Assignment- 13th Princess Read online

  There was a note of despair in McNamara’s voice as he said: “You heard.”

  “Everything.”

  A second passed.

  Then McNamara’s chopped .45 jerked toward Durell.

  Durell squeezed his trigger twice, the double blast shaking the chamber with ear-splitting thunder. The first shot went low and whacked into McNamara’s gut, and he made a fish mouth, his flashlight wheeling away. His knees buckled and banged together as the second slug penetrated breastbone, heart, and spine. He was dead when he hit the floor.

  There was a moment of startled silence.

  The acrid odor of gunsmoke brushed Durell’s nostrils.

  Then another voice came from behind. Durell did not catch its meaning, but saw Princess Ayla’s eyes widen and heard her gasp with relief.

  “Father!” she cried.

  “Thank you for disposing of this pig,” Prince Tahir said. “He was to have died with Sheik Zeid, but he escaped. He was clever. Quite competent.”

  “Why did you turn on him?” Durell asked.

  “He had outlived his usefulness—as I’m afraid you all have, except for my lovely daughter. Come here, my dear.”

  Princess Ayla went to her father, a stunned, groggy look in her black eyes. The violence around her seemed beyond her comprehension, and Durell could not guess how she had become involved in Prince Tahir’s bloody scheme, unless he had forced her.

  Only two of the prince’s men were with him, but they were armed with M-16s. The rest must be scattered through the maze of tunnels, Durell decided. There were only a handful of them in any case.

  “You will drop your weapons, please.” Tahir’s voice was composed and elegant now. Much of the tension seemed to have gone out of him. Durell and Dara had no choice but to do as he commanded.

  Princess Ayla watched wide-eyed, speechless.

  Durell spoke. “The emir is free. Your plot is a shambles.”

  Prince Tahir snorted and said: “On the contrary. General Abdurrahman’s troops are en route to Dhubar at this moment—and the worthy sheik has a long distance to go before he can arrive there alive.” His twisted mouth smiled. “I will wager he does not make it. Matters still will work out, despite my stupid daughter.”

  “There will be war if the Turks invade Dhubar.” It was Dara. Her eyes flamed with a fanaticism Durell had never before seen.

  “Father . . . ?” Princess Ayla lifted a beseeching face to Prince Tahir.

  “Hush, my child.”

  A long moment passed, as Tahir’s eyes switched from Durell to Dara and back, and his narrow face seemed to lengthen and harden. Something squeaked: it could have been a bat or a shoe, back in the tunnels. McNamara’s body lay grotesque on the floor, twisted awkwardly, as if life had been wrung from him like water from a cloth.

  Everybody knew what was coming—that Prince Tahir was about to order the two soldiers to fire. Durell tasted copper, felt the cold weight of Dara’s hand slide into his.

  The dank air was charged with onrushing violence.

  “Father, I beg you, no more killing!” Princess Ayla cried.

  The back of Prince Tahir’s hand slapped across her cheek, and she crashed to the floor. Her eyes widened with shock and hurt.

  “You must not interfere, my dear!” Tahir screeched. “I told you: all will be well.”

  “Not for you, my prince,” another voice said.

  All heads turned and found Sheik Zeid standing in the mouth of a dark side tunnel. The flesh around one eye was puffed and bruised, and he held an M-16 evidently taken from one of Tahir’s men. His sensitive eyes slid lovingly toward Princess Ayla. “I couldn’t go away and leave you.” And then, to Durell: “When I circled back, there was no one to stop me. All of Prince Tahir’s men must have been underground.”

  An abrupt sound of anguish escaped Princess Ayla’s lips, and she flung herself into Sheik Zeid’s arms.

  Durell shouted for her to get out of his way, but it was too late. In the instant that she blocked Sheik Zeid’s line of fire, the quicker of Tahir’s two soldiers whipped his rifle toward him. Durell took the chance, dove for the soldier, hammered the hard edge of his palm into his neck, and heard a vertebra crack.

  Flashlights fell.

  There was a deafening chatter as someone’s rifle went off, and dust and stone chips spewed from the ceiling.

