chapter one

DURELL awoke to the sound of the birds and an awareness of the swift shadow of wings across his face. He identified the mewing and cawing and screeching as gulls and crows and kites, even before he opened his eyes. The wings belonged to a buzzard. He threw an arm across his face to cut out the blinding glare of the sun as it rose over the Sind, and then rolled carefully on his right side; the buzzard lifted swiftly on the hot thermal currents rising from the juncture of the beach and the thundering sea. He watched it soar up to the ruins of the old Arab watchtower on the sandstone cliff above. It perched there, and waited.

His left arm ached. The noise of the surf and the smoky spume from the nearby breakers touched him. The sun was already hot, as hot as any dawn on the shores of the Gulf of Oman in August. He squinted against its stinging rays, aware of a stiffness in his face, a bruise on his temple, a feeling that someone had stood over him with a sledge hammer and successively pounded each and every portion of his anatomy.

He did not know how long he had been out. He had come a long way last night, flying east on the Pam Am jet, out of Istanbul. Everything had been routine. The military jeep met him at the Karachi airport in the relative coolness of four o’clock in the morning. He had expected to go directly to the Embassy and talk to Daniel Donegan, but the Pakistani driver, slim and dark-haired and hawk-faced, very trim in his khaki uniform, had taken him somewhere else, supposedly for an immediate interview with Colonel K’Ayub.

Durell sat up. He wondered why he was still alive. In his business, a moment’s carelessness could usually be equated with disaster. He remembered the driver’s name. Mahmud Ali. As common as John Smith, in this part of the world. He blinked at the glaring sun and turned his head with care to examine the beach.

There was nothing to be seen except the blaze of white sand and the long lines of combers smashing belligerently at the coast, in either direction, as far as the eye could see. To the south, where he would have to go, if possible, the shore curved slightly eastward and was lost, at a distance of some miles, beyond the bulk of a clay cliff scarp. On the sea itself, the horizon was marred by a thin plume of smoke from a tanker funnel. Closer at hand, but as far as the moon, was the bellied dirty sail of an Arab dhow catching the morning wind.

He began to sweat. If the object of the jeep ride had been to kill him, and the immediate effort was frustrated— although he had no clear memory of what had happened up there at the Arab watchtower—then its ultimate purpose might still be achieved, unless he could get away from here fast. The sun was a magnet, sucking liquid from every pore, draining him of vitality.

“Mahmud!” he called.

His cry startled the buzzard on the watchtower and it took off reluctantly, on enormous flapping wings that made a series of sharp reports in the hot, smoky atmosphere before it vanished over the edge of the cliff. Durell stood up and looked for the driver of the military jeep.

“Mahmud!” he called again.

He saw the jeep at the foot of the watchtower, about fifty yards from where he had awakened. Durell took off his coat, slung it over his shoulder, and plodded across the sand toward it. Then he paused and turned around and went back across the beach to where he had been first, and looked for his gun.

He could not find it.

He had been wearing a dark blue suit and white cotton shirt and a dark blue knitted necktie when he boarded the Pam Am plane in Istanbul, with orders to see Donegan in Karachi and make immediate contact with Miss Sarah Standish. The suit coat had a special pocket tailored in it for the snubby-barreled .38 revolver he preferred to the trick items issued by the lab boys at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington, hub of the K Section network of the CIA that spread out all over the world.

He looked for the gun in the sand, smoothing the grains with the soles of his shoes. It was not there. He dropped to his knees, worried now, even a little afraid, because Mahmud Ali had had a U.S. Colt’s .45 in a web belt and a machine-pistol in the jeep, and the last thing he remembered was that Mahmud Ali had told him he was going to kill him.

The gun was gone.

He straightened, regretting having called the other’s name. The beach was lonely, empty. The surf crashed and thundered, the seagulls mewed, the kites soared patiently overhead. The buzzard, however, was gone.

The jeep lay on its back, fat wheels uppermost, like a beetle turned over and helpless with its legs in the air. The front end was badly crumpled where it had struck after its fall from the road on top of the cliff, where the first eroded walls of the ancient watchtower lifted into the yellow sky. Durell walked carefully to the jeep. The exertion made sweat pour out of him, and he loosened his necktie and then felt for his wallet which contained five thousand dollars from Henry Kallinger, the K Section man in Istanbul, for which he had signed an expense chit, and his ID cards. He was not traveling under a cover identity this time.

He still had his wallet. He wished he still had the gun.

Then he found the machine-pistol, a World War II Schmeiser of German manufacture, sticking half out from under the body of the tan jeep. The sun had touched it and it was scalding hot, but he picked it up and felt better with it in his hand.

There was still no sign of the man who had brought him out here to kill him.

It was not an auspicious beginning, he thought. He had been told in Istanbul that his first contact for this trip into the north to Pakhusti province would be Sarah Standish. Donegan, in Karachi, would brief him further. He had not expected treachery so soon.

His watch was still running and he saw it was only six o’clock in the morning, and already on the beach the temperature was well over 100 degrees and it would get steadily hotter. He had not been knocked out for very long by the fall over the cliff. An hour, at the most. Enough for the sun to rise and the buzzard to find him.

He stripped off his clothes, aware of the bitter solitude of the wasteland around him. The tanker on the sea had gone over the horizon. The Arab dhow had inched farther away, southward. He walked across the hot sand and went into the lukewarm surf and bathed clotted blood away from a long scratch across his ribs and another gash on his left leg, obtained when he went over the windshield of the jeep and fell free down the cliff. The combers pushed and hauled at him, and he did not stay in the water long. By the time he walked back to the thin line of shadow under the watchtower, the wetness had dried off his tanned skin.

Durell was a tall man, well over six feet, with black hair tinged gray at the temples. He was solidly built, with a heavy musculature, but he moved and walked with a light and easy manner, in good co-ordination, like a man in a jungle wary of snakes and pitfalls. He often thought of his world and his business as a jungle. He had strong hands, with delicate and agile fingers, equally adept at manipulating cards or in use as devastating and lethal weapons.

He wondered if he had killed Mahmud Ali with that surprise karate blow. He hoped not. He had some questions to ask.

Durell scanned the beach with somber, dark blue eyes that seemed an angry, killing black in the sunlight. He had a way of holding his head as if he were listening for something more than the crying of the birds and the thunder of the surf. In Durell’s business, which was the cold war of defense, silently fought in every alley of every city in the world, you never entered a room carelessly, you never toned a corner without considering what might lie behind it, you never took friend or foe for granted. He had known many good men whose moments of carelessness proved a rendezvous with eternity. His own safety factor, he reflected, had long run out. But he was a gambler, trained in calculated risks by his old grandfather Jonathan, down in Bayou Peche Rouche in the Louisiana delta country. The old Cajun had been the last of the riverboat breed, shrewd in the ways of men and cards. He had taught Durell well, as a boy, and the man today remembered the lessons.

But he had been almost fatally careless an hour ago. Even though there had been no cause for suspicion, it was his job to be suspicious.

And at this moment, the silence itself was suspicious. The kites and the buzzard had gone away from the watchtower.

The tower loomed in silhouette against the ochre sky and the scorching sun of the Sind. Its rounded, ancient base was crumbling. The structure was long-abandoned, once a guide for the dhows, those Arab boats whose design had not changed in a thousand years, whose trade in gold, spices and slaves took their brown sails to every corner of the glittering Arabian and Indian Seas. A series of steps cut into the stone tower circled to the battered pinnacle. Nothing moved up there. The searing sun was behind the tower, turning it black against the white glare, defying detail.

Durell moved away from the wrecked jeep. The Schmeiser pistol in his grip was almost too hot to handle, from having lain in the sun. The surf thundered heavily behind him.

The shot came abruptly, a hard flat sound against the brazen sky. The report was familiar. It came from his own gun.

The bullet kicked up a little spurt of sand five yards from Durell’s left foot. A bad shot.

But Mahmud Ali, or the man who had taken Ali’s place in Colonel K’Ayub’s jeep, was still alive up there.

Durell ran to the shadows at the base of the clay cliff, the air like iron in his lungs, and then halted. There was no second shot. A seagull skimmed low over the surf behind him. The dhow was out of sight. The tower loomed overhead.

He began to climb the cliff with care, keeping to the darkest shadow. His legs trembled, and the gash on his left thigh began to bleed again, and his left arm ached when the bone was bruised by his fall. He was halfway up when a small stone came clicking and tumbling down the slope of sand and shale. Nothing followed. He waited for several long breaths, sweating, and then climbed up to the foot of the circular steps cut into the base of the old stone tower.

“Mahmud!” he called.

His voice echoed, was swallowed up by the sun.

He considered the stone stairway cut into the round tower Part of the time that he ascended, he would be exposed to view from the top. Part of the time he would be safe.

You can’t have everything, he thought.

He hit the steps at a hard, fast run, taking them two then three at a time. His momentum swung him perilously outward to the edge. He glimpsed the brazen sea, the wasteland of inner desert called the Sind, the beach far below from this height. There were no rooms in the tower, only a platform sheltered behind the medieval, crenelated block of the topmost wall. Halfway up he stopped, flat against the hot stones. They seared through his shirt, burned into his shoulders. He pushed away again, made the last two dizzying circuits of the circular stairway in a final rush.

On the last few steps he saw dried streaks of blood where Mahmud Ali had dragged himself onto the platform. It was too late to stop. He had the Schmeiser ready when he stepped through the opening in the top wall and jumped down onto the platform.

He need not have been so wary.

The driver sprawled on his face, Durell’s gun on the stone floor a few inches from his hand, his head thrust partly through one of the fire openings in the watchtower wall. There was a lot of dried blood on the sandy floor.

Durell drew a deep breath and walked over to the man and turned him over. Mahmud Ali’s eyes were open. They were alive with hatred.

Durell looked down at him and felt in his sweat-soaked shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels. The helpless man glared up at him. Durell lit two cigarettes and handed one to Ali, who took it with no change of expression on his gray face.

“Obviously,” Durell said, “you missed.”

“I was too weak to aim properly,” Ali said in English.

“Are you badly hurt?”

“I am dying.”

“I think not,” Durell said. “Perhaps not yet.”

“You will kill me now?”

“Not yet,” Durell repeated. “First you will talk to me.”

The man took the cigarette from his gray lips and made a spitting sound, then began to vomit over himself, trying to turn his body to ease the spasms, but unable to move. Durell did not touch him. He saw that Mahmud Ali’s left arm was broken, and there was a splinter of broken rib sticking out of the man’s military khaki shirt. He picked up his gun from the sandy floor and pocketed it and kept a grip on the Schmeiser he had taken from the jeep. The air began to smell sour. After a moment or two, the man’s sickness passed.

“Does it hurt you to breath?” Durell asked quietly.

“It hurts to live.”

“Your chest is crushed?”

“I fell on a stone from the jeep.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“To kill you.”

“Why?”

“To stop you.”

“Why?”

“It was ordered.”

“By whom?”

The man glared at him and tried to sit up and fainted. Durell waited. He felt the first touch of thirst, and knew that in this sunlight he could be dehydrated and dead before evening. From the top of the tower he had a fine view of the coast. Karachi was to the south, but he could not see it over the blazing desert dunes. The Sind had been a wasteland for thousands of years, a death trap for ancient invading and defending armies that clashed on the flanks of the sub-continent of India. Southward was the Indus River but the waters, pending irrigation projects that never seemed to be completed, had not reached here and perhaps neve: would. Hawk’s bay, the former English beach suburb of Karachi, was at least ten or fifteen miles down the coast to judge from the distance he had innocently ridden in the jeep with the unconscious man. He remembered they had followed a road and had seen the lights of houses, after leaving the predawn quiet of Karachi’s modernized boulevards, and then there had been only this desert, a simple and primitive track that followed the sandstone and clay scarp above the beach.

Nobody was in sight, wherever he looked.

He would have to walk back.

If he could.

He squatted down beside Ali as the man’s eyelids fluttered Ali whispered, “You have water?”

“No.”

“Good. So we will both die.”

“What harm did I do to you, Mahmud?”

“You are here. You plan to go north. It is enough.” “What do you know of why I am here? I came as a friend.”

“No. As an enemy.” Mahmud Ali shook his head rolling the back of his skull with a grisly sound on the hard stone floor. A shadow of wings silently crossed the top of the tower. The buzzard had returned. “I know nothing more. I was to kill you. I obey orders.”

“Whose orders?”

The man was silent.

“Donegan’s? Colonel K’Ayub?”

Ali made a spitting, negative sound of hatred.

“You are not one of the colonel’s mountain patrol?”

“I come from the mountains. This place is a hell, curse by Allah. I despise it. But I was sent here and I did what was told to do.”

Durell switched suddenly to Pakhusti dialect. “You come from Mirandhabad, don’t you?”

“It is my home, yes—” The man cursed. “You speak my tongue. You tricked me. But we will both die. My job is done.”

“I think not,” Durell said. “We’re going to walk back. “I cannot walk.”

“You will walk with me,” Durell said.

chapter two

IN ISTANBUL, the CIA man at the drop was Henry Kallinger, a lean and stoop-shouldered man with the face and eyes of an accountant. Kallinger had taken to a bushy Turkish military moustache, and his eyes were heavy-lidded, drooping and apparently sleepy, so that you saw only a kind of darkness under the bushy brows, with nothing but a sense of tiredness, of patient exhaustion in his face, like that of an overworked draft animal.

In the small room overlooking the Bosphorus, where you could see the little ferries plying back and forth between Europe and Asia, above the warehouse sheds redolent with the scent of Turkish tobacco—Kallinger’s cover was that of an exporter of tobacco to all parts of the world, and he had lived in Istanbul for twenty-two years—Durell had listened to the man’s slow, even apologies.

“I’m sorry, Cajun. I know you’re due back in the States. But we need you. This one has what our happy bureaucrats call top priority. And what hasn’t? Everything is classified, everything grows out of a crisis, like mushrooms in a bed of horse manure. They don’t stop erupting.”

“You asked me if I remember any Pakhusti dialect and Urdu,” Durell said. “Is that where I’m going?”

“How many languages do you really speak, Sam?” “Eleven,” Durell said. “And as many more dialects. You know all these things. You have my dossier. Everybody has it.”

“Yes. But I’ll bet ours isn’t as complete as the one at No. 2 Dzherzinsky Square, in Moscow.”

“Let’s hope there are a few pages missing in the MVD files,” Durell said quietly. “Why Pakhusti province? It’s up in the high Himalayas, without much frontier to separate it from Pakistan, Afghanistan and—last, but not least—Sinkiang Province of China.”

Kallinger sighed. “Exactly. Precisely. Where else?”

“There’s always trouble in that area. The Pakistan government usually handles it.”

“There’s also nickel up there,” Kallinger said.

“Nickel?”

“Apparently quite a lot. Enough to make up for what we’ve lost in Cuba. A very strategic metal, Sam. It goes into all kind of engines and machinery, all kinds of rocket components. Little by little, if we continue to lose the world’s resources, we lose the Cold War. Strategic Materiels people are in a flap. It’s part of the over-all strategic concepts, to borrow another one of the Pentagon’s damned phrases. More mushrooms, to me.”

“I’m not a geologist,” Durell said.

“Can you climb mountains?”

“I’ve done it.”

“That’s all we need you for. The nickel ore was found and lost again. The original geologist’s survey was stolen, lost or destroyed—or sold to the Chinese, who know about it—God knows how. They’ll be pushing patrols over the hills from Sinkiang to grab it by military force, if they get there first. Standish Nickel, Incorporated, with the blessings of our State Department, has already concluded a contract with the Pakistan government to exploit the nickel ore—if it can be found again. And it’s got to be found, Cajun. You’ve got to find it.”

“Pakistan doesn’t exercise much control over the Pak-hustis,” Durell said. “And the Pathans are in the way, besides the Chinese just over the hill, as you suggest.”

“You’ll have a military escort all the way with the expedition.”

“What expedition?”

“To S-5, naturally. That’s where the nickel is supposed to be. S-5 happens to be a mountain that’s also called Alexander’s Crown. Ever hear of it?”

“No,” Durell said.

“Read this, then,” Kallinger said.

He pushed two newspaper clippings across the small table to Durell. Durell read them in the light that cams through the window from over the Bosphorus.

The first was from Al Ahram, an English-language Pakistan newspaper of reasonably good repute:

—Rawalpindi, June 7. It has been reported that three survivors of the ill-fated Austrian mountain-climbing expedition to explore and scale Alexander’s Crown, the frontier peak labeled as S-5 in Pakhusti State, are on their way back to this city. Three male members of the group are known to be dead, either through accident or difficulties with local dissident tribesmen. The survivors, two men and a woman, are expected in Rawalpindi in a matter of days.

The second clipping was from the New York Times, dated two weeks later:

—Karachi, June 22—Two survivors of the von Buhlen expedition to the mountainous State of Pakhusti arrived here today and made immediate preparations for a new assault on S-5. Interviewed here today, Alessa von Buhlen merely stated that there had been no success in her attempt to verify the fabled story of Xenos’ march to recover the crown of Alexander the Great.

Hans Steicher, the well known Alpine guide who led the expedition, as well as two other missions of British and Italian origin in the past years, had no comment on the disastrous failure of the romantic attempt.

The adventurers’ assault on S-5 was based on an obscure legend long known to military historians of Alexander the Great’s Asian conquests. Professor Damon D. Johnstone of Columbia University, a specialist in Hellenic antiquities of Alexander’s time, denied any possible truth to the tale of Xenos’ march with a thousand men to retrieve a crown yielded to the Macedonian conqueror by a king of the Indus over two thousand years ago. Fragments of Buddhist writings and fables that survive the Mogul conquests in later centuries contain obscure allusions to the massacre of the thousand foot soldiers of Alexander’s army, but these are generally discounted as local folklore, Professor Johnstone said.

The two survivors, who will be joined by selected others, remain in Karachi for a new expedition to be immediately reorganized for a second attempt at S-5, according to Dr. Alessa von Buhlen.

Kallinger yawned and brushed his shaggy Turkish moustache as Durell returned the two clippings. “The first of these came by courier from Rawalpindi yesterday. The New York Times item was in a batch of stuff from Washington this morning. I put it all together for you, Sam.”

“I notice there’s nothing in these clippings about nickel,” Durell commented.

“Naturally. What really happened was that this climbing expedition after alleged ancient treasure ran into hard luck all the way. Bad weather, defecting porters, alienated tribesmen—even some Chinese military patrols sticking their noses over the Sinkiang border. The frontier at that point is rather vague, you know. Even so, they all came down off S-5 alive, according the Pakistan military report. There was trouble with the Pakhustis under their Emir at Mirandhabad for some time—the Emir has been pushing for autonomy, backed by the Pathans, Afghanistan, and the Chinese. But the climbers were all definitely alive—when they came down off S-5—five men and the girl, Alessa von Buhlen. Her doctorate is in ancient history, by the way. It was afterward that things began to happen. Disappearances. And murder. Only Hans Steicher and Alessa—who happens to be built on the order of the Valkyries, by the way, no matter what her university degrees—pity I don’t have a snapshot for you, Sam—and Bergmann, a geologist, made it back to Rawalpindi.”

“Then Bergmann disappeared,” Durell said. “The Times says there were only two survivors—Alessa and Hans Steicher.”

Kallinger nodded. Out on the Bosphorus, a tug hooted. It was growing dusky in the tobacco agent’s office. Lights gleamed like iridescent jewels on the European side of the straits.

“The Pakistan security police report two attacks since, one on Alessa, another on Hans. A knife thrown at Alessa, and a mugging job on Steicher. No permanent damage. Obviously, someone wants to silence everybody who hunted abominable snowmen, nickel and jewels on S-5, eh?”

“You think it’s because of the nickel ore?” Durell asked.

“Bergmann made a report, and a map, and both disappeared with him. You’ll have to find out. We’re reasonably sure the alleged treasure wasn’t found, and even if it were, we aren’t interested. But Bergmann was excited about the nickel strike, and talked about it before he vanished. Washington wants to know what was really found up there. Somebody is trying to stop these people from going back—maybe the Emir at Mirandhabad, maybe the Chinese, maybe your friends at No. 2 Dzherzinsky Square. The second expedition fitting out now has the immediate blessings of American and Pakistan interests. And there’s more.”

Kallinger took an envelope from his desk and handed it to Durell. It contained five thousand dollars.

Durell smiled. “You’ve counted it?”

“Every penny. I’m a businessman. It should cover expenses.”

“Who’s covering the cost of the new expedition? They take a little more to finance than a ride on the Staten Island ferry.”

“Sarah Standish. The Standish. She’s going along. You’re going, too, as Sarah’s bodyguard. We’d hate to have anything happen to her.” Kallinger’s dark, sunken eyes might or might not have been amused. “The richest, nickel-plated member of Park Avenue society. The world’s best-known business woman. Head of Standish Nickel, unromantic, hornrimmed glasses, and the despair of every couturier in Paris, Rome and Houston. She’s in love, Sam.”

He waited.

Kallinger seemed disappointed. “She’s in love with Alessa von Buhlen’s brother, Rudi. I have a thumbnail dossier on him for you. He’s in Karachi now, with Miss Standish. Hans Steicher is in ’Pindi. Rudi and Sarah may be enjoying a pre-marital honeymoon. I wouldn’t know. Maybe morals change when you get up to eight hundred millions, give or take a few score. Although I must say, Sarah Standish has never had a breath of scandal touch her, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, she’s financing the new expedition and going along. Do you want to read Rudi von Buhlen’s dossier?”

“Tell me,” Durell suggested.

“You look annoyed, Cajun.”

“I don’t look forward to being a bodyguard and a nursemaid.”

“It’s all in the day’s work, Sam.”

“Not my kind of work,” Durell said.

“Think of all that money!” Kallinger protested.

“You think of it, Harry. It may be big in your businessman’s mind, but not to me.”

“She’s in danger. Look what happened to the original expedition. We can’t take chances; we can’t let anything happen to her.”

“If she’s worried, let her hire an army. She can afford it.” Durell paused. “She can do whatever she likes.”

“But she isn’t worried, Cajun, that’s the trouble. Our State Department people had a hell of a time with her. She insists she’s only interested in the historical and archeological aspects of what’s on S-5. Nickel in itself doesn’t interest her. That’s for the employees, she says. As for danger, she feels that Rudi is company and protection enough for her.”

Durell’s mouth tightened. “Tell me about Rudi.” Kallinger laughed dourly. “Rudi looks more English than Austrian—wears his hair long, English style, over his ears. Pretty good mountain-climber, too—in the Alps. Full name is Rudolf Wolfgang Freihausen von Buhlen. Age 31, bom Vienna, father a British legation colonel, now deceased, mother a baroness of the Hapsburg nobility, living on pensions and nostalgic dreams of Emperor Franz Josef’s time. Rudi was educated at the Hausfulden Gymnasium, then the Sorbonne, and took a graduate degree at Oxford. He lives extravagantly. No political identifications, but an uncle was connected with the Rote Kapelle—the “Red Orchestra” affair in 1942, a German Communist espionage network run by old and prominent German families. It took guts, under Hitler. The Rote Kapelle people were uncovered by the Abwehr and most of them were executed, charged with high treason, along with a grandson of Admiral von Tirpitz. They were hung from meat hooks borrowed from a Berlin abattoir. Hitler enjoyed the view. Anyway, so much for the uncle. Rudi professes no politics. Interested Cajun?”

“Go on.”

“Rudi drives a Ferarri, races at Cannes, climbs the Alps. Married an English heiress, Elizabeth Dunning-Broome, in ’55, divorced in Mexico City in ’59. No financial settlement. Gambles a lot, plays in Riviera society, arrested twice on vice charges, both times dismissed, and is reputed to have slept with a hell of a lot of women. He met our Nickel Queen in Switzerland last winter at a skiing party. Sarah Standish finally fell. She’s in love, as I said.”

“I doubt that,” Durell said. “I’ve met her.”

Kallinger nodded. “I know you have. That’s why the long arm of K Section plucked you out of your cozy villa down the coast and interrupted your vacation—and your love-life with that Italian brunette, of which I know officially nothing, mind you—and is ordering you to Karachi to look after Sarah.”

Durell said one word, briefly.

“I gather from that,” Kallinger said, “that you don’t like the job with Sarah. Have you counted that five thousand dollars, Sam?”

“I don’t have to, if you did.”

“Then sign this receipt.”

Durell signed. “What about Alessa von Buhlen—the Valkyrie with a doctorate?”

Kallinger looked embarrassed. “I blew all my conceit in quoting Rudi’s dossier, Sam. We don’t have as much. Beautiful and brainy. Her Ph.D in history came from the Sorbonne—Greek history, naturally. They say the tumble-down family schloss—their old castle outside of Vienna—is a museum of antique pieces. An athletic type, too—she skis and climbs mountains. No romantic attachments we know of. Does all this give you ideas, Cajun?”

“Some,” Durell said.

“Have fun, then.”

On his way to the airport later, Durell reflected on what he knew of Sarah Standish. He had met her at two Washington cocktail parties and once had been invited, with Deirdre Padgett, to the Standish summer estate at Southampton, on Long Island. Deirdre went to finishing school with Sarah, and they were reasonably good friends—or as friendly as you can be with eight hundred million dollars.

Durell’s impressions of Southampton were not the best. Maybe it was the aura of all that money which, whoever the individual owning it, lends an air that sets you apart from normalcy. Vast wealth has its corollary in isolation— splendid, perhaps, but inevitably disturbing. It lent an arrogance and indifference to the normal problems and ethics of ordinary men.

Sarah Standish was not popular in the gossip columns; she did not belong to the celebrity set, like other fashionable heiresses. She was quiet, repressed, not beautiful, given to tweedy suits and painfully simple hair styles. Her escorts were always discreet and anonymous. Until her engagement to Rudi von Buhlen in Switzerland last year, no hint of romance had ever touched her austere personality. Until then, the private life of the Nickel Queen was an enigma, jealously guarded against sensationalism.

During the Southampton weekend, Durell had seen very little of his hostess. But what he saw, he remembered.

She rarely smiled. She had a rather wide mouth, only faintly touched with lipstick, a broad and intelligent forehead, wide and solemn gray eyes, pale and smoky. Her manner was earnest, whether playing tennis or sitting at the head of her dinner table. A tall girl, she affected only the simplest of jewelry; her quiet voice gave the impression that she was thinking of things other than her immediate words. She took a personal interest in the complex corporate structures of Standish Nickel. Part of her weekend had been taken up by lengthy conferences with executive types who came up to the rambling estate, closeted themselves with her in her office, and drove away again without mingling with the other guests.

Durell remembered Deirdre Padgett’s comment about Sarah’s engagement.

“I’m worried about it,” Deirdre said. “From what I know about Rudi, he’s the type who can break Sarah’s heart.”

“You can’t do anything about it,” Durell told her. “A girl like Sarah Standish is going to do whatever she pleases.”

“I know. And that’s the trouble. She’s really shy, intensely lonely, and quite starved for affection, I think.”

“Under that grim exterior?”

“I may be wrong. I’ve really lost touch with her, after all these years. But she’s reaching for love, and she may be hurt. Not all the Standish money can help her in that.” Durell had had other matters on his mind then. He never expected to cross Sarah’s path again. And now he was assigned to play bodyguard to her arbitrary and neurotic personality.

He did not look forward to it.

He left Istanbul an hour after his conversation with Henry Kallinger, catching the Pan American Orient jet that set him down in Karachi just before dawn.

chapter three

PATIENCE was something you learned, absorbed, and had pounded into you by its exercise and the grim examples of those who had failed to practice it. Patience could mean long days of solitude in a dismal, ill-smelling room, watching a doorway across the street—-or simply doing nothing, until the other side made a move, goaded by your inactivity. Or it could mean facing frustration with new resolve and new tactics. Or enduring the monotony of a routine that involved the hurry-up-and-wait tempo of war.

Patience in this case, Durell thought, consisted of steadily, grimly, unendingly putting your left foot ahead in the soft, yielding sand, throwing your weight forward on hip and knee, and using the momentum thus gained to get your right foot up there for just one more step ahead. And then another. And another. Again and again.

Patience meant to keep walking. To stay alive.

There came a time when he had to stop. And this, too, was a part of his patience.

The sun and the heat were incredible. Plodding between the brazen sand and the shining sea, he seemed to be motionless, making no progress, like a bug in the bottom of a deep, slippery bowl where all the unbelievable radiance of the sky, desert and ocean poured in and concentrated in one vast flame to destroy him.

The buzzards and the kites circled steadily overhead now, dark and silent shadows in the brilliance of the morning sky.

The ancient Arab watchtower was out of sight behind him. Ahead, there was nothing different. He saw another dhow far out on the Gulf. There was no wind. He was grateful for this, because the wind would have cut at him like a hot, melting knife. Inland, to his left, there was nothing but sand, rock and scorpions, a series of natural terraces devoid of any scrap of green, rising to a shimmering and unnatural horizon.

“For the love of Allah!” Mahmud Ali gasped.

The man fell to his knees in the shadow of a bronze-colored boulder.

“Leave me here,” he whispered. “Or kill me now.” Durell stood on his feet. “Get up and walk with me.”

“I cannot.”

“You must!”

“I want to die.”

“So you shall,” Durell said. “Very slowly, and with much more pain than you now suffer.”

The man’s face was skeletal. He coughed a little sputum, and there was some blood in it. His broken arm dangled uselessly at his side as he swayed on his knees. Durell looked down at him without expression. His mouth was as dry as the sand; his body ached and flamed. He had tom part of his white shirt as a bandage to stop the superficial bleeding of his left leg, and so far he had been able to go on, determined to live. He held the Schmeiser lowered, in his hand at his right side.

The assassin had told him little, until now. When he had stopped the jeep in the dawn at the base of the watchtower, two hours ago, he had been following simple orders to kill Durell. Durell had acted first, but in the struggle, Mahmud Ali fell from the jeep, the car went over the cliff to the beach below, and Durell fell free with it. Mahmud Ali had managed to crawl to the top of the tower to look for him. He had not been able to find strength to fire at him until at last he squeezed off the single shot that had warned Durell. Now they were both abandoned, dying, lost. Durell would not admit this.

“Am I the only one who was signed for death?” he asked.

“No,” Mahmud whispered.

“Who are the others?”

“The rich one. The rich American lady.”

“Sarah Standish?”

“That is her name.”

“And who else?”

“All the others who would climb the mountain.”

“Why?”

“I am a simple man. A soldier. I never ask why. It is not for me, such a question. To ask it is to ask for the sword at my throat.”

“Suppose you were to ask, anyway?” Durell insisted. “Who would you ask such a question?”

The man said nothing.

“You are dying,” Durell told him. “Will you speak of murder to Allah?”

“If He asks,” Mahmud whispered.

“Get up. You will speak of it to the officials in Karachi.”

“I cannot get up.”

Durell paused. He did not know how much farther he had to walk through this inferno to find someone who might help. Perhaps all day. Or forever. He did not know if anyone even knew he was missing. Kallinger, in Istanbul, had told him to work with Colonel K’Ayub, a Pakistan security officer who would command the escort patrol with the expedition. Was K’Ayub even aware that he had landed in Karachi early this morning and had been swallowed up in the sands of the Sind? Did K’Ayub even miss his jeep, his military driver who was supposed to meet Durell at the airport?

There might—or might not—be a search for him.

Help might—or might not—come.

It was a matter of time, a balance between thirst and heat and exhaustion.

He wondered about the others—Alessa von Buhlen, Rudi, Sarah Standish. Perhaps he was too late for everything. Perhaps they had all been killed by now, by other hired assassins, and his effort was in vain.

He looked down at Mahmud Ali.

“Get up,” he said, once more.

And he saw that Ali was dead.

He could do nothing for the dead man. He could not spare the strength to bury him or pile stones on him against the circling buzzards. He turned away and went on walking, moving south along the shore, and he did not look back when the silent wings of the birds came swooping down behind him on the currents over the surf and slanted in to the boulder where the dead man grinned at the bright sky.

He walked for an hour, rested ten minutes, walked on again. The land did not change. The sea was the same. The sky melted, pouring down heat on him. He was hungry and thirsty, but he did not let himself think about it.

Toward noon he saw a man on a camel that plodded along the beach. The man was bundled in white rags, with a dirty turban around his head, and the camel looked old and shaggy, with big patches of hair gone from his hide.

Durell called out to the man and was astonished at the harsh, dry sound of his voice. The man stopped the camel and looked at him and swung about on the saddle, and from the other side of his body he produced an old rifle and pointed it at him.

The man looked like his camel, old and ugly and morose, with speculation in his eyes as Durell walked as straight as he could across the sand toward him. Durell spoke in Urdu.

“You have water?” he asked.

“For myself,” the man said.

“I must get to Hawk’s Bay. You are going there?”

“If Allah wills.”

“I will pay you to take me on your camel and bring me there.”

“You have much money?”

“I have enough.”

The man’s rifle was of Pathan make, hand manufactured like a jewel in the far northern hills, polished and gleaming, the only clean and efficient thing about him. “You are alone?”

“I have a friend,” Durell said.

“I see no friend.”

“He is here, in my hand,” Durell said, and showed the man the Schmeiser machine-pistol.

It was a mistake, perhaps, but he could not keep staring into the muzzle of the other man’s rifle forever. The Arab looked at the machine-pistol for a moment and then shrugged and shifted his skinny weight on the camel saddle and then, with no other warning, urged the camel into an ungainly, galloping run away from him. Durell could have brought him down with a single shot, but he did not try. He couldn’t have caught the camel, anyway. He watched the two of them, old man and old camel, until they were gone from sight down the beach, and then he walked on again.

He stopped to bathe twice in the warm surf during the next two hours. The second time, as he staggered out of the combers to retrieve his clothes, he heard the grinding of an engine and saw a yellow Land Rover with a fringed-surrey top and oversized beach tires come across the searing sand, directly toward him. He picked up the Schmeiser first and then saw that the driver was an Englishman, with a European girl in a white linen dress beside him, next to the driver’s seat. Durell dressed quickly, before the salt water dried on him. The girl looked away. The Englishman jumped down from the gaudy Land Rover and walked toward him.

“I say, it isn’t really true what they say about us—noonday sun and mad dogs and all that—”

“Can you take me to Hawk’s Bay?” Durell asked.

“Of course. It’s only five miles down the way.”

Five miles or five eternities, Durell thought. He smiled his thanks. “I’d be very grateful.”

“We were looking for my sailboat,” the Englishman said. His eyes were bloodshot. “Sixteen feet, home-built, painted red, Marconi rig. New nylon sails from the States. She broke away from her mooring in the wind two nights ago. We went south yesterday, and were starting up here today. Perhaps it was stolen. It’s tiresome to have to nail everything down.” The Englishman was trying hard not to be curious, but it seemed to Durell that you could carry a national trait too far. He wondered if the girl was his wife. “Your car break down, old man?”

“In a way,” Durell said. “Do you know Colonel K’Ayub?” “Naturally. Charming fellow. Throws wonderful cocktail parties. Liz adores him.” Now he seemed garrulous, for an Englishman. “What are you doing with the gun? Popping at buzzards?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “Could you take me to Colonel K’Ayub?”

“Well, my sailboat, old man, cost me a pretty penny. Lovely little thing—”

“There isn’t any boat back there on the beach.”

“I see. Well. You’ve got a bad burn, my dear chap. This sun can be treacherous—”

“I’m in a hurry,” Durell said. “I’d be grateful.”

“All Americans are in a hurry.” The Englishman sighed. “Hop in, please.”

The pale, thin girl did not say a word on the drive south to Hawk’s Bay. But the gay, striped canvas top on the Land Rover made a cheerful flapping sand, and cast a small triangle of shade over Durell.

There were pale pink stucco houses, blue villas with red tiled roofs, a few date palms in carefully watered lawns and gardens that had turned brown in the salt air and the sun. The Englishman turned off the beach onto a bumpy asphalt road and paid a toll of one rupee at the entrance booth to the European beach colony, then followed a lane used by Arab peddlers, camels, a troupe of acrobats in colorful rags performing for some solemn English children. A man in a blue turban thrust a baby monkey at the Englishman’s wife and offered it for sale, cheap. The pale-faced girl said nothing, as if the monkey and the man did not exist.

The road between the modest houses was lined with tamarisk and wind-carved babul trees. White-necked crows crowded the branches and sat in long, silent echelons upon the sagging telephone wires. Servants in baggy white trousers called shalwars appeared here and there in the back yards. On the flat, sloping beach, blinded by the glare of the sun, a few more children played. Fishing boats out of Karachi floated on the brilliant sea. The surf looked heavy and sullen. Farther out, a few freighters plodded from the mouth of the Indus for the broader reaches of the Arabian Sea. “Here we are,” the Englishman said.

He called cheerfully to the smart, khaki-clad young Pakistan soldier on guard at the villa’s iron gate. “Ali, is Colonel K’Ayub about?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Every second Moslem here is called Ali,” the Englishman said, as if the soldier could not understand him. “These Shiites consider Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth Caliph to succeed Mohammed, as their most important Imam, or leader.”

Durell got out of the Land Rover. “Thanks for the lift.” “Any time,” the Englishman said. “Good luck, old man.” Durell looked at the pale wife, but she was still silent and unsmiling. He went in through the gate, nodding as the soldier saluted, and walked up the steps into the house.

Durell had to call upon another kind of patience to sustain him. Eight hours had gone by since his plane had touched down at the Karachi airport. He had been expected immediately at this big, cool, expensive house, and had not shown up, nor had the jeep which was sent for him returned, with or without the driver. Yet there was an atmosphere of easy complacence that made him bite down on his anger and ignore his own exhaustion.

