—and here was a real thought—what if Durell had planned it so that he, Volkan, would take the whole blame?

  The American was tricky.

  He could just see himself trying to explain the break-in, while Durell was out of it, running free.

  Oh, no—Volkan shook his head—he wasn’t going back there. It had been a mistake to come to these people on his own initiative, but it wasn’t too late to correct it. He glanced at his wristwatch, decided he had waited too long to alert the general. If Durell had come and gone, there would be questions as to why he had allowed the burglary in the first place.

  Volkan had another idea—he would get some of his colleagues, and Durell and his woman would be in for a nasty surprise when they returned to their hotel.

  The silence that came to Durell through the crack in the closet door seemed long and ominous. He breathed shallowly and knuckled sweat from his eyesockets. The closet smelled of woolen coats and musty old files, and he detected a thin, rank odor from his own body and wished for a bath.

  Less than a minute had passed when he became aware of a jarring of floorboards as feet padded toward the room. He heard the study door open, but it was out of his view, and he did not know who came through it.

  Someone spoke roughly, in Turkish: “She was in here. Look, the doors to the terrace are still open.”

  Another voice, young and deferential, perhaps that of an aide, said: “The room does not appear disturbed, General efjendi. Perhaps nothing was taken.”

  Durell got a scent of a perfumed Hisar cigarette as quick feet moved across the heirloom Kayseri carpet, and a short, barrel-chested man came into view. His close-cropped hair was the color of gun metal, his face square and taut with instant authority. He wore a dark smoking jacket and civilian slacks, but he had to be General Abdurrahman, Durell decided. The general strode toward the open French doors, stared into the dark compound, and he told the other: “Go check with the guards. See if they ran the wench down.”

  Durell heard the feet of the aide as he moved off in double-time. He breathed a sigh of sweaty relief: the shot must have missed her.

  General Abdurrahman snapped the French doors shut and surveyed the room, hands on hips, leathery face intent.

  “Huh. A woman,” he snorted.

  Then he stepped impatiently to the wall behind the desk, reached to a painting of caiques working the Bosporus against a background of Topkapi Saray’s clifflike walls, pressed a corner of its antique frame. A spring-loaded panel to which the frame was attached swung out and revealed a wall safe.

  A slow second of dread passed through Durell as the general glanced over his shoulder, seeming to glare straight at the narrow slit in the closet door. Then Abdurrahman turned back to the safe.

  Durell could not see the numbers on the dial, but he memorized the direction of turn: a free spin, then left, right, right, left. A yank at the chrome handle, and the general thrust his hand inside, withdrew a brown paper envelope, and turned it in his hands, seeming to relax suddenly. He did not trouble to open it but replaced it swiftly and snapped the wall panel back into place.

  With a last look around the room, he switched off the lamp and left.

  So far everything had gone just as Durell had hoped—it had been reasonable to expect the general to go straight to that which he most feared to lose and make sure that it had not been taken.

  Durell had no idea what the brown envelope contained, but he judged the gamble would have been worth the trouble if he could get it. He counted to ten, touched open the closet door, crept across the hush of the soft Kayseri carpet. With a thought for the armed soldiers somewhere just outside, he shielded his penflash as best he could and went to work.

  There were countless makes of locks, but he knew they could be narrowed to a few types that shared many similarities. In IPE—for Illegal, Perilous Entry—he had been taught at the Farm the refinements on everything from door locks and padlocks to safes and bank vaults. And how to outwit them with simple tools and cunning touch.

  The general’s safe was good.

  But it was old and rather noisy.

  A tumbler fell. Durell took his time. Reverse—another tumbler. Half a minute went by. He gave the handle an easy pull, and the round door glided open on oiled hinges.

  A leather jewel case blunted the beam of his penflash, then a small strongbox.

  The brown envelope lay on top of the strongbox. Red wax sealed its flap, and stamped into it was the curving image of a scimitar. Durell’s pulse quickened a beat as he recognized the national emblem of Dhubar.