  Dara grappled with the second soldier, and Durell spun to help her, felt a rip of pain in his thigh, and went down on a buckling leg. Another soldier appeared from somewhere, leapt on his chest.

  Everything was confused.

  The room was an amber cage of flashing shadows.

  Sheik Zeid was helping Dara. Through flailing fists Durell saw Tahir throw a forearm around Princess Ayla’s throat and drag her brutally into a tunnel, holding her as a shield. Her mouth worked with screams, whether from hysterics or fear of her father he did not know. Gasps, thumps, and cries filled the gleaming air as Durell and his opponent locked together in deadly embrace, breaths gushing, fingers clawing and stabbing. The man’s mouth blew an odor of stale onions. He reared back and raised a rifle butt to crush Durell’s skull. Durell heaved, rolled, and had the soldier beneath him. He got the steel rifle barrel across the other’s windpipe and put all his weight on it. There was a throaty sound of squeezed air, a drumming of heels as clenched teeth showed and eyes bulged.

  The man went limp.

  Wearily, Durell looked to his left just in time to see Dara break away from Sheik Zeid and the man with whom he struggled. Murder was in her eyes as she dipped to retrieve a fallen pistol and ran into the tunnel after Princess Ayla and her father.

  “Dara!” he shouted.

  She did not look back.

  “Don’t shoot her!” he yelled.

  He got up, took a step, and Ms leg went out from under him. It had no more strength than a soda straw. His fingers touched the fallen Beretta, wrapped around it, and he was distracted by a thick grunt. He twisted, saw Sheik Zeid unconscious beneath the pummeling fists of the Turk soldier. The Beretta kicked in his hand, and the soldier flipped onto his back.

  Durell got up and fell once more.

  “Dara-a-h!” His voice rippled down the tunnel and came back tauntingly. His leg had carried him as far as it would go.

  His mind dim with pain and fatigue, he went on hands and knees to Sheik Zeid, checked him over, decided his injury wasn’t likely to be serious. Urgently he tried to awaken him so that the emir might catch Dara before it was too late. But it was hopeless for the moment.

  All he could do was start crawling.

  He spared a thought for the remainder of Prince Tahir’s men. Two or three might be left, but he could not let that make a difference. The small chamber smelled of gunsmoke and death as he hefted a flashlight and entered the tunnel.

  He had not gone far when a high scream of terror pierced the damp silence. He checked himself as it trailed away despairingly.

  Whose voice that was, he could not have said, but there seemed no point to going on, regardless. If it had been Dara, he could never stop Prince Tahir; and if it had been Princess Ayla, it was too late to stop Dara.

  He leaned against the wall, guts cramped with anxiety, and tried to gather his strength.

  About a minute passed, and then he heard sobs. As the sounds came closer, he thumbed his torch and picked out Dara. Weeping against her shoulder as they walked arm in arm was Princess Ayla.

  Durell heaved a long sigh of relief and spoke to Dara. “What made you change your mind?”

  Dara smoothed the tormented princess’ shining black hair. “She is no enemy of ours or Sheik Zeid’s,” she said. “She deliberately led her father into an air shaft. Tahir is dead.”

  Chapter 23

  “There they go, the princess and her prince,” Dara said as a sleek executive jet bore Sheik Zeid and the Thirteenth Princess away from the provincial capital of Kayseri.

  Durell’s eyes followed the jet until it was a speck above the southern mountains.
He swung his wheelchair awkwardly and irritably away from the window of the VIP lounge where he and Dara awaited separate flights.

  “Don’t get teary over it,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t help it, Sam. One becomes hardened in our business. Seeing the sort of love they have makes me feel a little more human myself.” She took a chair beside him, crossed her lovely legs, and blew her nose prettily. It was only a few hours ago that Sheik Zeid, battered somewhat but little the worse for wear, had flown them out of the weird valley of fairy chimneys, but there had been time for showers, food, even a bit of rest after initial formalities with Turkish Security. In a new traveling suit of simple design, Dara looked as wholesome as a spring flower. She had resiliency in abundance.