The rooms were big, cool, air-conditioned. He felt his energy returning. Another uniformed soldier told him to wait in a European styled living room that seemed to be partly an office, and when Durell asked for water, a servant in white muslin promptly appeared with a thermos jug and a bowl of fruit. He drank sparingly while he waited, ate some figs, enjoyed the cool dry air blowing out of the air-conditioner grill.

He waited five minutes, hearing voices dimly from somewhere else in the big house. No one had asked his identity or questioned the gun he carried. He waited another five minutes and then walked down a white tiled corridor and out through a sunny, Moorish doorway with ivory screening into a cool, shaded garden surrounded by a high cinder-block wall painted a pale gray.

A man looked up at him from the table there.

“Ah, Mr. Durell. I am sorry, I was finishing a report, you must truly forgive me—”

“Colonel K’Ayub?”

“Yes. We have been waiting for you. I recognize you from your description. What detained you?”

“My plane landed eight hours ago,” Durell said.

“It did? We thought perhaps you had missed it.”

“You didn’t think to check the passenger list? Or wonder what happened to the driver you sent for me?”

“We supposed he went to visit his family on Drigh Road, when you didn’t show up. He often does. He has my permission. Please be seated, Mr. Durell.”

Durell remained on his feet. He did not like what he saw of Lathri K’Ayub. He had a soft face and a soft body and the pale yellow eyes of a lynx. It was Durell’s business to be suspicious, and he had reason to be; and he recalled that Henry Kallinger, in Istanbul, had not committed himself on the colonel’s reliability. K’Ayub had been eating mangoes from a brass plate, and he dabbed delicately at a bead of the juice that clung to his upper lip. There was a telephone on the delicately carved table where he sat.

Lathri K’Ayub was part of a powerful political family in Pakistan, said to be ambitious for national expansion. Lathri had been educated at UCLA in California, had been an attache for a UN military mission in the Congo, and was part of a group that bloodily resisted all compromise with the Pathan’s struggle for independence. But his military rank had been earned the hard way—he had been in command of border patrol expeditions in the high Himalayas twice, and was said to be hard, tough and ruthless.

Perhaps his soft face and soft body were deceiving.

He said now, delicately, “You have had a difficult time, Mr. Durell? You have been out in the sun?”

“I took a walk,” Durell said. He sat down and briefly recounted what had happened. Nothing changed in the other man’s lynx eyes. Halfway through Durell’s brief speech,

Lathri K’Ayub held up a hand and used the telephone and spoke in rapid Urdu, ordering a search for the jeep driver’s body. Durell finished quietly. “I am quite anxious about Miss Standish’s safety. Do you know where she is?” “Of course. I am so sorry about all this. I do not know how to apologize.”

“Will you take me to Miss Standish, please?”

“It is not necessary, Mr. Durell. She is my guest, here in this house.”

He sent a hovering servant inside to find Sarah. Durell felt deflated. He had fought his way here along the beach with a sense of desperate urgency, a feeling of impending disaster that his mission was defeated even before he had begun. The quiet and peace of Lathri K’Ayub’s house was disarming.

“And the von Buhlens?” he asked. “Rudi and Alessa?” “Quite safe. I spoke to them less than an hour ago. They plan to go ahead to Rawalpindi to make sure the new expedition’s supplies and porters are properly organized for the day of departure, day after tomorrow.”

“And there is one more man—the guide, Hans Steicher. No attempt was made on any of their lives? No threats received, no danger?”

“None, Mr. Durell.”

“I find it difficult to believe.”

Lathri K’Ayub seemed amused. Or something like amusement glittered in his tawny eyes. “We have made a bad beginning, you and I. Yet we must work together in the future, for some weeks, or a month or two, in guarding this expedition. My government is as interested in relocating this alleged nickel ore deposit on S-5 as yours—or Miss Standish’s personal financial empire. Yet we must be patient. We must trust each other, you and I.”

Durell said nothing.

“Oh perhaps you, too, believe in the legend or myth about a fabulously valuable crown that was stolen from Alexander the Great and lost on that mountain?”

“Do you believe in it?” Durell countered.

“My country is a land of many strangenesses. A place of the unexpected. Anything is possible. Our history reaches far beyond the Portuguese, beyond the Moguls who conquered in the 16th century, beyond even the Aryans who swept down from the northwest in 2000 B.C. to destroy the many older civilizations here in this valley of the Indus.

There are ruins everywhere, constantly examined by experts. Old books, like the Rig-Veda, turn up clues in their lines of poetry that suggest old invasions, the tides of conquering peoples, hymns that recall assaults on the cities of the Indus. Time is without limit here, Mr. Durell. Time is full and heavy and ripe with old, old stories. Man is nothing. His ruins and decay are under the sands of the Sind wherever you choose to dig.”

“You are an historian?” Durell asked.

“Let us say that I am aware of my personal insignificance, in the tapestries of history. I know that nothing is impossible.”

“Does the crown exist?”

“Miss Standish believes so.”

“Do you?”

Lathri smiled. “My mission, like yours, is very practical. I must verify the presence of nickel ore on S-5.”

The Pakistani stood up. He was as tall as Durell, who stood over six feet, but heavier with flesh, and slower and softer in movement. He smiled beyond Durell’s figure.

“Ah. Miss Standish. Please do join us.”

Durell turned and looked at the young woman who came out of the house and walked toward them through the shaded garden.

She was not Sarah Standish.

chapter four

SHE wore the same type of horn-rimmed glasses; but her eyes were pale blue, not gray. And her glance did not hold the cool objectivity and haughty remoteness that he remembered from past meetings. She looked frightened. She was a little shorter, perhaps a bit more fullbreasted, with a way of walking that not even Sarah’s tailored suit could hide. Her hair was the same, perhaps hastily tinted to match the rather pale sleek brown of Sarah’s, worn in the same severe fashion by having it pulled tightly back from a rounded brow into a prim, heavy knot at the nape of her neck. He thought, irrelevantly, that such a hairdo would surely be hot in Karachi’s climate. The impersonation was good enough to pass a casual inspection, a glance in a car, a glimpse from across the street, or identification from slipshod verbal description. But nothing could give this girl, posing as Sarah Standish, the innate quality of having been born into almost uncountable wealth, to power, to the rarefied atmosphere of lifelong social position and command.

She did her best to hide her fear, but it was there, in the slight moistening of her full lips with the tip of her tongue, in the fractional pause before she nodded to Lathri and came toward Durell with her hand outstretched.

“Mr. Durell. How nice to see you again.”

Her voice as not the same, either. It was richer, with more body and timbre; but that could be because she was afraid.

Nothing changed in Durell’s face.

“It’s nice that you remember me,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I? I’m known for remembering names and faces—like a politician, they say. Perhaps I am, in a sense. Who knows?” She smiled briefly at K’Ayub, then returned to Durell. The sunlight glinted on her austere glasses. “We have been expecting you for some hours.”

“I was delayed. I'm sure you know how difficult it is.” “You look as if—”

“—I had run into trouble?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for the trouble? Or how I look?”

She frowned slightly. “I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I,” he said. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter, I just wondered if you were aware of the small difficulty I had reaching you.”

“No. No, I—”

Her voice trailed off in puzzlement. He was aware of a slow apprehension growing out of his surprise at finding this impostor. Obviously, K’Ayub believed her to be the real Sarah Standish. But where was Sarah? He wondered what had happened to her, and then he wondered why this masquerade was arranged, and he wondered who had arranged it and coached this girl to look as much like the real Sarah Standish as she did.

She was an amateur, he thought, hoping to find his memory faulty. There was danger in this, as there always was in Durell’s business, and there was no room in it for amateurs. They simply did not survive long. And although this girl knew enough to be afraid, she was doing her best to conceal it and carry out her act as best she could.

But he had to find out about the real Sarah. He could be in danger here himself, in K’Ayub’s house. More than he had supposed.

“May I speak to you alone, Miss Standish?”

“Well, I—” She looked at K’Ayub.

“It’s important,” Durell said.

The Pakistani bowed, spread pale hands. “Naturally. I must make arrangements for our transport to Karachi as soon as possible. If you will forgive me?”

With another bow, another smile, the cat-eyed man was gone.

The girl drew a small breath between her teeth and walked to the table that held the telephone and helped herself to a cigarette from an ivory box. Durell reached beyond her for an enameled, jeweled lighter and held the flame for her. She blew out the smoke nervously and cocked her head as the cry of a peddler came dimly over the garden wall.

“Sarah didn’t smoke,” he said quietly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sarah Standish didn’t smoke. Sarah has gray eyes, not blue. She’s at least two inches taller, and her hair isn’t tinted. Her glasses are fake, with no prescription lenses, worn because she feels they defend her, somehow. Perhaps she think’s they give her more of an air of business competence.” Durell’s voice was flat and harsh in the hot, still air of the garden. The girl had shrunk a step or two away from him. “I don't know. I only know that you’re not Sarah Standish. Where is she?”

“I—”

“And who are you?”

“Oh, please—”

“Is she safe?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Alive?”

“Of course, I—”

“Where?”

“In Karachi. With the von Buhlens.”

“Then why are you here, as Sarah Standish?”

“We arrived just yesterday. We thought it best—”

Her voice trailed off again. He did not want to give her a chance to recover. It might have been useful and interesting to have waited a little, to learn her game without smashing down her defenses, to see what her ultimate objective might be. But he could not wait. His job was to protect Sarah Standish. He had to know the truth at once.

He looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock. He had landed in Karachi nine hours ago, and thanks to the attempted to murder him—for which he had a number of unanswered questions—he had contacted no one except K’Ayub, as yet.

The girl had not replied to his last query. She turned away, biting her lip in a gesture that was most uncharacteristic of Sarah. A professional actress could have done much better. A professional in Durell’s business would have had no such difficulty.

Amateurs were always getting themselves killed. . . .

“Did you all know what plane I was landing in?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered. “All of us knew. I’m sorry, but— please keep your voice down. I suppose this whole thing is silly, but Colonel K’Ayub isn’t supposed to know yet. After all, if the whole group is in some kind of danger—”

“Where do you fit into it?”

“I’m Jane King,” she said.

“And?”

She smiled wanly. “I’m secretary to Miss Standish. I always have been—that is, for the last two years. It feels like always to me.”

“And who asked you to act out this masquerade?”

“Mr. Donegan, at the American Institute Building. He said we were all threatened, somehow, considering what had happened to the members of the first expedition to S-5, and that fanatics were everywhere. He said that Miss Standish was a sitting duck for a kidnap attempt and that she had to be protected at all costs.”

“So you volunteered to be a decoy?” Durell asked.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Knowing the danger?”

“I—I’m being well paid,” she said.

“Doesn’t your salary as Miss Standish’s secretary pay you enough? Do you deliberately have to stick your neck out to someone who might want to kidnap or even kill Miss Standish?”

“I’m not afraid,” she said thinly. “It was only for today and tomorrow, anyway—just until we all leave to pick up our equipment in Rawalpindi.”

“It doesn’t take long to die, sometimes,” Durell said. He did not know what to make of this girl. He was sure she was not telling him everything. She looked flustered and dismayed, because her attempt to fool him with Sarah’s identity had failed so quickly and miserably. But there was more to her discomfort than that. He looked at her steadily for a moment. She met his gaze, crushed out her cigarette, and recovered enough poise to smile wryly.

He said quietly, “Donegan suggested the masquerade for you?”

“Yes. After all, he’s an intelligence officer—”

“Who else? I mean, who else here knows who you really are?”

“Well, Rudi knows—I mean, Mr. von Buhlen.”

“How well do you know him, Jane?”

“We met in Switzerland last winter.”

“When he became engaged to Miss Standish, your employer?”

Jane King flushed. “Yes.”

“I hear that Rudi von Buhlen is charming to women.”

“Yes.”

“Did he charm you?”

Her chin came up defiantly. “You’re insulting, do you know that?” “I mean to be,” Durell said. “It’s one way to provoke answers. Anyway, Rudi knows you’re posing as Miss Standish, to draw any fire that might be aimed at her.”

“If you want to put it that way. Rudi first suggested it. And Mr. Donegan thought it was a good idea. But I guess I just wasn’t up to it with anyone who really knows Miss Sarah.”

“Who else knows of this extra job of yours? Miss Standish? Mr. Donegan? No one else?”

“No one.”

She sat down suddenly and began to shiver, although the heat in the walled garden was oppressive now. She clasped her hands and pressed them in her lap between her thighs and leaned forward, as if she were in pain. Durell watched her. She denied fear, he thought; but she was possessed by it. His anger was gone—at least, it was no longer directed against Jane King. He believed as much as she had told him. He would take care of the rest of it with Donegan, in Karachi.

“Jane?”

She shook her bowed head. He could see the part in her hair, the severe arrangement of the thick brown strands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“There’s nothing to cry about,” he said.

“Isn’t there?”

“Unless there’s more, that you haven’t told me.”

“It’s nothing that concerns you.”

“Everything about everyone involved in this concerns me,” he said.

“No. It’s just that I’m a fool, that’s all.”

“A fool about what? You did your best.”

She lifted her head with an effort, and he     saw     the tears in her blue eyes behind the fake, heavily-rimmed glasses.    She had a Midwestern accent, too, he decided, that     was far removed from the polished finishing-school language of Sarah Standish. When she stood up and walked away from him, down the garden path, he saw that she had the head and face of a prim schoolteacher and the body of an exotic courtesan. And she was probably unaware of either phenomenon.

There was time for a shower, a fresh bandage on his leg, and food and coffee, before Colonel K’Ayub indicated he was ready to go into the city of Karachi. The thermometer inside the front door of the villa registered 110 degrees. It would be hotter in Karachi.

They rode in a scout car, preceded by a jeep-load of natty soldiers and followed by two motorcycles. K’Ayub was not bashful about his political and military authority. He chatted easily about international problems, his big, soft body relaxed on the back seat. Jane King, still acknowledged by the Pakistani strong man as Sarah Standish, sat between him and Durell.

“All is arranged for our departure to Rawalpindi tomorrow,” K’Ayub said. “The equipment is ready, the porters are hired, our quarters as we proceed to Base Camp One and the higher altitudes will be waiting for us. You are acquainted with mountain climbing, Mr. Durell?”

“I’ve done some. I’m not an expert.”

“Just so. But S-5 is really not much of a challenge to a climber. Rather uninteresting, in fact, except for the North Peak. I understand the first guide, Hans Steicher, is very professional. I’ve been in the area several times—a wild, desolate and beautiful land. We should be at our goal within the week, if all goes well.”

“Do you expect it not to?”

K’Ayub’s pale yellow eyes were without expression. “There is the Emir at Mirandhabad to deal with. And another element, as yet unclear, that obviously wishes to keep us out. We shall learn about it all, in good time.”

Karachi broiled under the oppressive August sun. The road into it traversed a land that was flat and seared to the horizon. To the right, Durell glimpsed the moving white lines of the surf from the Arabian Sea. The Indus valley was a land of scorpions and vipers and eternally moaning hot winds. The scorched plain where Alexander the Great led his army from the Indus in 325 B.C. looked empty of water and life, except for the poisonous insects and herbs. Inland, the blazing sand hills rolled as far as he could see.

Karachi held no charm or interest. It looked parched, a vast sprawl of flat roofs with a few domes and minarets upthrust through brown trees. The asphalt streets oozed, the diesel tramcars clanged irritably, and rubber-wheeled drays piled with cotton and pulled by philosophical donkeys or camels reluctantly got out of the way of K’Ayub’s convoy. Here, too, the white-collared crows that scavenged the city perched on every sagging power line.

There was noise and heat and confusion. On Victoria Road, Durell saw the ramshackle slums and markets, the improvised minarets and mosques where the mullahs, the Moslem interpreters and teachers of the Koran, held forth in strident voices. It was a quarter occupied by emigrants and refugees crowding into the city because of the seasonal drought. Some of the transients worked the docks along the muddy channels of the Indus, others found occupation in the slum streets. Traffic tangled insanely in the heat. There were bullock wagons and bicycle rickshaws and twowheeled donkey carts, three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, and ordinary rickshaws drawn by skinny, brown, barefooted men in dirty shorts or swathed in the sheet-like lungyis wrapped around their bodies. Here and there a covered tonga cart went by, drawn by a skeletal horse.

They passed the resettlement project on Drigh Road, cut in and out of the nondescript interurban commuter buses, came into an area of new stucco houses, spacious yards and brown lawns. Water tanks probed the coppery sky from every roof, since Karachi provided no municipal water pressure, and air-conditioners wheezed and pumped in every balcony window.

Lathri K’Ayub was patient with the traffic, soft-faced and sleepy-eyed. “You wish to consult with Mr. Donegan at once?” he asked Durell, as they reached the more spacious part of the city.

“I think it would be wise.”

“And Miss Standish?” His yellow eyes slid to Jane’s knees.

Durell said, “She will accompany me, from now on.” “As you wish. I have some business to attend to. A plane is ready for tomorrow’s flight to Rawalpindi, where we meet Hans Steicher. The von Buhlens are at a villa rented by Miss Standish. I shall leave the scout car for your convenience, if you will forgive my abandoning you.” “Are the others being guarded against any attempts at injury or sabotage?”

“Indeed, yes. Although I am not fully convinced as to the fate of the original expedition members. If they met with foul play, however, the plot will be crushed.”

There was something about the colonel that reminded Durell of other strong men in new countries—tough, ruthless, ambitious.

“We’ll see,” Durell said.

Donegan’s suite of offices was in a recently constructed building that was fully air-conditioned, when the apparatus worked. It felt cool, even clammy, after the blasting heat in the streets. Durell took Jane King’s arm and led her reluctantly down the corridor.

“Must I go with you?” the girl murmured.

“Why not? I’m supposed to be your bodyguard.”

“But shouldn’t you go directly to see Miss Sarah?” “She’s safe. I have to assume I can trust K’Ayub.” She looked away and murmured, “I’ve discovered you can’t trust anybody in this world.”

“Why so discouraged. Because you’re going to lose the extra pay Miss Standish promised you to pose as a. stand-in and target?”

“Maybe” she said bitterly.

“You ought to consider yourself well out of it.”

She looked uneasy. “Are you angry with her, too, for doing this?”

“I don’t like the idea of anybody using money to set someone else to die for them.”

“I’m still alive,” Jane King pointed out.

“I think you’ve just been lucky,” Durell said.

Daniel Donegan’s business as part-time K Section man for the CIA in Karachi was covered by the offices set up here as a branch of an economic development mission sponsored by the U.S. government. And wherever you go in the world, Durell thought, Washington’s bureaucracy managed to take seed and adapt itself and yet look the same. There were the civil service typists with disillusioned faces in the outer offices, the expensive electronic office equipment and standard green and gray filing cabinets and carefully apportioned desks of various sizes, according to status protocol and the hierarchy of civil service rank.

Durell left Jane King in an outer room, seated in a leather chair next to a table covered by month-old copies of Time, Life and the Post. The girl was docile now, accepting his orders without question. She sat meekly, hands folded, and nodded.

“You’re not to leave here under any circumstances until I’m finished with Donegan, understand?” he told her.

“Yes, Mr. Durell.” She hesitated. “But I haven’t done anything wrong. It was Mr. Donegan’s idea that I pose as Miss Sarah.”

“I understand that. As soon as we’re through here, we’ll find some tint and get your hair back to normal and you can wear your own clothes and get rid of those glasses.

I won’t feel easy about you until you can’t be mistaken by some fanatic as your boss.”

“Yes.”

He left her sitting quietly in the windowless room and went in to see Donegan, anger riding his footsteps, thinking of Jane’s prim face and lush, provocative body.

Daniel Donegan shook hands with a quick, limp gesture and gave Durell’s credentials only a cursory glance. He was a small man, his shoulders narrow in a white cotton suit. Although it was comfortable in the air-conditioned office, he was sweating, and there were beads of moisture on his brown, freckled scalp. He listened to Durell’s report on what had happened since he landed in Karachi, nodded once or twice, and blinked bloodshot brown eyes rapidly, offering apologies for the whole matter.

He seemed, to Durell, to be a man living in a swamp of fear.

“I’m sorry, truly sorry,” Donegan said, blinking again. “I’m not equipped to cope with this sort of thing. It’s really not my line.”

“Why not?” Durell asked. “It’s a simple matter.”

“Miss Sarah Standish cannot in any way be considered a simple matter. To be responsible for her safety in this city— indeed, anywhere in this country—is too nerve-wracking. You don’t know what she’s like. She wants everything her way. And she’s such an important personality back home, I shudder at the thought of anything happening to her.”

“But you’re not so worried about anything happening to Jane King, is that it?”

“Miss King does not represent Standish Nickel and eight hundred million dollars,” Donegan said thickly.

“Does all that money bother you?”

“Miss Standish is an influential woman back home—”

“And her money has thrown you off balance, is that it?” “See here, I resent—”

“Listen to me,” Durell said harshly. His anger was thick in him, his dark blue eyes looked black and hard and cruel. “You can’t equate money with the value of anyone’s life.”

Donegan protested feebly. “Your job is to protect Miss Standish, to see that she comes through this utterly quixotic venture without harm. She’s in the company of a rather peculiar lot of foreigners, I must say. And I merely thought it would be helpful to arrange a simple subterfuge to throw any potential fanatics off the track. We’re not wanted up there in Pakhusti, you know.” Donegan’s bald head glistened with sweat. “You know what happened to the members of the first S-5 group. The Pakhustis have people everywhere. They resent anyone coming into their province. The Emir at Mirandhabad has sworn to be independent. He’ll do anything to keep you from reaching S-5.”

“I understand all that,” Durell said. “It’s still no reason to put an innocent girl in jeopardy.”

“She’s all right, isn’t she?” Donegan demanded.

“A business like this is too full of danger to have any place for amateurs,” Durell rapped.

“I didn’t really think—”

Donegan’s eyes were haunted. “I’m sorry, Durell. I guess it’s all that money belonging to that stony-eyed woman. It’s put me in a panic. If anything happened to Sarah Standish here, my career is finished. Years of work gone out the window. I want to go home, Durell. I’ve got a wife and kids back in Chicago, a mortgage to get rid of, education bills to pay. I don’t want to make any mistakes this last year of my duty out here.”

Durell knew you cannot reason with fear. He felt a twinge of pity for Daniel Donegan, but an even greater apprehension for what the man had tried to do. The smell of big money created different reactions in different men. In Donegan, it made for poor judgment and cowardice.

“When did you speak to the real Miss Standish last?” Durell asked.

“She’s all right. She’s at this villa I got for her and the Austrians—the von Buhlens. I phoned them less than ten minutes ago.”

“And you spoke to Miss Standish, personally?”

“Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.”

“Let’s hope so,” Durell said.

He left Donegan’s office a few moments later and paused in the small anteroom outside.

Jane King’s leather chair was empty.

The girl had gone.

chapter five

SHE walked quickly through the crowded, noisy streets, away from Mr. Donegan’s modern office, but not too quickly to attract attention. The heat outside struck her like a brazen fist, making her flinch. She felt as if all her thoughts had glued together into an amalgam of despair, compounded by the hot sun, the smells, the fear and desperation that gnawed at her belly. For a time she thought she was going to be sick again and throw up on the street. But that would not do. A policeman might stop and be solicitous, and she could not attract sympathy or pause to say who she was or where she was going.

She couldn’t have answered, anyway. She did not know her destination.

Everything had gone so wrong since last winter in Switzerland, Jane thought. From a wonderful, miraculous success in New York, getting her job as secretary and companion and —yes, friend, too—to Sarah Standish, things went steadily downhill from a dizzy height of satisfaction.

Bicycle bells jangled in the street, a beggar crawled across the sidewalk toward her, hands outstretched like claws. She avoided him, walked around a domed mosque, crossed a small park where men in white muslin and women in veils sat in lethargy under the shade of peepul trees. Every now and then she turned her head and looked behind her. No one was following. Voices lifted on the oven-heated air, speaking Urdu, Pathan, English and Portuguese. All at once she longed for the familiar flat tones of her Midwestern home in Garden Falls, Indiana.

A short, fat man with a terribly scarred face, wearing a white silk suit and a topee, stopped in her way on the path through the park.

“May I help you, madam? Do you wish a taxi?’’

“No—no, thank you.”

“You are lost, please?”

“No, I’m not.”

She walked around him, thinking, But I am lost, terribly

lost, and I can never go home again, because I don’t know what will happen to me.

She paid no attention to where she was going. The heat dazed her, the nausea rode in her stomach. Something had to be settled. She couldn’t stand it any longer. Rudi would have to decide.

It had been wonderful to write home to Momma and Poppa, in that quiet white clapboard house on Elm Street, and tell them about her job and Sarah Standish and all the amazing things she saw and did; how she lived in the lap of luxury and traveled everywhere with one of the richest women in America. To get a job like that was a stroke of fortune; but now all her luck had turned bad.

She saw a policeman at the other end of the park and she turned and walked the other way, casually, aware of a heaviness in her legs and exhaustion in her lungs. She dodged one of the diesel tramway cars, forced herself around a covered tonga. Tricycle cabs sought her as a fare. She kept walking, ignoring the beggars on the sidewalk, the crisply uniformed Pakistani military men, the occasional European.

She had escaped Durell, but nothing else, she thought.

How ironical that she’d had to pose as Sarah here, for the one day! It was a circlet of thorns, crowning all her folly that had begun so long ago in Switzerland.

She had been the first to meet Rudi von Buhlen, because Sarah always made herself inaccessible to informal approaches. Rudie was the first man Jane had made love to.

Jane paused in her walking. She had crossed Napier Road and was in the Juna Market, a native bazaar. Here the women were less emancipated than those on Victoria Road and wore dopattas, long headcloths that fell to the shoulders, and even burkas, the heavy veils that have two holes in the face to see through. She paused, turned, bumped into a tall man wearing an immaculate white sherwani, a frock coat buttoned at the upstanding collar. His Jinnah cap and white hair made him look like a specter in the noise and heat.

“If you are looking for a bargain, madame—”

“No, no.” She tasted panic. “I was trying to get back to the Metropole Hotel.”

“Perhaps a taxi, then.”

“I’ll walk, thank you.”

He bowed and left. Turning, she went quickly back the way she had come. On Victoria Road again, among the shops and greater percentage of Europeans, she felt easier. There was a Chinese restaurant, and then Monkton’s Cafe Grand, looking somehow French. Again she dodged traffic to find a table and chair under the striped awning. It was safe here, she thought, crowded enough to hide in. But she had another moment of panic, thinking how she might be mistaken for Sarah Standish, and she hastily took off the useless glasses. But nobody paid any attention to her, beyond the usual speculative glances that men always gave her figure, until her prim face made them turn away. There was no reason to be afraid. Durell was over-cautious. After all, no one even knew Sarah Standish was in Karachi; they had arrived only yesterday; and Sarah hadn’t left her villa once. So she was safe enough, Jane told herself. Nobody wanted to kill her, even by mistake.

She felt better after sipping her iced vermouth, although the heat gathered under the awning was stifling. She thought of Rudi and wondered how anyone so strong and handsome could be so evil inside. Her stomach spasmed. Yet, remembering, she felt a familiar tremor.

Jane knew she was not particularly pretty, although her figure was all right. Rudi said her body was sculptured for love. And it had been a source of wonder that a man as sophisticated and cultivated as he should have chosen her, last winter in the Alps. She knew herself to be an unaffected Midwestern girl, even though polished by her employment with Miss Sarah. But Rudi became her first lover. And he had wakened an inner, passionate nature she had never suspected. Even now, fearful and worried, hating him, she still wanted him.

Because of her childhood in Garden Falls, Indiana, she was still ashamed of the lurid, pornographic memories of herself making love with Rudi. He was tall and strong, with a broad, flat brow and pale eyes, and his long hair was the color of old haystacks in the fields back home. His confidence—and arrogance—had overwhelmed her. He knew his way everywhere, knew everyone. He was a first-class bergsteiger, a mountain-climber and guide, at home on any glacial ridge, exulting in mastery over brute nature. She was clumsy at climbing, but he was patient with her those first days. She’d had a lot of free time, because Miss Sarah was resting and seeing no one. There were many quiet evenings then, in little chalets and mountain huts, when they made love and everything was wonderful.

Until he asked to meet Miss Sarah, she thought; and she innocently agreed. Then everything changed.

And everything ended.

She saw too late that meeting Miss Sarah had been Rudi’s single goal from the very beginning.

She saw him again in New York last winter, just once, meeting him at that shabby little hotel where it had all been so ugly; and yet she hadn’t been able to keep herself from begging him to love her again. He had been arrogant, impatient. But he had gone to bed with her, for just that last time. And she had been careless....

So their child would be born not out of love, but from that last union of hate and despair, Jane thought.

She hadn’t seen Rudi since. He went back to Europe—to the Carlton at Cannes, the Ritz Bar in Paris, the family schloss near Vienna. She followed him by the regular, devoted flow of letters addressed to Miss Sarah, which crossed her desk as Miss Sarah’s personal secretary. She had longed to destroy them, or to read them. But she did neither, impersonally turning them over to her employer.

Sometimes she had thought of telling Miss Sarah the truth about Rudi. But the opportune moment never seemed at hand, although it almost arrived the day of her first visit to the doctor.

Knowing they would meet here in Karachi, she had kept silent. Of course, she could not really go with the expedition into the Himalayas. Not the way she was. The doctor had utterly forbidden it.

So what was left now was to see Rudi alone and tell him what had happened and ask for his advice and help. There was nobody else to turn to. Certainly she could never go back to Garden Falls, Indiana.

He had avoided her at the villa last night. But never mind, Jane told herself. He would come to her now, this afternoon, this evening. They would meet alone, and settle everything.

There was a telephone inside Monkton’s Cafe. After she finished the iced vermouth, she picked up her purse and walked in and called the number of the villa.

Sarah Standish got up to answer the telephone. It was surprising to Durell how much Jane King had patterned herself after her employer. They were approximately the same age, and watching Sarah walk across the Bokhara carpet, he realized that she, too, had a body of full and unsuspected beauty, in contrast to her remote, cool features.

The telephone stopped ringing before Sarah could reach it. She made a little gesture of impatience. “Someone else took it,” she said to Durell. “On the extension.”

“Are the von Buhlens here?” he asked.

“They have a suite of rooms upstairs. Rudi and his sister are checking the supply lists. It’s probably a call for them.”

Durell had come here directly from Donegan’s office. The police had been alerted to look for Jane. K’Ayub promised every co-operation, although his soft voice had sharpened with irritability. “I cannot help but resent the fact, Mr. Durell, that I was not trusted to be told about the impersonation.”

Durell had apologized, said he, too, hadn’t known about the sham. The colonel was only slightly mollified. Nevertheless, a quiet, desperate hunt was combing the city for the girl. No more could be done at the moment.

Sarah Standish returned from the telephone and sat down, her knees and legs primly straight. “I am terribly sorry about this,” she said. “Jane is a fine girl, devoted and loyal. I’m quite fond of her. I can only hope nothing serious will happen to her.”

“If something does, it will be because she is mistaken for you.”

Sarah nodded. “I am aware of that.”

“Yet you let her take the risk of impersonating you.”

“I merely followed Mr. Donegan’s advice.”

“Your conscience didn’t trouble you?” Durell asked.

Her eyes were objective behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “It is not your business to be concerned about my conscience. You presume too much. Your job is to insure my personal welfare. No more, no less. I should point out, however, that I did not request your help. I think it is all rather melodramatic and unnecessary. I am not in danger. But everyone insisted some precautions should be taken, and Mr. Donegan suggested that Jane double for me, here in Karachi.”

“And now she may be killed,” Durell said.

“You seem to be unnaturally concerned.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m worried. Puzzled. No more. Jane is a capable young woman. I trust her judgment, and I have faith in her behavior.”

“You make yourself sound tough,” Durell said. “Are you really as hard as all that?”

“You are impertinent.”

“I don’t apologize. You don’t frighten me, as you did poor Mr. Donegan. I have my job to do, that’s all. You’re going into dangerous country, and all the people who preceded you didn’t come back. Those mountains aren’t like the Alps. They’re not mapped or explored. The Pakhustis are hostile. Are you tough enough for that?”

“I’m tough," Sarah said thinly. “I’ve had to learn to be.”

The room where they sat was big and airy, with wide doors open to a garden of date palms and tamarisk. An ivory screen that dated back to the Moguls, under Babur the Tiger, shone softly behind Sarah’s tall Bombay chair. A servant moved quietly in the garden, the flicker of his high-collared sherwani catching Durell’s eye. There were uniformed guards out there on watch. This house was as safe as any place could be. Yet he felt uneasy. He was worried about Jane. And he could not solve the contradictions in Sarah Standish. Her face was severe, her body in her white tailored silk suit remarkable. He could not avoid the firm lines of her thighs and hips, the swell of her breasts under the simple striped blouse. She was an enigmatic bundle of frustrations wrapped in a gilt package of money and power, the product of an unnatural life that was reflected in her wariness of all men, whom she had to regard as predators. There was a challenge in her. He wondered what she would be like if she let her mouth rest naturally and simply relaxed.

“Please do not stare at me,” Sarah said quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know I’m an object of curiosity to most people. I should be accustomed to it, but it makes me a little nervous.”

He said, “I didn’t ask for this assignment, Miss Standish.

I was chosen because I’m supposed to be acquainted with you.”

“Through Deirdre Padgett. I remember you well.”

“Thank you. I wasn’t sure you did. May I call you Sarah?”

“If you wish.”

“I’d like to know your real objectives here in Karachi,” he said. “The real reason for financing and going on this expedition.”

She looked faintly uncertain. “I am in love with Rudi von Buhlen. I want to be with him.”

“Is that all?”

“I am not quixotic by nature. I cannot afford to be.” She was firm and precise again. “There has never been any— adventure—in my life before. I decided that this would be good for me.”

“Is your goal the search for this mythical jeweled crown? Or is it the nickel?”

“You are not very flattering.” She smiled faintly, for the first time. “I can hire a hundred geologists to find more nickel. I don’t have to go about the world with a hammer, chipping rock. On the other hand, I don’t honestly give much credence to this story about Alexander the Great, or a crown that’s been lost for two thousand years. I’m not much interested.”

“Then why put yourself in danger like this?” he asked.

“Being with Rudi,” she said, “makes the danger unimportant.”

Rudi von Buhlen put down the telephone in his upstairs room and noted, with some surprise, that his hand was trembling slightly. He stood half-naked, having just stepped from the modern American shower stall in the bath next to his bedroom. A towel was wrapped around his waist. The hot wind blowing through the balcony windows brought with it the indefinable smell of the city and the Indus River wharves—a smell compounded of cooking, human waste and garbage, and oil storage tanks. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, saw the lines of strain on his handsome, tanned face. As usual, he admired the powerful musculature of his body, then dropped the towel and reached for his shorts and slacks.

His room had a tiled floor, a Sarouk rug, a huge bed in one corner with damask hangings. His hands still trembled. The shower had been tepid, the water coming from the tank on the roof under the broiling sun. He ran fingers through his long hair, turned, and saw Alessa watching him from the connecting doorway to her room.

“Was it Jane on the phone?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in town.”

“Are you going to meet her?”

“I’ll arrange something,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

She was three years younger than he, but somehow she had dominated him all their lives. He could not meet her steady, controlled gaze.

He spoke in German. “Leave me alone. Don’t interfere.”

“It is for your own good, Rudi. Are you in trouble again?”

“It’s nothing!” he said angrily. “Go away. I’m dressing.”

She remained in the doorway between their rooms. The house was quiet. They had both watched Durell enter the house, and they knew he was with Sarah Standish down oh the first floor, and Rudi knew that Alessa had been impressed by the American. He looked at her curiously, a little afraid, and more irritated by her aloof control than usual. Her tall, magnificent figure was strangely at odds with her intellectual capacity, her scholarly doctorate in history. He knew she had never been in love, although he suspected some affairs. It would be useful, occasionally, to have the details to throw back at her when she was like this, he thought.

Her face was a softened reflection of his, lovely and smooth. Her blue eyes were larger, wider; her brow not quite so wide and severe as his own. Their hair was the same, pale and tawny, and she wore hers in a simple, boyish cut that was practical and yet gave the shape of her head a delicate appeal. She wore a blue silk dress that accented her eyes, white shoes, an antique cameo pin above her left breast. Her mouth was full and sensitive. She had always been smarter than he; he had played away his years of education while she had used them to work hard and pull something out of the wreckage of their family life and fortune after the fall of the Third Reich. She was apolitical, he knew. Her interests lay in the old conquests and cultures of the past, the ancient forces which once swept the world and which, to him, were dead and useless.

They did not understand each other; they never had. Yet he was fond of her and irritated because he did not really know how Alessa felt about him.

She came into his room and watched him dress, assuming the intimate prerogatives of their family relationship. But he was nervous, in no mood for the lecture he knew was coming.

“Alessa, I’m in a hurry. If you have any advice, give it quickly. I probably won’t take it, anyway.”

She said quietly, “Rudi, you are a fool. You never stop, do you? You will wind up like Uncle Franz, your ideal.” “What was wrong with Uncle Franz?” he demanded.

“He was executed for a stupid Communist conspiracy. He died in such an ugly way—I don’t want this to happen to you.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t.”