  Aware that the envelope could have been delivered here by Prince Tahir and that its contents would be of the utmost gravity, he closed both safe and wall panel with trembling fingers.

  He moved outdoors, hustled from shadow to shadow as best as his sore leg would allow. A fresh scent of mowed grass came across the lawn. Two sentries stood by the floodlighted drive entrance, but they did not appear to be the ones seen earlier, and he swallowed a surge of apprehension as it dawned on him that there must be a guard barracks in the compound.

  The wall came up through the blurring shadows, and he heaved himself over, holding his heart down in his chest, eyes on the sentries.

  A guard turned abruptly toward the gatehouse.

  The silent sentry console must be in there, Durell thought—and this time the guards were not distracted. One of the men sprinted toward the place where he had crossed over, while the other, his back turned to Durell, grabbed excitedly for the telephone.

  With the wall still blinding the first sentry to him, Durell saw his chance to cross the street into the park and took it.

  He forgot his complaining leg and ran like a squirrel.

  Chapter 16

  “Dara?” Durell whispered.

  “Dara?” he repeated, and glanced back through the park shrubbery at the general’s house.

  “Sam?” She came through flowering bushes and unkempt grass, a ripple of shadow on his left. “Any luck?”

  He saw the .45 in her hand. “Some,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “It was a near thing. I lost them below Feshane Caddesi.”

  “They probably were called off when the general decided nothing had been taken.” Durell saw that the pair of sentries had been joined by two more soldiers and an officer. A jabbering discussion was going on, and the gist of it seemed based on the officer’s contention that the second alarm must have been a malfunction. It was clear that Durell had not been seen as he slipped away. He breathed a bit easier.

  “I was surprised that they didn’t call the police,” Dara said.

  “The general must want to keep the authorities out of this.” He walked across the park until he was sure that they were out of sight to the sentries and sat down behind some bushes. “Seen Volkan?” he asked as he took the envelope from inside his jacket.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know—he didn’t alert General Abdurrahman.”

  “I think he was too clever. You finessed him.” She looked like a child, sitting on her knees, the pale shine of her teeth showing in a smile. “What have you got there?” she asked as Durell broke the seal on the envelope.

  He held his flash to the document that was unfolded, saw that it was typed in Arabic on rich, heavy paper and bore the signature of Sheik Zeid. Immediately below that was the seal of state.

  She put her cheek next to his and read along with him, then drew in a breath and spoke in a low, grating voice that sometimes came to her in moments of alarm. “This makes Princess Ayla regent of Dhubar if anythi
ng happens to Sheik Zeid.”

  Durell nodded. “Meaning she rims the country until her son comes of age.”

  “And Prince Tahir would be the power behind the throne!” She sank down. “Oh, Sam—I have a feeling he won’t be satisfied with just Dhubar.”

  “Don’t panic. Sheik Zeid isn’t dead yet,” Durell said.

  “This shatters Moslem tradition, you know—women just don’t reign in those countries.” Her voice turned hopeful. “Perhaps it can’t be enforced.”

  “Traditions have been broken before.” Durell paused. “As for enforcement—think about where we found this.”

  “General Abdurrahman’s armored division! But surely Sheik Zeid wouldn’t be a party to Turkish intervention.”

  Durell spoke warningly. “Prince Tahir would.”

  “Sheik Zeid must have been out of his mind to sign that.”

  Durell’s voice turned thoughtful. “He may have feared that if he died, the people would reject his son because of his Ottoman blood. In that light it was prudent to name a regent who was certain to be sympathetic to the crown prince. He must not know that the document is in General Abdurrahman’s possession.”

  “Wouldn’t the general require the backing of his government for an expedition to Dhubar?”

  “He might try it solo. If he were successful, he’d probably be a national hero, and the government’s hands would be tied. The Turks haven’t forgotten their glory days, when they ran things from Athens right around the Mediterranean to North Africa.”

  “And all Sheik Zeid intended was to make his wife regent if he died sometime in the vague future, if there were an illness or an accident—”