  Durell wasn’t so sure about himself. He felt worn to the nub, maybe because of the injured leg stretched out before him. It hurt like hell, but he had no intention of drugging himself with the painkillers prescribed by a Turkish physician.

  He preferred to keep his senses sharp.

  There were plenty of old enemies as well as new.

  The doctor had ordered hospitalization for treatment of the leg, but Durell had refused. He could not really rest until he had filed his reports, although he had made a phone call to the embassy in Ankara giving the gist of his mission’s conclusion.

  “I do wish them a nice life in Dhubar,” Dara said. “Do you think they have a chance, after all this?” She was still thinking of Zeid and Ayla.

  “I suppose the people will give them the benefit of the doubt, now that McNamara isn’t there to stir up the crowds,” Durell said.

  “He was behind the whole thing, wasn’t he?”

  “In the beginning, yes. But it got out of his control. He was merely supposed to check out the families of the sheik’s prospective brides through his intelligence sources. Evidently he arranged for unfavorable reports while searching for someone amenable to his plan. Then he found Prince Tahir, and they worked out the whole scheme for a takeover, even to Pat’s fomenting the ‘foreign-inspired’ riots as a pretext for calling on Turkish protection.”

  Dara sighed. “He could see the billions of dollars in oil revenues rolling into Dhubar. It must have driven him crazy to be so tantalizingly close to such wealth.”

  “All he wanted was to milk the treasury,” Durell agreed. “Of course, he had learned of my mission through his contacts in Washington, and he tried to wipe me in London. He knew of the safe house in Istanbul through his past K Section affiliation and sent Prince’s Tahir’s men there after killing Volkan to keep him from talking—be was never in any danger in the cistern. He played it cozy the whole way, always keeping a veneer of legitimacy just in case things turned sour—as they did, finally.”

  Dara said, “He didn’t know that Prince Tahir had bigger ideas.”

  “Like the restoration of the Ottoman Empire,” Durell supplied. “He didn’t realize the prince would have no further use for him, once assured of Dhubar’s regency for Princess Ayla. Prince Tahir didn’t turn on him until he had delivered the document of regency, entrusted to him by Sheik Zeid. Saved there, all McNamara could do was kill Princess Ayla so that she could never tell how he had plotted against Sheik Zeid.”

  “But why did Prince Tahir take the document to General Abdurrahman?” Dara wondered.

  “Possibly as proof that everything had been arranged so that he could move on Dhubar,” Durell conjectured. “The old emir’s assassin must have been one of Abdurrahman’s men. Tracing him into the Turkish military zone of Cyprus would have been nearly impossible.” Durell gently massaged his cramping leg and added, “General Abdurrahman will be arrested aboard his command ship today, I’m told.”

  “I still can’t believe that Princess Ayla plotted against the man she loved so much,” Dara said.

  “That was the catch,” Durell said. “She was totally under her father’s influence and just as calculating as he, at first. The trouble was, she fell in love. She must have fought the emotion, because she even persuaded Zeid to sign the document of regency after the baby was born.”

  “I suppose he thought of that as no more than reasonable to insure the succession of his son,” Dara said.

  “It was really his death warrant,” Durell said. “Under the dominance of her father, Princess Ayla went along— until the assassination of the old emir. He was ill and frail, and she had thought he would be allowed to die a natural death. She couldn’t handle the violence—she knew then she could not go through with the murder of her husband. She returned to Dhubar determined to save him. But then she realized she could do that only by exposing her father’s treachery.”

  “That was when she called on your help, at the mosque in Dhubar,” Dara said.

  “She was panic-stricken. She didn’t wait to see me; she just ran away. She left Tahir as much in the lurch as us.”

  “She knew her father could do nothing without her, so the only way to save her husband was to give him up,” Dara said.

  “If Nadine hadn’t acted on her intuition, it might have ended quite differently,” Durell said. “Prince Tahir was certain to find his daughter sooner or later. And he might have convinced her she was in too deep to turn back.”

  “Didn’t Sheik Zeid say Nadine would live with them in Dhubar now?”

  Durell nodded. “As soon as she is able to travel. She had a concussion and bruised ribs, but the injuries shouldn’t hold her up long. Sheik Zeid owes her a lot.”