“I know how you admired him, Rudi. But I remember him, too. And I’ve read how he led such a Bohemian life after World War I, going about in a black sweater and flannel slacks, an intellectual light in Berlin in those days, speaking against National Socialism, eager to set the world aflame with radical ideas. He was a romantic, and he died with a meat-hook under his chin.”

“Be quiet,” he said uneasily. “Uncle Franz was a great man.”

Alessa lit a cigarette. She said softly, “Tell me the truth, Rudi—are you still the Red Oboe?”

He whirled, shocked. “What?”

“The Rote Kapelle of Uncle Franz—the Red Orchestra— is still alive in you, is it not?”

“No!” he shouted. “Where did you hear that name?” “The Red Oboe? I heard of your silly game years ago, when you adopted the cover name of an orchestral instrument. Using your travels and playboy activities to send scraps of information to the Soviet Embassies. It was dangerous, but you were young; I thought you would get it out of your system as something romantic you would grow out of as you matured.”

Rudi looked dangerous. “How long have you known about all that—that nonsense, Alessa?”

“I knew about it from the beginning.”

“It’s all over,” he said. “It was just a phase.”

“Truly?”

“As you say, it was romantic. I idealized Uncle Franz. It was fun, but I’ve settled down. I’m practical now, like you, Alessa. After all, look at my engagement to Sarah.” “Are you in love with her, Rudi?”

He shrugged. “Marriage is a practical matter.”

“She is devoted to you. She is a fine woman. I would not like to see you hurt her, and I know how you treat women, Rudi. Is it only her money that interests you?”

“Money is important. You are dedicated to recouping the family fortune with your archeology, eh? You hope to find a fabulously valuable antique crown.” He grinned indulgently at his sister. “And with the proceeds and your reputation, you and Mother can refurbish the house and live in splendor.”

“Is there anything wrong with that?”

“My way is easier.”

“By way of Sarah’s bed, Rudi? It’s indecent of you.”

“I am not a very decent fellow. You always tell me that. But I do have my practical side. You look for your mythical crown—but I seek something more tangible. Old Berg-mann’s nickel ore, eh?”

“Professor Bergmann was Uncle Franz’ devoted friend, Rudi. Why do you speak of him with such contempt?” “Like you, he is a scholar. Not practical. If we find the ore again, the location will be valuable.”

“You cannot buy real estate on S-5.”

“I can sell what I know. The Chinese would pay plenty for it.”

She said sharply, “I knew it! You have been scheming with foolish friends—”

“The information simply came to me,” he said easily. “It is a confidence. You must not mention it.”

“And you will do nothing about it!” Alessa stood up. “I do not wish to be your enemy in this, Rudi. But I will not be involved in your gestes.”

“Calm down, Alessa. Nothing has been settled.”

“See to it that nothing is. And to be practical—what will you do about Jane? She can upset your plans with Sarah, can’t she?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Rudi said.

His face changed when he spoke, and Alessa thought he looked like a stranger. She turned away, unwilling to let him see her fear.

chapter six

DURELL was on the telephone with Donegan when Alessa came downstairs. Donegan had no news of Jane. No one had seen her. Military patrols were scouring the city for her. But Karachi had a population of over two million. There were the wharf areas, the sprawling native slums, the new building projects, the hotels on Victoria Road. She had been reported walking on Kutchery Road, near the Palace Hotel; she was seen having tea at the Shezan; she had gone by taxi to the Karachi Gymkhana Club on Khuro Road. All the leads were false. The sprawling city had swallowed her up. The latest lead was that she was with some tourists visiting Quaid-i-Azam’s tomb of Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. There was no other word.

Durell hung up and shook hands with Alessa von Buhlen as Sarah introduced them. It was five o’clock. A servant in a white frock coat wheeled in a rubber-tired cart with bottles of liquor, tonic, glasses, fresh lemons and limes. He chose bourbon. Alessa asked for bourbon, too.

“You are our American escort,” she smiled. “I have heard much about you, from Sarah and Mr. Donegan. They say you are a dangerous man.” Her English was only faintly accented. “You have lived a very exciting life, they say, working for your State Department.”

“It’s exciting at this moment,” Durell said, meeting her eyes.

She flushed slightly. From the moment she had walked into the room alone, straight and tall and lovely, a kind of electric charge was generated between them. Her Viennese accent was well modulated. He had discounted much of Henry Kallinger’s description of her, in Istanbul. And she was not    a Valkyrie, fierce and warlike. There was a polish and grace about her that impressed him, an intellectual calm, a knowledge of herself as a stunning and desirable woman, but not    aggressive about it, not on the offensive, and disdaining the usual feminine postures and devices.

Her short golden hair, parted on one side, added to the delectable shape of her head and face. Small enameled earrings glistened on the lobes of her ears. She was proud. Her body was fine, her movements flowing with the easy co-ordination of an athlete.

A servant came in and murmured something to Sarah Standish, and Sarah excused herself and Durell was alone with Alessa.

“I am so sorry,” Alessa said. “My brother Rudi will be down soon. It will be a comfort to have you with us on this new expedition, Mr. Durell.”

“You managed to reorganize your assault on S-5 quickly.” “One must take advantage of the season up there. Once it snows, we may not find Professor Bergmann’s markers— the flags he used to locate the area from which he took his ore samples.”

“Why couldn’t you find the place yourself?” he asked.

“Oh, but I was not with him when he discovered the ore. Ernst went off to explore the North Peak, taking two porters with him, dividing our party. My interest was only in finding the crown of Alexander. Poor Bergmann came along simply to satisfy his interest in minerals and geological formations —that sort of thing.” She smiled sadly at Durell and sipped her bourbon. “This American whiskey is something I have developed a small taste for. Is it your favorite?” “Yes. It’s popular where I come from.”

“Louisiana? They call you a Cajun?” She frowned slightly. “Is that not a term meaning a form of exile—”

“Not exactly.” He did not go into it. He felt a thin edge of excitement, apart from his awareness of Alessa as an extraordinary woman. “I’d like to know more about what happened to Bergmann.”

Her eyes were pained. “I was very fond of him. He was very dear to me, a harmless, middle-aged man devoted to research. He was very excited about the nickel. He said it was quite rich.”

“But you didn’t go to the site with him?”

“There was a sudden storm, quite severe. It was impossible.”

“You didn’t wait it out?”

“We had to leave the mountain in a hurry. Some Chinese patrols were reported. Anyway, Bergmann had his ore samples and his map.”

“Nobody seems to know what happened to the map,” Durell said.

“Or to Ernst Bergmann,” she said in quiet reproof. “He was more important to me than the rocks and the map. In Rawalpindi he went to the American Information Office and spoke to one of your officers there and left the ore samples, but not the chart. Your official notified your State Department, I suppose. I had also cabled to Rudi and Sarah, at Cannes then, and I suppose Sarah notified her business office, who in turn also called Washington’s attention to the discovery of nickel on S-5.” She smiled. “And so you are here to accompany us and see that this time we conclude our mission safely.”

Durell wondered if she was avoiding the point. “But didn’t you see Bergmann after he left the American office in Rawalpindi?”

“No. No one saw him after that. He—simply vanished.” “What do you think happened to him?”

“I do not know. He was a gentle, naive man, not given to thinking in terms of violence.”

“Do you think he met with violence?”

She said desperately, “Nothing else would have kept him from returning to me that day. He was very loyal to me.” “You don’t suppose he might have been approached with a large sum of money for his map? Someone who was waiting for him when he left the American Information Offices?” She looked shocked. “You are a suspicious man.”

“It’s my business to be suspicious, Alessa.”

“For Ernst Bergmann to sell out and arrange a disappearance like that is most implausible. If you knew him—” “Then what happened to him?”

“I think he was killed—for the map.” Her voice was cold. “I think this should explain the haste with which your government and the Pakistani officials helped me reorganize the expedition to S-5.”

The telephone rang again. Sarah came into the room and answered it, then turned the instrument over to Durell. “It’s for you.”

It was Colonel K’Ayub. He spoke in Urdu, which expressed a sense of cool formality better than English.

“We have found her, Mr. Durell,” he said quietly.

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

“You have her in custody?”

“Under surveillance,” K’Ayub said, switching back to Eng-

lish. “She was traced in a rather erratic walking tour around the Shepsi Mosque, into Edward VII Park, then the Juno Market. She has been sitting at the Monkton Cafe Grand for an hour now, waiting for someone.”

“Who is watching her?”

“Zalmadar. A Pathan sergeant, my personal servant.” “Did she make any contacts?”

“We have picked up a beggar, a Jain holy man who accosted her, a Goanese gentleman, a chi-chi named DaSilva, and the owner of a silver bazaar, a Mr. Janninin. They insist they had no business with her. They say she seemed dazed and lost. We are continuing the questioning.”

“If she’s still sitting in Monkton’s, then she hasn’t met the man she’s expecting so far.”

“Exactly. Shall I pick you up?”

“I’ll meet you,” Durell said. “Tell me where and when.” “Ten minutes. At the Metropole?”

“Right.”

Durell hung up. Sarah Standish watched him with anxious eyes. “Is Jane all right?”

“Perhaps,” he said. He looked at Alessa. “Would you mind asking your brother Rudi to step down here for a moment?” “I’m sorry,” Alessa said. “He left the bungalow at the same time I came downstairs to meet you.”

The sun was lower, hazed by the steamy humidity, and it would soon be dark; but there seemed to be no relief from the heat. The crowd had thickened at Monkton’s, mostly Englishmen, shipping agents and claims and adjustment people, a few Americans on economic missions, some Portuguese businessmen. Jane’s nausea came in waves, like the thickening darkness. Her eyes searched the crowded sidewalk—the Europeans in small minority, the Pakistanis in sherwanis, pajama trousers and Jinnah caps, the Pathans and few Hindus, the Arabs, rich and poor, a Sherpa, the military in trim khaki. Traffic in motley interurban buses, packed until the vehicles bulged, rolled outward to the new urban development projects. Bicycles, rickshaws, a few camel-drawn carts fought for space on the broad avenue.

Then she saw Rudi walking from the direction of the Metropole, tall and handsome and Nordic, at ease in the diverse crowd. He wore a white linen Italian suit, an American drip-dry shirt, a dark thin necktie. She hated him and loved him,

despising her hand that lifted eagerly as if of its own will, to attract his attention and greet him.

He stood at her table, unsmiling. “Jane.”

“Sit down, Rudi,” she said humbly. “Please don’t frown at me like that. I’m sorry, but I simply had to see you, and you avoided me at the house, from the moment we came to Karachi yesterday—”

“We will    be    together for several weeks,” he said coldly.

“Must you    be    so melodramatic?”

“Why do you avoid me?” she insisted.

“You make a fool of yourself.”

She bowed her head. “But I can’t help it. I’m desperate.” “Desperate?”

“I’m in trouble.”

He did not ask what she meant. Perhaps he knew, or at least suspected. He said impatiently, “Come with me, Jane. People are staring at us.”

“I don’t care. I must talk to you.”

“Then let us talk in private, not here. I have rented a car, a Ferrari.” His sudden change in tone when he mentioned the motorcar was almost childlike, she thought. “It belongs to a member of the Italian legation, Count Pucci. He’s up in the Northwest Territory for the summer. We can enjoy a drive, perhaps out to the Karachi Country Club.”

“All right,” she said meekly.

She gathered up gloves and handbag clumsily, aware of his critical eyes. When she was ready, he did not move. “Where are Sarah’s glasses?”

“Oh, I took them off. Mr. Durell said I shouldn’t go on with the impersonation.”

“Nonsense. It is your duty to Sarah.”

“But I—”

“Put them on, please. At once.”

She obeyed, and followed his tall figure through the crowd to where a low-slung, dark blue Ferrari was parked. He drove quickly, settling with a sigh of pleasure on the leather bucket seats. She sat as far from him as possible, twisted side-wise to watch his strong, rather brutal profile, to see the way the wind whipped his over-long hair in thick, ropy strands. She was appalled, because she still wanted him. The hot wind seared her face like a branding iron as they drove out Victoria Road. A few lights glowed in the shop windows now, against the deepening early dusk.

“Don’t drive so fast, Rudi,” she said. “Please.” “One must face life boldly,” he said. “One must be ready for defeat as well as victory, Jane. I gather you wish to speak to me of our personal relationship.”

“Yes.”

“I told you before, again and again, it is over.”

“But it isn’t, unfortunately,” she said.

“I am not responsible for any further problems.”

“But you are. And I need your help.”

“Do you want to go home, back to the States? Is that it?” “No, I can’t go home.”

“You want money, then? For a doctor?”

She was startled. “You know I’m—going to have a child?” “You are a stupid, naive girl. Of course I know. With a type such as you, it was inevitable, I suppose. I should have known better, in the first place. But I needed you.” His voice was cold. “However, now I am going to marry Sarah Standish.”

“No,” she said, and the firm harshness of her voice was almost like an outcry. “No, you’re not.”

“You plan to tell her about us?”

“If I must.”

“What do you want of me?”

She twisted her gloved hands in her lap, not knowing how to reply. What did she want? He did not care a pin for her, perhaps he never had. He had used her to be introduced to Sarah, that was all, and now he was finished with her. But it couldn’t be all over for herself. She thought of all her dreams, her future with him idealized, the letters she had planned to write home to Poppa and Momma about him. Useless to try to bend life itself to fit such dreams. But how could she answer him? She did not know what she wanted.

“I will give you money and find a doctor for you,” Rudi said. “You will tell Miss Standish you are sick. The doctor will co-operate. You can stay here in Karachi until the matter is settled.”

“I won’t do it,” she said. “It’s sinful. I won’t lose the child.” “Don’t be stupid. It is all I can offer. You must agree.” “No.”

He said bluntly, “Very well. It shall be as you wish.” “What do you mean?”

“We will have to settle it my way, entirely.”

The Ferrari, she noticed, had slowed to a crawl. When had they left the bright and busy Victoria Road? She could not remember turning off. But now she saw loading cranes, warehouses, low tin roofs glimmering in the red rays of the sullen, setting sun. They were near the West Wharf area. The smell of the ancient Indus River, carrying with it the waste of a continent, touched her offensively. The car laboriously threaded its way down a narrow street of yellowed houses, a Chinese quarter of teashops, bazaars, tall and leaning Arab tenements. The narrow street was crowded with cycles, a tonga, and two haltered camels. As they halted for a moment, someone opened a window above and emptied a bucket of filthy water into the street. It splashed heavily on the driver of the two-wheeled tonga cart. Instantly the air was shrill with imprecations between Punjabi and Arab, the driver shaking his fist and screaming, the man above in the window looking down at the other’s rage with impassive eyes. A small crowd began to gather as the Punjabi tonga driver started bellicosely for the tenement door, and Rudi clucked in annoyance. But order was quickly restored by two uniformed policemen who shoved ruthlessly through the excited crowd toward the driver. Their methods were quick and efficient. Clubs lifted and fell, and the outraged Punjabi went down to the filthy gutter with his head bleeding. Someone in the crowd took the opportunity to kick at the fallen man. The cops turned on the bystander and clubbed him, too. The crowd scattered. A moment later, Rudi was able to drive on, past the bleeding, unconscious figure of the Punjabi, who still lay in the street.

They passed an alleyway where Jane glimpsed smoke from cooking fires as women crouched on the stone paving and prepared meager meals of curry. A sense of alien hostility swept from the crowd like a tidal wave around the bright car, thick-throated with resentment at Western affluence. A dirty hand suddenly reached in and snatched at Jane’s earring, and she ducked her head in frantic panic, turning to Rudi with a low gasp.

“What are we doing here? Why are we in this place?”

“It is all right, liebchen, my darling,” he said quietly. “Do not be alarmed. You have not seen this quarter before. It is interesting.”

“Rudi, take me back. I only wanted to talk to you.”

“In a little while.”

“It’s getting dark and I want to go back now.”

He turned his head as he stopped the car to permit a camel cart to cross ahead of them. His eyes were pale and vacant.

The pungency of dung fires stung her eyes, and she blinked at her tears.

“Jane, you arranged a pretty little trap for me, did you not?”

“A trap?”

“You know we have been followed,” he said.

“That’s nonsense. By whom?”

“The police, I supposed. By Durell.”

She looked back. The teeming humanity had closed in across the street like displaced water surging back to its natural level.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“We lost them. But I am disappointed in you,” Rudi said. “To trap me like this, Jane, is most unworthy.”

“Rudi, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are we here?”

“I have a business appointment,” he said shortly. “It will not take long. Some equipment we may need on S-5. Do not be so alarmed.”

He had turned the Ferrari into an alley between high, yellow-stained buildings that looked like warehouses. It was dark and hot here, like an oven, the buildings radiating back into her face the heat of the day. She hated the feeling of sweat that came out all over her, and yet she shivered with an inner chill. Rudi stopped the car and got out. They were in a kind of cul-de-sac, and from the sudden reverberating echoes of a freighter’s horn, she knew they were very close to the wharves on the Indus waterfront. She looked back again. Nothing was behind them. But she didn’t like the peculiar emptiness of this tenement alley where Rudi had parked. The windows, up there behind their small balconies, looked lifeless. Ahead was a concrete wall with a blue-painted door in it.

“I will be right back,” Rudi said. “You must stay here, Jane.”

“Please, Rudi, I want to go with you.”

“I will only be gone a moment.”

He walked away, going through the doorway ahead, and she was alone.

The heat seared her lungs. The freighter hooted again, as if it were just on the other side of the yellow warehouse on her right. She got out of the car, squeezing between the fender and the building’s wall. There was not much more room on the other side. She wondered if she ought to follow

Rudi. Why was it so quiet here? Back in the other street, at least, there had been busy, swarming people, sweaty and dirty and noisy. But it was so lonely here, she thought. Such a peculiar place.

She had gained nothing with Rudi. He would not help her. And he would not let her talk to Sarah. She saw it had been a foolish threat to make. But why had he said they were being followed? Maybe it was a good thing. But her momentary reassurance quickly vanished. She turned to the door in the wall, then turned again and started walking to the alley entrance.

Her heart lurched and pounded suddenly. Two men had come into the alley from the street beyond. They were young Chinese, and their appearance was incongruous. They wore blue denims and sneakers and one wore a white baseball shirt with YANKEES printed on it. The other wore a gaudy Hawaiian type sport shirt, the tails hanging out around his belt. They moved swiftly and decisively toward her in the evening gloom of the alley.

She choked down a silent scream. After all, Rudi had brought her here. It would be all right.

The two Chinese came toward her, walking on their toes. One said, “Oh, babe.” The other said, “This is too bad, Miss Standish.”

“I’m not Miss Standish,” Jane said quickly.

“Sure, honey, you’re nobody.”

They crowded close to her as she shrank against the wall, and then she saw the first Chinese boy’s eyes widen suddenly, unnaturally, and he made a quick movement and she felt something go into her belly and rip upward, with a hissing sound of cut flesh. A shattering scream tore out of her lungs and throat, like the sound of a slaughtered animal. She screamed again and then the Chinese boy pulled the knife out of her and she saw the blade, half shining, glistening with her blood, for just an instant as it flashed before her eyes. Then it came across her throat in a quick, expert movement and she felt herself falling, aware of no pain, aware of a darkness and warmth enveloping her and thinking dimly of Momma and Poppa in Gardens Falls, Indiana, before she died. . . .

Everything was quiet in the alley. The second Chinese, who had only watched, turned and trotted away. Rudi came out of the door nearby. He was wiping his hands on his handker-

chief. He did not look at the crumpled body of Jane King in the dirty alley.

“It is done,” the Chinese boy said. He was the one in the baseball shirt. “You pay me now.”

“Why not?” Rudi said.

He took a gun from his pocket and shot the Chinese boy in the head. The single report was enormous, echoing back and forth between the yellow warehouse walls. The Chinese fell across Jane King’s sprawled legs.

Rudi hesitated, staring up at the sky for a speculative moment, weighing the gun in his hand. Then he brought his arm up with a sharp, smashing gesture and struck himself once, twice, a third time across the face and forehead. He went down on hands and knees with blood spilling down his face, blinding him, and he remained like that, shaking his head, watching the drops spatter in the filth of the alley, and he did not look up as he heard Durell and Colonel K’Ayub run toward him at last. . . .

The nearest police station was in a dark blue cinder-block building near the Johnston-May Oil, Ltd. wharves. Inside, where a Sikh sergeant sat behind a new metal desk, there were several uniformed police at work in a long, wide room with barred windows that gave a view of the river traffic. A fat, bald Frenchman was arguing with the Sikh sergeant, and a naked man, except for a dirty loin cloth, was being dragged by two big policemen into a back room. An air-conditioner wheezed in the windows, but across the room another window was wide open, letting in the hot stench of the waterfront. Fishing boats, Arab dhows, and a tanker moved in the fairway. Lights blinked on the ships and busy docks.

The station smelled like all police stations the world over, Durell thought. It carried in its walls the stench of urine and vomit and blood, and above all, the smell of human fear and pain.

The doctor was a gaunt Englishman, yellow with years of malarial bouts. Rudi sat in a chair while the doctor tended to his cut face. Durell and K’Ayub stood against the opposite wall, watching the patient who was bathed in hot light from a tin-shaded lamp over the chair. At the door was Sergeant Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan servant, big and tough and light on his feet, like most mountain people.

“Could these wounds be self-inflicted?” Durell asked.

The English doctor waved a bloody swab. “My dear man, it would take a great deal of courage. This eye could have been badly injured.”

“But it isn’t.”

“Fortunately for Herr von Buhlen, no.”

Rudi’s mouth was puffy, and the eye the doctor referred to was partly closed by swelling. There was a gash above it that needed stitches.

“Tell us again why you took the girl to Aswali Alley,” K’Ayub said harshly.

Rudi shrugged. “I was lost, as I said. We were heading for the golf course—for dinner, a few drinks. Jane wanted to see the waterfront slums. I made a wrong turn and found myself in that dead-end spot and before I could back out; the Chinese boy jumped her.”

“For no reason?”

“He had a reason, I suppose.”

Durell lit a cigarette. “What do you suggest it was?” Rudi winced as the doctor began stitching above his eye. “He thought she was Sarah Standish. I don’t know how to express my shock. It was a terrible mistake, to impose the deception on Jane. It led to her death.”

“The Chinese boy addressed her as Miss Standish?”

“Yes. And then he knifed her. He was terribly fast.” “And then you shot him?”

“Yes. I was shocked, but after all—”

K’Ayub said quietly, “But you knew we were following you, did you not, Herr von Buhlen?”

“No, I did not.” Rudi’s voice was angry for a moment. “Why should I think anyone would follow me?”

“You knew we were looking for Jane King.”

“No, I didn’t know that, either. I was upstairs when Mr. Durell came to the bungalow. I haven’t met him before—not until you gentlemen found me in that alley.”

“Yet you took evasive tactics in your drive that caused us to lose you and drop far behind. We only found you because of the distinctive car you drove. It attracted some attention.”

Rudi spread his hands. “Well, there you are. If I were trying to lure Jane secretly to that place, would I advertise my route by hiring that Ferrari?”

“You might,” Durell said.

Durell looked tall and angry. He had seen the butchery on Jane King, and the ugly image lingered in his mind. It was one thing, when you were in the business and knew the risks and balanced your training and reflexes against the wiles of the enemy. It was another to be a bewildered and helpless Jane King, accustomed to the sane and orderly world above the surface of Durell’s. He resented her death. It was unnecessary. And it had been brutally cruel. He was not satisfied with Rudi’s explanation that Jane had been mistaken for Sarah Standish. Possibly it was the truth—but not all of the truth, he thought.

He tried to be objective about Rudi. There are men you meet whom you dislike instinctively, as two male animals in a jungle will at once be charged with mutual enmity. The feeling was there between himself and the blond man. Rudi knew it. They both understood it the first time their eyes met. There was a smell of conflict between them that might only be resolved by violence. Yet nothing but a few polite questions and replies had been exchanged.

The Sikh sergeant came in and whispered something to K’Ayub, who gestured to his Pathan servant. Zalmadar went out with the Sikh.

K’Ayub said, “Herr von Buhlen, you were a friend of Miss King’s, were you not?”

“Not exactly a friend.”

“More, perhaps?”

“Once. Not any longer.”

“You were once lovers, is that it?”

Rudi nodded readily. “True.”

“But today your love had turned to hate, it had ended in jealousy, in a threat perhaps by Miss King to tell Miss Standish of your affair with her?”

Rudi did not look surprised. He paused for only a moment. “She was pregnant,” he said. “I suppose your doctor just reported that. Please don’t play clever games with me, Colonel. You and I may be together for some weeks, starting tomorrow. We may need each other. So I admit it, man to man, and trust you will understand. Jane King thought I should be named as the father of her unborn child.”

“And were you the father?”

“I couldn’t say. There may have been other men. I don’t know of any, frankly, but with a girl like Jane—” Rudi paused. “She wanted to discuss her predicament. We were going to have dinner and talk about it. I had no idea you were looking for her. She telephoned the house while you were there, Durell, and I went out to meet her and we got lost.

When she saw the native streets, she wanted to go farther. But I guess we were followed all the time. Not just by you. But by the Chinese killers.”

“We did not see them,” K’Ayub said. He looked angry. There was a small silence while the English doctor asked Rudi to hold still and then snipped off the end of the sutures and applied a square of gauze and tape to his wound. Rudi pushed his long hair back from his yellow and bruised face, straightened his necktie, shrugged into his coat. The Englishman offered him some brandy. Rudi said, “Bitte,” and gulped it down.

“Am I under arrest now?” he asked quietly. “Perhaps my story seems strange to you, but I’ve told you all I know about how it happened. Jane was mistaken for Sarah Standish. It was my fault—our getting lost, I mean—but I think it would have happened, anyway. The miracle is that it didn’t happen earlier, when she was wandering around alone.”

“Yes,” K’Ayub said.

Rudi looked worried. “Will your report on Jane’s condition be kept confidential? I’m naturally concerned about its effect on Miss Standish if she learns what I’ve confessed to you gentlemen—”

“It will not be necessary to publish this fact.” K’Ayub looked at Durell. “Nor is it necessary for any of us to remain here.”

He nodded for Durell to follow him into the outer room. K’Ayub was a strong man here, with power and influence, and his soft body and face were deceiving. The Pakistani minced no words.

“Durell, do you think he killed Jane King?”

“I think he arranged it,” Durell said.

“And his wounds are self-inflicted?”

“They’ll heal,” Durell said. “But Jane is dead. Will you hold him on a murder charge?”

“We are a new nation,” K’Ayub said thinly, “but we respect law and order. Murder is the same the world over. An investigation is required. Technically, all of you could be detained for inquiry. But our problem is awkward. Miss Standish has leased a plane from a local airline. When one need not count money, luxuries and comforts are automatic, eh? Our problem is that, if we hold Rudi von Buhlen in Karachi for the courts, or on any pretext, we may not merely delay the expedition to S-5, but Miss Standish may call the whole thing off. This might be deplored by my government, but it would end its interest in the affair. I happen to be in opposition to certain governmental factions that resist exploratory progress. We may gain nothing in the end, anyway. If Rudi is an enemy and has further plans, we would give him a little rope, you agree? And if we proceed, pending a further inquiry, he will be in a sense in our custody.”

“I understand,” Durell said.

“You and I can take care of Rudi when the times comes,” K’Ayub said, smiling thinly.

“Let’s hope so,” Durell said.

chapter seven

THEY flew from Rawalpindi an hour after dawn, through a sky already a molten yellow, swinging wide over the many mouths of the sluggish, muddy Indus. The sun flared brilliantly over the sand hills and the winding black road that followed the river north through the desert of the Sind. For a hundred miles, the scene was one of severe desolation, erosion, and emptiness.

The DC-3 had been hastily converted, with comfortable seats, a kitchen, and staffed with two turbaned Bengali servants who served tea and rolls and omelets when they were aloft. Constraint persisted among the passengers since Durell had brought back the news of Jane’s death. Sarah looked as if she had not slept at all, and she had changed her usual glasses for a pair with large green sun lenses that hid her eyes. She sat alone at take-off, and then Rudi came back from the pilot’s compartment and kissed her lightly. She murmured something in apparent annoyance. Her face was pale. He whispered again and she shook her head and then he spoke more urgently and she sighed and got up and went forward with him. The Pakistani co-pilot came back and took a seat in the rear and promptly fell asleep.

Colonel Lathri K’Ayub kept himself busy with a small knee desk on his lap, absorbed in correspondence. A busy man, Durell thought and a growing power in this dynamic Moslem country—the sort of military man with education and ambition who often entered politics, usually with a military coup, and helped to rule the new nation.

There had been radio reports of trouble on the closed Afghan border, but nothing had come through on the news program of Jane King’s death. It had been kept off the air and out of the newspapers, thanks to K’Ayub’s influence.

Durell noted that Alessa had not spoken to her brother Rudi at all. She sat at a window with the harsh sunlight glancing off the wing and reflecting in her oval face. Her pale hair, cut like a boy’s, made her look youthful and denied her scholastic air. She wore a white silk blouse, cut low, and when Durell stood beside her and asked if he might sit with her, he saw the smooth, taut swell of her breasts under the silk. Her smile was mechanical. She touched her blue skirt and nodded.

“Please do. I am most unhappy. I am not a superstitious person, and yet I feel we begin under a bad omen.”

“Jane’s death may only have been an unhappy coincidence,” he suggested, sitting in the chair beside her.

Her eyes were solemn. “Do you believe that?”

“There’s no point in jumping to conclusions.”

“You do not strike me as a cautious man,” she said. “Nor much of a diplomat, either. I was very fond of Jane.” “So was Sarah, and your brother. Perhaps it will all be explained, one day.”

“Maybe it will be best if we never find the answer,” Alessa murmured.

“It must be found, though. I mean to find it.” He paused. “Why wouldn’t you want to know? Are you afraid of the truth?”

“Perhaps it would serve no purpose,” she said.

“Still, murder must be punished.”

She turned away then, and pointed downward at the brown, seared landscape to change the subject. “There are the ruins of Mohaghadoro. Do you know about them?” There was a short, dusty airstrip inland from the Indus, a few nondescript mounds of mud brick ruins that seemed insignificant from the thousand-foot elevation. Alessa spoke animatedly, engrossed in her special knowledge, pointing to the ruins of a Buddhist temple in what had been a flourishing city in 2500 B.C., a community of pillared halls, public baths, granaries and watchtowers. Durell saw small rice fields, groves of tamarisk and babul trees that looked dusty silver in the morning light. Laboring bullocks and men in turbans and loin cloths looked infinitely small as the plane bore north through the brazen sky.

Alessa talked on about the Mohaghadoro artificats—gold, silver and alabaster jewels, tall vases and tools of copper and bronze. Her face grew absorbed as she talked of Indra, the war god of the Aryans who fought the local “barbarians” who built the walled cities, discussing the word pur in Sanskrit that meant a fort, and how the Rig-Veda described Indra’s destruction of ninety of these walled cities of the Indus valley.

The land lifted steadily for the eight-hundred mile flight to Lahore, capital of Punjab. The waste of the Arabia Sind was left behind. By noon the lush garden city came i sight on the banks of the Ravi. Sarah had remained wit Rudi in the pilot’s compartment all morning. Lahoi looked like a green jewel of wide streets, emerald pari with cricket fields, stately Victorian buildings from the British reign, and the terraces and canals of the fabulous Shalimar Gardens. The tomb of Mohammed Iqbal loomed in red sandstone amid golden domes and spires, minarets and pavilions and cypress trees.

They landed for fuel and lunch, and a visiting delegation of Pakistani and American officials greeted them, seeking out Sarah and murmuring polite offers of assistance. Durell ate lunch with Alessa until a messenger came up to them and he got up to call Donegan, back in Karachi.

Donegan’s voice was thin and crackly over the Ion; distance wire of the airport telephone.

“Nothing here, Sam. We’re sitting tight on everything. Had to cable home to the King girl’s parents, of course,. and that will break in the local Stateside newspapers; but can’t be helped.”

“Any word on the Chinese boy who got away?”

“It’s like hunting a needle in a haystack. The local cops are still pushing at it, checking the waterfront and the Chinese colony. But there are a few hundred thousand people jammed into a single square mile, like a rabbit warren. Nothing has turned up yet. Is Miss Standish all right?” “Yes,” Durell said.

Donegan hesitated. “I’m damned sorry about it all, Sam."

“So am I,” Durell said.

The flight from Lahore to Rawalpindi was one hundred and fifty miles, and the land lifted up an additional thousand feet of rough ravines and rock plateaus. The desert of the Sind had long yielded to fields of corn, cotton, melons and rice. Rawalpindi was the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, the largest military station in the country. Now, far to the north, the hazy buttresses and peaks of the Gilgit range and Northwest Frontier country, where the Muree hill station was located, loomed like a mirage against the shimmering sunlight.

There was another reception at the airstrip for Sarah and she responded with gracious restraint to the uniforme men who greeted her. Rudi remained at her side. An air conditioned limousine took them through the city, around the Liaqat Gardens with its bandstand and wide lawn and stately trees. From noon to four in the afternoon, the city’s business was halted by the heat. Shops closed, fields emptied of workers, bullocks were unhitched from their two-wheeled carts and tied to trees. From the speeding car, Durell noted women washing clothes in irrigation ditches, while the men slept in the shade of banyan trees, using their turbans as pillows.

A representative of the Pakistan-American Society, the USIS, and Embassy officials occupied Sarah Standish at the big bungalow when they arrived. Little attention was paid to Durell or Alessa. Colonel K’Ayub’s picked squad of mountain troopers were already on guard at the walled grounds that Sarah had leased from a retired British brigadier who had gone home to England for the summer. Alessa, uncomfortable with the reception in the big house, touched Durell’s arm.

“I must find Hans and check our supplies. Will you come with me?”

“Let’s find him.” Durell was glad to escape. He was dubious about the newsmen waiting to interview Sarah, and decided she was safe enough for the moment. He had noticed the big mountain guide, Hans Steicher, hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, but now the man had disappeared.

Alessa took his arm. The bungalow was big and rambling, built among a grove of peepul trees, with spacious lawns and a walled garden. Some ruins of an ancient temple abutted the south wall of the garden, overgrown with dark vines and wild shrubs. A series of go-downs provided quarters for the Britisher’s servants. Bougainvillaea blazed on the walls of the main house, dripping in waterfalls of color from the wide eaves. K’Ayub’s men were discreetly out of sight now.

Durell walked with Alessa down a shaded path to a warehouse in the back. The area was quiet and suburban, a relic of British rule when Pakistan and India were one, and not in bloody strife, accented by Hindu and Moslem rivalry. The warehouse had a corrugated tin roof, its rust covered by more bougainvillaea over the wide, open doors.

Alessa halted, her arm in Durell’s. He was acutely aware of her physically, aware of a kind of inevitable attraction in their relationship that couldn’t be denied. Her eyes were troubled.

“Sam, may I speak frankly with you? I wish I knew what you were thinking, but—I want to trust you, and 1 may need your help. You don’t believe in the crown of Alexander at all, do you?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters terribly to me. It’s so important that I’m willing to overlook almost anything.”

“Meaning Rudi and Jane?”

“Perhaps. I—he’s my brother, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but—I don’t want anything to happer between you and Rudi. Please say that you will help me."

“I can’t promise anything.”

She hesitated. “Do you think Rudi killed her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose you will do what must be done. I know Rudi has made mistakes, but I can’t believe this of him. I don’t want you to believe it, either. Will you at least reserve judgment? I don’t want anything to happen to Rudi—or to you, either.”

She turned impulsively in the shadows by the corrugated tin warehouse and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, moving her body against him. Her lips were astonishingly soft and yielding. She was naive, he thought, to try to buy his good will this way. Yet the excitement existed between them, and he kissed her hard. She seemed surprised, started to draw away then yielded, her body suddenly alive and demanding. Scratch a Ph.D, he thought wryly, and you might find— anything.

Hans Steicher chose that moment to come out of the warehouse behind them. His thick grunt of surprise made Alessa pull free sharply, and something like dismay touched her eyes.

“Oh, Hans—”

“Alessa,” the big man said heavily. He kept his eyes on Durell. “Who is this man?”

She stumbled over the introductions. Hans Steicher was a giant with a face like a slab of stone, with thick dark hair close-cropped, a torso stripped to the waist, gleaming with sweat and rippling with enormous muscles. He wore sandal and a pair of oil-stained khaki shorts—it was hot inside the tin-roofed shed—and his body bore scars that could have come from accidents or wounds. His throat was flushed and angry red as he regarded Durell. He did not offer one of his huge hands to acknowledge Alessa’s fumbling introduction.

“I have been checking equipment,” he said without expression. He moved his head slightly to indicate the crowded bungalow. “I do not like public receptions. And there is much work to do. The two trucks and jeeps are ready, everything is packed; but one more case is due from Linz on this evening’s plane. I think we will be ready to leave tomorrow morning—if the others are.” Hans’ German was strongly tinged with a Tyrolean accent. He said to Alessa, still staring at Durell, “This man is the American agent for the nickel company.”

“Yes,” Durell said, surprising the man with his German. “Do you think I’m wasting my time?”

“Perhaps. But I am only paid to guide you back to S-5.” “You’re not afraid to return there?” Durell asked deliberately.

The huge man looked at him coldly. “It will be dangerous. It is a troubled land, too close to the border between the Chinese and the Afghans. But I am not afraid of anything.” Hans turned back to Alessa, towering over her. In his eyes was a look of dumb, dog-like devotion. “I am sorry if I intruded, Alessa.”

