Assignment- Sheba Read online

  Tom was built like a heavyweight boxer. He had the raw and ready manner of a honky-tonk bouncer—which he had been while earning his law degree from Duke University. He had a paranoiac streak that sometimes made him cruel and violent, but he got results, McFee reflected. He had worked in all quarters of the world. Now he was a scarred veteran in the prime of his career. He also was the closest K Section agent to Asmara, if you did not count Duncan Edmondson or Shep Calder. And they could not be spared from their posts in the Arabian oil sheikdoms.

  In small, precise letters, McFee wrote “affirmative” in the line marked “Reply” at the bottom of Tom’s printed message form. He initialed the form, then pressed a call button on his desk.

  Tom was the man to get the whole story from Sheba.

  He would have to do that quickly and move ahead with Sam’s mission.

  5

  “Let me row,” Deste whispered.

  “Quiet!”

  Durell’s shoulder ached, but not badly. He leaned into each stroke of the oars deliberately, careful not to start the bleeding again. It was slow going. The boat moved soundlessly. He peered across the moon-beaded water toward the beach club, wondering where the soldiers were. He had lost sight of them, but he knew they were still there. He had been watching for hours.

  Deste knelt with her back to him, her knees in three inches of bilgewater that swept gently back and forth with the motion of the boat. The hood of her shamma covered her golden hair and spread a fan of shadow across her face. Durell sweated under one of the garments also.

  The dinghy had seemed suspended between the island and mainland for hours.

  Then it scrunched into the beach in the shade cast by the club’s boat pier. A gentle surf sucked on the sand as Durell pulled the boat securely out of the water. The waves made purling noises among the pilings. Durell lifted Deste over the side of the boat. He was surprised at the feel of her. Her bones were small, but her muscles were hard just beneath her soft, womanly skin, harder than those of many men. He let her down inches from his face. Her eyes were calm, their irises the color of pewter. They told him he could depend on her.

  He hoped they were not lying.

  The sea soaked their flimsy cotton robes, plastering them to their calves. The wet cloth rustled as they darted across the beach in a low crouch. They looked like ghosts and sounded as if they were running on thin straw. In a landscape of black, gray and white, the shammas provided excellent camouflage, blending into the night shades of spiky desert growth.

  Durell stopped in the shadow of a fig tree. “You know what to do?” he whispered. He did not take his eyes from the hulk of the club building.

  “I am to go to the parking lot.”

  “Cars are still there. Find one with keys in the ignition. Be ready when I arrive.” He scanned the building and grounds. The stark moonlight had tumbled the scene into eerie geometric shapes. “Go. Now!”

  He watched for the soldiers as a moment passed and no sound came from Deste. He turned impatiently to urge her on: “I said . . .”

  She was gone.

  He caught a glimpse of her as she disappeared among boulders and scrub twenty yards up the slope. His ears had told him nothing. Where had she learned to move like that?

  Durell crept toward the club’s rear entrance. Training at the Farm maintained by K Section near Washington had sensitized his memory. The most casual perceptions were stored there for immediate recall. He knew the route he had taken that morning from the front entrance to the locker room, through the kitchen and out the rear exit, as well as if he had traversed it a thousand times.

  The glow of a cigarette tugged his gaze to the left. A soldier idled away the hours squatting in a slab of black shadow near a corner of the building. His rifle leaned on the wall beside him.

  Durell did not want to hurt him. He could kill in a dozen ways, with a finger, a hand, the heel of his foot. But he did so only when necessary. He flattened himself against the wall and inched toward the corner on silent, leather-thonged sandals.

  The soldier hummed a tune in a sleepy, bored way.

  All he felt was a firm pressure on his neck.

  Durell fanned him for flashlight or matches. Hyenas chuckled nearby. A garbage can crashed onto its side. A couple of soldiers out of sight to Durell discussed the beasts in Amharic. Durell was familiar with the tongue as that of the dominant Amhara tribe and the official language of the country.

  He stole into the building. The matches were not necessary in the kitchen where vaporous moonbeams silvered the disarray of pots and pans. A pool of blood told him the cooks had been unlucky. Lack of discrimination for the innocent was the most revolting characteristic of terrorists everywhere, Durell had found.