  A sentimental moisture glistened again in Dara’s eyes. “There will be a grand time in the old palace tonight, now that he has forgiven Princess Ayla,” she said.

  “Forgiven? He practically threw himself at her feet.”

  “Oh, damn.” Dara dug for her handkerchief again. “I still say it’s beautiful.”

  “Maybe—if Princess Ayla has learned her lesson. She still stands to be regent if anything happens to the emir,” Durell replied.

  “You’re a cynic, Samuel Cullen Durell.”

  “It helps in my line of work.”

  The public-address system echoed through the small terminal, calling Dara’s flight. She took Durell’s hand. “We’ve shared so much, Sam. I don’t want to go to Jerusalem just yet.”

  “You must,” Durell said. “I’ll be in Antalya. They say the Mediterranean air performs wonders of healing this time of year.”

  “In two days, then?”

  “I’ll wait for you, if I can.”

  “It’s too bad about McNamara,” General Dickinson McFee told Durell. “He was a good man, once.”

  “Good at playing both sides,” Durell replied.

  “The boys on the Mideast desk will miss him. They feel as if they’ve had an eye put out.”

  “They’ll grow another.”

  The deceptively innocent-looking little chief of K Section sipped his sparkling tonik. Even in the shade of the hotel garden it was hot, here on Turkey’s southern coast. But McFee, dressed in a gray, tropical-weight suit, looked perfectly cool. The routine reports had not sufficed for the mission of the Thirteenth Princess, and the boss had met Durell in the seventeen-hundred-year-old resort of Antalya to debrief him personally. Now they were saying goodbye.

  McFee broke the breezy silence. “At least our oil supply is assured for a few more years.”

  “Or months,” Durell said.

  “Don’t be gloomy, Samuel. Relax and take what satisfaction you can. You did your job well.”

  Durell toyed with his bourbon and soda. The wheelchair annoyed him almost beyond endurance, but the medical men had absolutely forbidden him to walk for another day or so. It seemed he had come frightfully close to losing a leg. The lovely town pleasured his senses, its white buildings scattered amid flowers and trees down to a small yacht harbor with green, red, and blue boats. The crescent of Konyaalti beach swept away to the Lycian Mountains in the west.

  But Durell’s dark blue eyes showed no pleasure with McFee as he said: “There was more than courtesy involved in linking me with
Israeli intelligence on this, wasn’t there, sir?”

  McFee looked briefly uncomfortable. “I see no point in going into that,” he said.

  “Dara had orders to kill Princess Ayla from the start, didn’t she?”

  “Only if you dropped the ball. It was preferable that you get her out of the country. That had first priority. Miss Allon’s experience suited her admirably to back you up if you failed.” He took a short breath. “We could hardly allow a calamity in Dhubar, if the sacrifice of Princess Ayla’s fife would have prevented it,” he said in a reasoning tone. “We couldn’t have an American involved in that, of course. There would have been disastrous complications with Sheik Zeid, if he’d found out.”

  Durell’s tone did not soften. “So I was put in the position of trying to save her from my own eager colleague.”

  “I regret that, Samuel.”

  “You regret?”

  “Deeply.” After a momentary pause, McFee switched the subject. “When may I expect you back in Washington?”

  “Not soon.”

  “Your doctor says—”

  Durell cut him off. “It is not the doctor’s leg.”

  He ignored McFee’s reaction, whatever it might be, and looked out at sparkling Vs cut by pleasure launches in the flat sea. He scented the soft and languorous fragrance of the water, admired the uncrowded beach.

  Then he turned his gaze to McFee and said: “I’ll need a month, at least.” He raised a palm at the man’s pale, bickering eyes. “I regret it,” he said.

  McFee studied his face for several seconds, then rose from his chair. “Two weeks. No more,” he said.

  And he walked away.

  Durell stayed at the shaded table and enjoyed his drink as the sea breeze cooled his bruised face and teased his hair. Shortly, he felt hands on the grips of his wheelchair.

  “Shall I push you around a bit?” Dara smiled down over his shoulder.