“Please, Hans, I have told you many times, you and I are only good friends—”

“I understand. But this American is more than a friend?” “Of course not.”

“You give your kisses cheaply, then.”

Alessa flushed. She started to reply, then shrugged and touched the big man’s bulging arms. “I am sorry you think so, Hans.”

Steicher looked at Durell. “You will not touch the fraulein again, please. Is it understood?”

Now Alessa looked angry. “Hans, I told you years ago that you cannot act as a watchdog over every man who is with me. I will not tolerate it! You cannot run my life for me, Hans. I will not permit it.”

“I am sorry, Alessa.”

She drew a deep breath. “We must all co-operate. We have a difficult time ahead, and we can do without foolish quarrels between ourselves. Is that clear?”

The big man nodded, but Durell saw nothing change in his blank, slab-like face. They went into the shed together to check the vehicles and the cases of mountain-climbing equipment.

At six o’clock, Durell borrowed one of the cars available to the party, choosing a small Morris, unlikely to attract attention, and drove into the city. Rawalpindi, at a much higher elevation that Karachi, had numerous stone government buildings dating back to the Victorian ’80’s, and wide modern tree-shaded streets. The military were in evidence everywhere, wearing smart Sam Browne belts and polished boots. Durell had showered and changed into a white line suit and shirt and a dark knitted necktie. A few European and tourists were in sight, beginning to awaken from the mid-afternoon lethargy of enervating heat. The shops were open again.

He turned away from the Liaqat Gardens into a twisting maze of crowded streets, like driving through a veil into past centuries. Punjabis, Sikhs, Pathans and Shinwaris with fierce knives in their belts mingled with aesthetic-looking Hindus and proud Arabs in the flowing white robes called kefeyahs. Smoke redolent of kerosene, spices and garbage accented the hubbub of languages, of which Urdu dominated.

The way ahead was blocked when he turned right toward the Gijhandra Bazaar. A crowd had gathered threatening at the corner, surrounding a man in a dirty white turban and robe. Durell had to stop the car. Before he could reverse to find another route, the mob suddenly set upon the cornered man with fists and stones, screaming as if on sudden signal. A Pakistani infantry lieutenant went running past, his club merciless on the heads of the mob. Durell started out of the car, then decided to remain where he was. He saw the lieutenant reach the fallen man and crouch over him and shout at the nearest people. They shrank away from him. The lieutenant picked up the man’s naked foot and dragged him over the refuse on the sidewalk and hurled him against the wall of the house. The man’s bald shaven head lolled in unmistakable death. As abruptly the mob had exploded, it was quiet again. The lieutenant saw Durell in the car and walked over to him.

“Your pardon, sir.” He spoke meticulous English. “Did you see what happened?”

“Not exactly. Is the man dead?”

Yes. He was a thief, they say. He stole six rupees from Mohammed Jangahar, the copper merchant.”

“Six rupees?” Durell said. “It’s not much.”

“It is a great deal to Jangahar. Excuse me, I must get a cart to take the body away.”

The dead man lay like a heap of dirty white rags against the wall of the building on the sidewalk. A skinny, skeletal yellow dog sniffed curiously at the corpse’s dirty feet. Nobody else paid any further attention. The incident was over. A man had died, but in the teeming millions, the death of one meant an infinitesimal increase in space for the others.

Swerji Hamad Isquital was a fat, complacent man who had three wives and countless children and grandchildren, all of whom he seemed to forget from time to time in the operation of his business, which was twofold. He ran a teahouse near the Gijhandra Bazaar, with several large brass Russian samovars constantly boiling. His clientele consisted of touchy, giant Pathans, fakirs traveling as holy men, bearded Sikhs in tightly bound turbans, Arabs, Shinwaris and Turkmen. The street outside Swerji’s pavilion swarmed with coppersmith, potters, tobacco venders, prostitutes in black with low veils to show their trademarks in rouge, sellers of live birds, palmists, huckster’s vending cold drinks and candy, thieves, beggars and murderers.

Swerji Hamad’s tea shop in the Gijhandra Bazaar was well known to K Section’s headquarters at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington. The fat man was not trusted. His only interest in peddling information was the money he was paid for what he knew. He was known to have passed military data to the Indian government, told the Pakistanis of Afghan plans, reported Chinese troop movements in Tibet. He was useful to every side, since his information was always correct, and hence he remained alive.

Durell had been here once, years ago, but he had no doubt that Swerji Hamad would recognize him again. The fat man never forgot a face, it was said. And he always had information—for a price. Durell was in the market and he had the five thousand dollars he had signed for in Henry Kallinger’s office in Istanbul.

He went in and found a table among the babbling press of customers who smelled of everything under the sun, and each of whom displayed his unique racial traits. Aside from a few curious glances, he attracted little attention. He ordered tea from a Punjabi waiter in dirty shalwars, watched a mullah go by, chanting to himself, wearing the dark green turban that indicated he had made the holy Hadj to Mecca. He waited.

It did not take long.

A small dark-skinned Arab boy with over-long hair and the face and eyes of a girl came to his table and spoke in Urdu. “Isquital sahib wishes the honor of a word with you, sir.”

“Where?”

“In his office, sir. Please follow me.”

Swerji Hamad sat in a heavily cushioned Victorian rocking chair behind a roll-top desk of equal vintage. A half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola served as a paperweight for the papers on the desk being stirred in the draft of a slow-turning, whining electric fan. His round brown face beamed at Durell. Swerji did not speak English. He spoke French, several Pathan dialects, and Urdu. He preferred French. “Ah, M’sieu Durell! Please be at home, yes?”

“It is a pleasure to accept your hospitality, Swerji. You are well?”

“As fat as ever. I suffer from asthma now. And I have a new wife.”

“And your children?”

“They eat me alive. One cannot earn enough money to raise a family decently these days. It is good to see you in our city again, m’sieu. It is good of you to patronize my teashop.”

“I thought I might buy something, being in town,” Durell said.

“Of course.”

“That is, if you have anything to sell.”

“Swerji Hamad has all sorts of merchandise for sale. Of course, some of it is expensive.”

“The price should depend on the quality,” Durell said.

“Ah, but your country is so very rich!” The fat man’s brown eyes were naive, hurt. “Everyone knows that America gives money away so freely, everywhere, to friend and foe alike.”

“And which are you, Swerji Hamad?”

The fat man laughed softly, his belly shaking; he sucked at his bottle of Coke. “I am a friend—of Isquital, yes? I have been expecting you—or one of your distinguished associates. I am quite prepared to offer something quite important, I believe.”

“I want some facts about Herr Ernst Bergmann, the geologist, who disappeared here in Rawalpindi about a month ago,” Durell said.

“Naturally. One expected this, too.” Swerji giggled, then stopped and said solemnly, “And you wish to know nothing about Red Oboe?”

Durell waited just a moment too long to reach for a cigarette and light it. His lean face was impassive. But he swore softly against the shrewdness of Swerji Hamad, knowing that the fat man had not missed the jolt of surprise his words had caused him.

“I’d like whatever you have on Red Oboe, naturally,” he said quietly.

“Ah, you are a man to do business with! You know of this man, then?”

“I have heard of him. Is he in ’Pindi?”

“So it is said.”

“By whom?”

“Rumor-mongers, whores, beggars, respected merchants.” Red Oboe. Durell thought, was only a name in the classification files of K Section’s cabinets. Except for the name, the card was blank, empty of specific data. But there were stories enough, and none of them were pleasant, he thought grimly.

The name had cropped up six years ago, in connection with the theft of some Nike missile data from an Italian-site NATO base. A girl had been involved, the daughter of a Roman baronial family named Ispiglia—a very young girl, in her late teens. She had been found brutally beaten, her face disfigured, her skull cracked. She died whispering her love for a man, unable to describe him except in romantic and idealistic terms. He was called Red Oboe. She had gotten data for him from her brother, an Italian Wing Commander being trained in Nike missile handling. She died before she could say much more.

Red Oboe cropped up as a free-lance peddler of international secrets a few more times. Smuggling arms to the Algerian rebels, setting an explosion in an Oran cafe that killed eighteen people and a French general, selling oil prospecting data in Moroccan interests backed by the Czechs. Involved with Lumumbists in the Congo; selling the Dutch information on Indonesian plans to take over the disputed East Indies territories on Papua. Organizing an underground safe line for East Germans to the West; and by the same token, intercepting and betraying certain important technicians wanted by the East who were induced to use the safe line.

The only fixed pattern of behavior in Red Oboe’s dossier was money and women. There were always women involved. And they always seemed to come out the worse for wear—some of them dead, some maimed.

K Section wanted to fill in their file card and a jail cell with Red Oboe’s mysterious person. But no agent of K Section had ever been directly involved with Red Oboe until the case had ended.

Durell considered Swerji Hamad’s round, bland face.

“Did Red Oboe have anything to do with Bergmann?” he asked.

But the fat teahouse proprietor seemed suddenly to have fallen asleep, pudgy hands folded over his vast belly, like a smiling Buddha. He spoke with his eyes closed. “It will cost you two thousand dollars, American currency, in cash.”

“It may be worth five hundred,” Durell bargained. Bargaining was expected of him. The value of Swerji’s information might depend on it. “That’s the top price these days.” “Two thousand,” Swerji repeated. “I am oppressed by many creditors. A Bengali merchant who deals in cotton swindled me out of a consignment I took on speculation—” “What do you know about Red Oboe?”

“Nothing—yet. I may know something later.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“All right. And Ernst Bergmann?”

“They say the old Austrian gentleman is still alive.” “Here, in ’Pindi?”

“It is what they say.”

“Where?”

“It will cost some money to find out. I will need two thousand American dollars, in currency, plus cost of expenses—”

“One thousand, and no expenses.”

Swerji Hamad sighed painfully. “I am glad that all Americans are not like you, M’sieu Durell.”

The fat man went off on another tack. He discussed the difficulties of the closed border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the increasing obstacles to smuggling and bribing border guards, the Soviet offer of shipping and communication facilities to Kabul to replace those cut by Pakistan recently. There was the never-ending problem of Kashmir, desired by both India and Pakistan, and the explosive tensions between the Hindu and Moslem populations. It was difficult to do business in such unsettled times. Most dangerous. However, one had to live, somehow. Every rupee, every anna, was snatched away by the growing demands of wives and family, the high cost of living, the increasing prices of merchandise.

“All right,” Durell said. “One thousand and expenses—a limit of fifteen hundred.”

Swerji Hamad opened his muddy brown eyes and smiled. “You have cash, of course?”

“American dollars.”

“See me tomorrow, then. Before your party leaves for the hills.” He paused. “Some laugh about the expedition to S-5 and say it is foolish to believe in such a thing as a jeweled crown once belonging to Alexander the Great. Others say it is possible. You are not a man who chases fables, however. You have other goals, eh?”

“Such as?”

Swerji Hamad smiled again. “Otherwise, why do you seek an old man, a geologist, named Ernst Bergmann?”

Durell matched the fat man’s smile. Tea was brought in, and cakes. They discussed Swerji’s family and business problems. Eventually, Durell returned to the subject of the Red Oboe.

“You have heard of the shadow system, Swerji Hamad? Where a free-lance operative such as Red Oboe has a silent partner, so to speak?”

Swerji looked blank. “I am sorry. I am ignorant of this.”

“The free lance must have his contacts to pass on his information, just as the thief needs a fence. Usually, in the shadow system, the professional is unknown to the amateur except as a number, a contact covered in different forms. There must be such a man for Red Oboe, here in Pindi. But you have heard nothing?”

“There are many professional spies in ’Pindi, M’sieu Durell.” Swerji sighed. “I can see you look beyond Red Oboe already. But I cannot help you in this matter.” Durell went out into the pavilion and ate another sweet

roll and had another cup of tea and wondered a little more about Swerji’s references to the Red Oboe. All the file data concerning the name referred to Europe. There was nothing to indicate operations in this part of the world. But that didn’t necessarily mean the man and his shadow couldn’t be here.

He watched the street and suddenly saw Rudi von Buhlen walking alone through the noisy, colorful crowd.

By the time he paid for his tea and rolls, the Austrian had turned the far corner and vanished. Durell pushed quickly after him, saw his Morris parked nearby, and turned toward it.

Every tire had been carefully slashed and flattened.

He walked away to the corner, searching for the blond man’s head above the crowd of bazaar merchants, beggars, Sikhs, Punjabis and Arabs.

But Rudi had disappeared.

chapter eight

RUDI turned left down the alley, counted off four doors in the leaning stone buildings, squeezed past a camel driver, a candy peddler, a beggar sprawled naked in the gutter, and avoided a huge Pathan to come to the fifth door. He opened it, went down an evil-smelling, dark corridor, opened a back door, and turned left again into a narrow lane. Naked children squirmed and screamed and played in the dust. He came out into another street too narrow for vehicular traffic, but crowded with a camel caravan squeezing between the back fences of bazaar shops. He avoided the long, wicked teeth of the beasts, answered a greeting from one of the scrawny drivers, and turned at last into another doorway that led into a small, walled yard. In the center of the yard was a small, eroded Buddha statue holding a lotus blossom in his stone lap.

So far the instructions were precise and accurate. He had found them in a small, folded wedge of paper in his coat pocket, only an hour ago, and he could not begin to guess who had put the paper there; Sarah’s bungalow had been so crowded with visitors and dignitaries during the late afternoon reception, it was impossible to pick anyone out.

A young Chinese boy was squatting beside the Buddha image paring his fingernails. He wore a baseball cap and blue denims and sneakers. He looked up at Rudi and said, “Hi, daddio,” in English.

“Are you Lim?” Rudi asked coldly.

“Welcome to the home pad. Glad you made it.”

“Take me to your father, please.”

“Right.”

The boy was insolent, Rudi thought, with his patter of beat English, his black eyes amused. Rudi followed him through small and gloomy back rooms, redolent with the smells of hides and baled spices and bins of tea. He knew that the front of the building was a Chinese restaurant of sorts, flophouses of the Pakistani variety. You could buy anything from Kou Li, Lim’s father, from betel nuts to European call girls, from hashish to smiling boys with make-up to enlarge and brighten their eyes.

Kou Li wore a Western seersucker suit and a tiny white beard; he looked gentle, smiling, obsequious. He stood up quickly from behind a long table and bowed.

“Ah. We have waited long for this honor. You will come with us, please?”

“Is he still alive?” Rudi asked shortly.

“Yes. An old devil, very stubborn. We could have made him talk, but his heart is very bad now. I had expenses for a doctor to give him adrenalin, twice.”

“You will be paid.”

“Further questions had to be postponed. We did not want him to die before you could see him. But force is out of the question. He is very frail now.”

“I haven’t much time,” Rudi said bluntly. “But I can make him talk, if anyone can.”

“Lim?” The old Chinese signaled to the boy in the baseball cap. “You know the way.”

Lim took a flashlight    from a    hook     on the wall     and went ahead, down a flight of cellar stairs and along a weaving path between unidentifiable boxes and bales of merchandise. A door in the cellar led to a brick-walled tunnel that turned sharply right, and opened into a narrow room furnished with only a plank table and long benches. Beyond was another room, then more steps into another brick tunnel. Rudi began to feel apprehensive, not knowing where he might be taken. Lim’s flashlight bobbed ahead, steadied on a thick wooden door that was bolted and locked. Lim unlocked it and stepped inside.

“You want the light, daddio?”

“If you please.”

Lim grinned. “Glad to meet you. Pops talked a lot about you. It’s a big deal, eh?”

“You talk too much,” Rudi said.

“I’m real Americanized. Spent five years in San Francisco with a cousin. Old Gramps sent me there to cover for some' body he wanted to get out of the States. I liked it there.”

Rudi stepped into the cell. He could see nothing in the darkness, except for what the flashlight showed him. Then were stone walls, filth on the floor, an odor of sickness and sweat and torture. Somebody breathed in quick, short gasps from from failing lungs. He turned the light into a corner and saw the living skeleton there feebly flail with a pipe-stem arm against the torment of the bright flash. He flicked the lamp aside.

“Uncle Ernst?” he said softly.

“What?” the prisoner gasped. “What?”

Rudi spoke in the soft German of the Tyrol. “It is I, Uncle Ernst. Rudi von Buhlen.”

“Impossible—”

“Yes, it is I. It was difficult to find you—when Alessa cabled about your disappearance. But I came as soon as I could.”

In the reflected light, the man in the cell struggled to press himself back into the filthy comer. The air stank. Rudi pinched his nostrils and did not move, not wanting to walk in the squelching filth any more than necessary.

Ernst Bergmann looked like a survivor of Auschwitz, he thought coldly. His white suit had long been blackened and tattered and fouled with food and blood and excrement. Rudi remembered the geologist as a stout, cheerful man in his fifties, with thick gray hair. What hair was left on the round head was white, in thin falling strands. The face was gaunt and haggard, almost beyond recognition.

Bergmann extended a shaking, claw-like hand. “You have come to take me out of here, Rudi? It is truly you? Your voice—”

“Yes.”

“You do not lie. It is not a trick?”

“No trick, Uncle Ernst.”

“Why did Kou Li let you in? Is he a friend of yours?” The old man’s mind was still sharp enough, Rudi thought dourly. “Do you work for Kou Li, Rudi?”

“No. It is just that I have—certain influence.”

The old man’s voice strengthened. “Yes. Influence. Like your Uncle Franz. Is Uncle Franz still your hero, boy? You still admire what he did, how he lived, and how he died?” “I did not come here to discuss Uncle Franz.”

“He was an idealistic fool, boy. A traitor.”

“To fight Hitler?”

“To help the Communists. He went to the other extreme.” Bergmann made a gasping sound that might have been laughter. “And you, Rudi? Help me up. Take me out of here.”

“I will, Uncle Ernst. You will see, I have—reformed.”

“Then help me. Bitte, Rudi. Please.”

Rudi crouched beside the old man in the corner, conquering his revulsion for the filth. “Uncle Ernst, you know how I have always admired you and Franz. I would do anything to help you. I think I can. I have convinced Kou Li to release you, since he has given up hope of making you tell him what you found on S-5.”

Bergmann sighed, grunted.

“He knows you went to the Americans with the ore samples,” Rudi went on. “Why has he held you prisoner like this, for a month?”

“He wants the chart,” Bergmann whispered.

“Didn’t you leave it with the Americans?”

“No.”

“Yet you didn’t have it with you when Kou Li took you.” “No.”

“What did you do with it, Uncle Ernst?”

The old man’s eyes were the only part of his parchment face that seemed alive in the reflection of Rudi’s light. “I have been asked that question several thousand times, Rudi.” “Could you answer it, if you would?”

“Yes.”

“You did something very clever, then, eh?”

Bergmann sighed. “Not very clever. Quite simple. And look what my cleverness bought me. I am dying.”

“You will not die. I will take you to a doctor, in the — American hospital.”

“If I tell you about my chart?”

“You must trust me, Uncle Ernst. I am not what you think. I admit I was wild when I was younger; but I have settled down now. Here,” Rudi said. He reached in his wallet and took out a clipping from the society page of the New York Times. He had kept the clipping with him carefully, for several months. “Can you read this. Uncle Ernst? It tells of my engagement to marry Miss Sarah Standish.”

“Yes. I heard of it.”

“Of Standish Nickel, Incorporated.”

“Yes.”

“She is here in Rawalpindi now. We are all going back to S-5. The American and Pakistan governments are giving us escorts to relocate what you discovered. If you help us, the job can be done quicker and easier.”

“And the Chinese?”

“If you help us,” Rudi insisted, “we cannot fail to get there first. Otherwise, your silence will defeat precisely what you hope to achieve by all the torture you have stood here.” Bergmann’s eyes closed, and Rudi was not sure if the old man was simply thinking, or had fainted, or had fallen asleep. He reached for the thin, skeletal wrist. The pulse was vague, thready. The odor in the cell seemed sharper. No sound came from the brick tunnel outside.

“You will marry Sarah Standish” Bergmann asked suddenly.

“It is all arranged, Uncle Ernst.”

“A very wealthy young woman, eh?”

Rudi made a jest of it. “A very capitalistic young woman, Uncle Ernst. But I happen to be in love with her.”

Bergmann sighed.

“Where is the chart, Uncle Ernst?” Rudi asked. “What did you do with it?”

Bergmann opened his eyes. “You have made an arrangement with Kou Li? He will let you take me out of here?” “Yes. I promise.”

“Then I will tell you—when I am in the hospital.”

Rudi stifled the spurt of anger in him. “You must tell me now. When I have the map, I will make a copy for Kou Li. But not an exact one.” He whispered anxiously, hurriedly. “When Kou Li has a chart—one I shall misinterpret for him—then he will release you.”

“I have been in this room for a long time,” Bergmann said.

“We will fly you home to Vienna, Uncle Ernst, as soon as you are strong again. The Americans will pay for everything.”

“Vienna, you say?”

“I swear it to you, Uncle Ernst.”

Bergmann whispered, “Sometimes the words were a scream in my throat. Sometimes I bit my tongue and filled my mouth with blood and choked, so I could not speak even when I wanted to. And now—Rudi, will you betray me?” “Would I betray my adopted uncle?” Rudi asked gently.

“I cannot keep it back any longer. Have I been here a month, really? I lost track of time. One can think of nothing but the answer to their questions. You fear you will scream it in your sleep. You think of it with every breath you take. It is like a sickness in me. I cannot hold it back any longer.” “Don’t try, Uncle Ernst. Tell me.”

The old man wept.

Rudi waited.

Bergmann said quietly, “I left the ore samples at the American Information Office. From there I walked down Aswali Street, to the corner. There is a shop just beyond, to the right, and the proprietor is named Gustl Broeder. He is a Viennese, you know? He sells musical instruments, Rudi.” “Musical—” Rudi paused. “Herr Broeder has the chart?” “He holds it until I call for it. He was instructed to tell no one about it. A few moments after I left his shop, Kou Li’s men took me and brought me here.”

Rudi stood up. “Thank you, Uncle Ernst.”

He became aware again of the stink and the slimy filth on the floor. He took the flashlight and walked to the big wooden door and looked into the tunnel. The Chinese boy was not in sight. Turning, Rudi went back into the cell and shone the light on Bergmann. The direct glare made the old man throw up his bony arm again to shield his blinded eyes. The mouth was open, like a black hole in his skeletal face, and there were ugly gaps in his teeth. Rudi took a gun from his pocket and pointed it at the prisoner. The old man could not see what he was doing. His smile for Rudi was an entreaty to hurry back and release him.

Rudi fired once, and the sound was a vast thunderclap in the underground cell. The old man jerked back against the corner and then tried to crawl out of the light. Rudi walked over to him and turned him over and put the muzzle of the gun to the back of the bald skull and pulled the trigger again for the coup de grace.

Then he walked out.

Kou Li waited for him in the office. The boy had heard the shots and came back to lead Rudi through the maze of tunnels and rooms to Kou Li’s establishment. Rudi sat down, unbidden, in a chair and looked at the old Chinese.

“The price for the chart,” he said bluntly, “will be the equivalent of one hundred thousand pounds sterling in used Swiss franc notes to be deposited in account number 552 in the Suisse Internationale Banque de Geneve. I will expect cable confirmation by tomorrow. You know how these arrangements are usually made.

Kou Li nodded, his black eyes touching his grandson. “So Herr Bergmann talked to you? You know where the chart is?” “I can get it.”

“Perhaps we can save you the errand.”

“I am not an exhausted old man,” Rudi said. “I can hold out against your questioning longer than Bergmann. By the time you made me talk, the Americans will be on S-5 and the

Pakistan Frontier Rifles will have a division of troops on the spot.”

Kou Li nodded again. “So it will be as you say.”

“It must be as I say,” Rudi insisted.

“It is a great amount of money you ask, but there is no time for bargaining. It is an agreement, then.”

Rudi paused. “There is one other thing you must do for me.”

“Yes?”

“There is an American agent with the expedition—a man named Sam Durell. A dangerous and competent man. It will go much safer if he is out of the way.”

Kou Li nodded, once again. “It shall be arranged.”

“It must be done tonight.”

“Mr. Durell will not see the sun rise again,” Kou Li promised.

chapter nine

A COOL night wind blew down from the northwest hills and washed away the stifling heat of day. It rattled the fronds of palm trees, rustled in the bougainvillaea vines, made a shutter bang erratically in the bungalow occupied by Sarah Standish and the S-5 expedition.

Durell’s room on the second floor had wide windows and a French doorway open to the veranda that circled three sides of the house. He had checked the door, the veranda with its Bombay chairs, the moonlit lawn below. He had locked the common corridor door, inspected the huge wardrobe closet, locked the connecting door from the bathroom he shared with Colonel K’Ayub.

He had arranged to send out a coded message for K Section’s information. At first he considered transmitting it by telegraph to Donegan in Karachi, then decided not to trust Donegan and used the cable office near the Liaqat Gardens to relay the coded inquiry to Henry Kallinger in Istanbul. Kallinger would get what he wanted by further relay to Washington, if he didn’t have it immediately on hand, although Durell doubted that the information would catch up with him in time to be useful. What he asked for was any information available on Red Oboe.

Sarah, Rudi, Alessa and Hans were playing bridge in the big, open living room below, when Durell returned from the cable office. He went quietly up to his room, made his routine check, and decided that what he needed was sleep. He did not think there would be many opportunities for rest in the days to come.

He slept uneasily, dreaming. The voices of the others downstairs at the card table touched him and set off new dreams of distant places and past times. He was in the bayou again, at Peche Rouge, a boy slipping through the mottled shadows on the old Indian chenieres, those dike-like paths that twisted across the black waterways where cypress knees lifted in abstract forms and the Spanish moss dripped down and brushed the surface of inky pools in supplication. He was running, but he did not know from what. He was afraid. Moonlight shone in patterns of ebony and silver on the gum trees, and the croak of frogs and the splash of fish and the startled cry of a bird accompanied him. He fell from the cheniere and slipped into deep mud that sucked at his feet, his ankles, his knees, dragging him helplessly into black mire. Someone called his name from above. Sam? Sam! It was a girl with Alessa’s face, and her enormous eyes were terrified and he tried to yell to her to run to Bayou Peche Rouge and escape the swamp. He was down to his hips and then his chest in the sucking mud, and something grunted and splashed in the water nearby and terror crawled like cold lice over his face. He tried to hold his chin up, but the mud reached a clammy hand over his lips and pinched his nostrils, and all at once there was an explosive convulsion in his chest as the air was cut off. He couldn’t breathe. He thrashed out—

He awoke with a dacoit strangling cord around his neck.

There was no time to think or question what was happening.

It was simple enough. He was being strangled quickly and silently and expertly.

His body, his screaming lungs and shocked nervous system made his muscles writhe and convulse, answering everything for him.

But the only answer was to get air into his lungs again. In that instant, all his thousands of reflexes, memory cells, habit patterns, likes and dislikes, past regrets and future hopes, became nothing. He had to breathe. Nothing else. He was a dying organism, and he responded with blind instinct, flailing, struggling, aware of the swift and terrible outflow of strength and life in him, that could end everything in a few more seconds.

He clawed at the cord around his throat. Through eyes that rapidly lost focus, he saw the moonlit room, heard the efficient silence of the deed against the explosive thunder of his heart, saw the dim loom of the thin figure garbed in black, belted robe and dirty tunic, arching over him on the bed.

The cord cut deep into his flesh. He could not even get a fingernail under it. Wrong technique, he thought dimly. Like following the hand of a carnie pitchman to divert the eye from the pea in the shell game. Check. Useless to fight the cord. Impossible to reach the hands that twisted and held it. Waste of time. Then try what they taught you at the Farm, in Maryland—that murderous school where friend turned to foe with a smile and handshake that landed you mercilessly on the hard ground, to teach you to trust nobody. Where you were taught anatomy, the secrets of the neutral centers, the use of hand and finger, edge of palm, rolled newspaper, making these innocent objects into lethal weapons to stun, paralyze, kill.

He arched his body, belly up, fell down, flexed his legs and kicked at the dark form bending over him. His naked foot caught the side of the man’s neck, but not quite right; the turbaned head snapped aside, an instant too soon, making the blow of his heel glance off.

There wasn’t much time left now. Nor much strength, either.

His lungs shrieked, his muscles trembled. There was a roaring in his ears. Once more. The turbaned head had retreated a little in caution. But not quite far enough. It could be done.

Now.

He flexed, arched, doubled, kicked. He knew at once his heel had caught the right spot in the man’s neck, behind the maxillaries, under the ear. With that blow you could dislocate the jaw, rupture arteries, permanently deafen, and kill.

The cord around his neck fell loose.

He heard the man stumbling away, and there was a wild whistle of air sucked into his chest, and he rolled aside to the left, fell off the bed, hit the floor on hands and knees. The carpet rocked and heaved under him. Another breath. He heard a noise that didn’t sound human and he tried to crawl around the bed where the strangler lay. The other man was trying to drag himself out through the open French doors to the veranda where the night darkness waited.

Durell pushed himself around the bed. The other man was halfway to the veranda, sobbing. He paused, the air in his throat like molten brass, then lurched and stumbled forward and fell on the black-robed man.

A hissing sound came from the gaping mouth, a fragment of Urdu. “A mistake—sahib—in Allah’s mercy—”

Under the long tunic was a khukri knife, curved, wickedly sharp. Durell pulled it free. He rolled away from the man and held the knife at his throat and said, “Be quiet, dog.”

The room smelled of the man’s fear.

Durell stood up and leaned against the wall and sucked in air in long, measured breaths, waiting for the room to stop spinning. The man’s route of access was easy—from within the grounds. A clever and careful man, dressed in black, could scale the compound wall, drop into the shadowed garden, climb the bougainvillaea to the second-floor veranda— But how had he chosen the right room?

He looked at the man who shuddered on the floor, still halfparalyzed by Durell’s blow. It might pass soon—or the damage could be permanent. Durell felt no sympathy. He rubbed his throat and walked back to the bed and got his gun, sat down and put on his shoes, trousers and shirt. The house was quiet. The bridge game and iced drinks and quiet conversation downstairs had ended. They had all gone to sleep. Maybe.

Perhaps someone was waiting to come into this room soon, to find him dead with his black tongue sticking out, his eyes like plums in a congested face. Someone who had told the strangler which room to choose, which way was easiest over the compound wall. . . .

Even as he thought of it, staring dully at the figure that twitched on the floor, someone knocked softly on the door.

He got up and walked to it, keeping his head turned toward the other man. He could be faking, gathering strength to streak like a fleeing snake out to the veranda and over the rail, to escape in the dark shrubbery below.

He faced the door panel. “Yes?” he said quietly.

“Sam, are you all right?”

It was Alessa’s voice, soft but worried.

Alessa? he thought.

He turned the big brass key. “Come in, honey.”

“I heard a noise, a thumping in here. The others are asleep. I couldn’t rest, thinking of all the details of starting tomorrow morning—”

She slipped into the room. Her hair was pale and sleek, a silvery casque around her small, proud head. She wore a dark skirt, a printed silk; blouse. Her hand touched him. He wished there were more light in the room. Was she surprised? Dismayed? Or just mildly worried at a strange sound in the night, as she implied?

Then she saw the man on the floor and she clapped fingers to her open lips. “Oh—”

“I had a visitor,” Durell said. “Keep your voice down, please. I don’t want to waken the others.”

“Your voice sounds—”

“He tried to strangle me. Classic silk cord and all. My throat is a bit sore.”

“Sam, I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I—yet. But we’ll see what he has to say, if he can talk.”

“Shall I call the Colonel? Phone the police?”

“No. I have a feeling this might be something personal.”

“But you can’t just force him—”

“I can do anything with him,” Durell said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him.”

He walked quietly to the shivering man on the floor. The shivering was a nervous reflex, a series of spasms resulting from Durell’s blow. Durell knelt and looked at the man’s dark, ugly face. He put his gun to the man’s ear. It was just a face, he thought, like several millions of other faces on the subcontinent. To be bought and sold, to live and die, to lie and laugh, to spit and swallow and breath.

“Can you hear me?” he whispered in Urdu.

“Yes, Durell sahib—”

“You know my name?”

“I was told.”

“Who told you to kill me?”

There was no answer. And he could not force an answer here. “Get up and walk with me,” he said.

“I cannot. There is a devil shaking my body—”

“Try,” Durell said. “Or you go straight to hell.” He pushed the gun muzzle into the man’s ear. The man got up. His body spasmed, and one arm hung limp, and he dragged one foot. “Outside,” Durell said.

Alessa stepped forward. “Sam—”

“You had better come with me,” he said. “You should watch this. We’ll go to the shed behind the house. It will be private there.”

“I think I ought to call K’Ayub.”

“Come with me,” he said again.

She followed, her face blank as it suddenly was revealed in a slash of moonlight they crossed on the veranda. Durell still felt uncertain on his feet. His throat burned, and there was an ache in his chest. He threw the khukri knife over the railing and heard it drop with a dry rustling in the vines that grew up the side of the bungalow. He pushed the turbaned man toward the wooden stairway that led down to the garden terrace. Lights shone on the lawn from some of the go-downs at the rear of the property, fifty yards away. If any guards patrolled the grounds, he did not see them.

No one was in the warehouse shed. Durell pushed the man in, waited for Alessa, and followed into the gloom. A shaft of moonlight guided him. There were the bulks of the two transport trucks and jeeps loaded with canvas bales of supplies that even included skis in case any snow prevailed in the mountains. In the moonlight, the man sat with his hands flat on the dusty floor behind him. His eyes rolled with fear. “How are you named?” Durell asked.

“Ali, sahib.”

“Everyone is named Ali, dog.”

“It is a good name. My father gave it to me. He was named Ali, too. Ali Hamadourji.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“Shaib, he will cut out my tongue and feed it to the crows.”

“He is not here, and I am,” Durell pointed out. “You will speak the truth to me.”

“I have not even been paid, sahib!” the man moaned. “I was promised one hundred rupees, but I have not seen one anna yet!”

“Killing is your business?”

“No, sahib, I swear by Allah, I have only killed two idolaters in my life.” He referred to Hindus. “And those were in riots which caused blood to run wild, like a river in flood time—”

“I am waiting for your tongue to run like a river, too,” Durell said. He knelt down and pushed his gun muzzle under man’s jaw and forced his head back until the throat was stretched and corded under the pressure. “Speak to me. Who hired you?”

“I cannot tell!” the man gasped.

“Was it Red Oboe?”

“I do not know this name.”

“Tell me!”

“I cannot—”

Durell hit him with the gun barrel, and when the man tried to roll away, scrambling on all fours. Durell used his fist and smashed him back against the nearest truck fender. He had no pity, remembering the moment of strangling in his bed. The man fell to his knees and whimpered. Durell looked at Alessa. Her face was white and strained.

“Must you do this?” she    whispered.

“Memsahib!” the man groaned. “Have mercy!”

“There is no mercy,” Durell said. He hit the man again, harder, and heard a small bone break in the man’s nose. Blood gushed from his nostrils and he coughed and choked. “Who hired you?”

“In the bazaar of Qissa Khani—”

Durell waited.

“—in the Street of the Storytellers—”

“I know it. Tell me no fables, Ali.”

“I am employed there by Omar, the Storyteller. The old man—everyone knows him on Jehanistan Lane. I run errands for him. I do everything. He is an evil old man. He promised me one hundred rupees to do this terrible thing, but I am an honest man and I do not like it. I have a wife, sahib, and six children, six hungry little ones I must always feed—”

“You are lying!” Durell snapped.

“I swear by Allah! It was Omar who ordered me to kill you.”

Durell paused. If he exerted more pressure, the man would shriek and scream in hysteria. It would waken the others and bring Colonel K’Ayub into it. But he wanted to take care of this matter alone. It was not mere personal pride or outrage at the attempt made on him. He had been selected by name, but more than that, he trusted no one, not K’Ayub or Alessa or even Sarah Standish, whose love affair with Rudi von Buhlen had blinded her to normal realities.

He found some cord in one of the trucks and tied up the turbaned man, lashing the wrists tightly, then the ankles, then taking more cord to lash him to the rear wheel in the shadows of the shed. Before he finished he searched the man, found only a few coins, a police identity card with the name Ali Hamadourji on it. He put them back and walked to the door of the shed. Alessa moved with him. In the moonlight, he looked at his watch. It was only a few minutes before eleven, to his surprise.

“What are you going to do?” Alessa asked.

“I am going to the Qissa Khani. That street never sleeps.”

“Don’t you think the police—” She frowned anxiously.

“You’re coming with me. It may be dangerous, but I’d feel safer with you in sight, even in the Qissa Khani. I want no interference.”

“You don’t trust me to be quiet here?”

“No,” he said.

There were dancing boys with bobbed hair walking hand in hand in the twisted lanes, and fakirs and blind beggars, one-legged beggars and naked beggars in the yellow-lighted dust. A radio in one of the Arab tenements spewed out the latest hate-hysteria propaganda from Cairo. Another radio played American jazz, relayed from the European hotels in Karachi or perhaps from as far away as Bombay. Camels and donkeys vied with the surging humanity that crowded the lanes between the shops, where gasoline lanterns added to the fragmentary electric street-lighting. The smells of coffee, curry and hides filled the air. A flute wailed somewhere, candy vendors monotonously hawked their wares. A lemon-drink seller bobbed up in front of Durell, urging a drink from the huge copper jug on his bent back. He poured the sweetish, sticky fluid from a long spout into a cup he took from his pocket, before Durell could wave him away. The man had one eye only, the other a shriveled, puckered socket. Durell gave the man a coin and turned the drink over to a naked urchin tagging at his heels. He reflected that everything was for sale here—live birds, fortunes, bullet belts, fruits and every diversity of women.