  The hallway beyond was as black as the pupils of a corpse, but he needed no light there. He pushed open the door of the locker room. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. A cricket chirped. The concrete walls rang with the echo of water dripping from a shower head. Durell struck one of the soldier’s matches with a thumbnail. He was standing in front of the locker he had rented. It was stippled with angry bullet holes. The match flame cast a yellow sheen onto a rind of blood covering the floor where the Italian father and son had fallen. A thick smear led to where a hand had thrashed out.

  Durell’s locker was empty.

  Looters must have got into the building in spite of the soldiers, he decided.

  He briefly considered what to do. Then he pulled up the hem of his shamma. Working quickly, he unfastened the safety pin holding his key with its metal disc to his bathing suit. He straightened the pin into a long slender picklock and used it to open the other lockers.

  Only his belongings appeared to have been taken. Why? It could not be merely because he had left his locker open. The lockers of the two Italians were open and their things were still in them.

  He would miss the .38 S&W like an old and reliable friend. And the loss of his passport certainly could complicate matters.

  The club catered to the wealthy. Almost any of the other lockers would have made a good night’s work for an ordinary thief. Most of the wallets were stuffed with Ethiopian dollars and credit cards. Durell had supposed that the authorities would allow no one to tamper with the possessions; that they would demand supporting identification before releasing them to avoid claims and counterclaims later. But someone had got past them. Just long enough to empty Durell’s locker. Again, he asked himself, “Why?”

  Ignazio Bertollini.

  Durell read the name on the Eritrean driver’s permit, wondering if Ignazio were dead or alive. His physical description probably was as close to Durell’s as he would find. Also in the ostrich-skin wallet were a club membership and other supporting identification, including a credit card of Eurocard International.

  It would have been advantageous to Deste if he could have secured new identity papers for her as well, but he did not know the location of the women’s lockers and dared not rummage through the building looking for them.

  She would have to take her chances—just as she said she had been doing.

  Durell heard the slap of footsteps in the hallway. He dropped the match and sprawled in the gore beside the row of lockers. He lay still, eyes shut, arms flung out.

  He heard the footfalls pause at the door, then hurry to his side. He waited patiently, the cold smell of the dead men’s blood strong in his nostrils. Then he felt the presence of the soldier bending over him. A finger poked his chest. “Corporal!”

  At that instant, Durell opened his eyes. They stared straight into the young soldier’s dark-skinned face. The man’s jaw dropped in fright. Durell brought the edge of his palm in a hard overhead swing and popped him in the neck. He folded. He was not seriously injured, but the carefully calculated force of the blow had totally incapacitated him.

  Durell jumped to his feet, almost tore an ankle ligament as he slipped on the blood, and ran toward the dining area and the front entrance to the building. A rifle fired three times, blind
ly; yells of alert, shouted commands came from behind.

  He burst into the plush dining room, tripped over a fallen teak dining chair, hit the carpet, rolled and came up still running, fighting the entanglements of the shamma. Tatters of a half-burnt curtain ribboned the moonglow coming through a plate glass wall. Against the gleaming sea, beyond the curtains, forms gestured and moved in confusion. Flashlight beams diffused in bright clouds on the plate glass, spreading low light over the upset tables and broken dinnerware littering the floor. Durell was at the exit when the plate-glass window shivered, spitting chunks, then shattered inward in a storm of glittering daggers. The submachine gun bullets thumped into the walls around him with deadly urgency,.

  Then he was outside, in the parking lot. He ran past the first row of cars to the second, where he had told Deste to guide him with a flash of parking lights. The first row of automobiles would conceal the fights from anyone near the building.

  Almost in front of him, the yellow parking lights blinked once.

  He flung himself into the driver’s seat of a little black Fiat. Deste had the engine running. Durell glanced at her as they lurched from the parking slot, his foot heavy on the accelerator, the headlights off.

  She looked back at the winks of rifle fire, then at Durell.

  “You got it?” she asked.

  He yanked the wheel and the steady little car swung with a squeal of tires onto the Asmara road. His Ups were drawn back over his teeth as he gasped for breath. The loss of blood had weakened him more than he realized. “I got something,” he said, nodding his head. He turned on the headlights.

  “Very professional,” she said. Her hands were clasped in her lap. She watched the road ahead as if on a Sunday drive. The glow from the instrument panel limned her aristocratic features against the darkness beyond. Durell looked hard at her. She was as cool as the moon that seemed to shine from her eyes.

  He wondered where she had learned to use a word like “professional”—in a context like this.

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