A cool wind from the northern hills had washed away the day’s heat. In the Qissa Khani, he had no difficulty finding Omar. The man held forth in a lane of shops not far from the teahouse of Swerji Hamad. Above the shops were rooms with balconies where the bazaar merchants lived and dispensed their more profitable products—stolen goods, opium, women and bhang—the ubiquitous derivative of Indian hemp, which is smoked, chewed, eaten in sweetmeats and downed in drinks throughout the sub-continent.

Omar’s operation was a little more elaborate than his competitors, Durell noted. Two musicians, one with a horn and another with a goat-skin drum, banged out ear-splitting Pathan music while a girl of ten, her eyes already indicating trachoma, stamped out a mountain dance in the dust. The crowd was appreciative, throwing coins to the men and the child.

Then, with a showman’s gesture, the old man stepped from a curtained doorway and the music stopped as he settled to a squatting position on a dusty pillow. The drummer went around collecting a rupee from each spectator.

Omar was the most famous of the entertainers in the Street of Storytellers. The old man wore a green gown that accented his sallow face in the flickering kerosene lamps. His straggly white beard and dark, piercing eyes and sunken cheeks gave him a diabolical appearance that he apparently cultivated. A fat Punjabi stood behind him, studying the crowd with careful impassivity.

The old man began with the usual glorification of ancient Arab conquests in the Sind, went on to diatribes against the British and their machinations—relayed directly by the Cairo radio, Durell thought—and for emphasis, the old man flourished a glittering dagger and drove it with hatred into the ground again and again between his folded legs. His voice lifted and fell, grew sad, dripped vitriolic hatred. The crowd listened with rapt attention.

Then he began on his special tales of long ago, fables of Alexander the Great and Roxana, the virgin daughter of King Oxyartes. The sum of his narrative, told in detail with much lewd emphasis, was how Roxana had induced the Greek conqueror to swim naked in a pool with her on a cold night, maddening the Macedonian with her ivory body, her pomegranate breasts, her hips and loins, and how Alexander then caught a chill and fever and died as a direct result of Roxana’s plan.

“The crown!” someone muttered. “Tell us of the crown, old man!”

Durell tried to see who had called for the story, but the voice had come from the thick of the audience, and he could not identify anyone. More rupees were collected, and Durell felt Alessa’s hand close on his arm in tight anticipation.

There were many embellishments about King Mahandra, sovereign over eighty purs, who had bowed to the conqueror from the West and offered a fabulous ransom for his cities in the form of a jeweled crown. There was a description of brave Xenos, the Greek zamindar, loyal captain of a thousand in Alexander’s army, and how one night a thief slipped into King Mahandra’s palace and stole the crown and fled into the Gilgit mountains and beyond, across the valley of Kashmir and into the towering Himalayas. Xenos volunteered to find and punish the thief and the tribesmen who sheltered him, and was ordered to march into the mountains. Xenos never came back. It was said that the gods who ruled at the time were angry at the invaders and shook the mountains and trapped the Greeks, every man of the thousand, and they died of thirst and starvation and cold in a black valley especially created for them by the gods, after they had sacked and tortured the hill tribes and found the crown.

And ever since, Omar said softly, his satanic eyes glistening, the skulls of the hated enemy rest in a black void somewhere in the Himalayas, piled high upon the golden, flashing crown of jewels given by King Mahandra.

The music of horn and drum began at once, when the old man whispered the end of his tale, and the mountain girl returned to stamp out her tribal dance in the dust of the Qissa Khani. The old man in the green gown vanished through the curtained doorway, and the crowd dispersed. Alessa was frowning.

“Is something wrong?” Durell asked “I am interested in the crown,” she said, uncertainly. “You know it is my only reason for going back to S-5. The antiquities departments of several European museums have backed my search.”

“Was there anything new in the old man’s tale?”

“The story of Roxana is an old one, of course, repeated in every generation. These people emphasize local pride, even after two thousand years. But the story of Xenos—” She paused. “I’ve heard it before, except for the black void that trapped the Greeks and still keeps them captive up there in the hills. That’s entirely new. It doesn’t really make sense.”

“Well, we’ll ask Omar for more details about it,” he said. Alessa still hesitated. “You’re going inside?”

“That’s what I came here for.”

“But it may be dangerous.”

“Sleeping in my own bed was dangerous,” Durell pointed out. “It can’t be any worse.”

“I do want to know if the old man can tell us more than he put into his public tale. It’s almost as if he knew we were here—”

“He’s probably waiting in there for us,” Durell said.

No one stopped them as he pushed inside the beaded curtain in the doorway. The Punjabi and the musicians and the mountain girl kept up their ear-splitting entertainment. There was a dim corridor, the walls painted blue, and a Moorish arch at the end opening into a tiny garden furnished with a rusty iron Victorian bench, a plank table under a scraggly palm. The surrounding houses towered four and five stories high, making the garden a well of darkness. But enough light came from an opposite doorway to beckon him forward. The old man stood there, bowing, his smile old and evil. “Welcome, doctor memsahib,” he said to Alessa. “It is an honor that you come to see me.”

Alessa shivered slightly. “You know of me, Omar?”

“Your fame is deserved. Mine is not.” The old man looked at Durell. “And this gentleman’s reputation is equal to his deeds.”

“My deeds are not as bloody as yours,” Durell said.

“One must live. Omar has struggled all his life, and in struggle one learns wisdom.” The old man’s white brows lifted. “You have dealt with Ali?”

“He failed you.”

“Then I hope you have killed him.”

“He will be turned over to the police or the military.”

“Ali was an expert,” the old man said. “I feel much respect for you.”

“Who ordered you to send him to me?”

“I am an old man,” Omar sighed. “I have dealt with life as it has come my way. Being full of years, thanks to Allah, I have not yet any desire to see the end. But if I answered your question, I would be as dead as Ali by sunrise.”

“One way or another, you will be dead, old man,” Durell said. “Now, or later.”

“You would not harm a helpless old man?”

“I will kill you, if it is necessary.”

Omar looked at Alessa and licked his lips, like the quick flick of a snake’s tongue over a blackened, reptilian mouth. He bowed slightly. “Come into my house, please.”

“You first,” Durell said.

The rooms beyond the little garden were decorated with rich silken hangings, brass plates, ancient Saracen armor, jade vases that would have graced any Western museum. There was a low couch in the second room, and as the old man sank down on it; a young veiled Arab girl came in silently and took off Omar’s slippers and rubbed the gnarled old feet with an oily paste taken from a brass jar. Another young woman came in silently and brought a brass samovar and poured steaming tea. There were rattan chairs, a smell of incense, a drifting hint of bhang; he wasn’t sure. The girl at the old man’s feet began to chafe and massage the skinny calves of Omar’s legs, working up above the bony knees under the green gown toward the old man’s thighs. The old man smiled and patted her head.

“Not now, my dear,” he said in Arabic.

“Yes, father.”

Durell said, “She is your daughter?” as the girl went out.

“I have many daughters. They are kind to me.” Omar looked at Alessa with brooding, speculative eyes. “You are the doctor memsahib who wishes to find the crown of Alexander?”

“Do you have any information more than you tell the public?”

“Perhaps. It could be for sale.”

“For how much?”

The old man shrugged. “Perhaps only for your mercy, in exchange for my life. Mr. Durell says he will kill me, because I cannot tell him who wishes his death enough to have me hire Ali.”

“The crown,” Alessa said, ignoring Durell. “What more do you know of it? Does it still exist?”

“Yes, doctor memsahib. So they say.”

“Who says?”

Omar shrugged. “It is said; that is all.”

“Can it be found?”

“It is in an accursed place. The Pakhustis would not go there. To enter this place brings death.”

“Why? Where is it?”

“There is a cave the Pakhustis call the Cave of a Thousand Skulls. It can be seen if one stands on Roxana’s breast and watches the sun on her golden belly in the hours of the morning,” Omar said.

“You speak in riddles.”

“I can say no more.”

“You can tell me,” Durell said, “who hired your man Ali.” “It was directed that I send him to his destiny.” Omar’s black eyes flickered to Durell. “And I did as I was bidden.” “Who gives a man like you orders to do murder?” “Who wishes to die by having a tongue that wags too much?” The old man laughed thinly. “You can kill me, but you know I would not talk to you. You are foolish, like all Americans. You are an imperialist spy, here on a mission of capitalistic espionage—”

“Cut out the garbage,” Durell said. “That’s fine for your mobs in the street, to whip them into a frenzy for the glorification of Islam. But you have no god and no politics, only money, old man.”

“You may speak the truth.”

“How much will loosen your tongue?”

“Ten thousand American dollars.”

“I haven’t got that much.”

“Can you get it?” Omar asked eagerly.

“There isn’t that much time.”

Omar said, “There is no more time for you now, sahib.” His eyes looked beyond Durell. Durell turned. The fat Punjabi had entered the room from the garden. He was not alone. From the doorway where the girls had gone, two Arabs appeared. Another man came in behind the Punjabi. They were all armed.

Omar clapped his bony hands.

“Kill the man,” he said.

chapter ten

DURELL ignored the others and jumped for the old man. Omar shrieked and tried to wriggle away, rolling over the silk-covered couch. His flailing arm struck a lamp vase and it fell from an ivory inlaid taboret and shattered on the tiled floor. Durell caught the flailing arm, wrenched it around without mercy, jumped on the couch, and hauled the old man around in front of him.

The rush of men came to a dead halt as the old man squawked something in Arabic. Knives glittered in a semicircle around Durell. He backed away, trying to reach Alessa. But she stood dumb-struck, not realizing the danger in staying apart from him. If he could reach her and use the old man to shield them both—

Omar was like a rattling bag of bones in his grip, steadily shrieking Arabic curses that Durell ignored.

“Alessa, get over here,” he called in English.

She looked dazed. Unfortunately, the Punjabi understood English. His big arm shot out, his ringed finger caught her wrist and yanked her sprawling across the room, away from Durell. Grinning, the fat man put Ms knife at Alessa’s throat.

Again the room was silent. One of the oil lamps made a faint fluttering sound. The Punjabi’s grin showed teeth stained by betel juice.

“Shall I kill the lady, Omar?”

Durell squeezed a little on the old man’s neck. He could feel the brittleness of ancient bones in Omar’s throat and chest.

“You will die, too, Omar,” he said softly.

“I am ready to die.”

“Tell him to let the lady go.”

“I will not. If you kill me, she dies. You cannot prevent it. You are an American, and Americans are sentimental about women. You will not let the Punjabi kill her, eh? Now let me go, or Admidi will slit her throat as a butcher slaughters a lamb.”

Alessa’s eyes were huge, terrified. She whispered, “I’m sorry, Sam, I didn’t think—my mind was on what Omar said about the crown—”

Durell released the old man.

Omar jumped away, gown flapping, and shrieked orders to the waiting men. Durell was not sure what might happen. He had put Alessa’s safety above his own, and in his business there was no room for sentimentality.

The Punjabi pushed Alessa to Omar, who thrust her through the curtained doorway across the room. The other men signed for Durell to follow. Someone pushed him in the back and he stumbled, saw something glitter above his head, descending in a swift, brutal arc. Pain exploded in him. He went to his knees, was surprised to find himself at the foot of a stone stairway. Omar and Alessa were already at the top. The old man turned and cried in Urdu, “Let him live! We shall see who talks. There will be many rupees for all!”

Durell was pulled to his feet by a sweaty Arab, who swiftly took his gun from him and then stabbed at his eyes with both thumbs. Durell knew the trick. He ducked, caught one grimy wrist and twisted, heard bones snap like brittle wood. The Arab screamed in pain. Durell ran up the stairs after the old man and Alessa. His only hope was to get to the girl where he could act in defense without sacrificing her. But the Punjabi, for all his fat, caught at his leg and hauled him back. Durell kicked with his free foot, but the next moment he was pulled down, struggling against the vindictive weight of Omar’s men.

The next moments were a nightmare.

He let himself go limp under the rain of blows and kicks, then felt himself lifted to his feet and shoved up the stairs by the Punjabi. Dim lights showed the way through a scented apartment. An Arab woman in black, with the prostitute sign on her rouged cheeks, shrank away, tittering. He was in a warren of corridors and small, crib-like rooms. Here and there a door opened and a man looked out cautiously, then hastily slammed the door again. One larger room, with a tiled balcony overlooking an inner court, held three naked women sprawled in a tangle upon colorful cushions, with an unmistakable, but anonymous white man. There were little cries and shrieks, a rapid untangling of fleshy hips and buttocks, and then Durell was hurried on into another corridor, down more steps, across a vile-smelling alley, down another flight of steps.

A door slammed. He heard the Punjabi grunt, draw in a preparatory breath, and then there was an explosion in the back of his head, and Durell pitched forward into darkness. . . .

He was aware of the cold first, and of a trickle of water over his left leg. He did not open his eyes or move. There was pain in his forehead and another that pulsed and ebbed at the base of his neck. He thought of Omar and the Punjabi and tasted dismay like coppery metal in the back of his throat. He had made a mistake, taking Alessa here with him; she had been a danger factor, hampering him. But he could not have left her at the bungalow, either, since he could not trust her.

The thought of the girl made him open his eyes. But everything was utterly dark. There was nothing to see. He tried to sit up against the pain, and bit back a groan between his teeth.

“Oh, Sam—I’m so glad—”

He spoke her name, his voice harsh. Her hands touched his face, then withdrew. He could not see her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” She paused. “But what they did to you—”

He could see something, after all—a faint yellow line glimmering in the blackness. He could not make it out, or guess its distance from him. He touched his jaw, felt crusted blood on his cheek, and tried to focus on the yellow line. There were no reference points in the darkness. He felt his body, was astonished to find he was stripped naked. It explained the chill. When he sat up, he found the floor was simply dank earth, with a little ooze of water running across his legs. He shivered. Alessa put her arm around him, and the scent of her skin was like something from another world, fragrant and civilized. He touched her shoulder, her waist. She still wore her skirt and blouse. His nakedness did not trouble her, apparently.

“How long was I out?” he asked, speaking into darkness.

“I can’t guess. About an hour, I think,” she whispered.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“So far. But I’m afraid of the old man.” She paused for a long time. “What kind of place was that, where they took us through. With all those—women?”

He grinned, and it hurt his face. “An Arab whorehouse. Our Omar the Storyteller is an enterprising old gentleman.”

“He makes me shudder,” Alessa said.

He stood up. The line of yellow fell far below the level of his vision. He walked carefully toward it, and it turned out to be exactly four steps. He bumped into a wooden door. The light came from beyond, seeping under the bottom. He felt the door all over with his hands, trying to orient himself. The door had iron hinges, an iron lock. He felt his way along the walls, judging the size of their cell. It was about twelve by twelve. He bumped into Alessa again. Now his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, utilizing the faint glow from under the door. He could make out her face dimly.

She said awkwardly, “They left your clothes here, Sam.”

“Where?”

She handed him his shirt, trousers, shoes. For some reason, his socks were gone. He searched for his wallet and gun. They were gone, of course. Five thousand in expense money, receipted to Henry Kallinger. He didn’t worry about that. He regretted the loss of his gun. His ID card and passport were missing, too, of course.

“I shouldn’t have insisted you come with me, Alessa.”

“It’s all right,” she said abstractedly.

“Are you still thinking of what the old man mumbled about a Cave of a Thousand Skulls, viewed from the breast of Roxana?”

She made a deprecating sound. “I’m afraid it stirred up my imagination. I think I know the place.”

“On S-5?”

“On the North Peak, where Bergmann went.”

“We’ve got other things to think about, at the moment. How to get out of here, for instance.”

“I don’t think it’s possible,” she said.

But he had to try. He moved slowly around the walls, his body responding slowly from the bruises of his beating. He ignored the pain and studied the cell. It had brick walls. He tried to jump, arm extended upward, to feel for the ceiling. He could not reach it. There was no furniture in the cell, no scrap iron, nothing useful. He returned to the door, his feet squelching in the wet mud floor. Pausing, he knelt and felt the floor, discovering a small, oozing stream that apparently seeped up from underground. He went to the door and considered the space under it. The wet earth extended to the very edge. At once he began to trace back on the wet trickle, digging a channel from the center of the floor toward the doorway, grateful that there was no stone in the way.

“What are you doing?” Alessa whispered.

“Digging out.”

“But we have no tools.”

“I have my hands. Help me.”

They knelt together and pulled away the soft, mucky earth from the area directly under the door, pushing it aside to make a slow, laborious excavation. The thin line of yellow light immediately grew brighter, and he saw Alessa more clearly now. There was a bruise on her face, where someone had slapped her. Her body kept bumping and brushing against him as they worked together to scoop away the wet mud.

Her eyes reflected the pale light from under the door. “You look at me, Sam, as if—”

He smiled. “You don’t look like a girl with a doctorate in ancient history. It’s unusual for someone as beautiful as you to spend your life absorbed in the dead past.”

“It isn’t dead for me. It’s been very exciting, stimulating—”

“You’re not at all like Rudi, are you? He has a reputation for chasing after pleasure.”

“No,” she said shortly. “We’re not alike.”

“Hasn’t there ever been a man for you?” he asked bluntly.

“I’ve been busy all my life—studying, trying to recoup the family fortune. I suppose you think that’s like an obsession. It was.”

“Do you feel differently now?”

“I’m not sure. I’m confused, and I don’t like it, because I usually know exactly what I’m doing, and why. Facts can be dealt with. Emotions are—new to me.” She paused. “A man like you is something new to me.”

He went on digging. She had stopped, staring at him as she knelt beside him. Whatever she was about to add was interrupted by the sound of footsteps beyond the thick door they were trying to tunnel under. Durell swore softly. The footsteps did not go by, as he had hoped. They halted, and a key rattled in the lock.

Instantly he was up, motioning Alessa to one side, and flattened against the wall beside the door as it opened The light that poured into the cell seemed blinding now. Omar’s old, quavering voice had a peculiar echoing quality.

“Come here where we can see you! Both of you!”

Durell did not stir.

There was a mutter of orders. Durell recognized the Punjabi’s voice in agreement. A flashlight flickered around the cell; but those outside were too wary to step in through the doorway. The light did not touch the shallow trench he had dug just inside the entrance. The Punjabi began to argue with the old man. There seemed to be no others out there. Then the old man made a snort of disgust and stepped in.

His sandaled foot came down in the shallow trench, threw him off balance, and he staggered toward Durell against the dark wall. Durell whipped an arm around him and hurled him aside as Omar began his usual shrieking; he felt the hard impact of the Punjabi as the big man rushed in. He hoped Alessa this time would stay out of the way. The Punjabi had a long knife, and he could not reach the other’s wrist. For a moment they struggled in the wet trough inside the doorway, slipping in the wet mud. The Punjabi’s fist slugged into him again and again. There was no escape from that pile driver. He was not in the best of condition, after his first beating, and he knew at once the struggle would go against him.

“Enough!” he gasped.

The Punjabi threw him to the floor, began to kick him. The old man staggered up, cursing. His flashlight shone on Alessa, in a corner.

“Ahmidi! You know what to do.”

“Yes, Omar.”

The big man grinned. Omar had Durell’s gun. The old man licked his black lips, his open mouth like an obscene hole in his face. Ahmidi went to Alessa and pulled her away from the wall. With hooked fingers, he ripped off her blouse and then her skirt. Durell started up, was quieted by a slight gesture from Omar’s gun. He knew, looking at the old man’s lascivious eyes, that Omar would kill him in an instant if he interfered.

Alessa stood naked, like a golden Teutonic statue, her body exposed to the old man’s slow, rapine gaze.

“It is good,” the old man whispered. He sounded choked. “She will learn to wash my feet as my other daughters do.”

Courage fought with shock in Alessa’s eyes. Her clothing made a small heap on the floor at her feet. Her body was perfect, bathed in the relentless glow of Ahmidi’s light; she looked strong and proud. Her quick breathing made her breasts lift and fall. The cell was silent, a token of the perfection of her body. She looked straight ahead, sightlessly. Omar broke the spell with a cackle.

“Yes, she shall wash my feet until I am tired of her, and then she can work in the bordellos with my other daughters. Bring her closer to me, Ahmidi.”

The Punjabi pulled Alessa toward the old man. Omar gave Ahmidi the gun, reached out to caress and fondle the girl’s frozen body.

Durell tried again. He went for the Punjabi, knifed down on the brown wrist, and sent the gun spinning into the wet earthen floor of the cell. The Punjabi grunted, apparently annoyed by Durell’s persistence. He spread his big arms wide to crush Durell in a bear hug. Durell moved in under him and sank a fist into the man’s belly, drove in another, lifted a left for the man’s astonished face. It connected solidly. The Punjabi went down, legs splayed wide, and tried to roll away. Durell jumped for him, and they rolled into the wet trough he and Alessa had dug in the doorway. He pushed the Punjabi’s head into the shallow, muddy water, face down. The big man writhed, convulsed. Durell held his nose and mouth under the mud. He heard Omar screaming for help, and then someone spoke from above him.

“It is not necessary to kill this stupid man, my friend.” Durell looked up and saw the round, beaming face of Swerji Hamad. Two other evil-looking men were behind the teahouse proprietor, watching with professional interest.

Durell eased up a little. The Punjabi gasped, choked, vomited. Durell rolled aside and found his gun and picked it up. It was muddy, and he didn’t think it was safe to fire it at this moment. But he pointed it at everyone.

“What are you doing here?” he gasped to Swerji Hamad. “Qissa Khani has a thousand ears. We heard you were in trouble down here in Omar’s nest of rats,” the fat man said placidly.

“And you came to help?”

“Naturally. As quickly as possible.”

“Well, I could have done without you, finally.”

“Perhaps. But you must still find the way out of this maze. Omar has many thugs at his command.”

Durell looked at Alessa. In the glow of the flashlights, she was stooping, like a golden, naked goddess, for her

clothing. Omar cowered in a corner, whimpering curses. The lights were turned delicately aside as the girl dressed.

“Are you all right, Alessa?” Durell asked.

“I think so. Yes.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

Swerji Hamad never forgot business. “I trust you will take my arrival here into consideration when we settle our account, Mr. Durell.”

“You’re too late, Swerji. Omar got my wallet.”

The fat man turned mild eyes on Omar and said something to his evil-looking followers. Omar babbled in return and delved under his muddy green robe and threw Durell’s wallet to the center of the cell. Durell picked it up. All the money was there, with his ID cards and passport.

“Let’s go.”

“Not as we came,” Swerji murmured. “There are too many men to overcome that way. Wisdom is sometimes better than bravery. Follow me. I have something to show you.”

They went out quietly into the corridor, turned right, went up a flight of stone steps. Durell walked with Alessa. She was shivering. Her eyes avoided him. He wondered if it was shame at having been stripped before his eyes.

Swerji Hamad led them on a devious path through empty rooms, down more steps, across a courtyard, up a ladder to a roof, down again into a well-like shaft and through storage rooms of camel saddles, rice, brass manufacture, an opium den in which their passage was hardly noted by the men and women on the low string beds. Not once did they come out on a street. At last Swerji paused before another door.

“You were looking for Ernst Bergmann, Mr. Durell. Your agreement was for two thousand dollars, American cash?”

“Fifteen hundred,” Durell said. “It was for the chart.”

“It was for Mr. Bergmann,” Swerji insisted.

Durell was too tired to argue. “All right.”

“Your man is in here. I am sorry.”

Durell looked into the cell. It smelled of death. He saw the elderly, skeletal old man with the bullet hole in his chest and the skull exploded by a second bullet in the back of his head.

“This was Bergmann?” he asked quietly.

“You have my word for it. He has been dead some hours. I do not know who did this,” Swerji told him. “This place is a Chinese information center, run by Kou Li, a famous patriarch and a good business man. His teahouse is prosperous. Would you like to question him?”

“I want Bergmann’s chart,” Durell said.

“Kou Li held this man prisoner for the past month, and questioned him. Then you arrived in our city, and Bergmann is killed. It seems to me,” Swerji said, “that Bergmann was finally induced to talk and then was executed, his usefulness over. In that case, your enemies obtained the map. But my part of the bargain—”

“Get us to the street,” Durell said. Alessa’s appearance alarmed him. But he made her look at the dead man. “Is this Bergmann?”

“Yes,” Alessa whispered. “This was Uncle Ernst.”

Swerji Hamad was nervous. “Perhaps we had better go. There is one problem left.”

They stood just within a doorway to the street as the fat man explained. Kou Li’s men were in the outer street. If they were spotted, they could never escape. If they could get to the corner, under cover of some confusion—

Swerji Hamad had arranged for it all. Later, Durell would have chosen some other tactic to get by this last hurdle, but by then the damage was done, and it rested on Swerji’s rather plastic conscience. Piercing the cries of the hawkers and merchants on the crowded street of bazaar shops came a single, outraged shriek from a thin little man in a white suit and floppy Panama hat.

“Infidel! Unbeliever! Defiler of Moslem women!”

An utter and complete silence, like the ticking of a bomb, fell on the crowded scene. The object of the small man’s rage was a tall, thin Hindu whose face drained of blood and whose eyes abruptly rolled in terror. He tried to walk around the smaller man, his back stiff, his head erect. The other caught him by the arm, struck him in the face. The Hindu did nothing to retaliate. He tried to leave again, and found himself surrounded by a close press of near-hysterical, angry people in the bazaar.

The tensions of poverty, propaganda, centuries-old hatreds and religious fanaticisms made what followed almost inevitable. There were other Hindus in the crowd, trying to reach the beleaguered man. Their efforts only provided the spark that touched off the riot. In a moment there were shrieks and curses rising to a crescendo. A stone flew. A shot cracked. A man went down, screaming, and was trampled in the dirt underfoot. Sticks, articles of merchandise whipped through the air. Beyond the doorway where Durell and the girl crouched with Swerji Hamad, the street turned into a raging, insane torrent of panic-stricken humanity, each man and woman fighting for survival in the mindless massacre that began.

“Now we may go,” Swerji whispered. “Follow closely behind me.”

“You arranged this?” Durell asked harshly above the tumult.

“They are my men. They will manage to get away. In the distraction, we shall escape, too.”

“But those people are killing—”

“It is their destiny to love and hate and die.” Swerji was not interested. “We must hurry.”

There was nothing Durell could do. He held Alessa close to him, sliding along the shop-fronts away from the center of the human vortex. The faces of the mob of mixed Moslems and Hindus reflected racial and religious panic, an hysteria that could be answered only by explosive violence. From far away came the sound of a military siren, always alert and prompt to respond. But for the moment, Durell was concerned only with getting Alessa away.

A man with a bloody face and a gouged eye ran full tilt into them. Alessa gasped, screamed, and Durell spun the man aside, back toward the mob. He vanished, swallowed in a storm of fists and clubs and knives. Screams and curses filled the air. Smoke from a fire billowed over the scene.

“This way, Durell sahib,” Swerji muttered.

They reached the halfway point to the corner. The Hindu and Moslem who had started the riot had long vanished. There was no sign of Kou Li’s men. Swerji Hamad cursed and kicked aside a bloody man who was trying to crawl out from under the trampling feet of the mob. Shots sounded, and more smoke swirled as the military police arrived. A car waited at the corner.

“Get in,” Swerji gasped. “Get in, before they turn on us.”

Durell glanced back. The police were swinging clubs and rifle butts on the panic-stricken crowd. A few bodies lay sprawled in the narrow lane, Hindu and Moslem alike, victims of volcanic passions. Then Swerji pushed at him.

“Hurry, please.”

They left the scene without being challenged.

It was past midnight. The bazaar was quiet again. In Swerji Hamad’s office, Durell gave the fat man two thousand dollars from his wallet, mostly for future good will. Swerji was honest in that respect; he would recognize the unspoken debt on both sides, and perhaps perform with greater capacity the next time a K Section man called upon him.

Swerji Hamad turned his car and driver over to Durell and Alessa. Durell rejected the driver, said he would take the car himself.

“You will be safe now,” the fat man murmured. “The riot is over. These things can be useful, but most distressing. We live in troubled times, when every man here fears his neighbor, shouts spy against an Indian, just as the Indians murder Moslems in panic. One must use the tools at hand. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but I didn’t like it,” Durell said. “Too many people were hurt.”

“Well, you will be safe now,” the fat man said. “Do not trouble yourself about my car. Leave it wherever it is convenient. I shall get it back in the morning. May you go in peace, Mr. Durell.”

“You learned nothing more about Red Oboe? Or the chart?”

“Herr Bergmann left his appointment with Mr. James Howell at the U.S.I.S. office in Regency Lane and vanished two blocks north, taken by an unidentified taxi, perhaps directly to Kou Li’s place. That is all I know.”

“Thank you, Swerji. Go in peace.”

Alessa was silent as Durell helped her into the car and drove away from Qissa Khani. But he sensed that her silence was different now.

“I’m sorry about Bergmann,” he said. “You were very fond of him, weren’t you?”

“Rudi and I called him uncle, although there was no real relationship,” she said in a low voice. “His end was so ugly, I—feel sick, betrayed—”

“Betrayed?”

“Perhaps that is the wrong word.”

She sat very close to him in the little car, and every now and then he felt an uncontrollable tremor go through her. He drove to the old U.S.I.S. office on Regency Lane, a street of stone Victorian buildings almost a century old. It was quiet and deserted, relatively clean and modern. Policemen were evident two corners away. He drove slowly in that direction, considering the European shops that wen dark and shuttered at this hour. An ambulance stood at the second corner, and a small crowd had gathered, kept from the doorway of a music shop by armed military patrols. The broken window showed several antique Persian and Chinese instruments. The name on the broken glass was German.

Durell stopped the car and spoke to the young subaltern in command. The Pakistani spoke English with an Oxford accent.

“Yes, sir, the proprietor was shot. A plain case of robbery, sir. His safe was opened, you see.”

“Thank you,” Durell said.

He returned thoughtfully to the car. It seemed probable, in view of tonight, that this was where Bergmann had ditched his geological survey chart—-with a fellow countryman. He wondered if there was any significance between the music shop and the name Red Oboe. He decided il merely might be coincidence.

But the fact remained that Bergmann’s chart was now in enemy hands.

chapter eleven

THE thug who had tried to strangle him had escaped from the warehouse. The ropes still lay around the rear wheel of the truck, slashed by a knife. Durell sent Alessa into the house and spoke briefly to Colonel K’Ayub about what had happened in the past few hours. K’Ayub did not look as soft as in Karachi. His pale, amber eyes were objective, and he merely nodded and went into the house to telephone.

Everyone was accounted for. Sarah Standish came downstairs in a silk Chinese robe, her hair tousled from sleep, but wearing her defensive, horn-rimmed glasses. In answer to Durell’s question, she said flatly, “Rudi took me sightseeing after the bridge game ended. We were alone together for some time, and he was never out of my sight.” She added, flushing faintly. “After all, we will be married when we return to Europe. Am I to gather from your questions that you suspect one of us of betraying our plans?” “Perhaps I just have a suspicious nature,” he said. “Would you mind if I asked everyone to permit a search of their personal belongings.”

She flushed again. “Yes, I would mind it.”

“I’m afraid I must insist.”

“I forbid it,” she said flatly. “You are all my guests, and I will submit no one to such an embarrassment.”

“You’re being unreasonable, Sarah.”

Her voice was cold. “I have often been accused of that, in making executive decisions for Standish Nickel. Most business men seem to think I am incapable of rational and intelligent behavior—perhaps because I am young, and a woman. I assure you I make few mistakes. In this case,

[ feel that trust among us is essential if we are to share danger in a few days. I will not permit you to air your suspicions.”

“We’ve got to have that map,” he insisted.

“I disagree with your opinion that it may be here.”

There was no arguing with her autocratic nature. She simply :urned away and went upstairs, leaving him with her decision.

Hans Steicher hovered like a granite mountain over Alessa, his face shocked at her mud-streaked appearance, his mute eyes having to guess at what had happened to her. The look he gave Durell was one of hatred and outrage that his goddess might have been in a moment’s danger. Hans said he had not been out of the house at all. He had missed Alessa, then checked on Durell, and discovered them both gone. He’d had a couple of drinks and turned in. Durell thought he looked a little drunk, and dangerous.

When they were gone, he called Karachi on the telephone, giving Donegan’s number. He did not have much faith in Donegan, and he had no regrets at routing the man out of bed. But Donegan’s sleepiness evaporated when Durell told him what he wanted.

“Sure, we’ve got a couple of radio monitoring stations up north, part of the CENTRO outfit. But most of them are directed across Afghanistan, to pick up Soviet stations in Kazan and the Kirghiz Republic.”

“Turn them on Sinkiang and Tibet, where the Chinese are. See if anything special went through that way tonight.” “Check.” Donegan seemed quicker and more efficient, now that Sarah’s safety was no longer his responsibility. “I’ll come back to you in half an hour.”

Durell went upstairs to his own room. A servant had straightened the rumpled bed and the wrecked furniture from his struggle with Omar’s strangler. He stripped off his muddy clothes and got under the antiquated shower, staying there for fifteen minutes. The water was still tepid from the sun-heated storage tank on the roof. He soaped and toweled vigorously, then shaved, keeping his wallet—which still held three thousand of Henry Kallinger’s money—in plain sight next to his gun. His .38 needed attention, too. He stripped it, wiped mud from the barrel, and from his grip took a can of solvent and oil, cleaning the mechanism until it shone. He threw away the cartridges that had been in the chamber and reloaded with fresh bullets. Then he put the gun and his wallet under his pillow, checked the veranda doors again, and turned out the light.

In a moment, someone knocked softly on his bedroom door. He got up and opened it. Alessa stood there, in a pale red robe.

“May I come in?”

He held the door wide and she passed him and sat down on the bed and shivered. A cool wind came through the veranda doors, but it was not that cool. In the moonlight, she looked very pale, her eyes defenseless.

“You need a drink,” he said quietly.

“I’ve had two. Nothing happened. It doesn’t help.” When he started to put on the light, she said quickly, “No, please. I think Hans is in the garden, watching your room.” “Why?”

“He is jealous of you.”

“Has he any real reason?” Durell asked.

She frowned slightly. “Hans has been in love with me for a long time. Don’t be fooled by his inarticulate nature. We met at the Sorbonne, years ago. He’s well-educated, intelligent. He simply prefers the physical life of a mountain guide to the sort of scholastic existence I’ve chosen.”

“Are you in love with Hans Steicher?” Durell asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t decide.”

“I still think you need a drink.” He watched her shiver again under the red robe. In the moonlight she looked half nude, and he suddenly remembered how she had looked stripped before the lecherous Omar. He got a flask of bourbon from his bag and a glass from the bathroom and carried the drink back to her. She brought it to her lips with both hands. He heard the glass rattle faintly against her teeth.

“You’re still in a state of shock,” he said gently. “You must put what happened tonight out of your mind.”

“How can I? Poor Ernst! What a horrible end for him!” “All men have to die,” Durell said.

“For Uncle Ernst, it should have been in a featherbed in the Tyrol, in the Alps. Not in that terrible underground hole.” “He was a stubborn and brave man.”

“So are you,” she said. “And if Ernst could end like that, I can’t help fearing and wondering—”

“We’re safe now,” Durell said. “At least, for tonight.” “How can I ever sleep again?” she whispered. “I’m so cold—”

A telephone rang somewhere in the house. The girl sat rigidly on the edge of his bed, watching him. A moment later a servant rapped softly on the door.

“Mr. Durell?”

He went downstairs with the man to answer the phone. Sarah Standish had come down, too. Her pale brown hair looked disheveled, and there was a look about her eyes as if she had been crying. But she stood in prim pride, saying, “It’s urgent, for you. From Mr. Donegan, in Karachi.”

Durell nodded and listened to Donegan’s excited voice rattle in the receiver, along with numerous frying, crackling noises.

“Sam? You were right. I checked with monitors we have working with the Pakistan Government up in the Gilgit range—past where you are now. They reported some clandestine radio traffic in code from the ’Pindi area that interrupted the routine transmission to the Kazan station. A Chinese boy we’ve got broke it down fast. An ‘investigative patrol’ is urgently requested for Area BH-21—and dollars to doughnuts, that’s S-5. The acknowledgment came back on the Chinese military wave length. You’re going to have to push hard to get there first.”

“All right. Have you passed this to the Pakistani people?” “Not yet. Just got the word from the monitors, myself.” “Good. If we go in fast, there may be less trouble than if we alert the Pakistan military and they go in up there with heavy troop movements. That will mean martial law and may hold us up too long.”

“It’s risky, though, just using K’Ayub’s patrol.”

“What’s important is to move faster than anyone else now.”

“Whatever you say.” Donegan paused. “Listen, Sam, I’m really damned sorry about what happened to Jane King.” “Not your fault,” Durell said, and rang off.

Sarah Standish was waiting for him upstairs in the airy corridor between the bedrooms. Her scrubbed face was solemn, and she wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her eyes were wide, a lovely gray, troubled by what had seemed to him earlier to have caused tears.

“I know something rather desperate is going on,” she said. “But we’re leaving tomorrow, unless you’ve placed some official obstacles in our way.”

“No. We leave right on schedule, Sarah.”

“Good. I’ll want to talk to you tomorrow. I have a few things on my mind, but I’m sure they can wait. We all need sleep right now. The guard has been doubled, and I’m sure we won’t be disturbed again.”

“I’m glad of that,” he said drily.

His tone made her look up with sharp irritation. “Are you still angry because I protected my guests against the search you demanded.”

“I think I understand how you feel,” he said.

“Do you? I know you don’t like me. Most people don’t; but I can’t help that. I know you don’t care for the job of looking after me, either. I was rude about it when we first met, because I didn’t like the idea, either.” She tried to smile, but her tension made it a feeble gesture. “Can’t we call a truce between us, Sam?”

He wondered what she really meant. “It’s fine with me.”

“Good. I’m glad. Good night, then.”

Turning, she walked down the corridor to her own bedroom. Durell waited until her door closed, then went into his room. Only the moonlight glowed silver through the veranda doors inside. He glanced first at the huddle on his bed under the thin sheet, and walked to the veranda. A guard patrolled the garden at the foot of the bougainvillaea climbing the house. He wondered where Hans was, and what the big man was thinking. Not golden thoughts, he decided wryly. He turned back to the bed.

Alessa was waiting there. Her arms reached out to take him.

“Sam? Hurry.”

“Everything is quiet now, Alessa.”

“Make it so, Sam. Make it fine for me. Make me forget that horrible old man and what he wanted to do. Make me forget poor Uncle Ernst.”

Her body was warm, trembling against him as he slid beside her. He felt a small wonder, but no surprise. There had been an inevitability about this moment from the first time they looked at each other, as if some irresistible chemical had bonded them in an urgency he had never known before.

She shivered, burrowing against him, demanding the warmth and safety of his love, asking for assurance that she was still alive after the cold touch of death that had missed them tonight.

Then she made a small sound, drew back.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I want you to know—there was a boy once, in Paris— but you must be gentle.” He felt tears on her cheek, crushed against his chest. “Am I so awful, really, to want to forget Uncle Ernst?”

“You won’t forget him,” Durell said. “It’s just for now.”

“Yes. For now.”

He felt detached when he took her, aware of a curious objectivity, as if part of him stood aside and regarded their union as a segment of a larger pattern that still hovered with dangerous vagueness in the back of his mind, forming a nearness to disaster, a union with cruelty and death.

chapter twelve

THE convoy of two trucks, two jeeps, and a station wagon of equipment that included a powerful military field radio, left shortly after dawn. The mountain troopers numbered twenty-four men, all tall, tough, rangy members of K’Ayub’s Frontier Rifles. The day was hot and clear. The road north from Rawalpindi was crowded with traffic for the first hour— Army transports, bullock carts plodding the edge of the fields, bicycles, men carrying bundles and bales on their shoulders.

The oppressive morning heat lifted as they wound up toward the hill station of Muree, the most historic of the British military posts and summer resorts, 7,500 feet above sea level. Along the road were rice paddies flashing in the sun, then terraced farms and maize and potatoes, mud-house villages and then houses with thatched roofs. In a short time the convoy roared through groves of long-needled Chiel pine that sheltered old-fashioned resort hotels placed at vantage points for the views. The villages they passed had narrow streets, some of them banned to auto traffic. At eight thousand feet the road became tortuous, switching back and forth up the terraced mountainsides, now and then with a glimpse of the far mountains of Kashmir, where snow lingered on the peaks like an illusion in the clear August sky.

Before leaving Rawalpindi, Durell had checked with K’Ayub about the police investigations of last night. There were no significant clues to the murder of the music shop proprietor. Bergmann’s body was in the morgue. A high-powered radio transmitter had been found in Kou Li’s teahouse, but there was no sign of the Chinese. Omar, too, had vanished, but K’Ayub was confident of an imminent arrest. Durell was dubious.

“If Bergmann told the location of his survey map, and it was taken from the music shop,” he had said, “then they’ve got the jump on us, Colonel.”

K’Ayub was solemn. “Then we should proceed to our destination with all possible speed.”

“I have the feeling the chart is with someone in our group,” Durell insisted. “But Sarah Standish forbade a search last night.”

“With some wisdom,” K’Ayub said. “If someone has the chart, it proceeds with us, does it not? When the time comes on S-5 to resurvey Bergmann’s path, we will take the necessary steps to learn the truth.”

“It may be too late by then,” Durell insisted.

“If we hold up the convoy now, the procedures and formalities would delay us too long,” K’Ayub pointed out. “I’m sure you see that.” He had paused. “We will proceed at once, then.”

At noon, they stopped for lunch at a mountain hotel run by a young Swiss couple above the village of Ramathgali. Durell had been riding in the second jeep with Alessa, Rudi and Sarah. A curiously taut silence held the others. The driver was Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan trooper. There had been no trouble at the two military checkpoints below. K’Ayub rode in the point jeep with Hans, and the two truckloads of troopers and the station wagon of supplies followed.

There were woodcutters weighing wood on old-fashioned scales suspended from a tripod beside the road below the hotel’s porch, and women in black washed clothes in an irrigation ditch among the pines. Cigarette and candy sellers in bright skullcaps pedaled by on bicycles. Another hotel, glimpsed through the trees, was a relic of British days, since it sported a cricket field and several tennis courts.

Alessa asked Durell to walk back into the pines to see some old Buddhist ruins nearby. He was faintly amused by her deception. She had been withdrawn all morning, not meeting his eye, and he would have preferred a few moments alone with Sarah. His glance caught Hans’ glowering features when Alessa touched his arm, and Durell went a little reluctantly.

The ruins were hidden in the pines about five hundred feet above the hotel. The air was warm, pungent with the Chiele needles. In one sunny corner of the ruins, on a flat, mossy platform of stone, some men sat sewing shirts with hand-operated machines. They looked at Durell and the girl with polite, reserved eyes, and kept on working.

“You can see Kashmir from here,” Alessa said, pointing across the fleecy sky. “And that way are the Karakorums. That’s the summit of Nanga Parbat—26,650 feet high.”

Durell admitted the view was breath-taking. Far beyond were the famous peaks of Everest, Kankenjunga, and Austen’s famous Annapurna. Alessa spoke pedantically about the crossroad invasion route of empires here. Persians, Greeks, White Huns, Moguls and British, she said, used this route to conquer the people. She told him how the Buddhists came to die Punjab and converted King Asoka to Buddhism and how this area became one of the greatest seats of Eastern learning and philosophy.

“You can read about it in the manuscripts of Fah Hian, a Chinese Buddhist who made a pilgrimage here in 400 a.d.” Wild olive trees had rooted in the cracks of the massive stone ruins where they stood. Nearby was the major shrine, the stupa, in the form of a massive Buddhist figure with a circular hole in the navel worn smooth by generations of pilgrims begging relief from internal pains. Beyond several smaller stupas was a chapel of red and black, then a long block of monastery cells, two stories high, with broad verandas above.

Alessa went on as if lecturing at the Sorbonne. “When the White Huns came down from China, led by Toramana and his hordes, most of these monasteries were destroyed. By the seventh century, when Hsuan Tsang, another Chinese pilgrim, came through here, most of it was desolate, with only a few monks still attending the shrines. The Moslem conquest of nine hundred years ago finished the job of destroying Buddhist culture here.”

A small boy came along, selling mangoes. Durell bought two as they walked toward the monastery ruins. “You didn’t bring me here to lecture on history I already know, did you, Alessa?”

She stared at the distant, soaring mountains. “I’m sorry. It is just that it is embarrassing, after last night—”

“There is no need for that.”

“But, you see—Hans knows about it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Sam. But he is dangerous, so possessive toward me. It is frightening, I think. Yet I am fond of him, and I am afraid for you, because of him.” She stooped and plucked a cinquefoil growing in a grassy area between the stones. “There’s something more. Have you noticed that

Rudi and Sarah were quarreling this morning. He is very upset by her behavior.”

“He ought to be,” Durell said drily. “When eight hundred million turns cool, it’s reason enough to be upset.”

“That’s not fair. You don’t like Rudi, and you still think he had something to do with poor Jane King’s death, don’t you?” “Yes. And more.”

“I wish—” She paused, bit her lip. “I’m sorry. My mind is really only on the crown. I can’t stop thinking about what that old man said last night—the directions to a Cave of a Thousand Skulls. Do you think he was lying?”

“Perhaps. Maybe he was just stalling with some mumbo-jumbo until he got us where he wanted us.”

She shivered in the mountain air. “You are probably right. Let’s go down. I think the others must be waiting for us, by now.”

By afternoon they were in the valley of Swat, the convoy making good time along a tunnel-like road through tamarisk trees whose branches met in a lacy bower overhead. Here, where the British had fought the wild Pathan tribes, were a number of rivers, mud villages with flocks of geese, china-berry trees, and an occasional giant lizard. The air was cooler. Twice the convoy stopped at small mosques and the Moslem guards went in to pray while the mullah chanted passages from the Koran.

At evening they pulled into a small village nestled below a high ridge, where a border patrol post and checkpoint were established. The road had improved again, and there was evidence of an enlightened government in the small schools and clinics they had seen. But there was no farm machinery, and the few telephones belonged to the police and military stations.

The language here was Pushtu, and the populace followed the Sunni, or orthodox Moslem creed. There was a stone hotel run by a lean, dour Swati in a beaded skullcap, and Ajjar servants. Beyond the village, the road diminished between the rock walls of a canyon shaded with blue spruce, silver fir and walnut trees. The running water made a constant murmur in the background.

Durell went with Colonel K’Ayub to the military station at one end of the village. It was a low, fort-like building of gray stone, with an immaculate white floor in the large common room. Rock pigeons and roosters made a steady burbling on the roof. K’Ayub spoke to the officer in command, Lieutenant Mungial Ali Khan, a thin man with a fierce mustache. In the radio room, K’Ayub considered several coded transmissions. It was evident to Durell that K’Ayub was a man who received much respect here.

“There is a report of early snow in one of the passes,” K’Ayub said. “But it is only a few inches. We should get through easily.”

“Any Chinese troop movements?” Durell asked.

“Some activity, but we are not sure of the direction of the probe. Some refugees rioted over in Kashmir, and there is always a trickle of Tibetans out of the east. Perhaps the people spotted were these groups. The border patrols have nothing else to report. Conditions on S-5 are normal, they say.” K’Ayub flicked another of the radio reports. “There was a small rockslide north of Lake Mohseri. The road will end there for us. We will have to walk in from that point.”

“How far?”

K’Ayub shrugged. “Almost thirty miles. My men and I could do it in a day and night, but the women—let us count on three days. It is a difficult climb at the end. The altitude is fifteen thousand feet. We have oxygen masks, of course, but we will have to carry everything—food, equipment, radios, tents. I am mainly concerned about the snow reports. And there is no radio check from our patrol near Mirandhabad. The Pakhusti radio, which is really only a hobby of the Emir’s, has also been silent.”

The next morning was gray, with a slight drizzle seeping down from the overcast sky. They started early. Sarah rode in the lead jeep with K’Ayub and Hans. Durell remained with Alessa and Rudi. The road climbed steadily through rocky gorges and across small plateaus where creaking bullock carts made way for them. The land grew wilder and more desolate, and the cold rain and mist blotted out the distant Karakorum range. Before noon the road degenerated into rutted tracks that made the vehicles jolt and groan. Low gear was almost in constant use, and the whine of the engines echoed back and forth from limestone cliffs. There was another military checkpoint in a Sujjer village, one more at an aerie-like settlement of Kohistanis. The air was thin and sharp, and the rain had an icy sting.

At the top of the pass marking the frontier of the Pakhusti emirate, the convoy halted for an hour to save one of the trucks that had broken down. K’Ayub’s men levered the rear wheels out from between the jumbled rocks that pinned the truck. They ate here, cooking on gasoline stoves that sputtered erratically at the high altitude. The rain stopped, and the scudding clouds suddenly shredded away and revealed the valley ahead, between the looming high peaks.

Durell walked ahead with Sarah to look down at Lake Mohseri. A cold north wind blew, and the visibility became sharp and crystalline. The valley was long and narrow, the lake nestling in grayish light between long arms of the mountains. Even from here it was possible to see a few fishing boats at the near end, and a faint, jewel-like glitter on the far shore indicating the town of Mirandhabad.

Beyond, the valley lifted in a narrow gorge and vanished in a twisted jumble of hogbacks and peaks.

Sarah pointed. “There, that’s the Crown of Alexander, S-5.”

The twin peaks floated majestically, two enormous upthrusts of rock capped by snow on the higher slopes, with vast battlements of cliffs that lifted in sheer splendor for thousands of feet, into the clouds. It was too far to make out details, but its size was awesome for its clarity.

“Rudi showed me pictures from Alessa’s collection,” Sarah said.

“You haven’t talked much to Rudi since we left ’Pindi, have you, Sarah?” he asked.

“No. We’ve all been so busy.”

“You said you wanted to discuss something with me, the night before we left.”

“Did I? I’ve forgotten,” she said shortly.

“If there’s something I should know, let me have it.”

But she was silent, staring at the vista of valley, lake, and distant provincial town. She wore riding breeches and boots, a fleece-lined jacket with a hood that covered her hair. She wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her costume made her look younger, somehow more vulnerable. He realized with some surprise that with a little effort, Sarah could make herself into an extraordinarily attractive young woman. The chill wind colored her cheeks, and her lips were slightly parted, her eyes unguarded as she considered the majestic view. She moved a little closer to him. From the road behind them came the grunting chant of the troopers trying to get the truck back on the path.

“I can’t get Jane out of my mind,” she said suddenly. “I feel that what happened in Karachi was really all my fault.” “You were tough enough about it when it happened.”

“I know. But it was habit, from the responsibilities I’d like to be rid of. Don’t you think I’d like to live like everybody else?” she demanded fiercely. “Just to be anonymous, without everyone staring, or flattering me, or thinking what they can get out of me? I’ve had that all my life. It’s made me defensive, and I hoped that Rudi—”

Durell said, when she broke off, “Was Rudi with you all the time, that last afternoon and evening in Rawalpindi?”

“It’s not fair to ask me that.”

“Because you love him and feel loyal and should protect him?”

“I’ve never been in love before. In Switzerland, it was like a dream. He treated me—well, just like any other girl.”

“Smart fellow,” Durell said.

“Do you think his technique was deliberate?”

“You have to decide about that. But was he with you all that day in ‘Pindi,”

“No,” she whispered. “Not all the time. I’m sick about it.”

“Where did he go?”

“In the afternoon he said he would take a nap. But when I knocked on his door an hour later, he wasn’t there. The servants said he’d gone into the city.”

“Did he tell you where he’d been when he came back?” “I didn’t ask. I had no right. I mean, I didn’t want him to feel I was putting a leash on him even before we were married. I mean, I want Rudi to know that my money leaves him a free man in all respects, and I wouldn’t make any selfish demands about anything.”

“Do you still play to marry him when you return to Europe?”

“I don’t know.”

“What makes you uncertain?”

But she couldn’t reply. There were footsteps behind them, and it turned out to be Rudi, tall and handsome and blond, with the cold mountain wind blowing his long strands of hair across his flat forehead. He carried a rifle, borrowed from one of the troopers, in the crook of his arm.

“My dear, it is best if you do not wander away from everyone like this. I know Herr Durell is supposed to watch out for you, but that is my job, too, is it not? And I think I may be more devoted to the task.” His smile never touched his eyes. “In any case, one of the forward troopers reports a party coming up out of the valley to meet us in this pass. It is a military group, believed to be Pakhustis.”

Behind Rudi was the big figure of Hans. When they moved back to the convoy, Rudi and Hans turned aside, talking quietly. Hans shot Durell a malevolent glance as Rudi spoke earnestly to him. Sarah went back to Alessa, and Durell joined Colonel K’Ayub.

“About one hundred men, I think,” K’Ayub said, lowering his glasses. “They may dispute our passage. Mirandha-bad is under our national control, but these mountain people guard their freedoms fanatically. They can be quite unpredictable.”

In a few moments Durell spotted the thin line of men coming up the crest of the pass where they waited. They were mounted on tough, shaggy, little Mongolian ponies. Their sheepskin coats and caps were green, and all had rifles resting across their saddle pommels.

“I shall meet with their commander,” K’Ayub decided. “You come with me, Durell. The rest stay here with the trucks.”

They rode down the slope in one of the jeeps, with a dozen troopers trotting alongside. The long line of dark figures came to a halt, and a smaller group spurred their shaggy ponies up the pass toward K’Ayub.

The commander of the Pakhustis was a man with a scarred and weathered face, a drooping mustache and beard. He wore a karakul cap and bandoliers of cartridges across his massive chest. He saluted K’Ayub, dismounted, and spoke too rapidly in Pakhusti for Durell to follow. K’Ayub’s voice was no longer soft. He was a different man in these mountains.

There was a brief exchange, and K’Ayub turned to Durell. “The Emir has directed these men to escort us across the valley to S-5,” he said in English. “He does this as a friendly, co-operative gesture.”

“Do you trust him?”

“No.”

“There are a hundred of them, and only thirty of us.”

“Yes. It makes me uneasy to have them riding our flanks. But rejection of their offer will mean no assistance thereafter from the Pakhustis. They have always been difficult. It would be tiresome to have to campaign against them, in these mountains—and they are all brother Moslems, in any event.”

“Can you make some excuse to refuse the offer?” Durell asked.

“Yes, but then we will not be permitted in Mirandhabad.” “Can we go around the town?”

“It will mean another eight hours of marching.”

“Fair enough. Make your excuses, then,” Durell said. K’Ayub went back to the Pakhusti commander and spoke briefly. The Pakhusti made sounds of objection, gestures toward his mounted men massed in the roadway below. K’Ayub pointed upward. The troopers from the trucks had taken up positions among the rocks and sunlight glinted on their gun barrels. The man in the karakul cap looked angry, scrubbed at his long mustache, and began to shout. K’Ayub spoke even more softly, but his voice was like polished steel. He turned back to Durell.

“He says there are certainly Chinese patrols to the north.”

“Across the border?”

“No man knows where the border is precisely. The Emir’s excuse for offering an escort is to protect us from the Chinese. But it is difficult to tell one snake from another. We could be massacred in the night.”

Durell nodded. “Tell him we’ll go around Mirandhabad.” There was some more discussion. The Pakhusti’s face was angry, but he wheeled his pony around, shouted to his men, and they galloped away down the pass toward the shining lake in the valley, far below.

“From now on,” K’Ayub said quietly, “we must be on the lookout for snipers.”

chapter thirteen

BY NIGHTFALL they had circled the lake and gone as far as the vehicles could take them. The twin peaks of S-5 seemed no nearer in the sunset light. The trucks and jeeps were parked in a level area below sheer cliffs, tents were pitched, equipment distributed, and the evening meal cooked. K’Ayub was busy on the field radio for a time, then came to where Durell sat alone with his back against a large gray boulder.

“I have requested aerial reconnaissance,” K’Ayub said briefly, “But only if it can appear as routine patrolling. Planes are not much good in this rugged territory.” He looked sharply at Durell. “You are still convinced that someone among us has Bergmann’s chart?”

“I’m sure of it. But we’ll soon know the truth,” Durell said, “unless we’re ambushed. We’ve been watched all the way, today. There are watchers on that ridge right now.” He pointed to the east. “I’ve caught some flashes of light up there—probably off gun barrels.”

“It is to be expected,” K’Ayub nodded. “They are the Emir’s men. They may try to delay us, since Mirandhabad is uncertain of its political affiliation. The Chinese have been flattering the Emir into moving for autonomy, making great promises for the future.”

“If every hour counts,” Durell said, “we should make a night march tonight. Is that possible?”

Again K’Ayub nodded. “A good idea. But we must be careful.”

They told no one of the plan, to keep the camp looking normal in the swift mountain nightfall. Pickets were posted, lamps were lighted. The surrounding dark seemed vast and empty. At midnight, when everyone was rested, K’Ayub said, they would quietly break camp and march to the north. A six-hour lead before sunrise might prove decisive.

Durell turned in, but he could not sleep. The pressure of time slipping away made tension slide along his nerves. There was more danger from within the camp than from the Pakhustis watching from the higher ridges. The air was cold, breathing a warning of the snow they might reach by dawn at the higher altitudes. There was no moon, and the stars reeled overhead in a crisp black sky. He smoked a cigarette, watching the camp sleep, and thought of Sarah’s loneliness. She was not so different from Alessa there—Alessa, whose preoccupation with the past was a cover for her desire to belong somewhere, to restore her aristocratic family name to one of importance. How strong was this drive in her? He did not know. He knew only that he could trust no one.

At ten o’clock, everyone seemed to be asleep. He smoked one more cigarette, then slid from his sleeping bag and stood up in the shadow of the nearest tent. Alessa and Sarah slept in the next one. Hans was a long mound of shadow rolled in his bag across the campfire. He looked for Rudi von Buhlen, saw him sleeping about ten feet from the mountain guide.

Their rucksacks and gear stood near their individual sleeping areas. Durell moved softly around the tent, careful of the loose shale underfoot. Rudi’s rucksack was not far away. He paused, watching the man. There was a sharp report from a piece of wood in the dying campfire, and sparks flew; but Rudi did not stir.

Durell knelt beside his bag and swiftly undid the straps to explore the canvas compartments. Aside from rations, an oxygen mask that fitted two small cylinders beside the rucksack, and changes of socks and linen, he found nothing. There was a compass, a flashlight, a small transistor receiving radio, a heavy envelope containing Rudi’s passport and identification papers. Durell took the envelope and held it so he could examine its contents in the firelight.

Passport, two letters from Sarah written in New York, addressed to Rudi at Cannes. He did not read them. A photo, very faded, of a man in a turtleneck sweater with long pale hair and a defiant smile, against the unmistakable background of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin. It was signed in German with a bold signature—from Uncle Franz to Little Rudi—and a Nazi swastika banner against a building background identified the time the snapshot was taken, somewhere in the late ’30’s. Durell frowned, trying to identify the man’s face. Perhaps only the resemblance to Rudi teased his memory. But he thought not. He had seen this man’s photograph elsewhere, in K Section’s files, perhaps, or in some faded dossier in Paris, at the Deuxieme Bureau’s headquarters. But he could not be certain.

There was no sign of Bergmann’s chart in the rucksack.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything. It could be on Rudi’s person. Durell felt irritated by the restraints placed upon him both by Colonel K’Ayub and Sarah. He started to rise— and something gently pricked the nape of his neck. A shadow had fallen across him, cast by someone standing between him and the firelight.

“You are curious, Mr. Durell?”

It was Rudi. He had not been in his sleeping bag; the bag had been made up to imitate the shape of a sleeping man.

Durell moved carefully. A long hunting knife was in Rudi’s hand, and the man’s face was inscrutable, shadowed by the dying campfire.

“Did you find anything interesting?” Rudi asked.

“Who is Uncle Franz?”

“A relative. A man I much admired. But he is dead, long ago.” Rudi gestured to the open rucksack. “I trust you are satisfied?”

“Not quite. I think you and I have much to settle.”

“I do not know what you suspect, or what you talk about.”

“I think you do. Soon we will come to a time when you will be frank about it.”

Rudi put his knife away and smiled. “We are men of the world, you and I. We need not be enemies. You still suspect me in poor little Jane King’s death, do you not?” His voice hardened suddenly. “Did you speak to Sarah about it? Is this why she has been upset today?”

“What did you do with Bergmann’s chart, Rudi?”

“You think I have it in my bag? You must be insane.”

“What did you do with it?”

“You speak in riddles. I have nothing more to say.”

Durell gave it up.

The camp seemed to sleep again. Rudi went back to his sleeping bag. Durell returned to his own and waited for half an hour. Then he moved to the rear of one of the trucks and pulled Alessa’s rucksack from those on the tailboard. But he only got as far as unbuckling the straps, when he was again interrupted. This time it was Sarah Standish.

“I’ve been watching you, Sam.” She stood fully clothed, ready for the night march. Her hair was tied with a small ribbon, and she wore a quilted jacket over slacks and boots. “What are you doing with Alessa’s things?”

“Looking for Bergmann’s chart,” he said bluntly. “I don’t know if Alessa has it, but I think Rudi knows where it is. He might have given it to her.”

“Are you accusing my fiance of being a spy or a murderer?”

He looked directly at her. “Yes. I am.”

Her face was pale, blank. How much did she really know about Jane King? How much was she willing to overlook? A woman like Sarah, in love for the first time, could be blindly irrational to protect what would seem most precious to her. He said, “Sarah, did Rudi give you anything to hold for him, last night in ’Pindi?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Before I got back from Qissa Khani—when you claimed you were with him all that day—did he turn something over to you for safekeeping?”

She said dimly, “He was not with me all the time. I lied to you, and I think you know why.”

“All right. Did he give you an envelope, or a chart?”

“He gave me a packet of maps, yes,” she whispered. “Did you examine them?”

“No.”

“Where are they now?”

She gestured to Alessa’s rucksack. “I gave them to Alessa to return to Rudi. I couldn’t speak to him about it, after you—after you told me what you suspected about him. They may still be here.”

“We’ll see,” Durell said grimly.

Her voice was dull. “Sam, if what you suspect is true—” “I think you know it is,” he said harshly. “But I think there is someone else—someone who was here in ’Pindi when Alessa, Bergmann and Hans came down off S-5 the first time. Someone who worked with Rudi before. It’s the only reason I don’t step on your fiance right now.”

She said nothing, and he turned angrily back to Alessa’s rucksack. But once again he was interrupted—this time by Hans. For a camp that seemed to be asleep, he thought in frustration, everyone in it was restless enough.

Hans put a huge hand on Alessa’s pack.

“You will not touch anything that belongs to Fraulein Alessa, Herr Durell.”

“I thought you were asleep, Hans.”

“I do not sleep when Alessa is in danger. We are all in danger here. You, especially, Herr Durell.”

“From you, Hans?”

The man scowled; his deep-set eyes were sullen and angry. “You have taken something from me, I think, that I wanted for a long time. However, we shall see which of us comes back from S-5.”

But then Colonel K’Ayub stalked over to the truck. Durell gave up his effort to examine the others’ belongings. K’Ayub ordered everyone ready for the march, to slip from the Emir’s men to the ridge above. He spoke with hard authority. When the others scattered, moving silently in the starlight, Durell told K’Ayub what he had tried to do.

The colonel looked grave. “If someone has the chart and it travels with us, what can we complain of? He—or she— will be alone against us all. We can watch and wait. My only mission is to verify Herr Bergmann’s discovery of nickel ore, for my government. If successful, a simple radio message will bring a division of troops to hold the frontier. Such a move will naturally be considered an aggressive act by our neighbors to the north. And my government does not wish to tweak the tiger’s tail without good cause. If the flags Bergmann used to mark the ore site are still there, the international difficulties will be worth the trouble. Our objective will be to occupy the area first, and I will brook no interference in this aim.”

“Your goal is mine, too,” Durell agreed. “But someone among us is a traitor—possibly two.”

“Then let us give our enemies every chance to show their intention. That is my decision, Mr. Durell. And I am in command here.”

They marched in double file up the gorge that led north from Lake Mohseri. The route was always upward. A thin moon arose to shine on the twin peaks of S-5, soaring with white slopes against the night. A rough trail provided clear footing for the first two hours. The pines grew scrubby, and often the party was strung out for some distance across exposed rocky slopes. The women did not complain at the forced pace. Now and then Durell dropped back to talk with one or the other.

There was no sign of pursuit from the Mirandhabad troops. Looking back through a narrow defile, Durell glimpsed the sheen of moonlight on the distant lake far below. A few minarets gleamed silvery in the strange mountain light. Then a growth of pine and scrub oak cut off the view, and he did not see either the lake or the town again.

He sat with Alessa at a ten-minute break shortly before dawn. She stared straight ahead, refusing a cigarette, huddled in her fleece-lined coat, her face partly hidden under the folds of her hood.

She said abruptly, “I do not have what you were looking for, Sam. I cannot tell you what I did with it. That night in Rawalpindi gives you no right to ask that I betray anyone.”

“Then you know something that might betray Rudi?”

“I did not say that.”

“Alessa, you’re thinking the same things I do, about Jane King and Ernst Bergmann, and wondering if your brother—”

“No,” she said sharply. “Rudi is all the family left to me. He must be protected—saved, if you like. When you spend your life in history, you come to value a sense of continuity in man. Family, too, represents such continuity. The survival of a name, a blood line, always in the last analysis rests with the individual.”

“At any cost? And even if the individual is unworthy?”

“I cannot judge that. I simply deny your suspicions. I refuse to believe you are right.” She turned to look at him. “I am sorry, Sam, for many things. But you and I are too different.”

The ten-minute rest period was over. They got up to march again.

At dawn a light rain fell again. They stopped for breakfast in a rocky, treeless area shrouded in mist. Tumbled peaks loomed in vast, ghostly shapes all around them. The wind breathed of snow and ice in the upper altitudes ahead. K’Ayub’s men quickly set up canvas shelters, pegged against a sheer rock wall that soared out of sight in the clouds above. Other troopers fanned out ahead and to the rear to cover the line of march.

They had lost the Pakhustis, it seemed, by the simple ruse of the night march. Then Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan servant, returned from scouting the trail ahead, speaking earnestly to the colonel.

K’Ayub turned to Durell. “We have a problem ahead. The trail goes down a sheer rock face a mile to the north. Zalmadar says that dynamite charges were set off some time ago and destroyed the path cut into the rock. We cannot go around it. Our route offers no alternatives. But perhaps Hans Steicher can show us how to bridge the gap.”

“Any sign of who sabotaged the trail?” Durell asked.

K’Ayub shrugged. “The Emir’s men—or perhaps a Chinese patrol—although this is pretty far over the border, even for them.”

They went ahead to look at the trail. The gorge that cut across their way had to be descended and then climbed on the other side. The path that led down was shattered in several places, with gaps of more than twenty feet across. Below was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.

Hans knew his business. From his pack he took a handful of steel spikes and a hammer and began to climb across the first gap like a huge fly clinging to an impossible rock face. With the hammer, he drove in the spikes at regular intervals. Yet it seemed inevitable that he would slip and fall. Durell stood beside Alessa on the path, watching. Her face was pale, watching the big man, her eyes never leaving his labored progress.

By carefully selecting small cracks in the stone face and driving home a series of pitons as hand grips, the big man swung across the first gap in a matter of twenty minutes. He waved to them, went on down the narrow path to the next, and went through the same procedure, trailing the climbing rope behind him to fashion a series of safety holds. The rain increased, and the wind thundered in violence around the rock pinnacles. The troopers waited, with Zalmadar belaying Hans’ climbing rope at the edge of the gorge. Finally, Hans Steicher signalled the others to follow.

The colonel went first, using the nylon line, his legs occasionally dangling over the dizzy drop below. He made it with what seemed to be comparative ease. Half the troopers then followed. Rudi and Sarah Standish went next, and Durell was interested to see that Sarah showed no fear. Alessa, a fine climber in her own right, covered the stretch of perilous path in a few, easy moments.

Durell followed.

The first gap wasn’t difficult, using the pitons. And the second. On the third, close to the end, one of the spikes suddenly ripped free of the crumbling gneiss and he dropped violently into space.

Even as he fell, he whipped the nylon rope around his wrist. The other end was belayed by Hans, who had stood on monolithic strength to anchor the passage of the others across the abyss. Durell swung in a short, savage arc against the brink at the other end of the path; he twisted, got his legs up and flexed his knees to break the impact with his booted feet. The nylon rope stretched, bouncing him back in a spin. The misty sky and wet rocks far below turned giddily under him. Pain shot through his arm and shoulder. He looked up, turning helplessly on the rope. Some of the troopers were shouting in alarm. Their voices had a curious, echoing quality in the misty chasm. He saw the heads of K’Ayub and Alessa peering down at him. He looked at Hans Steicher.

The big man was braced, holding the climbing axe he had jammed into the yielding gneiss to belay the rope that kept Durell from dropping to his death. There was no slackening. The line could have been anchored in steel, as Hans began to pull him up.

It was a laborious effort, with quick disaster waiting for any slip. Durell caught a grip with his left hand on the line and slowly walked his way up the rough face of the cliff. Hans pulled at the same time, allowing no slack in the rope. The man’s face was grim. It seemed forever before Durell looked over the top edge of the path that was his goal. K’Ayub reached down and offered a hand. He shook his head and hauled again and Hans gave one more heave that brought his knees and then his booted feet onto solid ground again.

Durell drew a deep breath and looked into Hans’ eyes.

“Thank you.”

Hans was unsmiling, his enmity still unabated. “Next time,” he said softly, “I may not be able to belay in time. Perhaps you will fall again—later.”

No one else heard the remark. Was it a threat? Durell wondered. A promise of destruction later, when it was safer to accomplish? He did not know. He walked on, to join the others.

They paused for an hour on the opposite side of the gorge, then marched on all day, with regular halts for rest. The rain did not stop, except to give way in the late afternoon to a cold, penetrating fog that seemed to crawl right into their parkas. Once they came to a small village of Hunzas and were ferried across a rushing tributary of the Indus on an ancient wooden barge. They camped that night at a stupa, a small Buddha figure, centuries old, erected long ago by travelers on the trail they followed. But there were no recent offerings in evidence at the shrine.

The second day the ascent was an average of 40 degrees, a steady climb that demanded long traversing techniques, more ferrying across icy glacial streams, and once they fashioned a rope handrail to ford a smaller river, wading chest-deep in the frigid water melted from the ice of the mountains ahead. They camped again in an abandoned monastery that seemed like a miracle in the stony wilderness. No fires were permitted now. They ate cold rations, used their sleeping bags on the stone floor of the crumbling Buddhist building. K’Ayub set out his routine pickets. They all slept in a huddle on the cold common floor of the ruins.

The next day they reached the first snow. It was a foot or more thick, lying unmelted in the perpetual north shadow of a giant monolith that soared several thousand feet above their heads. They put on crampons, metal plates with sharp cleats worn on their boots for better footing, and unsheathed their ice axes. Zalmadar acted as lead man, poking ahead on reconnaissance with his axe or a pole, probing for crevasses. In the morning they traversed a long, steep slope, moving diagonally across the lesser mountain. Traversing was a special technique that demanded the ankles be bent outward, so that your body remained vertical while your feet assumed the same angle as the snow. It was a temptation on any steep slope to lean inward, which was a sure way to guarantee a slip. Beyond the snow slope was a series of smooth ice ledges. Here Hans used his tubular ice pitons, driving the hollow metal spikes into the ice where they froze solidly and made a rope ascent possible. K’Ayub’s men were tireless, uncomplaining. By noon the overcast lifted and gave them their first true glimpse of the wild, tumbled mountains that soared around them.

They were in a long, shallow valley, free of snow again, between two towering ranges of peaks that ended in a col directly ahead, where the twin summits of S-5 blocked their way. Far to the west in the valley was another Hunza village, an oasis of terraced green against the gray and brown and white of the mountains. Misty in the distance, the towering Karakorums loomed against the sky. In contrast to those more distant peaks, S-5 looked relatively small for which Durell felt mildly grateful. Yet he noted the snow fields in cold, lavender blankets along the north and eastern shoulders of the twin peaks. And up there, in that vast empty stillness, nothing seemed to love or live.

Sarah Standish pointed to the peaks, her face flushed with the cold, half hidden under the hood of her parka. “How far do you think it is?” she asked.

“Fifteen—eighteen miles,” Durell told her. “We may reach it by noon tomorrow.”

She looked backward along their trail. “I have the oddest feeling that we’re being watched all the time.”

“It’s quite probable.”

“I never—I didn’t think it would be like this.” She made a vague gesture with her gloved hands. “So—empty.”

“Do you regret coming with us?”

“No. Why should I?”

“You and Rudi have quarreled, haven’t you?”

She didn’t reply.

“I think you should tell me about it,” Durell urged. “It’s not wise to keep secrets from the rest of us up here.”

“It’s purely a personal matter,” she murmured.

The march was resumed. The brief noonday sun yielded to a thin overcast that was driven across the sky by a southeasterly wind. The air felt colder. The thin atmosphere tended to exhaust them quicker than the day before.

By four o’clock the wind was howling, and huge plumes of snow drifted in ragged shreds from the peaks around them. The snow came down upon them with a rush, blotting out everything.

Camp was made a little earlier as a premature darkness fell. It was too dangerous to proceed in the snow in the night hours. This time there was no ruined monastery to shelter them, and the tents went up again.

Durell shared a tent with K’Ayub. For an hour after their dinner, he listened to the wind and the hiss of hard-driven ice particles around the tent flaps. The pressure of the storm increased steadily, the wind shrieking and threatening to tear the tent to shreds. Every hour, the colonel got up and patrolled the site, spoke to his men, checked the sentries. He seemed tireless, calm and efficient, in his element up here.

Durell dozed restlessly. Once, it seemed, he heard someone cry out, and he sat up and got out of the sleeping bag. The oil lamp in the tent was turned low. As he stood, KAyub came back in, dusted with snow, and lifted inquiring eyes.

“I thought I heard something,” Durell said.

“It is only this accursed wind.”

“Is everything secure?”

“Zalmadar says the snow will end soon, and tomorrow will be warm.”

“Let’s hope so.”

But he slept uneasily for the rest of the night.

The camp was astir at dawn. Cooking fires were permitted in the thin air at 12,000 feet elevation, and the smell of coffee filled the air. The snow storm had ended. The sky was clear. Durell dressed in the wool-lined mountain outfit, fastened his boots, and walked to the nearest campfire where Alessa was pouring coffee.

“Good morning.”

She looked at him quickly, then turned away. Since the night in Rawalpindi, she seemed afraid to meet his gaze. Hans hovered in the background at the next cookfire, but he was staring off to the north, at the looming peaks of S-5, their goal. The snow glittered everywhere, only a few inches deep, with many cleared spots ahead along a sharp ridge that lifted to the shoulders of the fabled mountain. To the west and north, the mighty Karakorums loomed as an impregnable wall, casting back brilliant sunlight.

Durell took a cup of coffee from Alessa. “Isn’t Rudi up yet?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

He looked further around the camp. “And Sarah?”

“I haven’t seen her, either,” Alessa said.

Durell walked toward Sarah’s tent, then turned and looked back at the blonde girl. “Sarah shared this tent with you, didn’t she?”

“She was gone when I got up,” Alessa said quietly.

“Gone?”

“I haven’t seen her or Rudi this morning.”

His alarm came in a swift, angry surge that broke in dismay over the bright, promising morning. He went quickly to the girls’ tent, knocked on the pole, lifted the flap. The two sleeping bags were empty. He turned and walked to Hans, who crouched at the fire and washed his messkit in the light, crunchy snow.

“Where is Herr von Buhlen?” Durell asked.

Hans looked at him with his usual blank, stony face. “I have not seen him. He is gone away, I think.”

“Where?”

Hans shrugged. “It is his own business, perhaps.”

It took only five minutes for Durell and K’Ayub to prove the dismaying fact. There was no sign in the camp of Rudi or Sarah. Their rucksacks and equipment were missing. Some food had been taken from the common packs. On the snow-field behind them there were no footsteps, no trace of which direction they had taken. It could only mean one thing.

Some time during the night, while it was still snowing hard enough to cover their tracks, Rudi and Sarah had deliberately left the camp.

They were missing.

chapter fourteen

AT EIGHT o’clock that morning the snowfields changed color from pale lavender to a dazzling, blinding white that demanded snow glasses. K’Ayub came out of his radio tent and nodded to Durell.

“I have sent Zalmadar and four other men back along yesterday’s trail after Miss Standish and Herr von Buhlen. They have just reported, by their walkie-talkie. It is possible they are heading for Mirandhabad.”

“Alone?”

“There was no sign of violence.” The Pakistani was calm. “As far as I can determine, they left us of their own free will. Sergeant Zalmadar will determine that.”

Durell was angry. “Sarah Standish is my responsibility. My job is to make sure she remains safe. You should have let me know you were sending Zalmadar after her; I’d have gone along.”

“I am sorry. I cannot permit that. I understand your quandary—you must protect Miss Standish, and also verify the discovery of nickel on S-5. I cannot concern myself, however, with which is more important to you. It is my judgment that those two left us willingly. If she was misled or hoodwinked—” K’Ayub shrugged. His voice was hard. “I must go on to S-5. It is only a half-day’s march from here. And I have been getting radio reports. Two Tibetan refugees picked up by our frontier posts reported some Chinese probing activity in the mountains beyond S-5. I think speed is vital. I pleaded with Karachi to send a division here immediately, however the Pakhustis might resent it. But no move will be made until the nickel is verified. I have taken it on myself to survey the roadway to this point—two of my men are engineers—and if mining development promises, it must be considered as a practical measure.”

“I think Sarah Standish is in grave danger,” Durell insisted.

“I cannot spare guides to accompany you. And I will need you on S-5. It is my decision, Mr. Durell, that you come ahead with us. More than a decision. It is an order. After all, the life of one woman—”

“A most important woman,” Durell insisted.

K’Ayub’s shrug was indifferent. To his Moslem mind, none of Sarah’s wealth or influence raised her to an equal scale with any man. His lynx eyes were adamant. He was going on.

Durell looked at Alessa, then at the peaks ahead. K’Ayub was in command. He refused to send more men after Sarah, denied Durell permission to go alone. Sergeant Zalmadar was big, tough and competent. The Pathan would travel fast, perhaps overtake Sarah and Rudi before they could reach Mirandhabad. He had no choice. They had to go on.

The last five hours of the march were the most difficult. By noon they were on the lower shoulders of the southern peak of S-5. On every horizon, the outlook was desolate, as alien as a lunar landscape. Durell could see the vast, domeshaped thrust of rock on the southern peak that Alessa identified as Roxana’s Breast. The old man, Omar, in the bazaar of Qissa Khani, had mentioned it, and he sensed a growing excitement in Alessa as they toiled upward to their goal. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright with-anticipation. Not once did she mention Rudi or Sarah.

“Do you think Omar told us the truth?” she asked. “I believe I know the exact spot he mentioned, from where we might get a clue about the North Peak. Poor Uncle Ernst went there alone, interested by some unusual fault he had glimpsed. But I gather the light has to be just right. Oh, if we can find it! If there is a Cave of a Thousand Skulls, it will verify all my research. I could write several papers on it for—”

“Take it easy,” Durell suggested. “We’re not there yet.”

She looked up at him, her excitement dashed. “You are worried about Sarah?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I am sure that Rudi can take care of her. He is an excellent climber. It seems to me that perhaps they had a sudden impulse to abandon the climb and go to Mirandhabad —perhaps to be married there. Why not?”

“Then why not tell us, or leave a, note?”

“Rudi has always been impulsive, unpredictable. Perhaps they were together last night, and felt too impatient to wait longer—”

“Did you hear her leave your tent last night?”

“I was fast asleep. But if she was taken by force, I’m sure I’d have been wakened by any commotion. That is why I am not concerned. Sarah went willingly with Rudi.”

“Alessa, listen to me—Rudi has Ernst Bergmann’s chart, hasn’t he?”

Her eyes hardened. “I cannot believe that. If I did, then I would also have to believe that Rudi killed Ernst. I cannot accept it.”

“Maybe K’Ayub sent his sergeant off in the wrong direction,” Durell said. He stared at the sunlight on the slope above. “Maybe Rudi pushed on ahead of us.”

“Why should he do that?”

“To find Bergmann’s flags first. To radio the Chinese.”

“But that would be treasonous,” Alessa whispered.

“Exactly,” Durell said.

She left him abruptly, and thereafter walked beside Hans.

The wind whistled coldly across the bleak, rocky slopes. Now and then the snow blew in hard, icy particles that scratched their faces. The angle of ascent increased, and Hans reconnoitred the way ahead with care. Climbing ropes were the rule of the day, and their progress was slower than they had hoped. In the thin snow cover, Alessa found traces of the original encampment she made on her first expedition here. It was late afternoon when K’Ayub announced they would make camp for the night.

There was nothing special to be seen on the pinnacle of the North Peak. It looked desolate, separated from them by a deep valley that lifted in a series of steep ledges to a tumbled peak three miles away and two thousand feet higher. Because of the failing light, no details were discernible. Alessa stared through field glasses for long moments, then lowered them in disappointment.

“I see nothing unusual. Omar must have been lying.”

“Didn’t he say about looking for the spot in the morning light?”

She bit her lip. “There cannot be anything over there.”

Durell took her glasses and studied the tantalizing peak. It was empty, barren, savage—the end of the world. In the dark shadows that mantled the eastern slope, there were few details to be seen. But if Bergmann had planted pennants on his climbing wands to mark his discovery, surely they would show up against the thin crust of snow. But he saw nothing.

Then a small black spot moved, infinitely tiny, and vanished.

He was not sure he had seen it.

He watched the place for long moments.

Another spot. And a third.

Then they were all gone.

Three, he had counted. Not two, which might have meant Sarah and Rudi had gone ahead, but three. Perhaps more. He watched, but there was nothing else. The light changed the snow to dark purple as the sun went down behind the savage western peaks. The air grew colder at once. His fingers were numb from holding the glasses to his eyes.

He walked over to Colonel K’Ayub and mentioned what he had seen. K’Ayub was impassive. He ordered a double guard for the night.

No one slept much during the hours of darkness.

In the morning, with the sun full on the face of the North Peak, there were still no details to be seen except the natural ravages of erosion and avalanches. It was warmer, and much of the snow evaporated in the thin, dry air. No fires were permitted for breakfast.

K’Ayub consulted with Alessa and decided to wait for the changing light to verify, if possible, Omar’s story of a cave mouth being visible from where they stood. The hours dragged. Again and again, Durell scanned the ominous peak. He did not see any further movement there.

At noon precisely, they scanned the cliffs ahead for anything unusual. No one spoke. The light on the mountain brightened, faded, and brightened again. Several reddish streaks suddenly glowed as the sunlight played on the cliffs. There were only a few pale clouds in the sky. In the silence, they could hear the distant thunder of the wind, the rumble of a rock slide somewhere. The air vibrated with vast, primeval pressures.

“Oh,” Alessa whispered.

“What is it?”

“I think I saw it—wait a moment.”

She studied the mountain again, through her field glasses. Durell tried to spot the precise area she watched. The face of the cliff seemed sheer and solid up there. A wisp of cloud made a shadow cross the distant rock, melting all detail in the monolith. Then the sun shone brightly again.

He saw it at the same moment Alessa spoke again.

“Ernst spoke of a fault—a rock slide—that happened some years ago over there.”

“That dark streak?” Durell asked.

“Yes.” Alessa was taut with excitement. “See the shale at the bottom of the bank of rubble, like a col? Is it a split in the rock, or just a discoloration?”

Hans rumbled. “It will be difficult to approach, Alessa.”

“But we must try!” she cried.

Another minute went by. Then it was certain. The old slide had exposed a natural fissure, a giant chimney fault that seemed to go far back into the face of the huge ledge. From this distance and perspective, it was possible to spot it only when the sun struck it at this angle. Even as they watched, the light changed and the face of the cliff flowed together to hide the dark fissure that had been evident a moment ago.

Hans had taken a compass bearing on it.

“Let us go. It will be a hard climb, to reach it before dark.”

Alessa’s eyes shone. “Oh, if the crown of Alexander is hidden somewhere over there!”

Durell wondered. He was sure something waited for them on that distant peak. He thought of the tiny dark movements he had seen the evening before. What they might find on S-5 might not be pleasant.

The light snow had evaporated from the path they had to take. The descent into the valley between the two summits was tricky, the upward climb over the series of huge ledges exhausting. Now there was nothing to be seen in the face of the cliff. It loomed in shadow, the sun hidden behind the soaring mountaintop above.

Twice, K’Ayub halted for radio transmissions with other Pakistan frontier posts. The second time, he packed the gear grimly.

“No answer from Junnam,” he said.

“Is that the post that reported Chinese troop movements?” Durell asked.

“Yes. We should hurry.”

In the end, their goal was suddenly visible and easily accessible. A rock slide had to be climbed, scaled by Hans first, who belayed ropes for the others to ascend after him in rapid order. At the top was a small plateau slanting up to the tumble of debris at the base , of the next giant ledge.

A high, narrow fissure led in from the shale that had poured down the face of the mountain, and something red fluttered feebly in the wind at the opening.

“It is one of Ernst’s flags!” Alessa called.

She started to run forward, scrambling up the shallow slope, only to be halted by a sharp command from Colonel K’Ayub. The Pakistani was wary of a trap, although nothing was in sight. He sent two armed men forward to scram-Ble up the crumbly gneiss to the opening in the rock wall, while the others waited. The minutes seemed interminable. Then, for what seemed an even longer time, the two troopers vanished into the narrow cleft above.

They came out moving backward, facing the dark fissure.

K’Ayub called up to them. One man turned, and his voice was small against the vast mountainside. He signalled for the rest to come up.

Alessa, Durell and Hans were among the first to reach the narrow opening. The troopers, burdened with equipment, were a little slower. The two scouts still stood and stared into the darkness between the rock.

“It is a cave, Durell sahib,” one of them said. “The Cave of a Thousand Skulls.”

“Did you go in?” he asked sharply.

“Only a few steps. It is an unholy place. Aza had a flashlight, but he dropped it. It is not a fit place for decent men.”

K’Ayub arrived and called for electric torches from the packs carried by his men. The first two troopers were reluctant to enter the fissure again. Alessa picked up Bergmann’s wand and the little scrap of red flag attached to it. The wind had shredded the bit of cloth in the month since it had been driven with its pole into the ground.

“We are the first here,” Alessa exulted. “Otherwise, would an enemy have left this to guide us? Bergmann said he left three flags and a cairn to mark the ore deposit. Can it be the ore is in the cave, with the crown itself?”

“Bergmann never mentioned finding the crown, did he?” Durell asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“Would he have kept such information to himself, Alessa?”

She looked crestfallen, frowning. “No. But Uncle Ernst was not interested in anything but geological formations.”

The lanterns had been brought up. Durell, Hans and Alessa went inside, with K’Ayub a step behind. Almost immediately, within the fissure, the light grew dim. High overhead, three or four hundred feet up, the narrow crack of rock showed the afternoon sky, like a jagged tongue of brightness above them, shining on the next shelf higher up. The fissure narrowed rapidly for the first fifty steps, then formed a sharp left turn. Rubble slid out underfoot, and each step had to be chosen with care. A second ragged red flag on a thin willow wand, in better condition than the first, marked the turn.

The scrap of blue sky vanished from overhead. The fissure was becoming a cave, widening at the bottom, with the rock walls leaning toward each other at the top and lowering to form a cavern ceiling. The battery lanterns were necessary now. A few more steps, and the third flag and the cairn, as Alessa promised, was found.

A small tin box was atop the cairn. K’Ayub went up to it, drew a deep breath, and at a nod from Alessa, opened it. It had not been locked. Inside were folded papers, a notebook, a few rock samples. The writing was in German, and the colonel turned it over to Durell. The notes confirmed the finding of nickel deposits and promised a variety of other mineral finds in the area.

It was what K’Ayub had come here for.

“We have found the place,” K’Ayub said heavily.

“It looks like it,” Durell said.

“There is no need to go farther, then.” The colonel showed some uneasiness at being in here. The air held the chill of centuries where the sun never penetrated. Durell saw Alessa shiver, and Hans, beside her, lifted his arm as if to hold her; but the big man checked the solicitous move.

K’Ayub went on, “we must get out a radio signal that our search has been successful. We cannot doubt Bergmann’s notes or the validity of his ore samples, or that this is the place he took them from. Karachi will send up a team of geologists and an armed escort and engineers. It will be a great help to my country, to have a mining development here.” He looked at the black walls closing them in. “The radio will not work in this place. Let us go back, outside.”

“Wait,” Durell said. He was watching Alessa. “Like you, Bergmann turned back at this point. Let’s look farther inside.”

“Why?”

“Miss von Buhlen should be satisfied about the legend of Alexander the Great, and Xenos’ disappearance on this mountain with his thousand men.”

“I do not believe such legends,” K’Ayub said shortly. “We are wasting time.”

“It will take only a few minutes,” Alessa pleaded. “Otherwise, Hans and I will go in alone.”

K’Ayub looked angry, then shrugged. “Very well.”

The cliff walls that joined overhead now came down at a swift slant, lowering the ceiling of the cave above them. It was obvious that rubble had fallen in within recent times. Perhaps the fissure had been wide open in past centuries, and then a quake or rock slide had closed it as the mountain settled to a new adjustment. Then, within the past decade or two, a new avalanche or tremor had opened the chimney once more to the outside world.

Durell took a lantern from a trooper and probed ahead. The darkness was as cold and silent as eternity. They went on for a hundred feet. The ceiling of rock sometimes forced them to stoop. The darkness seemed to suck the light from the powerful lanterns and gave them little more power than a flickering candle. Durell wondered if it was wise to go on. K’Ayub was right in worrying about the need for haste. The sooner they returned to the open and got their radio message out, the better their chances for a safe return. One part of his mission was accomplished. But there was still Sarah Standish to think of. She must have gone willingly with Rudi, or there would have been an alarm. But what had Rudi promised, to get her away from the others? Was she a prisoner somewhere—a hostage in Mirandhabad, with all the diplomatic complications such a situation would mean? Or was she even alive at this moment?

He did not know. He felt K’Ayub’s impatience—and then Alessa, who had pushed ahead of the others, gave a small, choked scream.

Her torchlight had dissolved into a massed whiteness far back in the recesses of the cavern. Durell added his light to hers. A hush fell over everyone.

The centuries when the rock chimney had been closed had preserved the scene untouched since the days of Xeno’s ancient disaster. No man could ever know the truth, Durell thought grimly. Had the savage hillmen of ancient tribes drawn the Macedonian and his thousand hoplites into this trap, leaving them to die of starvation, thirst, and wounds? The cavern floor was littered with the bones and skulls and ancient armor of men. As far as their light reached, the whiteness of grinning skulls and ribs and femurs gleamed, mocking them from two thousand years in the past.

It was like stumbling into an ancient charnel house, seeing the massed, tumbled skeletons of what had once been proud fighting men of ancient Macedonia. A few dusty helmets and bucklers of bronze still remained; the wood had rotted from the spears, leaving only the bronze blades; the swords and daggers still shone, melted into the tumbled bones, with here and there a helmet with proud horsehair plume in fragile outline, ready to dissolve into gossamer dust at a breath, a touch.

No one spoke.

Then one of K’Ayub’s troopers murmured in superstitious terror. The colonel spoke sharply, and the man subsided. Something collapsed in the vast heap of bones ahead of them, rustling gently.

“The Cave of a Thousand Skulls,” Durell said quietly.

“It is Xenos and his men,” Alessa whispered. Her face was pale. “The fable was true. I really didn’t—didn’t dare believe—”

Durell felt a deep wonder at these relics of ancient men, at this dust that remained from the proud conquests that shook the old world and left Alexander’s name stamped for all time on all the far comers of the world.

“And the crown?” Durell asked. “Do you think it’s here?”

“I must see,” Alessa whispered.

She went forward, picking her way delicately among the bones and skulls that grinned at her, some with rakish helmets tilted over an eyesocket, some in contorted writhings that indicated a painful death. More than one had a sword thrust through the ribcage, indicating how they had chosen to die quickly by falling on their weapons rather than linger on. The cave was vast, echoing. Every whisper was answered from the dry vaulted ceiling.

Durell and Hans started after Alessa. K’Ayub and his men chose to wait. The cave narrowed and then opened into a kind of inner chamber. Here were helmeted, armored relics that indicated the officers, the last survivors. And there was one skeleton alone, propped against a far wall, grinning foolishly to belie the tales of noble strength and endurance that had come down through the dusty corridors of time.

Alessa ran to these last remains and knelt to pick up something from among the white bones. She turned her face to Durell, and he saw the shattered blindness of tears in her eyes.

“The crown,” she whispered. “Here. Here it is.”

The centuries had tarnished the thin band of gold. It looked dented, fragile, a poor relic to represent ancient splendors. Alessa’s trembling fingers pointed out the gem sockets.

“The jewels are gone. They must have been stolen from here long, long ago,” she whispered.

Her disappointment was crushing. Years of hope and research might be capped with academic honors, if they escaped here alive, Durell thought. But Alessa had been after the crown for its own value, too, and the jewels that represented wealth even in the twentieth century.

Her mouth arched with bitter disillusionment. The tears slid down her face. “I so much hoped—to go home and restore my family’s position—to end our wretched poverty—”

She stood up slowly, the thin, relatively valueless circlet dangling from her gloved hand. She looked at Durell, took a step toward him, and then Hans murmured in German and with a sob, she suddenly flung herself into the big man’s arms.

At the same moment, the sudden rattle of automatic rifle fire, like the chattering of a mocking idiot, echoed in shock waves through the darkness of the cave.

chapter fifteen

K’AYUB shouted, his voice enormous in the hollow cavern. Another burst of fire spattered the darkness with shrieks and whines. The pickets stationed at the cave opening, two hundred feet outward, answered with a few erratic shots. Everyone turned, running toward the entrance.

Durell was with the colonel as they turned the last corner and saw the fading evening light through the high walls of rock. Two of the troopers sprawled on the shale outside the entrance. A grenade exploded somewhere out of sight. Another burst in their path, and K’Ayub and Durell threw themselves flat as splinters shrieked overhead. One of the troopers behind them groaned and fell, holding his face. A third grenade burst outside.

Then there was abrupt silence.

Somewhere beyond the fissure opening a man screamed in the thin air. A single shot punctuated the sound. The scream ended.

Durell lifted his head. They were just inside the place where the leaning rock walls parted to admit a faint streak of waning daylight into the bottom of the crevasse. A hundred feet ahead was the opening where Bergmann’s tattered flag fluttered in the cold wind. There was nothing to see beyond except the darkening sky, a jagged segment of far mountains, and the emptiness of the bitterly cold air between.

He tried to guess where the enemy could be. On either side of the opening, he supposed, covering their escape with automatic rifles and grenades. The pickets had been wiped out with the first bursts of fire. All their gear, food and water, had been left outside. The ambush had been sprung with deadly precision. They were hopelessly trapped.

K’Ayub looked pale. Durell turned his head toward him.

“Can you identify the weapons out there?”

The colonel nodded. “Pakhustis. The Chinese rifles are lighter. You were right about Rudi von Buhlen. He must have had the chart. He went to Mirandhabad or met the Emir on our back trail and led them here. I swear by Allah, he will not survive this treachery.”

One of K’Ayub’s men spoke quietly to him. K’Ayub nodded and the man began to inch ahead, rifle cradled in his arms, toward the two visible pickets who had fallen beyond the cave entrance. The trooper almost reached the first body when a rain of bullets stitched across the open shale. The man got up to run back and pitched onto his face, his body jerking with the impact of a dozen slugs in his back.

The ambushers were well hidden on both flanks of the fissure. Durell counted K’Ayub’s sprawled, tense men. Nineteen. Their cartridge belts were full, and one of them suddenly sprayed an angry burst outward into the empty air. K’Ayub’s sharp order to save ammunition halted him.

“We have enough water in our canteens for two days,” Durell suggested. “And some emergency rations in our pockets. If you can work your radio in here, we might contact one of your posts for relief. Those people out there can’t get in to us.”

“Nor can we get out,” K’Ayub said bitterly.

“Try the radio,” Durell suggested.

The light was fading rapidly. A damp chill filled the cavern. The radio man crawled forward, looking dubiously at the rock walls towering above them. His equipment was in fitted canvas cases. He blew on his hands, hooked up battery and transmitter, extended the thin whip of an antenna as high as possible, and began calling quietly into the microphone, then paused at regular intervals to listen in the earphones over his head. Again and again he sent out his signal. The minutes ticked by. K’Ayub made a tentative gesture.

“The mountain blocks us,” the radio man said. “It is useless.”

“Can you get anything from Post Blue?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Very well. Save your power pack until later.”

It grew dark outside. K’Ayub ordered all flashlights turned off. The blackness made the penetrating cold seem worse.

“It is hopeless,” K’Ayub said quietly to Durell. “They need only to keep us bottled up here for two days.” He gestured back into the cavern. “Then we can join our bones with those ancient ones. If one thousand men could not get out, we will die here, too.” He lifted his head and looked outward. Nothing could be seen. There were no challenges from outside. “We will wait until dark. Then we can try to get the radio out far enough to make a successful transmission. It’s our only chance.”

The time dragged by. The troopers huddled together, facing the only exit. A foot or two away, and they became invisible in the inky dark. K’Ayub ordered three men forward, about fifty paces from the main group, to act as alarm if the cave entrance was infiltrated. Durell moved over and sat beside Alessa. She was a dim, remote figure, absorbed in her defeat, seated on a blanket and hugging her knees.

“If we get out of here,” he suggested, to cheer her, “you’ll gain international fame. Surely this discovery should be enough for you.”

“I wanted the jewels,” she whispered, like a disappointed child.

“You might never have found these relics at all, though.” “Just these bones? A few scraps of armor? What can they do for me or my mother, for my family in Vienna?” “Why is it so important to recoup your family fortune?” “It is a dream I have always had—like an infection. Perhaps I got it from Rudi.” She drew a deep breath. “I am sorry. I must seem childish, sulking this way. Please forgive me. I have been cruel to you—and to Hans, too. I wish—” She paused for a moment. “But nothing matters, does it? We will not get out of here alive.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“I know the truth. You will die. All the soldiers will die.” “And you?”

“I think I will be permitted to live. But I shall not want to live, knowing that all of you are left here.”

“Is it Rudi out there, with the enemy?”

“It must be.”

“You gave him Bergmann’s chart, didn’t you?”

“I gave him the packet that Sarah turned over to me to return to him. I suppose it contained Uncle Ernst’s charts, showing this place. But we didn’t need them, did we— thanks to Omar. But I do not want to be reminded of that night.”

“There are some hours of it I won’t forget,” he said gently.

“But I am ashamed of that, too. I was frightened. I felt as if I had been near death, and I wanted you, to be reassured I was still warm and alive. How can I ever explain that to Hans?”

“Must you?” he asked.

“I would like to. I wish I could.”

He got up and left her and walked to the front of the cave. K’Ayub’s radio man had wriggled forward with his transmitter in the darkness, to try to get away from the suffocating walls that blocked his message.

“We have no hope,” the colonel murmured, “unless we can contact the military posts.”

They waited.

Several minutes went by in the cold darkness.

Then there was a rifle shot. A grenade burst, the explosion like a blast of lightning that illuminated the narrow fissure. In the glare, Durell saw the radio man twist about, holding his canvas-covered transmitter. Then the man fell and darkness returned.

“We need that radio,” Durell said.

He started forward before K’Ayub could object. Only the faintest hint of starlight beyond the cave opening guided him. He moved in a silent half-crouch, advancing toward the fallen man. One of K’Ayub’s pickets challenged him softly. He gave his name, and the invisible trooper touched him, and he went on. Ahead, he heard a scraping on the rubble that littered the floor. The high cliff walls were farther apart here, admitting a little more starlight from above.

He called out softly, gave his name. The radio man groaned. “It is my leg, Durell sahib.”

He reached the man in another moment. He was only twenty feet from the fissure opening. He could hear the'“ faint fluttering from Bergmann’s red flag at the entrance. The wounded trooper was a dark huddle nearby, and he pulled himself toward the man.

“I’ll take the radio. Can you go in alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a chance to send out a signal?”

“It is hopeless from in here.”

The man crawled painfully in toward the cave. Durell gathered up the canvas straps of the radio and slung them over his shoulder. Before he could retreat, a flare burst directly in his eyes, dazzling in white magnesium brilliance. He twisted, started to drop again, and someone called his name.

“Durell! Do not move!”

He froze. The flare blinded him. It was Rudi’s voice. The flare sputtered and smoked only a few feet away. He knew he was clearly visible to both sides, to those inside the cave and the Pakhusti tribesmen outside. He also knew he had never been closer to sudden death. He did not move.

Rudi called harshly, “Is Alessa inside with you?”

“Yes.”

“You realize your situation is hopeless?”

“Come out here where I can see you,” Durell challenged. There was a pause. Then, “Very well. Perhaps we can come to a sensible arrangement. There is no reason for any of us to die here. But before I come out, I must make it clear that I speak to you in a truce. Do you understand? If I am attacked, Sarah Standish will be killed at once.”

“Is she with you?”

She is here.”

“Let me see her,” Durell said. “Let her come with you.” “No. You must take my word. If I die, she dies. Agreed?” Durell did not hesitate. “Agreed.”

Rudi stepped out from behind an upthrust of rock at the entrance to the huge split in the rock. He was alone. Durell looked back into the darkness of the cave. He could see nothing there, but he hoped that K’Ayub had heard everything and had warned his men not to fire. The troopers were hot-tempered, eager for revenge at being ambushed.

He turned back to Rudi. The flare sputtered between them, a small fusee that would last only a minute or two. It would have to be quick, Durell thought. He could take no chances that Rudi was not telling the truth about Sarah being a hostage out there with the hillmen.

Rudi looked bigger in the light of the flare, his yellow hair long and gleaming; his Parka hood was shoved back on his shoulders, and his wide smile was confident.

“So now,” he began slowly, “we speak the truth here.” “It’s a bit overdue,” Durell told him.

“You know the facts. Your position is hopeless. You cannot get out of the cave by force. We have machine guns placed to cut you down if you step out. We have only to wait, if you are stubborn, for a few hours. Thirst, hunger and cold will do the rest, eh?”

Durell indicated the radio. “We expect help soon.”

“Do you? It is a bluff. Transmission in this area is impossible. Certainly it is useless inside the cave, eh? Otherwise, why should your man take the risk of crawling out here with it?” Rudi smiled, shook his head. He carried a rifle in the crook of his left arm, and his booted feet were spread wide in the loose shale. “No, this is not the time for bluffing, Durell. You are finished. You are caught here like little mice in a big trap. So you should be sensible, eh? We can easily make an equitable arrangement.”

“What do you offer?”

“Your lives,” Rudi said simply.

“Simply on your word?”

“You have no choice. You must accept it.”

“You’ll spare all of us?”

“You will be kept in custody for a short time. I am sure your government will make swift arrangements to repatriate you.”

“From where?”

Rudi smiled coldly. “From China, perhaps. There will be some Chinese troops here by morning. It was all arranged back in Karachi. You worried me for a short time. I thought you might ask the Pakistan government to place me under arrest.”

“For Jane King’s murder?” Durell asked coldly.

Rudi gestured in a small sign of dismissal. “She was of no consequence. A small nuisance, only.”

“And Ernst Bergmann?”

“He served his purpose. A man lives to function in his single element. When his capacity for such function is ended, it is fitting that he be finished, too.”

“Then you’re the man who calls himself the Red Oboe,” Durell said quietly.

“Are you surprised?”

“No. I’ve known it for some time. The only problem was how far to let you go, and how to find your partner.”

“Partner?” Rudi shrugged. “As you see, you let the rope out too long, this rope you hoped I’d hang myself with. I broke free. And it is you and your friends who are in the trap.”

“Your sister Alessa is in the trap with us, remember.” Rudi nodded. “But no harm will come to her. In exchange, I guarantee Miss Standish’s safety.”

Durell smiled harshly. “And what does Sarah think of you now?”

“Her opinion is unimportant. It always was.”

“You’d give up all her money for a cause?”

“I am not a fool, nor a puppet on a string. Would I be satisfied with a woman like Sarah, with a mind like an adding machine, counting her dollars, doling it out in payment for love?” Rudi made a sound of disgust. “I do not delude myself. The money I will be paid for the nickel ore site and Miss Standish—”

“Then you won’t turn her back to the Pakistan authorities?” Durell asked quickly.

“I did not say that.”

“You intend to give her to the Chinese. She’d be worth something to them for international propaganda. You don’t intend to set her free.”

Rudi scowled. “You must take my word for it.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you will all die very soon.”

“Including Alessa?”

“If necessary,” Rudi said coldly.

Durrell stared, wondering if Rudi was only bluffing. But then he thought of Jane King and Ernst Bergmann, and he knew that Rudi did not bluff in matters of his business. “It’s no deal,” Durell said.

“There are two hundred Pakhustis outside. Can you escape?” Rudi challenged. “You will die of cold and thirst and hunger.”

“Would the Chinese that you’ve sent for offer anything better?”

Rudi swung his rifle a little. “You are a stupid man.”

“If you move that gun an inch more,” Durell said, “you’ll die right now, Rudi.”

Rudi hesitated. There was no gun in Durell’s hand. His eyes locked angrily with Durell’s, then he shrugged and lowered his rifle.

“You may feel more sensible in the morning.”

The flare guttered out and darkness fell between them.

chapter sixteen

HANS sat with Alessa in the farther reaches of the cave, safe from the stray sniping that began the moment Durell returned. One lantern was kept on where its light was shielded by the sheer rock wall that twisted to the left, away from the fissure’s opening. Its dim glow did not reach to the entrance, where K’Ayub’s men waited watchfully on guard through the night.

Durell had explained the situation to the colonel, and K’Ayub accepted the ultimatum with a shrug. He was a soldier. He was prepared to fight and die.

The canteens of water and the rations were put in a place safe from the occasional stray sniping bullet that whined into the cave to worry them and keep them awake. Their supplies were pitifully small. Durell was sure they could stay in the cave for no more than two days before thirst and hunger began to weaken them.

Some of the troopers had gone to sleep, being phlegmatic about their fate. None ventured into the back of the cave to the field of skulls. It was too promising of their own fate, repeating the ancient military disaster that had overtaken Xenos and his troops.

At midnight the harassing sniper fire stopped. But no one ventured into the outer lines to test their safety. Durell sat with his back to the stone wall of the inner cavern, aware of his frustration. There had to be a way out. None of this could have been forseen, but the problem now was to stay alive and escape before the Chinese came. Durell had no illusions as to what would happen then.

He got up and walked to Hans, and Alessa. The big, granitefaced mountain guide was wide awake. Alessa slept, leaning against the massive bend of his arm. Steicher looked at Durell with cool, appraising eyes.

“Hans, will you come with me?” Durell asked quietly.

“For what?”

“I want your opinion on something.”

“You and I have no need for words,” the man said flatly.

“We have need of each other’s skill and strength. Come.” Hans was reluctant to take his arm from around Alessa, and did so with surprising gentleness. His eyes softened, and a small smile touched his hard mouth. She did not waken. He slid away from her slowly and stood, towering the gloomy light shed by the single battery lamp.

They walked together toward the cave entrance. The man’s enmity was like a cold wall around him. At the point where the path angled sharply right, the cave roof yielded and a glimpse of midnight stars was available high up between the jagged opening of the cliffs.

There was no other source of light. A cold wind blew into the fissure from the mouth of the fault, a hundred feet away. Durell looked up at the towering rock walls and Hans followed his gaze and grunted.

“It is impossible,” Steicher said softly.

“How high do you estimate it?” Durell asked.

“Three hundred and fifty—possibly four hundred. And we do not know what is above us.”

Durell said quietly, “But if we got up there, we’d know what is below. Rudi’s men, the Pakhustis—and perhaps the Chinese. They’re certainly not up there. We’d get on their flank; we could surprise them.”

“It is suicide    to    try,” Hans said flatly.

“It is suicide    to    stay here, isn’t it?”

Hans tilted his head back to stare at the looming walls. “It cannot be done. See, the face of the rock tilts in, leans to each other to meet over the cave. Farther out, it opens more—but we would be under fire out there.”

“It has to be done here,” Durell said.

“I am a man, not a fly.”

“They told me you’re the best bergsteiger in the world,” Durell said. “Are you afraid?”

“Nothing frightens me,” Hans said soberly. “I am intimate enough with death. I have been trapped in snow, buried in an avalanche; I have fallen and dangled by my ankle in two thousand feet of air. Do not tell me I am afraid.” Hans looked to right and left; but the darkness was so thick that Durell wondered what he could see. “I considered this before, Herr Durell. The same idea occurred to me. If we could climb out to the top and then flank those people outside, we could take them by surprise and destroy them, yes. But I would not want to try it.”

“Because you still feel Rudi is your friend?”

“No, he is not my friend. But he is Alessa’s brother, and there are remarkably strong, strange ties between them. Could I kill him, if we succeeded in getting out of here? It would kill everything for me, with Alessa, too.”

“Ask her, first,” Durell urged.

“No. It is madness to try such a climb, in the darkness, the way the wall leans outward. It would need two men for the first climb. Afterward, with a belayed rope, we could lift up some of the soldiers and their weapons. But it would take two men to climb first.”

Durell said, “I’ll try it with you, Hans.”

Surprise stirred the man’s dark body. “I have sworn an oath to myself.” Hans paused, sighed. “You know what it is? I promised myself that I would kill you.”

“Because of Alessa?”

“Yes, because of her.”

“I don’t care what you feel about me, Hans. But we must get out of here. I’ll try the climb with you, and take my chances on what you might do.”

Hans was silent for a moment. “You are either a brave man or a great fool. Do not trust me, Herr Durell.”

“I don’t. But perhaps I’m a little of both.”

Hans moved toward the wall. He was a huge shadow in the darkness at the bottom of the pit. The cave entrance was silent, and Durell wondered why the harassing sniper fire had been discontinued. He drew a deep breath.

“Hans, you can do it,” he said. “I’m sure you can.” -“We will both fall. We will both be killed.”

“You said you were not afraid.”

“True. But some things are impossible.”

“Right now we have to try the impossible. If I could go alone, I would,” Durell argued. “But I need your help. No one but you could climb this wall. You could save us. When the Chinese come, we’re finished. It must be tried now, at once, in the dark, before dawn comes.”

He sensed the inner struggle going on inside Hans. The man’s solid devotion to Alessa had existed for many years, since their days at the Sorbonne. She had always rejected him. And Durell was sure that Hans knew about the night in Rawalpindi. The man hated him for gaining so quickly what he had always wanted. Yet his love for Alessa was unchanged, except that it was balanced by the hatred he equated with Durell. Hans might be as good as his word and try to kill him. But that was a risk he had to take.

They were enemies, but for the next few hours, they had to help each other at the risk of instant death.

“All right,” Hans said suddenly. “It is the only way out. We will try it. But I can promise you nothing.”

Hans had carried several coils of nylon climbing rope with him when they first entered the cave. They gathered these, together with Steicher’s pitons and hammer. Each added an ice axe, sheathed in leather, to his gear. Colonel K’Ayub watched their preparations dubiously.

“No man can climb out of here. It is impossible. You will make noises, dislodge stones, and be shot down from the outside.”

“You can cover us with some irregular fire from your guards.”

“We do not have much ammunition to spare.”

“You couldn’t use it to better advantage,” Durell argued.

K’Ayub gave in. Alessa spoke to Hans in a quiet, earnest voice as the big man gathered up his equipment. Now and then she looked toward Durell, and he knew she was trying to convince Hans about something concerning him. Hans stolidly went on with his preparations.

It was one o’clock before they were ready. Hans threw one coil of rope over his shoulder and Durell took the other. Then they moved out of the cave and around the corner of the fissure until they could see the stars through the crack in the mountain overhead. The walls, leaning inward, looked impossible to scale. But Hans felt his way along the north side, then the south, taking his time. The faint starlight that sifted down offered little guidance. Hans returned to the north wall, moving sidewise and outward toward the entrance. They were dangerously near the point where the Pakhusti snipers might reach them. And the higher they climbed, the more exposed they would be.

“We will try here,” Hans announced in a whisper.

He had found a fault in the otherwise sheer rock face that leaned over them, a rough chimney, perhaps two feet wide. Hans reached up for a grip and lifted himself with a handhold, braced his shoulders against one side of the narrow cleft in the rock, flexed his legs against the other. A few pebbles dislodged by his ascent clattered loudly to the ground. One of K’Ayub’s men promptly fired three rapid rounds out of the fissure entrance, into the night.

Hans called softly from above. “Come.”

Durell followed, using Hans’ technique. The first few feet were not difficult, except for the blinding darkness. Hans paused overhead, then went on. The chimney narrowed, then angled sharply left to form a narrow ledge that gave only a few inches for a toehold. Only occasionally could Durell see the man above him. On the ledge, he felt the vast pressure of the rock wall, tending to push him outward.

—The force that thrust at his sense of balance seemed irresistible. He paused for a few moments.

Hans called softly again.

“Wait.”

The click of his hammer driving a spike into the rock made the troopers unleash another series of shots to cover the noise. The echoes were deafening in the narrow slot of rock. There came another series of hammer blows, a long pause, a grunt. A white snake of nylon rope flicked down and lightly grazed Durell’s cheek.

“Climb,” came Hans’ disembodied voice.

Durell lashed the line around himself and hauled upward. He gained another fifteen feet, felt another ledge under his knee, and hoisted himself up on it. Hans waited for him here. At their backs, a bulge of rock pressed outward and overhead, cutting off their progress.

“It is impossible,” Hans whispered. “It cannot be done.”

“We’ve got to go on.”

“The overhang is too great. It affords no grip.”

“Try it.”

“Well—” The big man sighed, a shapeless form in the dark. “We must belay ourselves. If I slip, if one of the pitons gives way, I go down. I doubt if you could hold me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Hans made a sound in his throat. “Perhaps you would.”

They went on. The big man was methodical, agonizingly slow. The next twenty feet took almost an hour. They had climbed less than a fifth of the way during the first seventy minutes. The top, where the stars shone in cold glimmerings, seemed as unattainable as ever.

As each spike for a handgrip was used, Durell withdrew it and passed it on up to the man above. His muscles ached and trembled with the tension. He shed his coat for greater ease of movement, dropping it to the ground below. There was a small cry down there when it thudded down. He thought the sound came from Alessa, expecting the worst. Hans, too, tossed his hampering clothes aside. They no longer

felt the chill of the thin mountain air. Their bodies were covered with sweat.

Another hour passed. They could see each other now, as they crawled upward inch by inch, gripping with fingers and toes, panting and probing and testing for every step upward. The darkness yawned below. The stars seemed brighter overhead. Now and then, an occasional burst of fire from the troopers below covered the sounds they made.

At any moment they could be spotted. Another flare, tossed into the cave entrance, would expose them like flies on a wall. But none came. Everything was silent outside. Were the Pakhustis trying to entice them into probing out of the trap, so they could be mowed down? It was a cold war of nerves, and Durell knew his own tension was matched by the uncertainties of those he had left beneath.

They were halfway up when they came to the widest ledge. It had been invisible from below, in the dark, and for several minutes, following its upward slant, Durell began to hope for quick success. And then Hans paused.

“It is no good,” he gasped.

“Why not?”

“Everything ends here.”

In the dim starlight, Durell saw the dismaying prospect. The ledge terminated abruptly, and where they had halted, crouching, it was only eight inches wide. But overhead, a heavy bulge of rock pushed outward for five feet into space and presented an impossible obstacle to their climb. To go back and retrace their way for another route would be suicidal. But they could go no farther, either.

Hans breathed gustily, feeling his way upward. A small rivulet of shale fell from his fingers, followed by the covering burst of fire from below.

“If we could climb another ten feet, I think it would be easier. I have a feeling we were deceived from below by this bulge,” Hans gasped. “The rock will slant back above, if we can get past this.”

“We must try,” Durell said.

Hans turned his face toward him. It was pale and hard in the gloom. “I have never tried anything so dangerous.” “We have nothing more to lose,” Durell said.

“I would depend on your strength and skill. How can I trust you?”

“I’ve trusted you so far, haven’t I?”

“I wonder,” Hans said. “I do not understand you.”

“Go ahead,” Durell urged. “Let’s do what we can.”

There was no real alternative. Hans belayed one of the safety ropes and then spent ten minutes searching overhead for tiny cracks in which to insert his pitons and tap them home. They provided an extra handhold for Durell to cling to the tiny ledge. When he thought of the drop below, a wave of dizziness touched him; he put it from his mind. Hans reached upward cautiously, against the outward thrust of rock and tapped home another grip for himself. Clinging to his first iron, he reached another two feet against the rock underside and drove home a third. The sound of his hammer echoed loudly in the black air. With his left hand gripping the second piton, Hans then reached for the farthermost thrust of the overhang. He leaned at an angle over the abyss now, struggling for a new grip. His right hand drove home a last iron, then, with his left securing his weight against the drop, he hammered it in securely.

Durell knew what had to follow. Hans must swing out, feet free, and haul himself up and over the bulge by sheer physical strength. It would take steel nerves, a lifetime of skill.

The man’s breathing was harsh.

“Now!” he whispered.

He swung, gripping the outermost iron with his left hand, dangling in the dark air two hundred feet above the fissure floor. His body jerked, heaved upward, pulled by the immense strength of his arms. The upper half of his body slid up and out of view beyond the overhang—

It was a fault of the rock, perhaps. Or Hans had underestimated the force and pressure of his upward swing to get above the rock bulge. Whatever the reason, there came a grating sound, a spill of crumbling stone, and Hans fell abruptly, the piton wrenched loose from its socket.

There was nothing to stop him except the rope belayed around Durell.

Almost any other man would have cried out in that moment, shrieking a negative to his imminent death.

Hans fell silently.

The jolting impact tore Durell’s left hand loose from one of the two grips Hans had prepared for him. He felt an instant of utmost pressure, yanking him out and down after the big man’s falling weight. Pain flashed through his arms and shoulders and down his body. There came a second jolt as Hans bounced with the spring of the nylon rope.

Durell was pulled perilously outward, clinging to his last grip, his feet braced against the tiny shelf under him.

Hans swayed back and forth over the abyss. And even now he did not call out to betray their presence to the enemy outside the cave.

The enormous pull on Durell’s arm seemed impossible to overcome. Carefully he swung to one side, then the other, reaching with his left hand for the grip he had lost. At the third try, his fingers touched the piton, slipped, and fell away again. He swung once more, caught the steel spike, pulled himself flat against the cold face of the rock. The climbing rope around him tore and wrenched with Hans’ weight below. He did not move again. It was up to Hans to climb up once more.

He heard a faint exhalation from the other’s lungs, a scrape of spiked boots on rock, a new series of tugs at his waist.

A few moments later, Hans was back on the tiny ledge beside him.

And a flare burst, thrown in from the outside, brightening the fissure with an implacable, deadly brilliance.

chapter seventeen

THEY did not move. They were exposed like flies on a wall, easy targets for searching eyes that looked for the source of the sounds they had made. At any moment, if the eyes lifted, they would be seen. Two easy shots could pick them off, where they clung to the face of the rock.

Hans was shaking. In the glare, his hard face was pale, shining with sweat. His eyes were white. A few sniping bullets screamed into the fissure; but they were aimed at ground level, and one of K’Ayub’s men answered with a burst of fire that shook the air with its echoes.

Two minutes dragged by.

The flare sputtered and went out. Darkness returned, seeming more absolute after the brilliant blue light.

Hans shifted his weight carefully to release the pressure on the climbing rope around Durell. His whisper was an exhausted sigh.

“You could have let me fall, you know.”

“Would you have done that to me?” Durell asked.

“I think so, yes. I promised it to myself.”

“Because of Alessa?”

The big man was silent.

“Or is there some other reason, Hans?” Durell asked quietly.

“No. No other reason.”

“It seems to me that Alessa has finally chosen you, these last few days.”

Hans stared into the dark, his body slumped, drained of its strong, rock-like quality. “I do not know. You saved my life now. I would have let you fall, if our positions had been reversed. It would have been an easy thing to do, even if the others were watching.”

“You had another chance, on the road up here. Why didn’t you kill me then?”

“I don’t know. I do not understand myself, these days.” Durell looked at the overhang. “Are we stranded here, then?”

“No. I shall try again. I am all right now.”

“Take your time,” Durell said.

“No, it will soon be daylight. We must get to the top before we can be seen.” Hans straightened slowly. “A man is full of weaknesses that betray him,” he said heavily. “One tries to be strong in all things. It is the only way to survive in this world. Our lives are made unreal by sheltering propaganda. But reality is stern, and we live only once in this foolish world. One guides his life by such realities as he can discover, and then—”

Durell smiled slightly. “Then you fell in love.”

“Yes.”

“It is no great weakness, Hans.”

“It is, with me. It leads to mistakes, perhaps to destruction.” The big man turned his head and looked at Durell again. “But sometimes one gets the chance to correct such mistakes.”

He tackled the overhang again, and the second try went easier and quicker, as if the fate that had almost destroyed them had resigned its opposition. A new piton was hammered home to replace the one that had torn loose. Again Hans swung himself into dark space, clawed upward, gained a toehold, got his knee over the edge, and then swung out of sight, dangling the white climbing rope behind him.

Now it was Durell’s turn.

He waited for the signal on the rope and looked down at the bottom of the crevasse. It seemed utterly black down there, impossible to see the straining faces trying to watch their progress. He drew a deep breath and swung out on the taut line belayed by Hans, above him.

But some small instinct warned him not to depend on the rope entirely. He kept one grip on the pitons at all times, and the nylon rope was actually slack as he wriggled up and over the bulge of rock that had stopped them at this point.

Hans was waiting, silent, hauling the rope in hand over hand.

“It will be easy now. You did not quite trust me, eh?”

“No,” Durell said.

“It is just as well.”

He saw that Hans had estimated the problem beyond the overhang with surprising accuracy. The bulge had offered a false top to the cliff’s edge, when seen from below. For another hundred feet upward, the fault slanted back and away. The rock surface was rough, affording easy handholds, inclining in a relatively easy direction for the next twenty minutes’ climb.

A few more moments, and they both heaved themselves over the top into the outer world.

It had taken over three hours to get out of the cave. For long minutes, they sat side by side in the cool wind, sucking thin air into their aching lungs, waiting for the trembling of their muscles to ease. Neither spoke. There was a rising moon, and the tumbled mountains lifted in awesome grandeur in every direction, a sight that Durell had begun to doubt he would ever see again.

There was no sign of the Pakhustis. The night was clear, cold and empty. In an hour, it would be dawn.

Durell stood up, slipping free of the climbing rope. Hans got up, too, his movements oddly cumbersome. His face looked chiseled from granite. Under his heavy brows, his eyes gleamed, reflecting the moonlight.

“Let’s get some troopers up here, Hans,” Durell said. “There isn’t much time left.”

“There is no time left at all. I am sorry. It was not my plan to have anyone escape from the cave,” Hans said heavily. “Not even you, Durell. But I needed your help to get up here.” Durell looked at the big man and saw the gun Hans had taken from his coat. He held it loosely, muzzle pointing down beside his leg. The wind made a soft keening sound against the naked mountainside.

“You had a plan of your own?” Durell asked softly. “All the time,” Hans said.

“Let me remind you that Alessa is still down there.” “She will be safe. That is why I wanted to get out first, to be sure nothing happens to her when it is all ended.”

“And the others?”

Hans shrugged. “It is the fortune of war. You should know about war, Durell. You have been in it for a long time. A quiet kind of war, is it not? Full of silences, and full of surprises.”

“I’m not surprised,” Durell said. “Put away the gun Hans.” “I cannot. It is too bad, because you are a brave man, and you saved my life. It is a sad duty for me. But as I said, one must be a realist to survive today. The world is too crowded for two kinds to survive. Only the strong and the scientific can exist. Humanism and democracy are only words that are as dead as the last century.”

Hans paused. “I knew you suspected Rudi. But when did you begin thinking about me?”

“From the beginning,” Durell said. “A free-lance romantic like Rudi von Buhlen is usually teamed up in your so-called shadow system. Someone was behind him, giving the orders, making the plans, receiving the information he gathered and passing^ it on. It had to be someone who was on hand here when "Ernest Bergmann first disappeared. Obviously, it was you.”

“So you knew all the time?”

“I guessed. I wasn’t sure. I had to give you both enough rope to expose your system of silent partnership. Does Rudi know who you are?”

Hans shook his head. “He has never known. Our system of dual teams, with one in command and hidden behind a perfect cover, like my own, gives the orders by various systems of signals. Rudi never knew who gave him his jobs, although several times he tried to find out. Rudi was a fool. But his personality was a good cover for the things he had to do. He had been useful to us. Between the two of us, we earned much money.”

“Selling international secrets?”

“Yes.”

“So Rudi played the instrument—the Red Oboe—but you called the tune, Hans?”

“Yes. Always.”

“And you expect the Chinese to pay you for the location of this mineral deposit?”

“The arrangement is for the equivalent of one hundred thousand English pounds sterling, in Swiss francs, deposited in Geneva. Rudi splits his share with me. He deposits my part of it in a numbered account there.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” Hans asked. “You know what I must do?” “You’ve got to kill me,” Durell said. “And everyone else down there. You must join the Pakhustis and the Chinese to make sure Alessa comes out alive, however. But none of the others. You can’t quite trust the Chinese commander, though. If you’re in the cave at the end, they might wipe you out, too. After all, you’ve kept your secret well. Rudi doesn’t even know you’re his boss. You might have a hard time saving yourself.”

“It will work out satisfactorily,” Hans said slowly.

“And how will Alessa feel about the way you’ve used her foolish brother? You’ve made him a gambler and a woman-chaser, encouraged his extravagances to get him into debt, wrecked his life to make him obey orders. Not a pretty picture for her, when she learns about it.”

“She will never know. And she will forget about you, too, once you are out of the way.”

Durell looked at the other’s gun. “You’ve arranged with the Chinese patrol to take over this section of the border, is that it? No report will be made about the nickel ore, so nothing more will be done by the Pakistan Government. There may be some international exchanges about border violations in the next few months, a few top-level conferences, an appearance of negotiation, some yielding by the Chinese, a grant of autonomy to the puppet Emir of Mirandhabad—and Red China gets the nickel mine.”

“These things,” Hans said, “are for others to settle. My job is done. I arranged for Ernst Bergmann’s questioning in Rawalpindi, but I needed Rudi to get the charts from the old man. Ernst was too stubborn for me to handle. As for Jane King, that was Rudi’s personal foolishness—but I have always had to cope with Rudi’s silly problems. His usefulness compensated for the trouble he gave me.” Hans laughed thickly. “It takes a fool to idealize the foolish image of one’s Uncle Franz.”

The sky was lighter behind the peaks to the east, and the dim loom of the mountains showed the paling, starlit sky. The dawn wind blew icily across the huge ledge where they stood. Hans’ gun still dangled from the man’s fingers. Durell’s gun was in an inside pocket, out of reach.

“If you shoot me,” Durell said, “they’ll hear it in the cave. They’ll know what you’ve done.”

“None will survive. What will it matter?”

“Alessa will know, because you plan to save her.” Hans stared. “You are right. I don’t need the gun. If you fell back into the fissure it will satisfy her that your death was accidental.”

“I won’t oblige you by jumping,” Durell said.

Hans unsheathed the ice axe with a swift movement. The sharp blade on one side of the head, the pointed pick on the other, gleamed with murderous brilliance in the strange light. “Back up, please.”

Durell stood still. The edge of the cliff was not far behind him. Then he took a step backward. The cold wind cut at his face. The big man stood with his back to the east, his dark hulk outlined against the pallor of the sky. He looked implacable, armed with gun and axe, beyond argument.

Behind him, something moved against the pale scree of the little plateau. Durell did not turn his eyes from Hans’ face.

“Another step, please,” Hans said quietly.

Durell backed up again. He turned his head as if to see where the edge of the cliff lay at his heels; but he used the opportunity to look beyond Hans at the movement of shadows against the glimmering rock. One. Two. And a third. Three men, moving stealthily toward Hans Steicher. He could not identify them. They were soundless phantoms, their detail obscured by their mountain clothes. But a faint gleam of light caught on a rifle barrel and shone briefly.

“You can’t win, Hans,” Durell said. “They’ll kill you, too.”

“Why should they? It is only a business arrangement.”

“They may not do business your way in this wilderness.”

“We have talked enough.” A thin edge of impatience rasped in Hans’ rumbling voice. “Two or three more steps, please.”

Durell deliberately looked beyond Hans and called in Urdu, “Don’t shoot him, sergeant! We want him alive! Don’t make any noise here!”

Hans started to turn, checked himself, grunted impatiently—and Durell hit him with a thrusting charge that closed the gap between them in an instant. Hans was fast. His axe came up, slashing at Durell’s head. Durell ducked, felt the shaft strike his shoulder, slammed into Hans’ belly to force him back a step, drove the axe handle back and down with his free hand. Hans dropped his gun, grabbed him in a bear hug. Durell drove an elbow into the other’s face, felt the nose bone crush and splinter. It did not stop Hans. Hans swept him literally from his feet, carrying him toward the edge of the precipice. For a shocked instant, Durell knew the big man had the strength to throw him into the dark fissure below. He struck again with his free arm, felt Hans cough and strangle. Blood was running from the man’s crushed nose, into his mouth and throat. It was all that saved Durell for the moment. His own lungs were squeezed beyond endurance by the other’s grip. The sky turned black. There was a roaring in his ears. Through the wild sound of his body’s panic, he heard a quick scrape of booted feet on the rock. Hans Steicher made a thin, agonized sound. His body jerked, his grip slackened. Durell tore loose, spun away, and fell to his knees. The earth yielded, slid away under him, and he grabbed at Hans’ leg to pull himself back from the edge of the cliff.

Hans tried to kick free and came down on top of him. For a moment, the impact drove Durell closer to the precipice’s edge. Hans got a massive hand under his jaw and drove his head back until Durell heard the bones of his neck crack. He summoned his last strength from somewhere to heave upward and free himself. Hans, too, staggered to his feet. The edge of the crevice was only a step or two from where they stood, facing each other.

Hans rushed at him.

Durell flung himself aside, felt the big man’s jarring impact, and went spinning away. Hans kept going.

There was a moment when Durell saw the glitter     of     a knife in the other’s back, and in that instant of wonderment saw the shapes of other men carefully circling toward him— Hans went over the cliff.

There came a deep outcry, a bellow of rage and denial as Steicher fell. And then there was silence again.

chapter eighteen

DURELL turned to the three men who kept him pinned to the edge of the cliff. In the dawn’s light, he thought one looked familiar. It was Sergeant Zalmadar, the Pathan. He remembered that K’Ayub had sent Zalmadar and others on their back trail to hunt for Rudi and Sarah. Only these three had survived. He looked at them and could read nothing in their dark, savage faces.

Zalmader spoke in his precise English. “You are not wounded, Mr. Durell?”

“No.”

“The others are down there, where you come from?” “Yes.” Durell answered the Pathan’s unspoken question. “The colonel is all right. They’re trapped down there, do you understand?”

Zalmadar nodded. “There are some Chinese troops now with the Pakhustis outside the cave mouth. You were trying to out-flank them?”

“Yes.” Durell looked at the dark pit behind him “I couldn’t have gotten out without Steicher.”

“He was a brave man. I put the knife in him to help you. I had to throw it. We heard you climbing, for some time, from up here. And we heard everything you said together.” “Then you know he was a traitor.”

“Yes.”

Durell wondered what was happening in the cave. What had Alessa thought when Hans came crashing down, after all the agonized hours of waiting? Their tension down there must be enormous.

He turned back to Zalmadar. “We need help. Your friends are down there waiting for a rope. Will you give me a hand?”

“That is why we returned,” the Pathan nodded. “We followed the man, Rudi von Buhlen, and the American lady until they met with the Emir’s troops, then we trailed them to this place. We worked our way up the cliff to seek another entrance to the cave. And then we saw you.”

They lowered Durell’s rope rapidly to the bottom. A faint pink aura in the east heralded a clear day. For several moments there was no reaction from the darkness below. Then the rope was tugged twice, rapidly, and Durell signalled to Zalmadar, who made the line fast and held it as someone began a slow, laborious climb to the summit to join them.

It was Colonel K’Ayub. He greeted Sergeant Zalmadar with surprise and relief, listened to Durell’s explanation of what had happened, and spoke with rapid, crisp efficiency.

“The woman has not stopped her tears since Hans’ body came down. We found Zalmadar’s knife in him. It explained most of it to me.”

From then on, matters were out of Durell’s hands. K’Ayub took charge of lifting his men out of the pit, one by one, as the light grew stronger and the distant loom of the mountains grew more distinct. A peak to the east suddenly shone with rosy brillance as the rising sun touched its summit.

Durell turned away and sat down to watch the rapidly growing numbers of Pakistan troopers on the cliff top. He felt drained of further resources. The long climb up the rock wall with Hans had been harrowing enough, and his eyes felt as if someone had thrown gravel into them. Every muscle of his body ached. In any case, he thought, he could take no part in the fighting that was imminent. He had to remain neutral now. It was up to K’Ayub and his men, and their mood was dangerous.

Alessa was pulled up toward the end of the maneuver. She walked directly to where Durell sat and seemed to collapse beside him, as if her legs could no longer support her. In the pale light, her face looked haunted. For several moments she was silent, then she said quietly. “Did you have to do it, Sam? Must you take everyone from me? First Rudi, and now Hans?”

“Hans tried to kill me.”

She started to speak, then nodded slowly. “Yes, he was always very close to Rudi. He taught Rudi to climb in the Alps, and was often with him on the Riviera. He was a strange man. He—I think he frightened me, and that is why I could never—I mean, when he said he loved me, something in him seemed repellent. I could never understand it.”

“I’m sorry, Alessa.”

“No, it is better this way, to know the truth.” She looked sharply at him. “You are concerned for Sarah now, are you not?”

“We’ll know about her in a few minutes, I think.”

“Rudi will kill her, if he can. She could be a witness against him. I have no illusions about Rudi now. He killed Jane, and Uncle Ernst. He must have had orders from Hans about Ernst.”

“Yes.”

She turned her face away and began to cry silently. He did not touch her or speak to her.

K’Ayub was quick and efficient with his military problem. In the growing light, he went forward to negotiate the downward slope at the end of the fissure. Durell went with him, crawling until they could see the enemy encampment. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, Durell thought.

The Chinese were camped apart from the Emir’s men, their small tents militarily precise. They were apparently secure in feeling their quarry was hopelessly bottled up. Only a few pickets were awake, and some cooks, who were starting breakfast fires. Two machine-gun crews dozed at their posts where their weapons covered the cave entrance.

Durell borrowed field glasses to study the Chinese. There were about forty in the patrol, short and stocky men who looked Manchurian. Their arms were modern. He swept the glasses to consider the Emir’s large, gaudy tent, with its pennant flapping in the dawn breeze. A sense of confidence and security seemed to prevail among the sleeping enemy.

He saw no sign of Rudi or Sarah, and spoke to K’Ayub about it. The colonel nodded. “They will be in the Emir’s tent—unless the Chinese have already removed them. I shall give my men orders to be careful of their fire when we begin.”

“I’m going down with you,” Durell said.

The colonel frowned. “It is not your battle now. It may provoke complications for you, if you take part in this.”

“I must be sure Sarah is all right,” Durell insisted.

K’Ayub said nothing, his silence giving assent. In the end, K’Ayub’s men worked with clock-like precision. Their light automatic rifles were trained on the Chinese and Pakhutis camped below. A squad of troopers, left in the cave, had orders to wait until the day brightened and the enemy began to stir. Durell lay flat behind a boulder, watching. His body ached with fatigue from the long march, the hours of climbing with Hans. But there was still this last job to be done.

Rudi came out of the Emir’s tent and went over to one of the cooks’ fires. A Chinese met him and they talked briefly. Durell focused the lenses more sharply. The Chinese was flat-faced, grim; his gestures were quick and angry. Rudi pointed to the Emir’s tent, but when the Chinese officer started there, Rudi held him back. There was a moment’s pause, and then the Chinese went back to his own men.

Sarah had to be in the tent, Durell decided. Rudi might have lied to everyone, all around, perhaps left her on the back trail or in Mirandhabad, so that he could return to her with some invented story of disaster and preserve his chances of marrying her. But not with the Chinese here, Durell thought. Rudi would have to show his good faith by bringing her with him. In that case, her life was in greatest danger the moment the fighting began—

The blast of a grenade signalled K’Ayub’s attack. It came from the cave, hurled by one of the remaining troopers down there, as a diversion. It did no damage. But it made the besiegers tumble out of their tents and sleeping bags in expectation of a counterattack, focusing their attention on the cave mouth.

Several more grenades and shots brought the Emir and the Chinese commander toward the cave entrance. Most of the Pakhustis and Chinese were awake and milling about, gathering up their weapons.

Up above, K’Ayub gave the signal to fire.

The sharp rattle of machine guns and rifles split the dawn silence. The effect was devastating, as the fire poured down from the height above the unsuspecting enemy. Screams and shrieks of panic were drowned out by the troopers’ steady onslaught. It was a complete surprise. Secure in thinking that no one could escape from the cave, the enemy was not prepared for their appearance above and on the flank. It was a massacre.

Almost at once, the Pakhustis ran in panic for their shaggy ponies. They were cut down without pity by the troopers. K’Ayub did not relent. The encampment below became a shambles. The Chinese tried to rally, and K’Ayub ordered the commander cut down. The shots were quick and effective. Disorder yielded to more panic below. The shale plateau was dotted with bodies. A fire broke out in one of the tents, sending a thin plume of smoke into the clear dawn air.

Obviously, the enemy thought they had been set upon by a relieving column of regular Pakistan Army troops. They fled on foot and pony. The Chinese tried to shelter themselves among the rocks, and few stray, futile shots came up, seeking targets. But in a few minutes their resistance broke, too.

Durell searched for Rudi and Sarah. No shots were aimed at the Emir’s tent, on K’Ayub’s orders. With the first outbreak of firing, Rudi had appeared there, then had ducked out of sight. Durell’s worry deepened. If Sarah was a prisoner and used as a hostage, their victory was weakened. He got to his feet, ignored the colonel’s shout, and started to run down the slope into the enemy camp. K’Ayub’s men could not hold themselves back. They shouted and jumped up, too, and ran downhill into the shattered camp.

Durell was well ahead of the others. A bullet whined past his head, another kicked up gravel at his feet. He saw the Emir in a white tunic and turban, running for his tent. Somehow he had escaped the first burst of fire. The Emir darted into his tent. Durell passed a few sprawled bodies, hurdled a smoldering camp fire, and swung toward the big tent.

Rudi and Sarah came out.

The Emir had a gun at Rudi’s back. Sarah’s hands were tied behind her. She looked frightened, not knowing what was happening. Durell felt a vast relief, shouted to her—and then halted abruptly.

The Emir shot Rudi in the back.

The sound was muffled in the clamor of gunfire and yelling around them. Smoke drifted around the big tent, hiding it. Durell was still fifty feet away when Rudi went down on his knees, a look of astonishment on his face. Then he pitched forward on the gray shale and was still.

The Pakhusti chief turned his gun on Sarah.

Durell’s shout distracted him. The Emir was a big man, well over six feet, with a fierce mustache and a face like a ravaged bird of prey. He looked at Durell, running well ahead of K’Ayub’s men, and hesitated. Sarah sank to her knees beside Rudi’s body. The Pakhusti raised his gun, fired at Durell, fired again.

He missed both times, and Durell jumped over Rudi’s body and grappled for the other’s gun. The Emir stumbled over Sarah, went down. His gun went off a third time. Durell felt the other man’s strength and knew that he himself was spent. He swung the butt of his borrowed rifle as hard as he could, but his blow rocked the Pakhusti backward only a step. He scrambled up before Durell could regain his footing. He still had his gun, leveled, ready to fire—

Sarah fired the last shot. She had snatched up Rudi’s gun to use it. The Pakhusti turned halfway to her, amazed, coughed blood, and staggered back into the tent.

Durell turned slowly toward Sarah. She was on her knees beside Rudi. He could not see her face, and the wind blew her hair across her cheek. Her body was in an attitude of collapse, and the gun she had used lay on the ground beside her.

“Sarah?” he said. She did not reply. He knelt beside her, and took her hands from Rudi’s body. She did not look at him. “Sarah, he’s dead. Come away.”

When she looked up, he saw there were no tears in her eyes. Instead, her face was carved by a furious anger.

“He lied to me,” she whispered. “He lied to all of us. He was going to sell me to the Chinese. He tried to say it was all a mistake, that he was helping, me; but the Chinese commander last night insisted I was to go to Sinkiang with his patrol, to be held for political purposes.”

“And Rudi agreed?” Durell asked.

“Yes. He never loved me, did he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Like all the others,” she said dully. “The men who flattered me, cheated me, the ambitious men and the greedy ones. I think—oh, I wish I were dead, too!”

“Come along,” he said. “It will seem different, later on. You’re lucky to be out of it.”

She looked dubious, like a child. “Lucky?”

“Either way—whether he sold you to the Chinese or talked you into marrying him—it would have ended like this. He killed Jane, and he killed Ernst Bergmann. He worked with Hans, who was his boss. We’ve had him in our files for a long time. I had enough on him so he wouldn’t have lived another month.”

“Would you have killed him yourself?” she whispered. “That would have been my next job,” Durell said softly.

chapter nineteen

THEY waited two days at the cave for regular Pakistan Army troops to take over, summoned by the field radio. At regular intervals, jets of the Pakistan Air Force patrolled overhead. The Chinese were shadowed until they retired over the border. On the second day, the Emir’s son came from Mirandhabad to remove the Pakhusti chieftain’s body. K’Ayub made him swear his loyalty to the national government. The son was a quiet man of thirty, grieved by his father’s death, but fatalistic and compliant.

Durell slept for twelve hours, was awakened by Alessa, who brought him coffee and food, and then slept again. It was afternoon when he awoke and shaved and stepped out into the sunlight.

The weather had turned warmer. The sound of motors throbbed up the long valley from Lake Mohsere, and the first column of half-track mountain vehicles probed up the slopes of S-5, green pennants fluttering in the wind. Durell sought out Colonel K’Ayub in the camp. The colonel looked neat and elegant, once more his political, rather than military, self.

“You will return to Rawalpindi now, Mr. Durell,” K’Ayub decided. “Perhaps you will be good enough to escort the women. I shall remain here, of couse, to supervise the construction of a military road and insure adequate protection for the development program.”

“I doubt if there will be any further trouble,” Durell said. K’Ayub shrugged and looked to the north. “One never knows. The new Emir will be amenable, and can be persuaded to run an enlightened local government. But the dragons that live over the mountains—” He shrugged again. “None of us can foresee the outcome.”

They shook hands, and Durell went to find Sarah. She was already packed and waiting, seated alone on a camp stool, drinking coffee from a tin mug. Already the area of S-5 around them looked busy and utterly different from its earlier, empty hostility. Durell took her coffee cup, sipped from it and then said, “You’re all right now?”

“Not a bit different from when we began,” she said quietly. Her face looked scrubbed and fresh, and she did not wear her glasses. She added, “I must admit that I’m glad you came along on the trip, Sam. If not for you, we’d all have been lost.”

“No. Oddly enough, it was Hans’ skill that got us out.” “And he’s dead now. So your problem is solved.”

“Rudi is dead, too,” he said deliberately. “Is your problem solved yet, Sarah?”

“I don’t know.”

He asked abruptly, “Where are your glasses?”

“I don’t think I need them any more. I threw them away. Perhaps it’s symbolic, don’t you think?” Her smile was wry. “They were a poor defense against my making a fool of myself. I did exactly what I was afraid to do, all my life—left myself wide open to a smooth-talking, handsome man who promised me the moon and everything money could not buy.”

“It wasn’t an honest offer.”

“I know that now. But maybe it did me some good.” “Are you going home now?” he asked.

“Yes, to New York, where I’m going to resign as chairman of the board of Standish Nickel. I’ll leave all that to men who get paid to know their business.”

“And then what?”

She smiled again, and suddenly looked younger and less austere. “I think I’ll spend some time trying to grow up inside, instead of using my glasses and a tough exterior as a defense.”

“I think that’s fine,” Durell said.

She kissed him suddenly, leaning toward him with her arms around his neck. Her mouth was fresh, even naive, as if she were artless in expressing herself. He wondered about her future. She had learned a bitter lesson, but she was still the Nickel Queen, the most prized woman in the States. Men would be after her for all sorts of reasons—and all the reasons added up to her money. But perhaps someone would come along who would be right for her, if she didn’t make too many mistakes until then.

He couldn’t guess the future. He didn’t want to.

Sarah Standish flew home from Rawalpindi. Durell saw her off, then went to Alessa’s hotel. But Alessa was not in, and there was an urgent message for him from Donegan, in Karachi. When he telephoned, he was ordered to report there immediately, and there was no time to see Alessa before he left. He wrote her a note, left it with the desk clerk, and took the first plane south across the desert of the Sind to the coast.

He had almost forgotten the suffocating heat of the Indus Valley, and he was aware, on the trip, of a loneliness that was not usual for him. He went directly to Donegan’s office, where the little man was most apologetic.

“I’m sorry about tagging it urgent, Sam. Henry Kallinger is due in from Istanbul, but I just got word he’ll be delayed a few days. He wants to see you, naturally.”

“Probably to check on my expense account,” Durell said.

“I wouldn’t know. But you’d better stick around until he gets here.”

“What about Hawk’s Bay?”

“Sure, you can stay there, if you like. Do you good.”

Donegan found him a small villa that a friend wasn’t using, and Durell rented a car and drove out along the blacktop highway to the sea. He paid his rupee at the toll gate and found the house without difficulty. It was small, secluded, pleasantly furnished, directly on the wide beach where the Arabian Sea thundered and lashed the shore with its white combers.

He stripped, put on a pair of bathing trunks he had bought in Karachi, went into the blazing sun, and baked for a while in rivers of sweat; but the heat failed to melt a hard knot of ice inside him. He went swimming in the heavy surf, let the thick salt combers smash at him, swam beyond them for half an hour, then spread a towel and lay on the hot sun and waited. Far down the beach an English family was having a picnic under umbrellas. A camel and rider made a silhouette against the ocher sky on the sand ridge island from the beach.

He couldn't lie still. He went into the villa and showered in the tepid water from the roof tank, cooked his own dinner, and watched the sun go down over the sea. It was an awesome and lonely sight.

When it was dark, a wind blew from the ocean, cooling the beach, blowing through the windows of the little house. He showered again and felt the weight of being alone in a strange land. He was still careful. The Pakistan police

were hunting for the Chinese, and there might be others who had marked him for erasure. Far away in Washington, they would be closing the file on Red Oboe—a small step, another skirmish, in the dark war that girdled the world.

When she came walking across the beach in the moonlight toward him, he was not surprised. He was seated in a cane chair, near the door, and he watched her stride across the sand, her legs long and lithe, her hips swaying with the effort to pace in the yielding sand. The moonlight made her short-cropped, boyish hair look silvery.

He stood up.

“Alessa.”

She stood before him, wearing a white linen suit, the skirt slim and hugging her thighs, the blouse and feminine jacket embroidered with tiny seed pearls. She smiled uncertainly. “Were you waiting for me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I asked Donegan where I could find you. He didn’t want to tell me, but I got it out of him.” She smiled briefly. Her eyes searched his face in the shadows. “Donegan said you won’t be here for very long. So I made reservations on the Lufthansa flight to Tokyo for the day after tomorrow.”

“Tokyo?”

“It’s one way to go home,” she said. “And you?”

“I don’t know where I’ll go next.”

“I thought perhaps you might return to the States. It’s a chance, anyway,” she said tentatively. “Tokyo is on the way. We might go together.”

“True.”

She stood quietly and said in a small voice, “Don’t you want me? Are you angry with me, because after that night in ’Pindi I thought perhaps Hans—I mean, after all, Hans always loved me, and I did not suspect what he was—”

“I know.”

“I tried to tell myself I loved him, when we were in the mountains. But I suppose my first instincts, in all the years he was    after me, were the true ones. Love is either there, or it is not. One needs a person, or one does not.”

“I need you, Alessa,” Durell said.

“Yes.That is why I am here. But now that I see you—”

“Are you sorry you came?”

“No.”

“Come inside,” he said.

He took her hand. The cool sea wind had scoured the heat from the bungalow. In the darkness, she turned to him with a sudden fierceness and he kissed her, felt her tremble against him, and her weight pulled him down to her. She sighed, and he drew a deep breath. He knew that this with Alessa would last only a day or two. He would not go to Tokyo with her. It would be better if she left for Vienna without him, to return to her frayed and ancient family home and scholarly research. But for now—

“I understand how it is, Sam,” she said, as if knowing his thoughts. “It’s all right.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

He picked her up and carried her into the other room, where the sea wind blew darkly across the tiled floor.

THE END

of an Original Gold Medal Novel by

Edward S. Aarons

Table of Contents

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen