Part One

VIRGINIA

Chapter One

Up here, on the high wooded slope that overlooked the narrow flanges of the valley, the wind had a cool autumnal bite to it. Durell shivered slightly. He flexed his fingers to keep them warm, concerned about the effect the temperature change might have on the trigger spring. The wind that funneled down the north-south orientation of the Alleghenies had to be considered for trajectory deflection. He knew he would have only the one chance. He had to make it perfect, against the light of the sun in the west, where it just touched the long whale-back ridge opposite them on the other side of the valley.

“Marcus? Henley?”

“Yo,” they both said.

Franklin said, “This ought to be good enough.”

“A little more to the north,” Durell said. “Marcus, take Henley down there with you. Get close to the road. Be ready when you hear them coming.”

The men in their hunting shirts and heavy boots all nodded. They looked competent. Durell hoped the reports on them from DIA were accurate. He wasn’t too worried about the first two. It was Franklin who worried him.

Franklin, puffing a little, said, “We can spot him perfectly from here, Cajun.”

“It’s not good enough. Over there, where the spur pushes west, toward the bridge. We have to get higher.” “I’m tired,” Franklin objected. “We’ve hiked over the

ridge three miles from the van.” He was a little too stout for this sort of work.

“We’ll go higher,” Durell insisted. He thumbed the button on his transceiver. “Dee?”

“Yes, Sam,” she answered quietly.

“Any problems?”

“I’m ready to go on down to the spa.”

“Take the road that comes around to the back. In that hippie van, they’ll never let you stop at the front gate.”

“All right, Sam. Sam?”

“Yes.”

“You be careful.”

“Yes.”

“You read the dossier on Tomash’ta.”

“We’ve all read it.” He was a little irritated. “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be. And his family.”

“Right, Sam.”

Her voice flowed through him, calm and soft and competent. Deirdre Padgett would be moving the gear now, handling the van that the lab boys had picked up, all decorated with wild primary colors in sworls of red and yellow, artfully rusted, curtained with ragged chintzy stuff. There were other vans of this type, parked here and there in the national forest. It wouldn’t be noticed. Neither would she, in her patched denims and tie-dyed loose shirt that could not conceal the long, clean lines of the body he knew so intimately. Durell did not want to work on this one with her. Kokui Tomash’ta was too dangerous, too tricky, too fast. But McFee hadn’t given him a choice.

He let Franklin catch his breath while Marcus and Henley faded downhill toward the cut where the road came through the notch in the hills. It took less than ten minutes.

“All right,” he told Franklin. “Let’s go.”

“They aren’t there yet.”

“Yes. Over there,” Durell said.

“Where?”

“Near that yellow maple. Half a mile north-northeast.”

“The sun’s in my eyes.” Franklin squinted against the high light. “I can’t see a damn thing over there.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Durell saw that Franklin was breathing normally again, and stood up. The Remington .30-30 felt smooth and warm in his hand. There wasn’t too much time left before the autumn sunset plunged the narrow valley into dark gloom. The lights of the little village to the north, where the Alleghenies shouldered together to form another notch, would be of little help here. The snooper scope would be an aid, of course, if it grew dark before Tomash’ta tried to come through, but he hoped it would happen while it was still daylight. He wanted to get Tomash’ta quickly and cleanly, and finish it. He didn’t want to chance that someone else might kill him.

The mountains seemed to sing in the clear, crisp air of afternoon. The sky was a pale burnished blue, so pale it seemed white, except where the high cirrus clouds to the west reflected the red of the setting sun. The foliage, which had brought so many leaf-lookers to the Shenandoah, off to the east, had already passed its peak, although there were gaudy splashes of red, yellow, and bright purplish brown in the oaks, lower down in the valley. Traffic on the road was negligible, seen from the height of the pass through the southern notch to where the village at the northern end of the valley filled both sides of the narrow gap. Durell thought it should be relatively easy to pick out the sporty blue Porsche that Tomash’ta would be driving.

The right front tire would do it—when the car reached that spot down there, where there was a decent shoulder to the road. And Tomash’ta would try to save himself by taking the car there rather than crash on down into the gorge.

As if reading his mind, Franklin, the FBI man, puffed and said, “It would be just as easy to grease his skillet, Sam.”

“We will. But I want him to tell us a few things first.”

“He’s not apt to talk, anyway. He’s one of those fanat-

ics who call themselves the Japanese Red Army, one of those terrorists, like a kamikaze. He won’t talk.”

“You’re always a pessimist,” Durell said.

“And you’re not? You’re in the USA now, Cajun. Not in some African jungle or Asian village where you could really put the blocks to the bastard.”

“That’s not my line, anyway.”

“Just the same, we have laws here, Sam. And lawyers. Of which, God help me, I’m one.” Franklin, who had worked for the FBI for over ten years, and who considered Durell’s presence an intrusion into his own field of domestic security, winced at a vision of future court hearings, trials, appeals, more appeals, hostile judges, countercharges of brutality, violence, and failure to cede to the subject full latitude in protecting his Constitutional rights, even though Tomash’ta was an alien. Franklin didn’t care much for anything he had heard about K Section, that free-wheeling, trouble-shooting branch of the CIA that worked everywhere in the world. He didn’t know why Durell, a senior field agent for K Section, had been called here from Hong Kong or Karachi or some God-forsaken place like the Somali desert to take command of this operation. He admitted some resentment in himself.

If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t matter or carry any juridical weight that Kakui Tomash’ta was a known international assassin, a killer who operated for hire now for a splinter group of anarchists known as the Red Lotus. It all seemed like a lot of hash smoke to Franklin. What Tomash’ta was, or more correctly, was supposed to be, was not Franklin’s real business. Tomash’ta had committed no crimes here—as yet. He wasn’t even on the Interpol list. Ergo, you could watch and you could wait, but you couldn’t touch.

Durell didn’t think that way, he supposed. It was only by exceptional fiat and interdepartmental back-scratching that Durell was working on this within the borders of the United States. The man was more at home abroad, Franklin had been told. He was certainly different. He worried Franklin. There was a cold professionalism about Durell, a sense of careful isolation, which, while it might be comforting in some respects, certainly was disturbing in its unpredictability.

“Here,” Durell said.

They had climbed through blazing sumac and pale alders and then crossed a small plateau covered thickly with hazel bushes, screened from the valley floor by an old stone fence that meandered across the shoulder of the mountain. There was no sign of the farmhouse that once had existed here, before the land was taken over by the Federal Forest Preserve. Above them, the wind soughed through a thick grove of long-needled pines. The whiteness of the sky was being tinged now by lambent rays from the setting sun. The air felt colder.

“Yeah,” Franklin said. “I agree, this is better. I can see the bridge now.”

“That’s where we’ll take him.”

“What about Marcus and Henley?”

“If I miss, Marcus can make the hit.”

Franklin smiled without humor. “Do you think you will miss?”

“No,” Durell said.

He put the rifle down on the stone wall and blew on his hands to warm them.

If only the local cops stayed out of the picture long enough for them to pick Kakui Tomash’ta out of the wreckage and get him up here and away in the van. If only Tomash’ta came through here at all. If and if and if. The business was always full of permutations, combinations, and probabilities. Not to mention the impossibilities.

He wished his leave hadn’t been interrupted, and that he was back in Washington. Better still, in Prince John, on the shores of the Chesapeake, with Deirdre.

From the comer of his eye he saw a troop of quail move with cautious, silent tread out of the pine thicket. A squirrel leaped from an alder branch and scurried down into the scrub. He saw a deer trace to his left, where the stone wall was broken down, and heard the trickle of water somewhere in the distance.

They waited.

Down iii the valley, where the dark ribbon of road was already cast into darkness by the whaleback mountain’s shadow, some lights came on around the walls and gates of the White Spring Spa Inn, a resort for the wealthy aged. The main building echoed the grace and elegance of Virginia a century ago: pale red brick, which reminded him of Deirdre’s house on the Chesapeake, with massive Doric columns supporting a Greek-keyed portico, a curved driveway empty now of the usual number of limousines. The pale green of golf fairways and tees reached upward in undulating folds behind the resort. The sulphur springs nearby had made the resort an oasis for a hundred years, set in the middle of the Federal Forest, along with the litde town in the notch where the railroad still maintained a wide-roofed, jigsaw depot unchanged from another century’s way of life. There were only a few guests here at this time, according to the report McFee had given him in Washington. He watched wood-smoke lift suddenly from a chimney of one of the separate cottages behind the main building, as someone lighted a fireplace against the evening’s chill. The smoke moved in thin ribbons, driven by the wind that funneled up the valley.

Durell blew on his hands again, rested the rifle on the stone wall, and made himself comfortable. Franklin remained standing, his round face glum, his saddle nose a bit red from the biting wind.

“You’re sure Tomash’ta will come this way?”

“Nothing is sure,” Durell said. “Sit down and try to relax. We’ll know soon enough. He can only enter the Spa from this end. His target is down there. Tomorrow, the target leaves, flies back to Japan. He has to do it now, tonight, or never.”

“What’s so important about the target?” Franklin was querulous. “A Japanese newspaper owner, that’s all.” “Yes.”

“So why is Tomash’ta after him? What makes you people so sure about all this?”

Durell did not take his eyes from the road. He checked the wind, adjusted the scope a hair, sighted through the lens toward the bridge. The bridge crossed the little white-water river about three hundred yards from where he knelt behind the stone wall. The road curved up beyond the bridge and went out of sight to the south, coming up from the new Interstate 64 that ended at the West Virginia line, only a few miles from this place. The wooden trestle and old timbers of the span leaped into sharp focus as he adjusted the knurled knob on the Remington’s sights. He pushed a cartridge home into the chamber.

“Is he coming?” Franklin asked.

“Not yet.”

“This whole thing—the philosophy of it—makes me damned nervous.”

“Shut up and sit down,” Durell said.

“Listen, you can’t—”

“I can. Sit down. Keep quiet.”

I must be getting worried, Durell thought, to let Franklin see my impatience. It was time for Tomash’ta to come barreling down from the notch and across the bridge. Another few minutes and it would be dark. A shot then, to disable the car, would be risky. Not sure of success at all.

He heard a buzz from the portable transceiver and flicked the switch.

“Sam?”

“Yes, Dee.”

“He just passed.”

“A blue Porsche?”

“New York license plate.”

“Good. Go on down to Akuro. Remember to use the back trail. Watch your driving. The van is top-heavy.” “Yes, Sam. Sam!” Her voice was suddenly alarmed. He said quietly, “Yes, Dee, what is it?”

“Sam, there’s something—oh, dear God! Sam—”

The radio crackled.

“Dee?”

There was no reply.

“Deirdre?”

Nothing.

At the same moment, he heard the sound of the car coming around the curve down from the notch, racing for the bridge.

Chapter Two

Durell knelt behind the stone wall and slid his finger along the trigger of the Remington. A single shaft of sunlight slipped across the top of the whaleback ridge to the west and splashed brightness into the clump of pine trees behind him. A crow cawed. The throb of the Porsche engine echoed back and forth within the walls of the valley. He kept leading the car through the sights, watching the front wheels. He could not see the driver behind the windshield.

Durell was a tall man, with thick dark hair streaked with silver at the temples; he had a loose, heavy musculature and a manner of moving like a primordial hunter, learned from his boyhood days in the bayous of Louisiana near Peche Rouge. His blue eyes normally darkened in moments of anger or tension; but he did not often permit himself the luxury of emotion. In his business, emotion was something he could rarely afford. Even now, he did not permit the sudden silence of Deirdre’s radio in the van, some two miles down the valley, to distract him from his mission.

The Porsche roared downgrade toward the bridge.

“Sam?” Franklin whispered.

“Take it easy.”

“What happened to the radio?”

“Deirdre was cut off.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know how come.”

“Think she’s all right?”

“We’ll find out.”

“But you and she, I hear—”

“Shut up.”

Durell’s work as a field agent for K Section, whose work was mostly anonymous, unheralded and unsung, made him liable for assignments in any far and remote corner of the world. He had been in the business a long time. Almost since he had first earned his law degree at Yale. Statistically, his survival factor had long run off the tape. His dossier was on file with the KGB in Moscow, the Black House in Peking, and a dozen other intelligence departments among the world’s leading nations.

Long ago, he had been marked for extinction by certain of these counterintelligence units. But he did not think about it too often. His life was marked by habits of caution. Whether in London or the jungles of the Amazon, in Singapore or the Fezzan desert of Libya, he never opened <a door carelessly or turned a corner without awareness of what might lie behind. He had survived. He took his orders from General Dickinson McFee, that little gray man who commanded from the anonymous building at No. 20 Annapolis Street, in Washington. There had been times, because of Deirdre Padgett, when he had wished for the routine nine-to-five life of the suburban commuter; but he had lived in his shadow world too long to ever hope for release. He had killed, and knew that other men were living who would not rest until they had killed him.

He did not worry about it. But he was careful.

The Porsche was at the bridge now, coming toward the turn he had selected as his target area. He could not yet see the driver behind the reflections on the windshield.

“Jesus, Sam.” Franklin sweated, despite the chill breeze that shook the aspens beyond the stone wall. As a special agent assigned to Durell from the FBI, to make Durell’s activities here in the States follow the law that confined K Section’s activities to events abroad, he had been hostile from the start. His department jealously guarded its prerogatives. The other two men from the

Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, were more prosaic about the job. Marcus and Henley were cool and efficient. But Franklin worried Durell. “Suppose something has happened to Deirdre?”

“I told you to shut up.”

The Porsche was over the bridge now.

Durell did not resent the interruption of his leave with Deirdre at her quiet house at Prince John, on the Chesapeake. He conformed to the needs of K Section, and he accepted this, as he had once accepted the disciplines o1 his old Grandpa Jonathan, when the old man dictated principles to him on the old riverboat hulk moored in tht mud at Bayou Peche Rouge. Old Jonathan had been £ gambler, one of the last of that breed of men on the Mississippi; Durell had learned from him the ways of the hunter and the hunted, a survival pattern that made him unique in this business of gathering intelligence. Whatever the diplomats discussed in the halls of statehood, the fac remained that information was the one precious commodity, bought sometimes with hardship and blood. Intelligence gave those men at the conference tables the cards they needed to play the game that might keep man kind alive. Not that Durell considered himself a patriot although he was. No bugles blew for him, no medals were handed out for his work in the silent world in which he lived.

The Porsche entered the target area.

He squeezed the trigger.

The rifle shot made a small flat sound in the humming silence of the valley. Two crows lifted, complaining, from the pine trees. A squirrel chattered admonitions at him.

He was up before the echoes died, running down through mountain slope toward the road. Franklin scrambled after him. The Porsche suddenly veered from it straight path and swerved back and forth on the narrow asphalt highway. It hit dirt on the left shoulder and left puffy cloud of dust behind screaming, locked wheels, the slammed across the road to the gravelly shoulder opposite.

Brambles slashed at Durell’s hunting outfit. A leafy branch slapped his face. He jumped fallen logs, went through a thick area of brush, then took a long slide down the rocky slope toward the edge of the road.

Durell had shot accurately. The right front tire of the Porsche was flat, breaking apart, pieces of the rubber flying high in the air. As the driver desperately fought the wheel, the vehicle hit the shoulder again, tipped on its side and rolled over, skidded on its roll-bar like an upside-down beetle, and came to a halt at the edge of a steep drop into the valley stream below.

Dust boiled up around it.

“Wait,” Franklin gasped. “It might explode—”

“Let’s get Tomash’ta out of there.”

Durell did not look back to see if Franklin had followed. He ran across the road toward the wrecked vehicle, and fought at the upside-down door handle. The panel was caved in; it would not open. The windshield was starred and shattered in an intricate maze of webbed cracks. He could not see inside. He ran around the front of the car and tried the other side, where the driver slumped, hanging by his safety belts behind the wheel. This door was stubborn, too. Durell yanked at it, got it partly open, and reached in for the man who hung there so helplessly.

Behind him, Franklin drew a handgun and waited.

A small tongue of fire leaped from the back end of the car. Durell’s movements were careful and precise. The buckle of the lap and shoulder belts was stubborn only for a moment. Then the driver was free. Durell smelled the acrid smoke, thought of the gas tank, thought of it exploding and enveloping them all in a boiling ball of flame. He pulled the driver free by the shoulders, heels dragging, and got away from the wrecked car, down the shoulder of the road, ten, twenty, thirty feet.

The fuel tank exploded with a deafening roar. A great cloud of black smoke billowed up into the evening air. The sound rumbled back and forth between the long mountain ridges on either side of the valley. Durell felt the blast like a blow across the stomach; he stumbled, kept hauling at the driver, got him safely into the brush.

The Porsche burned with a crackling finality.

Durell rolled the driver over.

Franklin began to swear in a thin voice. “That’s not a Japanese.”

“No.”

“It’s not Tomash’ta. But it’s his car.” Franklin sounded outraged, as if such a thing could not be, and was a deliberate affront. “What happened?”

“Tomash’ta outsmarted us. This one is just a decoy.”

He felt urgency vibrating along all the intricate nervous patterns of his body. His eyes went dark. The driver was just a boy, with straw-colored hair, a freckled face, a checked flannel shirt, and corduroy slacks held up by a wide, brass-studded belt. Durell flicked hands over the young man’s body, found no weapons, plucked out a wallet.

“He’s still breathing,” Franklin said. “Thank God.”

“His name is Henry Fields. From Jackson Station. That’s about fifteen miles from here, at the junction of the Interstate.” Durell flicked the wallet. “He has a hundred dollar bill, two singles, and some petty change. Local youngster.”

“I don’t get it,” Franklin complained.

“It means Tomash’ta knew, or guessed, that we were waiting here to bushwhack him.”

“Knew? Guessed?”

Marcus and Henley came running down the road toward them. They were still some distance away.

Durell breathed thinly through his nose. Franklin said, “But he couldn’t have known about us, Cajun.”

“I think he did.”

The remote valley was quiet. The sun was gone, sliding down behind the ridge. The darkness of evening fell like so many thin gray curtains, and the pale sky to the east was already black over the mountaintops. The White Spring Spa Hotel was two miles away to the north, and beyond it was the village. Someone there would see the plume of black smoke rising from the wrecked car. The Porsche burned with a hungry, crackling noise. Durell could feel the heat of the flames even from where they stood.

He thought of Deidre in the command post set up in the hippie van. He thought of the silent radio, the alarm and surprise in her last words before communication was broken.

He swore tightly.

The boy was coming to, groaning. There was a bad bruise on his forehead, his nose was bleeding, and his left arm looked broken. When his eyes opened, they had a dazed, faraway look in their gray depths.

Durell knelt beside him. “Son?”

“Oh, gosh. I’m hurt. My arm—”

“You’ll be all right. What happened to you?”

“Oh, gosh. I told him I’d be careful with his fancy little car—”

“Who did you tell that to?”

“The foreign guy. The Japanese. He paid me to deliver the car to the Spa.”

“A Japanese?”

“Yes, sure. He—”

“He paid you a hundred dollars?”

“Yeah. I told him it was too much. He was kind of funny. He never stopped moving. Like a dancer, maybe. Always on his toes. He stopped at Pa’s service station and asked me. Pa said I should do it. Pa is supposed to pick me up at seven tonight, in White Springs. I’m a good driver, mister. I don’t know what happened. It was a great car. Handled like silk. I—”

The boy tried to sit up. Durell held him down with a gentle hand. He looked at Franklin. Tomash’ta’s dossier recorded the man as a one-time professional dancer.

“You take care of him,” he told Franklin. “I’m going up to the hotel.”

“It’s two miles. You going to walk?”

“I’m going to run,” Durell said.

Chapter Three

He tried the radio again. There was still no answer from Deirdre.

He had been with her on the Chesapeake Bay skipjack he had converted from its original oyster-boat rig to a broadbeamed, stable sailer they used on his rare returns to Washington. General McFee had called himself, and there was no denial to the quiet orders. They had returned to D.C. in her car.

There was a time when he and Deirdre had almost ended their love affair when she began to insist on marriage. He had refused, not because he did not love her enough to want to make her his wife, but because of the business he was in. He had known too many good men whose lives ended due to a moment’s inattention, a distraction, or the long attrition of concern for someone. An instant’s carelessness could be lethal. More to the point, he did not want to make himself vulnerable by threats aimed at Deirdre.

She had countered by joining McFee’s little agency herself, training at the Maryland “Farm” and passing every test with high colors. Deirdre was exceedingly competent in everything she did. There was a calm serenity in her that made him feel at home with her, when he had no real home in all the world. A tall girl, she had dark hair touched with coppery tints, like a brush fire seen at black midnight; her oval face and gray eyes never betrayed impatience with him. She gave herself freely and joyously when they were together. But he had not liked it on the few occasions when McFee assigned them to work together. For him, she was the most desirable woman in the world. There had been other women, and he did not question her own life when they were apart. But when they were together, as when they had gone sailing three days ago on the late September waters of the Chesapeake, it was as if they had never been apart.

No. 20 Annapolis Street was an innocuous graystone building whose brass plaque inside the lobby door advertised the offices of various commercial, legal, and lobbying firms. No one who did not belong there got farther than the lobby. Although there were two elevators, Adam Kesselman, who was on duty when they arrived, waved them down the hall and into a doorway whose frosted glass indicated a manufacturer of Capitol souvenirs and gimcracks. The door actually opened into a small elevator that took them up past the second floor, where Analysis and Synthesis people prepared reports for McFee to present to the White House, Joint Chiefs, and other appropriate bureaus. In the basement of No. 20 Annapolis was the lab, where gimmickry was devised and tested—most of which Durell usually refused. The topmost floor held Dickinson McFee’s private apartment, an aerie he rarely left.

“Sit down, Samuel. Deirdre.”

“Yes, sir. I’m on leave, you know, General. Ever since I returned from Sumatra.”

“Sit down, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your contract expires this month, Samuel. No renewal has been recommended. Too risky for you.”

“It would be too risky for K Section,” Durell said quietly, “not to renew it.”

Dickinson McFee merely stared at him from behind the desk. The apartment did not look like an office. It could have been any middle-aged bachelor’s quarters, furnished with heavy leather, bookcases from floor to ceiling, a small but efficient kitchen, a bedroom in which there was nothing personal or intimate to betray McFee’s private life.

On the desk near the fireplace was a pile of foreign newspapers: the Milan Corriere della Sera, opened to a red-penciled article by one Professor Rafaelo Buzzati; the Soviet foreign affairs weekly, Za Rubezhom; a clipping from the Malaysian news agency Bernama, datelined Kuala Lumpur.

The fireplace was false, leading to a ladder to the roof and an escapeway from the building that only McFee and four others knew about. Also on the desk, next to the newspapers, was McFee’s blackthorn walking stick. It was an instrument devised by the lab boys, equipped with a spring sword, a thermite bomb, and possibly other gadgets that Durell preferred not to know about. He had been threatened with that stick once, and he hoped it would never happen again.

“It is precisely because of Sumatra that I called you in,” McFee said. “I need you both. It is a matter of fairly high priority.”

“Isn’t it always, sir?”

“Are you annoyed with me, Samuel?”

“My vacation has been interrupted.”

“It is exactly because you are recently back from the Sumatra assignment that I need you. And Deirdre, too. I saw nothing in your debriefing to indicate that you ran into Kokui Tomash’ta there.”

“The kamikaze assassin from Red Lotus? No.”

“But you worked with Eli Plowman,” McFee stated.

“If you can call it that. He fouled us up.”

“Tomash’ta was one of Eli’s hit men.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“No. But he is here in the States, on business. His own peculiar business.” McFee looked quietly at Dierdre, but did not address her directly. “He still works for Plowman.”

“But I thought—”

“That we laundered Plowman? He got away from us in Singapore.”

“I’m not in that end of the business,” Durell said. “I have no sympathy for Plowman’s ‘sanitation squad.’ He’s an assassin, and even if he does fight fire with fire for our side, I’ve never subscribed to it and don’t do so now. He referred to his work as a garbage detail, cleaning the world of killers, terrorists, and it all became an excuse in his mind for selective murder. We didn’t get along in Sumatra. If he got away from you in Singapore, send someone else after him.”

“I’m sending you,” McFee said flatly. “You and Deirdre. It’s more important that simply changing our policy and eliminating Plowman’s performances. He’s working against us now, in a sense.”

“In a sense, sir? Either he is, or he isn’t.”

“Do not be flip with me, Samuel.”

“No, sir. I simply want to be clear about it. If the job is to find Plowman and kill him, then send someone else. It’s not my line of work.”

McFee said, “It’s to keep Plowman from killing someone else. Since you worked with Eli in Sumatra, presumably you know something of his methods which, frankly, have been too distasteful and incriminating for us to document. He is a dangerous man. You may not be able to cope with him.”

Durell smiled. “Then send someone else.”

“I’m sending you, and a man from the FBI, and two others from DIA, since this will be a domestic assignment.”

“And Deirdre?”

“I include Deirdre because I think the safest place for her to be, in the next few days, is with you.”

“Why so?”

“Because she may well be on Eli Plowman’s list for elimination,” McFee said softly.

The thing you always fear the most rarely comes to pass, Durell thought. He ran up the road from the wrecked Porsche at a long, easy stride that ate up the distance to the White Spring Spa Hotel. Behind him, the fire from the car’s ruptured gas tank had died down. Franklin had stayed with the decoy driver, the hired youth from Jackson Station. The first stars began to shine in the eastern sky, far off over the Shenandoah, and there was no longer any direct light from the setting sun. The shadows across the road in the depths of the valley were cold and dark.

Marcus and Henley kept pace with him. They were professionals, and wasted no time asking questions. They knew what they had to do.

There was a high brick wall topped by flat concrete slabs with shards of glass embedded in diem, surrounding the cottage compound of the White Spring Spa. Even in today’s relative austerity, there were a number of cars visible through the ornate iron gate to the left. Most of the cottages had wood-burning fireplaces, laid and set by the Jamaican attendants, and many of them were working. The pungent smell of wood-smoke made Marcus sneeze.

“Keep it quiet,” Durell said.

“Sorry.”

Marcus was short and stocky, with the immense musculature of a circus acrobat, which he had once been. His brown face was contrite. In contrast, Henley of the DIA was an ascetic-looking man with remarkably brilliant blue eyes; he had a professional air, and also a look of helplessness that was immensely appealing to women. Both men were experts in the business. They had scouted ahead like bird dogs, fanning out along the rutted trail where Deirdre’s van should have been waiting. They found it half a mile up the mountainside, driven into the thick brush overlooking the Spa. The battered vehicle seemed innocuous, the whorls of wild paint that decorated its panels artfully similar to dozens of other vans and campers that plagued the Federal Forest Preserve.

Deirdre was not in the van.

Durell checked for the keys, found them still in the ignition, and opened the back doors to search further. Old sleeping bags were arranged on the floor in a mare’s-nest to allay any local official’s suspicion. The radio, which had been incorporated into a commercial frame, was not operative. There was no sign of violence. Henley checked the leafy, spongy ground around the van, sniffing like an old Indian tracker.

“Anything?” Durell asked.

“She went down to the Spa, Cajun.”

“Alone?”

“Can’t see anything else in this light. Can I use a flash?”

“No,” Durell said.

“Don’t get tight about it, Cajun. The transceiver probably conked out on its own initiative.”

“I think not.”

“What do you think, then?”

Durell was silent, then signaled the two men to follow him down to the compound wall. Marcus swung himself up into the limbs of a white oak and vanished into the gloom. It was growing totally dark now. The stars and a rising new moon offered little help. Durell heard the hooting of a small owl in the forested slopes that formed the north side of the notch. The clock in the Town Hall belfry of the village, half a mile north, sent out mellow chiming sounds. It was just seven o’clock. High on the crest of the ridge, a few lights shone from a building or a house situated up there. Durell looked at the faint yellow twinkling through the leaves, then looked up into the big oak tree.

“Marcus?”

“In a minute, Cajun. No sweat.”

There was a faint crackling of broken twigs, a sly creaking in the tree, a few fallen leaves, betraying Marcus’s movements up there. Beyond the wall, a brook chuckled and rippled in its chilly movement.

“Cajun?”

It was Marcus’s whisper.

“Cajun, they have security men and guard dogs. Coming this way. Shall I take them?”

Durell sent a whispered order upward. “No. The dogs would bark. Come on down.”

“How do we get over the wall, then?”

“We’ll go under. Henley, the brook you hear has to have an exit culvert. Can you find it?”

“Sure thing.”

Marcus leaped soundlessly down out of the tree. They moved north along the high wall, came to the circular culvert where the brook came out of the hotel grounds. A web of iron rods blocked the way in. Durell tested them, kneeling in the icy water, and found that the grill had been removed and then carefully replaced to look untouched. It took only a moment for them all to crawl through.

According to McFee’s briefing, the cottage he wanted was the third one up a steep walking path beside the little brook. He waited until the watchman with the guard dog had turned behind the massive building that housed the indoor swimming-pool and gone up the other side toward the Spa’s main building. Then he was up, moving fast, the sense of urgency within him stronger than ever.

Chapter Four

FILE KAPPA 2375/GB AS DEPT.

FOR: McF. Eyes Only

FROM: MAGDA 1001

Sections 2290/Zed 5, 18/Sigma.66

COLLATOR: A. Mitstein

COMMENTS AS FOLLOWS:

On Friday the 15th, in the high cordilleras of the Bolivian mountains near the village of Tacuiba, the Argentine industrialist Señor Roberto Gomez da Ucuman was kidnapped from bis private ski lodge by a group of six or possibly seven men equipped with submachine guns and rushed away in >a high-powered car.

The local Indian servants and family of Señor Roberto Ucuman were unable to give more than a confused and garbled version of the affair. They seemed terrorized. Their statements were contradictory.

Ucuman had had his usual breakfast and stepped out on the terrace to enjoy the cold dawn over the spurs of the snow-capped Andes. The authorities under the district minister believed this was yet another terrorist move aimed at wealthy businessmen, foreign executives, and industrialists, designed to extract a large ransom to finance the outlaw groups, following the pattern of such events in South America. Señor  Ucuman was president and major stockholder of Partigas Industriales, S.A., a multi-million dollar complex of tin mines, shoe factories, sheep ranches, department stores, a small railroad, a fish cannery in Venezuela, two oil tankers, and a number of small newspaper chains including the well-known L’Assuncion.

On the following Sunday, Señor Roberto Ucuman was released unharmed on a remote mountain airstrip and the police returned him to his wife and six eager children.

The industrialist could give no description of the terrorists, nor could he describe the places to which he had been taken during his captivity. No ransom had been demanded. No ransom was paid.

Señor  Ucuman insisted the affair was a tragic mistake.

On the 22nd of that month, the transfer of controlling stock in L’Assuncion and all the other minor newspaper chains was effected by a sale of seventy-two percent of outstanding issues to I. Shumata & Company, a Japanese zaibatsu or trading company.

It was discovered later, but considered to have no connection, that the youngest son of Ucuman, Rudolfo, the apple of his father’s eye, had encountered an unhappy accident three hours after his father’s return, and was killed in a fall on one of the mountain paths near the ski lodge.

On the 22nd of the same month, Herr Ignatius Klocke, chairman of the board of a West German steel firm, was reported missing for twenty-two hours while in Zurich to meet representatives of the Union Bank of Switzerland to discuss rising commodity prices. Herr Klocke was an authoritative, arbitrary industrialist who brooked no opposition to the expansion of his firm, which included an interlock with the American company, D.F. Agro-Chemicals, a heavy soybean exporter, and the Hamburg import firm of U.T.B. Weksteen, which owned, among other industrials, a network of sorghum farms in Australia. A minor holding of Herr Ignatius Klocke was the Bamberger Zeitung and its affiliated network of small television and radio stations scattered through West Germany.

Herr Klöcke, who was a bachelor with no known relatives, was found floating in Lake Zurich the next day.

The Klöcke firm did not falter in its operations because of Klocke’s death, which Swiss police authorities described as a suicide, with no known motives. Two weeks later, the next in command, a dedicated industrial executive named Herr Walther Grubner, authorized the sale of the Bamberger Zeitung and its media affiliates to a French combine, which in turn yielded its majority stock holdings to the I. Shumata zaibatsu of Japan.

M. L. Swannson, of Stockholm, Sweden, corporate manager of the Tannborg Pulp & Paper Co., with interests in Canada’s Alberta province and affiliated through minor subsidiaries to various lumbering and electronic-manufacturing companies in Scandinavia, sold his interest in his chain of smalltown newspapers in Norway and Denmark, one day after his actress-wife was badly disfigured in an auto accident some fifty kilometers north of Stockholm.

The buyers were a small conglomerate of Italian tractor manufacturers. Among their commercial interests was a strong tie to the trading company known as I. Shumata of Tokyo.

Maurice K. Tang, chairman of the Hong Kong Sulu Sea Electronic Manufacturing Co., Ltd, was kidnapped, presumably by Communists from the mainland, and dropped out of sight. Mr. Tang’s interests included banking affiliates throughout Southeast Asia and spread as far as the Banco Popacario SA of San Gionanna Mula of Honduras. The Banco Popacario owned a chain of small newspapers scattered throughout Central America, as well as a number of minor radio stations in that part of the world. After Maurice K. Tang’s disappearance, the Banco Popacario divested itself of its media interests to C.P. Dillers, Ltd, a chain of housing developers in Great Britain. Dillers was majority-owned by the I. Shumata zaibatsu.

“Had enough?” McFee asked.

File Kappa 2375/GB AS Dept, was fat and heavy. Durell had put it down on General McFee’s desk and watched Deirdre finish leafing through her copy.

Durell said, “Who is this collator, A. Mitstein, who wrote these comments?”

“He works with Magda 1001, our computer down in the basement.”

“How did he stumble on I. Shumata’s activities?”

“His uncle’s shoe store. It was a forced sale, and Alfred wondered about it. The shoe store was taken over by an Italian firm, Falba Shoes, based in Torino. Mostly manufacturing for export to the U.S. Alfred’s uncle was squeezed by his local bank in Alexandria, received a good offer to bail him out by Falba, and accepted, retired to Miami Beach. Alfred had lived with his uncle and resented having to find quarters for himself. Magda 1001 is his baby. He traced Falba Shoes to an Austrian firm in Vienna, T.P.D. Inc., and from there to the Freilich Bank in Luxembourg, which owns mortgages and investment loans of T.P.D.’s. Freilich Bank is financed out of Lebanon, Saudi oil money. But T.P.D. was originally set up as a subsidiary of the Schilling Furniture people, who have interests in Montreal and Ottawa, as well as the Fukui Tomura Bank in Nagasaki. It’s the way the world works, Samuel. Behind Tomura is I. Shumata and Japanese and Korean media enterprises.”

McFee paused. “None of the major world radio, TV, or newspaper chains are affected. But you see the relationship, of course. Buried in shipping, banking, food-processing, electronics, you-name-it, are hundreds and hundreds of outlets for the formation, shaping, and influence of public opinion. We wonder why. Every one of the outfits was taken over by violence. Sometimes overt, sometimes quite well-hidden.

“Albert couldn’t get Magda 1001 to go beyond the zaibatsu in Japan. We’re at a dead end.”

Durell said, “And?”

“There is method in this apparent web of commercial coincidence, Samuel. Governments rise and fall, go to war or make peace, frame inhibiting trade policies or form alliances, based mainly on strong public opinion. The opinion of the small-town masses, Samuel. Deirdre?”

“Yes, sir,” she said quietly.

“Do you see why you are involved?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You are related to Rufus Quayle, are you not?” McFee asked softly.

“I’m his niece. It doesn’t mean anything. I saw him only once, when I was a child. He is not a man who cares for poor relations.”

“Aside from his daughter Deborah, you are his only other living blood relation, are you not?”

Durell sat back, a sudden unease in him. He looked at Deirdre as if he had never seen her before. He watched her nod slowly. She did not glance at him.

Durell said, “Sir?”

“Yes, Samuel.”

“Are you talking about the Rufus Quayle?”

“Yes. The man who created a myth out of himself in his own lifetime. The billionaire several times over. The recluse, the mysterious figure who owns, wholly and completely, banks, shipping fleets, oil interests, and the Quayle system of radio and TV stations, and, of course, the famous—or infamous—network of small dailies and weeklies that cover this country like a blanket, flooding the population with his personal editorials which, while strange and off-beat, nevertheless have defeated senators, voted in congressmen, interfered with various government bureaus and agencies, effected new policies and directions, caused a reshuffling of our lower courts, and in general represents the greatest lobbying industry in the U.S. A patriot, but not a crackpot, Samuel. His efforts have been all to the good. But he is too powerful a man. If his empire should fall, let us say, to I. Shumata zaibatsu, we don’t know how the editorial policies of his media chain might change. Or what directions he might urge the American people into taking. It would be effective. I could prove this to you, Samuel, with data and readouts from Madga 1001’s computer efforts, but you may take my word for it.”

Durell looked again at Deirdre. “Rufus Quayle is really your uncle, Dee?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t know the General knew it, either. I’m not particularly impressed by it. It’s a connection that does not really exist in my life.”

Durell looked at McFee with anger tinged by respect. “You knew this when you hired Dee for K Section?”

“Of course, Samuel.”

“And you want her on this assignment because she might be personally involved?”

McFee nodded. “Under the circumstances, I thought you might prefer to work with her.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“Rufus Quayle has disappeared. Permanently this time, it seems. Last week in New York, the general manager of his Q.P.I. also vanished. He flew from Zurich to Manhattan to meet his estranged wife, Deborah Quayle—your cousin, Deirdre, Quayle’s only child—and they both vanished. Deborah Quayle’s apartment was ransacked in the process. There are no clues. Nothing to identify the kidnappers or tell what they wanted. No ransom notes. No publicity. It was a hard, clean, very professional job. We have tried to contact Rufus Quayle. No success. And while Deirdre disclaims any emotional tie between her uncle and herself, she may yet be another target.”

“You think the I. Shumata organization is now trying to pick up Q.P.I. to add to their other strings of worldwide media chains?”

“Most likely,” McFee said. He picked up his blackthorn stick and waggled it at Durell. It made Durell distinctly uneasy to have that multiple weapon pointed at him. “Coincidentally with Deborah Quayle’s vanishment, and her estranged husband’s, we picked up word that a man answering to Kokui Tomash’ta’s description showed up in New York and was seen in the Park Avenue apartment building the day before the kidnapping. Tomash’ta works for Eli Plowman, who has turned into a rogue agent. We want Plowman. We can’t afford to have him and his killer crew turned loose against Quayle. Do you follow?”

Plowman was no mean adversary. The man was dedicated to ruthless assassinations. He had operated almost independently of K Section for years, mainly in Southeast Asia, and his resources were private and mostly unknown. It was not the first time an agent turned rogue and went independent, to sell data commodities for personal gain. It was not a question of going over the wire to work for the other side. In a sense, Plowman’s defection was worse. There were few files, fewer dossiers, with which to work on him. He could vanish at will, do as he chose, work wherever and for whomever he wished.

Durell flicked more pages of the file McFee had handed him. Every job was professional, every incident of extra violence seemed gratuitous. Most of his victims could have been spared. But that would not be Plowman’s m.o. Eli had been a “sanitation man” too long to change.

He felt chagrined that he had not known the item about Deirdre’s relationship to Rufus Quayle. He thought, with anger at himself, that where McFee had dug out everything about her before taking her into K Section, he himself had allowed affection and love to blind him.

Rufus Quayle had indeed made himself a myth in his own time. His monthly editorials in his TV, radio, and newspaper media were devastating, down-to-earth, harsh, and uncompromising. He was a legend. His gravelly voice, taped for broadcast but without his image permitted for viewing by the public, was almost a trademark. He advocated a strict Federalism, a return to the virtues of an earlier America that seemed lost forever in this technological age. His psychology was marked by a haunting nostalgia for the past century, a nation illustrated by Currier & Ives, in which self-reliance, home rule, Bible precepts were the rules by which Americans should live. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” he insisted.

Quayle’s enemies insisted that the man, one of the world’s wealthiest, could hardly five according to these simple virtues. They pointed to the incredible mansion he had built in the salt marshes of the South Jersey coast, set amid hundreds of acres of inlets, tidewater swamps, sand dimes, and islands. Quayle’s personal taste in earlier years had run to a kind of Venetian Gothic. Amid the channels and tidal flats of the shore, he had built a vulgar imitation of a Venetian palazzo, which he called Ca’d’Orizon. No one knew why. It was rumored that he had a priceless art collection there for his private edification, an army of retainers and guards, and a harem of gorgeous women to appease his appetites.

Rufus Quayle was never seen there. Indeed, he was never seen at any of the penthouse apartments and villas he kept in London, Rio, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, or Beirut. He had a house in Bermuda, another in California. In view of his refusal to appear publicly, it was rumored that no such man really existed. That he was, indeed, only a myth. That he had died years ago and that Q.P.I., as a robot organization, kept going of its own momentum. Quayle never appeared to refute such rumors. But his editorials and his angry, pervasive voice continued to be heard—until two months ago.

Quayle’s right-hand man, Martin Pentecost, who had married Quayle’s daughter, denied regularly that Quayle was ill, dead, or insane. On the other hand, he had offered no explanation for the cessation of Quayle’s editorials. Q.P.I. rolled on, in all its intricate corporate devices.

Now Martin Pentecost had vanished, too.

And his wife, who was Quayle’s daughter.

And Q.P.I. was threatened by a shadow zaibatsu, a vast mercantile corporation that had devoured, by threat, coercion, and violence, a number of similar media chains all over the world.

The dagger point of the movement was one Kokui Tomash’ta, the Red Lotus assassin. And Tomash’ta worked for Eh Plowman, a renegade from K Section.

Durell said, “It’s too big for Plowman, sir. I don’t believe he could handle it. He’s very good at specifics, but to tackle a conspiracy of this size is just too complicated for him. What do we really know about this I. Shumata outfit?”

“The Japanese government is usually clannish about protecting the zaibatsu. They include the Mitsubishi, the Mitsui, and any number of other trading corporations. I. Shumata does exist, but as far as we can determine, it is all a paper tiger.”

Durell watched McFee tap on the desk with his walking stick. McFee said, “However, we have a place for you to start. A Mr. Yoshi Akuro, his wife, and three children, are in the States. Mr. Akuro is the nominal head of the I. Shumata Company.”

“Hell,” Durell said. “Where?”

McFee tapped the desk again. “He was in San Francisco to start with. It should be noted that Yoshi Akuro has only recently inherited the I. Shumata zaibatsu. Shumata himself was killed in an auto accident near Kobe two weeks ago.”

“A legitimate accident?” Durell asked.

“As far as we can tell. A trick of fate, perhaps. Akuro inherited control of the Shumata outfit—which, by the way, began last year as a very minor trading corporation with few assets and financing borrowed at usurious rates. Everything that happened to I. Shumata enterprises happened within the past six months.”

“Why did Yoshi Akuro and his family come here?”

“We don’t know. We think he meant to ask us for help. We think he innocently inherited the mantle of control of I. Shumata, discovered its enormous and peculiar aggrandizement, dug into it, and refused to operate as a simple figurehead. Maybe he’s a man of honor. If so, he represents a crack in the enemy’s armor, Samuel. He asked for police protection as soon as he arrived with his family at San Francisco.”

“Then we give it to him, of course.”

“Akuro changed his mind. Maybe he was finally terrorized by whoever is really behind the zaibatsu. He suddenly rejected police help and flew to New York, where he conducted some routine business and then, yesterday, flew by private plane to White Springs Spa in Virginia. Do you know the place?”

“Playground of ailing millionaires,” Durell said. “Remote and exclusive. We tried to get in. We were refused. We tried to put agents in as guests. They were kicked out. Yoshi Akuro wants no part of us now. He’s hiding there. We want him, just to talk to, to shake him down—privately, with no chance for him to complain publicly. Also, we’d like to save his life.”

“From Tomash’ta?”

“After Martin Pentecost and Deborah Quayle disappeared, Tomash’ta showed up en route to White Springs Spa. He made the mistake of applying for passage on the resort’s own airline. Turned down, of course. He purchased a blue Porsche this morning and is on his way by car.”

“Alone?”

“So it seems.”

Durell was silent.

McFee said, “It’s all laid out for you. You and Deirdre 'have thirty minutes to meet your crew and get going.”

On the way to meet Marcus and Henley, Deirdre said softly, “Does it matter, Sam?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what if Rufus Quayle is my uncle? It’s nothing to me. I told you, I only saw him once, as a child.”

“You could become an enormously rich woman, Dee.”

“Not likely.” She smiled, touched his arm, kissed him. She smelled good. “You’re annoyed because you never dug into my background like McFee did. Would it really make any difference, if by some fluke I inherited Q.P.I.?” She hugged his arm tighter. “After all this time we’ve had?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You’d never lose me, Sam. Never, never.”

Chapter Five

Durell's urgency did not override his usual caution. Twenty feet from the screened veranda of Yoshi Akuro’s cottage at White Spring Spa, he checked Marcus’s plunge for the doorway with an outstretched arm.

“Wait.”

“What for? If your girl is in there, or something’s happened inside—” Marcus’s broad face in the shadowed shrubbery was impatient. “The place is all dark—”

“But the fireplace is going,” Durell said.

“Maybe they went to the main house for dinner.”

“Akuro has his own cook, I’d guess. Or he prepares his own meals for himself and his family. Look at the trays on the porch. Waiting to be picked up.”

A wheeled serving cart loaded with china and dim white teapots stood outside the closed door. No lights shone from the windows. The brook nearby made a cold tinkling sound in the chill evening air. The wind was stronger, moving the high branches of a sycamore tree.

He wished he knew what had happened to Deirdre. A quick spasm of fear for her coiled in his stomach. He put it aside, concentrated on the immediate problem. He respected Kokui Tomash’ta’s deadly capacities. He knew Eli Plowman even better, and in any contact with Plowman, caution was the keynote to survival.

Henley said, “Do we stand here all night?”

Durell pointed. “How good are you at explosives?”

“I’m checked out with a triple-A classification,” Henley said. His glasses refracted light from one of the Spa’s distant lamp posts, seen uphill through the landscaped trees and shrubs. “Why?”

“Booby trap,” Durell said. He pointed again. “Over there. Go ahead and get to work on it.”

It was a simple thread run across the approach path to the beckoning veranda steps. Henley moved forward obediently, not touching the thin wire, went to the right, vanished into the shadows. A single flash of light showed from his tiny hand-torch, near an azalea bush. Henley came back and went the other way, following the thin wire; he made busy sounds for two more minutes while Durell and Marcus waited.

Henley returned, pushing his glasses up on his nose. He held two small cans in one hand.

“Treat them politely. They’re like shrapnel. We’d have a hundred holes in each of us if these went off. They’re defused now.”

“Jesus,” Marcus said. “This Tomash’ta is a real worker. Some busboy could have had his head blown off.” “Tomash’ta wouldn’t care,” Durell said. “Let’s go.” There were no other traps.

The cottage door was locked. Marcus used a steel pick and had it open in ten seconds. Durell waved him aside, took his .38 Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, and fingered the door open. He saw the ruddy glow of a dying fire on the hearth. He smelled the pungency of Japanese food.

He smelled death.

Yoshi Akuro had committed hari-kari.

His small figure was clad in Japanese ceremonial robes, crouched on pillows, with a large brass bowl before him. His shaven head touched the rustic rug of the cottage living room. A bowl of incense sent a curl of fragrant smoke into the still air. The ceremonial dagger with which he had disemboweled himself had fallen to one side, still glistening red with the man’s blood. Marcus drew a quick hissing breath. Henley made a clucking sound and knelt beside the dead man with clinical and detached interest. “Never saw this except once before.”

“Is it legitimate?” Durell asked.

“Oh, he did it himself, all right. With his own hand. Could never understand how these Japanese in olden times could do it. A matter of redeeming honor, of course. He was not killed, Durell. He did it to himself.”

Marcus said, “Not too long ago, either.”

Durell's mind jumped to a conclusion, rejected it, sought another. It was neither accident nor coincidence that Akuro had chosen this moment to appease the demands of honor. He straightened, studied the rustic room, saw two bedroom doors, kept his gun ready. The nearest room was empty. The bed had been turned down, with smooth linen sheets, ready for the night. It had been intended as the master bedroom, for Akuro and his wife. He saw the woman’s kimono in the half-open closet, stood flat against the wall beside the closet door, toed it open, ready for an eruption of violence.

Nothing.

An empty closet.

He came out and saw that Henley and Marcus had not touched Yoshi Akuro’s kneeling body. The second bedroom door was locked. “Marcus? A job for you. Quietly, now. We don’t want to raise hell with the Spa’s staff.”

“There will be hell enough when they find this,” Marcus grumbled. “It’s a shitty piece of work, all right. It’ll make all the papers, coast to coast. In Japan, too.”

“No, it won’t. They’ll keep it quiet,” Durell said.

“You know something we don’t know, Sam?”

“A little.”

Marcus opened the second bedroom door. It had a simple ward lock. They all stood back, protecting themselves, thinking of another booby trap.

The door opened with a small squeak of hinges.

Nothing happened.

The place was like a charnel house.

Three more bodies were scattered about the small cottage bedroom. The woman, a slender Japanese matron in a thin yellow robe, had been shot in the back of the head; she had fallen forward, her face still wearing an expression of concern, as if she had been listening for what had taken place in the living room. Durell had heard no shots; there was no sign of alarm in the hotel. A silencer had been used, then.

The other bodies were of children: a twelve-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, in formal Japanese costumes that made them look like the dolls carved in the northern provinces of Japan. But they were not attractive. The explosive force of the bullets in the back of their heads had rendered their faces as ugly and grotesque caricatures of human features.

Marcus said, “The son of a bitch.”

Durell said, “Check the desk in the living room. I saw some papers there.”

“Right.”

“Henley, wipe for fingerprints. We don’t want to get involved publicly.”

“Check.”

It was plain what had happened. Tomash’ta, whose vicious immorality was clear in his past record when he had worked for Eh Plowman, had forced the victim first to sign over his interests in I. Shumata zaibatsu, under threat of harm to his family locked in the bedroom; then he had been forced to commit suicide in the traditional Japanese manner. That done, Tomash’ta had then cold-bloodedly murdered the wife and children to remove them as witnesses.

Durell checked his thoughts.

“Marcus. Henley. Akuro had three children.”

“Right, Cajun.”

“So where is the third? A ten-year-old girl.”

“Yes.”

Durell checked the luggage and closets. There was a small suitcase, a drawerful of Western clothing designed for a ten-year-old girl. Her name, Durell remembered, was Kabuye. He had checked out photographs of the entire family before coming here to head off Tomash’ta.

The middle child was missing.

Henley held some papers taken from the desk. “Just business reports. No sign-over of anything, Cajun.”

“I want the other child,” Durell said.

Henley shrugged. “Maybe Tomash’ta took her.”

Marcus said, “Is he one of those creeps?”

“No,” Durell said. “I think he missed her.”

At that moment, he heard a small girl’s voice calling from outside the cottage.

There was a plaintive, wailing note to the words that he could not understand. A hint of forced terror, of sobbing fear. Durell snapped off the torch he was carrying, drew his gun, waved the other two men aside, and went to the front door, paused a moment, then stepped down to the darkened gloom of the cottage veranda.

The path from the cottage steps led upward to a small footbridge over the brook, disappearing into the lawn and shrubbery toward the main building, a hundred yards away. Something moved on the path across the bridge.

“Durell-san?”

The child, incredibly, knew his name. He saw her clearly for a moment in the distant light from the lawn lamp post, clad in a white kimono, her slippered feet moving her reluctantly toward the small footbridge. Her voice quavered with fear.

“Durell-san?”

He did not hear the sound of the shot that came from about twenty paces to the left of the child. The muzzle flare betrayed its location at the same moment that he dived forward off the veranda. Glass crashed from a window broken in the cottage. Durell rolled, felt a jolt in his ribs as he came up against a rock, and then he was running, sheltered by a tall azalea hedge that bordered the walk. A second shot tore leaves down around his head. From behind him came Marcus’s curse, a thick angry voice. He got up and dodged toward the brook, slid down the embankment into knee-deep, icy water. He kept the gun up, ready; but he could not see a target. The child was crying somewhere off to the right. He could not see her on the path now because of the steep, rough embankment made by the brook that flowed down toward the culvert in the brick wall. He moved that way, with the current, for a dozen paces, saw a handhold, and pulled himself up the bank. This time he heard a phut! phut! as two shots came at him in rapid succession from the silenced gun. Dirt spattered in his eyes. He went flat, crawled forward, saw a shadow move, started to raise his gun, checked himself. It was only a branch. He stood up behind a thick maple and looked carefully to the right and left. Nothing. The massive domelike roof of the enclosed swimming pool loomed beyond a stretch of two tennis courts and a bit of lawn. To the right and higher than this spot, he heard Marcus run toward the child. He could tell it was Marcus from the man’s heavy, undisguised footfalls.

Something splashed in the brook behind him. Light glinted on Henley’s professorial face.

“Get up here,” Durell whispered.

“Where is he?”

“He’s good. I can’t find him.”

“Tomash’ta?”

“Who else?” Durell was irritable. “He found the girl, who probably was out in the main hall when the killings were done. He sent her back here for me.”

“For you?”

“She called my name.”

“How would Tomash’ta know your name, Cajun?”

“I’d like the answer to that, too.”

There were no further shots. Henley slid away to the left, holding his gun thrust forward as if he were standing on a target range. He vanished into the gloom. Durell stepped onto the path. He felt angry, impatient. He offered himself for the hidden Tomash’ta’s gun, but nothing more happened. The man was gone; his ambush attempt was a failure.

He turned to the child.

Marcus was trying to comfort her.

Durell spoke to her in Japanese. “Who told you to call my name?”

The girl looked at him. “A man. A man from Nippon. He said he was my father’s friend. I don’t like this place. I don’t like you. I want to see my father.”

“Later,” Durell said.

Marcus said, “Jesus, Sam, what do we do with her?” “Take her up to the main hall and leave her there.” “She’s in shock, sort of.”

“It’s only the beginning. Did you see Tomash’ta?” “Nobody. Just the kid here. Where’s Henley?”

“Scouting around. He’ll be back soon. Tomash’ta is gone. Probably took our own route, through the culvert.” “And we let him go, just like that?”

Durell looked at the dark wooded flanks of the narrow valley. “Yes. This time. When you get back from the main hall, head for the van.”

“I’m not a baby-sitter,” Marcus objected.

Durell looked at the frightened little Japanese girl.

“Try it, just this once. It won’t hurt.”

The DIA man looked at him from under heavy, angry brows. “What kind of people do you guys from K Section play 'around with?”

“We’re not playing,” Durell said. “This one is for keeps.”

He did not want to admit the depth of his worry over Deirdre’s disappearance. If Tomash’ta knew his name, he knew Deirdre, too; probably knew all about her, perhaps he had come upon her in the hippie van—

He didn’t want to think about it.

All at once he began to move, cursing his own carelessness. As he ran up the narrow road behind the hotel, he saw the first flicker of fire from the spot high above, where he had found the flowered van and left it for later. He felt a terrible fear that he might be too late. One day he would find Tomash’ta and kill him. It wouldn’t do any good. It would not bring Deirdre back to him. He had been warned of her possible danger, but he had thought her safe enough, alone in the van, while he had been waiting for the Porsche. But nothing could be taken for granted in this business. If the worst came to worst, he would quit, after he settled with Tomash’ta. Then he knew that this sort of thinking would do no good, either

to himself or to Deirdre, if anything could still help her, and he stopped considering alternatives while he ran uphill along the rutted mountain road.

The van was burning.

Tomash’ta had gotten here ahead of him.

The glare of the fire fit up a wide area of the back road. Durell halted in the shadows at the rim of the flame-lighted area. One of the windows of the van had been blown out, and the ragged flowery curtains were ablaze, blowing in the mountain wind. His first thought was to get away, since the fire would surely ring a local alarm and bring people here, with questions he did not care to answer. He searched the brush carefully. Tomash’ta might still be nearby, waiting for another chance at him.

The dry autumnal brush wavered in shadow-patterns all around him. Already some of the weeds beside the road were burning where spilled gasoline had run into the brush. The whole mountainside was explosive at this time of the year. The wind shifted slightly and blew acrid smoke around him. He pinched his nostrils. There was a ditch alongside the gravel road that crossed slantwise along the brow of the mountain ridge. A clump of hemlocks moved in firelit patterns, stirred by the wind. A heavy outcrop of rock lifted perpendicularly on the other side of the area occupied by the van. He tried to remember Deirdre’s last words on the radio transmission. They gave him no clue.

Someone thrashed through the brush downhill toward him. Durell tightened the grip on his gun. Then he saw it was Franklin, whom he had left on the other side of the valley. The FBI man’s stubby figure moved with desperate pain, hobbling along. He had hurt his leg or ankle. His pudgy face was screwed up by his effort to make progress.

Durell stepped from the brush. “Take it easy, Franklin.”

“God damn it, is that you, Cajun?”

“What happened to you?”

“I slipped. Couldn’t keep up with you and those DIA men. Where are they?”

“Coming. Is anything broken?”

“I don’t think so. Have you seen Deirdre? Is she with you?” Franklin’s voice was anxious. “Who set the van on fire? Was it you?”

“No. Deirdre hasn’t shown up yet, either.”

“She should be somewhere around,” Franklin said.

Durell nodded. The question was whether Deirdre was still alive, or lying dead and broken, another of Kokui Tomash’ta’s victims. But Tomash’ta had been working alone down in the Spa. And Durell had followed him closely up this road in the wilderness of the mountain ridge. If the killer had tied her up, intending to take her with him as a hostage after he dealt with Akuro, there wouldn’t have been time for him to pick her up.

“Help me look along this ditch,” he said to Franklin.

“I can’t get around too well.”

“Do what you can.” Durell’s voice was tight. “Marcus and Henley will be along in a minute.”

He slid down into the ditch, fighting brambles and brush and fallen saplings. He no longer cared that Tomash’ta might be lying in wait somewhere nearby, hoping for another chance at him.

The ditch paralleled the rough road, then dipped to form the dry bed of a stream. Smooth, water-worn rocks impeded him. He left the burning van and Franklin behind. After thirty yards, in a flatter area, he halted. The light from the burning vehicle was no help here. He thought he saw something white move in the shadows, and he paused to dry his palm, shifting his gun to his left hand.

“Durell!”

The voice came from the high, rocky escarpment on

the other side of the road.

“Forget her, Durell!” There was a short laugh. “She’s dead!”

He felt the curl in the pit of his stomach again. It couldn’t be. There was a thickness of hazel brush ahead.

The dim spot of white that he had glimpsed was up there. He moved to the edge of the stream bed, where the high bank and the road protected him from Tomash’ta, up on the rocks.

“Dee?” he called softly.

He heard Marcus yell at Franklin, asking questions. Then Henley’s voice urged him on. Durell slid forward, careful of Tomash’ta’s penchant for booby traps.

“Dee?”

The spot of white wavered. Moved slightly. He pushed through the brush and clutter of forest trash. Some of the trees behind him had caught fire and were burning like torches against the dark mountainside. Far down in the valley, a forest-fire siren began to wail.

“Deirdre?” he called a third time.

She was there.

She had been tied and gagged with savage force, and she lay helplessly in the dark brush, only her eyes alive, wide and staring at him. She blinked and moved and he saw that the whiteness he had spotted, showing him where she lay, was a handkerchief gag in her mouth. Her slacks were torn and the man’s hunting shirt that she wore was ripped off one shoulder. There was a bloody scratch on one cheek.

He knelt beside her and took off the gag.

She coughed, and while he untied the bonds, she said, “Sam, it took you long enough. He was coming back for me just now. He’s still somewhere around. Be careful.”

He put down the gun and untied her ankles and helped her upright. For a moment, her weight rested gratefully against him. She even managed a small smile.

“Were you worried about me, darling?”

“A little.”

“Just a little?”

“How did he happen to grab you?”

“There was a log across the road. I had to stop the van, and he came at me fast, out of the bushes. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was talking to you on the radio, remember, and he tore the mike out of my hand and ripped out the wires. Then he tied me up and said he’d be back for me soon. He—he was like an animal, Sam. So quick. Something ferocious about him. Is that Henley?” Durell picked up his gun and turned around. He was surprised to find his hand shaking a bit.

“Yes. We’re all right now. Can you walk?”

“Just give me a hand, Sam.”

“All right. We have to get out of here.”

Behind them, the woods were alight with the growing, leaping, hungry flames.

But Durell felt cold.

Part Two

THE QUESTIONING

Chapter Six

“Deborah?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Quayle?”

“I am not Miss Quayle.”

“Technically speaking, no. But your maiden name was Quayle?”

“Miss Deborah Quayle. I was, once. Not now.”

“You begin this by quibbling?”

“My name, legally and by preference, is Mrs. Martin Pentecost.”

“Ah, yes. But you are no longer married?”

“No.”

“You are a divorced woman?”

“Obviously.”

“Just so there is no error. We wish to be sure that no mistakes are made. Please do not think we are being deliberately tedious. If we state the obvious, or question what seems to be the obvious, you will respond accurately and with the whole truth. Do you understand?”

“No. You have no right to do this.”

“My dear young woman, we have every right. You are here with us—”

“Not of my own choice.”

“Do not interrupt again. You do not realize the enormity of your situation. This much is obvious. It is to be expected. We shall be lenient and patient with you. If you cooperate. We understand you are a stubborn, extraordi-

nary young woman. If you think your ordeal here is unjust, it may be so. But the exigencies of the situation demand it. There is no question of right or wrong here, you see. Morality is so relative, my dear. What is a sin in one culture may be a virtue in another. I speak to you plainly. We have no morality except our means must accomplish our end. In any case, I shall refer to you as Deborah Quayle. This is how we think of you. This is why you are here. This is how it shall be.”

“You’re not an American, are you?”

“Ah. Ah. You have a sharp ear, to catch the nuances of our inflection.”

“Have I been kidnapped? Is that it?”

“Let us say that you have been taken by us.”

“Why?”

“That will become evident enough, I trust. It is a simple matter. We are not really interested in you or your welfare. Or your personal life. It is of no consequence to us. But I assure you that we are in supreme earnest. Will you be cooperative?”

“I don’t know who you are—”

“You need not know that.”

“Or what you want from me.”

“Is your husband still alive?”

“As far as I know.”

“Living in Zurich, Switzerland?”

“As far as I know.”

“You have not been in communication with him lately?”

“I hate his guts.”

“Strong language. And a lie, of course. The first one. A small matter. Yet important. We will not tolerate obstructionism from you. You are still defiant. Perhaps in a state of minor shock. But you were treated gently? Without physical violence?”

“It depends on your definition of gentleness.”

“You were not harmed?”

“No.”

“And suffered no pain?” “I’m not sure what happened to me. Or where I am. Or who you are. Or why I am here. Wherever here is.”

“Not relevant. You do not hate your husband, whose name is Martin Pentecost, who nominally lives in Zurich, Switzerland. You still love him. You would like to remarry him, if possible. Am I correct?”

“There’s no easy answer to that.”

“But there is. You do or you don’t.”

“Life isn’t all black or white, right or wrong.”

“It is. We make it so. Good or evil. Yes or no. No middle ground. No shades of color in between.”

“Are you insane?”

“Do I sound insane?”

“Yes. Very articulate, overconfident, paranoiac.”

“Am I menacing to you, Deborah?”

“You sound evil.”

“Ah. Very fine. Yes. I am evil. An old-fashioned word, perhaps, in your culture. But to the point. Evil. Satanic. Maleficent. You are a sensitive young woman. You can smell death, eh?”

“Are you going to kill me? Or hold me for ransom?” “Yes, perhaps, to both your questions.”

“Nobody would pay you a red cent for me.”

“Is your life so loveless, then, Deborah?”

“To hell with you. Stop mincing around. What do you want of me?”

“Only a few simple answers to certain questions.” “About my ex-husband, Martin?”

“And other matters.”

“Ask them.”

“You will cooperate with us?”

“It depends.”

“Very sensible. I shall bring you some tea.”

“I don’t want any tea.”

“I suggest you develop a taste for tea. It is my favorite drink. You will receive no other.”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“I’ll drink your goddamned tea.”

“You are thirsty, then?”

“You know it.”

“Perhaps we will have the tea later.”

****************************************

Her mind was like a rich, fruitful field of grain, bearing an infinite number of seeds, each individual, each a part of the field as a whole. It was a blessing and a curse. Something she had always lived with from the time she was aware of her own identity as a child, knowing she existed. Martin had said, when they told each other goodbye, “It’s more than I can take, Deborah. ’’{Deborah was his formal address. When making love, it was “Debbie, Deb, oh Deb!”) “You’re not a woman,” Martin had said. “Very good in bed, but like a damned computer, Deborah. I can’t tolerate it any longer. It’s like living with a machine.”

“I’m sorry, Martin,” she had said.

“I still love you, you understand,” Martin had said. “And it’s tearing me apart. But you’re too cold, your mind is a calculating machine, you’re too absorbed in the work, in the complex, too slavish to Quayle—”

“Leave my father out of it,” she had said.

“Yes, you’re Rufus Quayle’s living office files. Living and breathing it. Growing, buying, selling, watching the world’s money markets, calculating day and night, hour upon hour, with no life for ourselves.”

“We could have children,” she had said.

“That’s a lie. You don’t want any.”

“I didn’t, at first.”

“And now you do?”

“Yes. Now I do.”

“Now is too late,” Martin had said. “Goodbye, Deborah.”

A mind like a rich field of wheat, each kernel containing the seeds of data, infinite and convoluted, endless.

A curse.

****************************************

“Miss Deborah?”

“Yes. I’m still here. Obviously. These ropes are hurting me."

“Not so. I checked them myself. We were speaking of your husband, Martin Pentecost.”

“Not I. You were. My former husband.”

“Quibbling. Obstructive. You still do not grasp the situation you are in.”

“I know I’ve been kidnapped. Taken on a private plane. A jet. Three hours in the air. Where am I?”

“You are in our hands.”

“And who are you?”

“It is I who ask the questions. Your friendly interlocutor. It is a joke, eh?”

“A poor one.”

“About Martin. Is he in Zurich now?”

“I’m not going to answer any questions about Martin.” “It is a painful subject?”

“An unpleasant one.”

“Life is full of unpleasantness. When did you see him last?”

“You know when.”

“Please tell me. I refer, of course, to a lengthy and private time spent with him.”

“Oh, well. Two months ago.”

“On September the eleventh, to be exact.”

“So why do you ask?”

“Was it in Zurich?”

“Zermatt. You know that, too, obviously.”

“Why did you meet him at Zermatt?”

“We went skiing.”

“Not so. You were friendly enemies? He was exercising. Mountain-climbing. You do not ski very well.”

“I do everything well. But skiing is not my thing.”

“Yes, you sail, you hunt, you fish. Very strenuously. Too strenuously. Considering your life-style, Deborah, you do everything to the fullest extent of your capacities. Which are enormous.”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

“Which you have set out to conquer, intolerant of the congenital weaknesses of your body. You did not go skiing with your ex-husband. Or mountain-climbing. You met him only briefly, really, in the Gerberhaus Inn. In his hotel room. You were locked in there for two hours.” “We made love. Why not?”

“And you lie again.”

“We went to bed and he gave it to me.”

“Crudeness does not become you.”

“I was sex starved.”

“You had two brief affairs since your divorce on the previous March twenty-first. First, to a Swiss army-reserve officer twenty years your senior, a man with a remarkable reputation with the ladies. With remarkable sexual prowess. He satisfied you. But he was married, and left you. The next was with a wandering young hippie, a boy of only nineteen, eight years your junior. At that age, he should have fulfilled any physical needs you may have had. Were those the first times you were unfaithful to Martin?”

“I wasn’t unfaithful. We were not married then.” “Morally. Ethically. Aesthetically. You have never accepted the divorce. What did you do in that locked room in the Gerberhaus Inn at Zermatt on September eleventh?” “We talked.”

“Ah. About what?”

“How did you know the room was locked?”

“It was tested, too late. Infallibility is not a common human trait. We had planned to put listening devices in the room. Our aides came too late. You were already there. Which is why we wish to know why you had this extraordinary meeting with your ex-husband.”

“We talked.”

“Again. About what?”

“Business.”

“The Quayle business?”

“Of course. Martin still works for Q.P.I.”

“And so do you?”

“Yes.”

“And the subject of your two-hour conversation?” “Buying and selling.”

“Tht Nikitashi Shimbun newspaper chain?”

“Among other things. Is it important?”

“What other things?”

“My father.”

“Rufus Quayle?”

“You have an irritating habit of redundancy, whoever you are.”

“We wish to be sure of the facts. The precise data. Why did you discuss Rufus Quayle?”

“Everyone discusses Rufus Quayle in Q.P.I.”

“He is the gray presence, I’eminence gris, everywhere?”

“You can call him that.”

“What specifically did you discuss with Martin about Rufus Quayle?”

“All sorts of things.”

“Did Martin want to know where Quayle was?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know then, at that time?”

“No.”

“Did anyone know?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Do you know where your father is now?”

“No.”

“You lie.”

“No. It’s common knowledge. He lives a strange and secretive life. Read any newspaper item about him. The stories are world-wide. He’s become a legend.”

“Does he really exist?”

“I often wonder, myself.”

“When did you see your father last?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come, come. A mind like yours—”

“I hate it.”

“Your mind? You hate your mind?”

“Yes.”

“But it is an extraordinary phenomenon.”

“Yes. I hate it.”

“You hate yourself, Deborah?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to die?”

“Sometimes. Yes.”

“Such an attitude may make it difficult for us.”

“Hard cheese for you.”

****************************************

She had stripped herself naked for him. Literally. Let her clothing slide off her long, proud body, flowing down in silken ripples around her feet. She could see herself in the pier glass of the overheated room in the Swiss hotel, with the white-clad Alpine peaks reflected in the mirror behind her. She had let her hair down, in long, black, lustrous waves, one long tendril touching the sensitive nipple of her left breast. Awareness of glandular function, of rich juices and electrical nerve impulses, flowed through her. She told herself she was beautiful and desirable. Any man would want her like this. She did not dare look directly at Martin. She turned in front of the mirror, so that he could see all of her, the proud breasts, the narrow waist, the swelling curve of hip, the firm buttocks, full but not fat, the tight thighs, the long legs, the shaven secret parts of her. The air in the hotel room was warm, languorous. She knew he had been continent since their divorce, unlike her own activities.

“Don’t do that, Deborah,” he said.

“I’m just as beautiful as ever,” she said. “Am I not?”

“More so.”

“Then what’s the harm?”

“It’s a matter of principle, Deborah.”

“Oh, hell.”

She did not understand it. He was not all that handsome or glamorous. Tall, yes. With an active, muscular, normally demanding body. Pale brown hair, brushed side-wise, cut short, a nose a bit too long, a mouth with lips a bit too thin. Tanned, outdoorsy, smelling of Alpine air, snow, ski wax. The heavy class ring on his finger. The wedding ring was gone. She still wore hers. A silly little thing, not too expensive for the daughter of one of the richest—perhaps the richest—man in the world. She wore her little emerald friendship ring, too, that he had first given her. The heart-shaped stone was a lambent green flame on her finger. It seemed to burn her.

He was the late-twentieth-century computer man, she thought. Crisp, articulate, efficient to a fault. Everything Martin did was done with a purpose, with calculated forethought. He was devoted to Q.P.I., to that vast sprawling complex of commercial enterprises built by Rufus Quayle. He was Rufus’s lieutenant, unquestioning, loyal, following orders even when they seemed senseless.

Yet somewhere in him was a humanity that she herself had uncovered, that she craved and needed as a counter for that field of wheat in her mind that she herself possessed. He understood her. He had been considerate and thoughtful of her needs. She did not know what had gone wrong. The quality of patience in him, constantly at odds with her own dedication, had gradually eroded, become flat and meaningless, then passed the point into a negative gray area where their lives together no longer had a purpose.

“Deborah, I have to see Rufus,” he had said.

“I thought you called me here to see me.”

“Where is your father. It’s really urgent.”

“Why? Is anything wrong?”

“I’m not sure.”

She had mocked him. “But you’re always so sure of everything, Martin. This is a switch, for you.”

“But I told you, Deborah, it’s important. Something is going on that I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps Rufus doesn’t want you to understand.”

“I can’t explain it. Too many little things, adding up to something—something minus. We’re losing ground. Q.P.I., I mean. It’s never happened before.”

“What’s a few million more or less to Rufus? He doesn’t miss it, if it’s a matter of some temporary losses.” “It isn’t that. It’s—”

He paused, looking at her helplessly, his brown eyes searching her face, looking for something he wanted, something he needed. She saw envy there, and helplessness, and a kind of soft rage.

“You could put it together, Deborah.”

“You’re asking me to use my talent—my curse—which you said has destroyed us?”

“This one time.”

“No, Martin. Maybe later—” She ran her hands from her breasts down along her hips and up across her bare, smooth stomach. Stared him in the eye, challenging him. She saw no response. She was touched by an inner destructive fury. “No,” she said again.

“You have the ability to put things together, to take data from this and that source, to make that jump toward a conclusion, Deborah.”

“Try the computers.”

“They tell us nothing. They have no . . . no . . He was rarely at a loss for words.

“Instinct?” she had asked.

“I suppose so.”

“You surprise me. Shall I get dressed?”

“Listen, can you meet me in New York? The data output is there. Maybe you can make something out of it.” “Go to hell, Martin. I’m not your computer anymore. I’m a woman.”

“I know.”

“Can you see me, me, when you look at me, Martin?”

“I see you,” he said helplessly.

“So?”

“I can’t do it without love,” he whispered.

“And you don’t love me anymore?”

“No.”

“What a confession. Impotent without love.” Her fury exploded. Her naked body trembled. “Go to hell, Martin. Go climb that mountain out there and fall off it. I won’t help you.”

“Your father—”

“I don’t know my father. He doesn’t know me. Rufus Quayle couldn’t care less about me.”

He said desperately, “But will you meet me in New York?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

****************************************

“Miss Quayle, you are not listening, are you?”

“I was thinking of something else.”

“Of Martin, in Zermatt?”

“I guess so.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

“Only thirty-eight minutes.”

“Well, it seems like hours.”

“Would you like to rest?”

“I’d like to go home.”

“Do you have a home?”

“You ask embarrassing questions.”

“You have no place to call home?”

“I have apartments. I have three houses. None of them are home.”

“How sad. You did decide, however, to meet Martin after you saw him in Zermatt?”

“Yes.”

“In New York City?”

“Yes.”

“In your apartment there?”

“On Park Avenue. Yes. God, I’m getting tired of you, whoever you are.”

“Did you discover what motivated Martin’s urgency?”

“No.”

“Then what changed your mind about meeting him?”

“I don’t know. A woman’s prerogative, I guess.”

“But you' do not think or feel or live much like a woman, do you?”

“I suppose not.”

“But you did meet Martin in New York?”

“Yes. You know the answers, all of them, don’t you? Zermatt was not our last meeting. You knew that. But you let me babble on.”

“Babbling lies. A pattern begins to form. When did you meet Martin in New York?”

“Three days ago, I think.” “For how long?”

“When are you going to let me go? What do you want? Money? I can arrange money for you, you son of a bitch. Is that what you’re after? Is that why you broke in and snatched me and took me here?”

“Here? Where are you, Miss Quayle?”

“I don’t know.”

“And who am I, Miss Quayle?”

“I don’t know. You sound fat.”

“What?”

“The way you breathe. Like a fat man.”

“Yes. Immaterial. I believe we were discussing—”

“I can smell you, too.”

“Yes.”

“Something bad.”

“Like fire and brimstone?”

“Maybe.”

“Can one smell evil, Miss Quayle?”

“If what I smell is evil, yes.”

“You are correct. This world is held in hostage to the Dark One. I am his Messenger.”

“Oh, boy, you really are freaked out.”

“We shall find out who is sane and who is not, Miss Quayle, before our interviews are finished.”

****************************************

They had come in with a rush, after she answered the bell at the service door. Their efficient violence was utterly appalling. She was stunned and shattered by the force with which they took her. The brutality. She had seen violence before, but she had always kept a cold, iron control over herself. Like that time the jetliner crashed at the end of the runway in Boston, and all the passengers panicked, clawing at each other to get out. She had remained calm, keeping seated as the safest thing to do in the face of the mindless savagery of what had been a peaceful, civilized planeload of human beings.

But this attack was different.

Perhaps it was the silence with which they worked. There were three of them, wearing stocking masks, and they looked unnatural, faceless entities whose whole beings were absorbed in what they had to do. The apartment was on the fourteenth floor, a quiet and old-fashioned place in the Sixties, high above the noise of traffic and the city’s usual congestion. They were ruthless about everything, slamming her backward against the wall with a jolt that knocked the breath out of her. All without warning, without the slightest hint of what was to come when she innocently opened the door.

The tallest and heaviest one kept her pinned to the wall, her wrists gripped with iron strength that held in it the tremors of incipient violence. The others, both of medium height, although one was shorter than the other and all but danced as he moved, like a ballet performer on his toes, ravaged the apartment with a speed and thoroughness she could not believe. She turned her head to watch them move from the service door, down the hall into the living room. Soft crashing sounds echoed the destruction of the Italian Renaissance furniture. There were quick ripping sounds, soft padding noises, several thuds and bumps she could not understand. Her breath stopped in her throat.

When they came back, one said, “Not here.”

The voice was just a voice. It meant nothing.

“Lady?”

“Yes.”

“You’re Deborah Quayle?”

“Yes.”

“Where is your husband?”

“I have no husband.”

“Don’t get funny. You know this is serious. Where is Martin Pentecost?”

“He’s gone.”

“And the papers he brought?”

“He—he didn’t bring anything.”

She was appalled at the terror that shook in her voice, like a latent scream out of a dark and primeval jungle. The three men wore ordinary suits, dark, neat, expensive. White shirts. Polished shoes. Clean hands and fingernails. One of them smelled of expensive French cologne. She thought that was an error, the only identifiable thing about any of the three.

“When is he due back?”

She looked from side to side. Her wrists hurt where they were pinned high above her head by the man who pressed her to the wall. She knew better than to try to knee him as he crushed her backward.

“What?” she asked.

She could feel their silent eyes watching her, gleaming, behind the nylon of their stocking masks. She knew what their question was. They weren’t going to ask her twice. Terror that defied all her previous concepts of intelligent and calculating behavior moved in her like a tropical storm.

“I don’t know when Martin is coming back.”

“He’s due at eight, isn’t he?”

“If you say so. Look, if you want money, jewels—” None of them laughed.

She was told, “We want you to say when.”

“Yes. Martin is due at eight o’clock.”

“We’re on time,” one of them said. “He’s always prompt. We’ll wait the five minutes.”

Her apartment became a strange place, like an alien land. The smallest of the trio, the one who moved like a dancer, gave her a small mocking bow from the hips. An Oriental gesture. But he did not speak, so she couldn’t tell. The five minutes became an eternity. She had agreed to meet Martin here at eight o’cock. Whatever it was that had so troubled him back in Switzerland had intensified, to judge by the urgency in his voice when she spoke to him on the phone.

“No stripping for me this time, Debbie,” he had told her. “No tricks. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Oh, Martin.” She had discounted his melodrama. “I’m sorry about last time in Zermatt. It was stupid of me.” “You’re never stupid, Debbie. Deb, listen. You haven’t seen your father since Zermatt?”

“No.”

“He’s not at Ca’d’Orizon?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll see you at eight. Debbie?”

“Yes?”

“I really need you, Debbie.”

“I need you, Martin.”

“But this is different. We’ll talk about it.”

“Yes.”

The front door of the apartment gave off a melodic chiming sound. She felt the grip on her wrists tighten. She had not seen any weapons evident among the trio, but their very silence, the way they moved, the way they had so speedily ransacked her apartment—looking for what? —gave her warning enough. She kept silent, sick with a sense of betrayal. Even if she shouted a warning, she knew Martin would be taken in as unprepared a manner as she had been.

She whispered, “You’re not going to hurt him?”

“It depends,” one of them said.

“On what?”

“Maybe on you, Miss Quayle.”

The chimes sounded again. The dancer went to open the door. She heard Martin’s exclamation, heard a quick, muffled thud, heard the door close sharply. She suddenly strained against the grip that kept her flat against the wall. She was strong, she knew all sorts of tricks, but the man who pinioned her was too good for her capacities, too ready, too well-trained. Something sharp hit her stomach and now, when it was too late, she cried out to Martin, and then something was pushed against her face, over her mouth and nostrils, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to struggle for another moment, and then everything became of no importance. She wanted to weep as she felt the curtains dropping, one by one, like clouds drifting in thickening layers over the fruitful fields of her mind.

****************************************

“Miss Quayle?”

“I want to know what your people did with Martin.” “You may learn all that in due course. Did Martin ever explain his problem to you?”

“No.”

“Not over the phone, when vou and he appointed to meet at your apartment?”

“No. Martin rarely talked of intimate business problems over the telephone.”

“But of course he did. Daily. From wherever he happened to be, on Rufus Quayle’s orders.”

“That would be routine business. He wouldn’t talk about this thing that troubled him.”

“This thing that required your peculiar talents to solve?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he never hinted what its nature was?”

“I suppose it affected Q.P.I. interests.”

“Nothing beyond that?”

“I told you, he didn’t even hint to me what it was.”

“Was this not unusual?”

“Our relationship, since the divorce, is unusual.”

“What was he supposed to bring you on that evening?” “Some papers he wanted me to study. Some computer output to analyze.”

“But he had nothing on his person when we intercepted him at your apartment, my dear child. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t.”

“You look dejected, poor girl.”

“I feel dejected. How long does this go on?”

“As long as necessary.”

“Let me go. Please. I’m worried about Martin. Do you have him? I want to see him.”

“Why didn’t Martin have anything with him, if he was coming to see you and ask you to study something for him?”

“I can’t explain that.”

“But you must.”

“I simply can’t.”

“I see. You are obstinate. Unusually loyal. Do you realize that your life is at stake?”

“I don’t care.”

“And Martin’s?”

“Martin is an innocent.” “No one is innocent in this affair. No one in the world. Do you not care what has happened to him? And what will happen to him if you do not cooperate?”

“What have you done to him?”

“You will see.”

“I can’t tell you what I simply don’t know.”

“About Martin?”

“Yes, about Martin.”

“But you know so much about Q.P.I., do you not?”

“I suppose so. But nobody knows it all. Not even the computer memory banks. Maybe not even Rufus.”

“You refer to your father by his given name?”

“I think of him like that.”

“And you have not seen Rufus Quayle for how long?” “Months and months. Maybe a year.”

“And where is he now?”

“I’ve told you. I don’t know.”

“My dear Miss Quayle. Do you realize how much I have stretched the limits of my patience?”

“You stretch mine, too.”

“It is said here and there, in the media and in the international business, financial, and industrial circles, that of all the thousands of members of the Q.P.I. complex, you, his daughter, and you alone, always know where Rufus Quayle may be reached. You, and you alone, always know where he is.”

“Are you after my father? Is that your real aim?”

“Please respond to my question.”

“It’s not true. I used to know, always, where to reach him. Rather, it was the reverse. He always knew where to reach me. When he needed me.”

“For your—ah—instincts? Your talent?”

“My talent is like ashes in my mouth.”

“You are a brilliant woman, Miss Quayle. Do you not agree?”

“I’m a freak.”

“Because of your abilities to remember, to collate, to integrate, to see relationships between diverse items of data that no one else, and no computer, can see?”

“That’s my talent, yes.” “And you have lied a third time. You do know where Rufus Quayle may be reached.”

“No.”

“You defend him and his privacy, even at the risk of your own life? Do you do that?”

“I told you—”

“Has Rufus Quayle ever shown you the slightest hint of affection?”

“No.”

“Or paternal love?”

“No.”

“Yet you love him?”

“He’s my father.”

“Answer me, please. You love him?”

“Yes ”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t. He hasn’t ever been a real father to me. But I love him.”

“And so you are loyal to him?”

“Yes.”

“Out of love? Not fear?”

“Perhaps a bit of both.”

“And where is he, Miss Quayle?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what did Martin want you to solve?”

“I don’t know.”

“My patience, for now, has come to an end.”

****************************************

The small dancer type, the man who had bowed to her with that odd, mocking Oriental gesture, was the leader. She never had a chance to see what they had done to Martin. She was blindfolded, with such swiftness and dazzling efficiency that there was no opportunity, absolutely none, to struggle again. They had led her out the back door of the apartment and down to Park Avenue, onto the ramp that led to the underground garage below the building, and from there she had been pushed into a waiting car. She tried to listen to their voices, to tape them in her mind so she could identify them later; but they rarely spoke, and their orderly plan proceeded smoothly without any need for them to direct each other.

They did not take Martin with her, and she wondered about that, and then realized that one of the original trio was missing, not in the smoothly driven car. So Martin was with the absent third man. She felt an ache of worry in the pit of her stomach. She felt outrage and anger at being the victim of what was obviously a kidnapping. She felt violated. A number of possibilities rippled through her mind. It could be just a criminal kidnapping for ransom. If so, they were fools, she thought bitterly. Rufus would never pay a cent for her. That was the way he was. Proud and indomitable, stubborn and unyielding, whether it was a commercial deal or a personal matter. (But she knew little about her father’s personal life.) Rufus Quayle was too ruthless in his own right ever to yield to a simple criminal ploy like this.

Perhaps it was something else. A matter of industrial espionage? Yes, that could be it, she thought. If so, then Q.P.I. would get her free. The conglomerates within conglomerates that represented the empire of Rufus Quayle, all seeded and fertile and growing and related to each other like the field of wheat within her mind—the conglomerate had no emotion except that of self-preservation and growth. She was too valuable to Q.P.I. for Q.P.I. to desert her. They would gain her release, eventually. They would pay the price for her return.

The world was a place of terror, of international pressures toward violence, playing a politics of fear and death and blackmail and wildly irrational plots that, incredibly, caused sovereign nations to bow meekly to debasing and degrading demands. Yes, she thought, that was it.

Relax, she told herself.

It will be over soon enough.

They won’t hurt Martin, either.

She was aware of the cool September air, the smells of traffic in the street, the rush and push of passing cars. And then there was an airport, somewhere out in the country, maybe Westchester, she thought, judging by the turns her captors’ oar made. She was pushed into a plane, a small jet, and they took off with the swift efficiency that marked all their moves.

After that she was not so sure. Whatever had been impregnated in the cloth over her mouth had worn off swiftly, or partially, so her attention was dreamlike, her span of concentration dimmed and attenuated. She was not sure how long the flight lasted. She guessed it was almost four hours, but it could have been longer or shorter; she could not tell.

The landing was rough, which meant a small or ill-kept private airstrip. They made sure her blindfold was still secure, and then hustled into another car. She was aware of an abnormal chill in the air, a sharp biting cold that made her shiver. She felt the car climb and climb. The air grew even colder. It felt dry. She was wearing only the simple little black frock with which she had meant to meet Martin in her apartment. No one in the oar spoke or complained or thought to give her something warmer to wear.

Then she was in a building, and the contrasting wave of hot, humid heat struck her like a blow.

The heat in the building was something she would always remember. It was like something out of a tropical rain forest. She could not understand it.

And then her cell.

And the silence.

She was left blindfolded. She waited for some time, for long minutes after she heard locks snap and bolts thrown home. No one came to her. She sensed she was alone.

She reached up and untied the blindfold knotted at the back of her head.

She was still blind.

The darkness seemed absolute.

She wanted to whimper, to cry out, to yell and scream. Terror tore her mind apart. She simply stood in the center of a blackness as deep as the deepest part of black interstellar space. She bit her lip and tasted the salt of her blood, and refused to make a sound.

Finally she sank down to her hands and knees. The floor was of stone. It felt warm under the palms of her hands. She lay down on her side, as if floating in the infinite darkness of space.

And waited.

****************************************

“Deborah, you have been hostile and negative toward me.”

“What do you expect?”

“I have no more time for you. I believe it is now necessary to demonstrate to you that this is not a game we play, that my intentions are most earnest. I will not be balked by any devices you imagine will keep me from learning what I wish to know.”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“I want you to know that when I ask you a question, I intend to receive a proper reply.”

“All right. I’ve done so.”

“You have not. You have lied. You have tried to be devious. Not a good policy toward the Messenger.”

“What messenger?”

“It is a title, not a servant’s status.”

“I’m not convinced that you are sane.”

“I do not try to convince you of that. Will you now tell me about Martin Pentecost and his suspicions?”

“Why not ask him?”

“It is not possible.”

“He got away? Really?”

“In a sense.”

“But you don’t have him here?”

“We do. In a sense. Where is Rufus Quayle?”

“I told you—”

“Very well.”

****************************************

They took off her blindfold. For the first time in many hours, she saw light again. Dimly at first, as if it came through hundreds of thin, gauzy curtains. One by one, the curtains lifted. She blinked her eyes, trying to clear her vision.

It was as if she were in a motionless plane, high above a darkening desert. Mountains loomed in the far distance, purple with the shadows of evening. Far below, the flat vista stretched without meaning, empty and desolate, dotted here and there with scrub growth, ravaged by canyons and buttes, by grotesque and beautiful rock formations of reds and grays and glittering quartz.

She realized she was looking through a wide, panoramic window.

“You may turn around.”

“I can’t.”

“Tomash’ta?”

It was the first name she had heard spoken among them. She felt herself turned in the chair on which she was seated. They had tied her to the chair, arms and legs, so she could not rise up out of it or move in any way. The chair was turned.

She saw her inquisitor.

She felt again the impact of a sense of unreality, of mental denial. Gross, enormous weight, fat, breathing with that faint hint of asthmatic difficulty. A face whose' detailed features escaped her amid a wave of malignancy, of evil, that emanated from the seated figure.

“You find me repellent, my dear young woman?”

“Yes.”

“I am the Messenger. I signify all the wickedness to which this world has been abandoned.”

“You’re still talking nonsense.”

“We shall see. You asked about Martin? I told you, my patience is not limited. Look at Martin. Turn her some more, Tomash’ta.”

The chair was turned, lifted bodily, set down quietly at a new angle. She saw the room, a simple plastered chamber, with a Spanish archway at one end, another arch becoming visible as she was turned about. There were heavy old beams in the ceiling. Hooks had been hung from them on iron chains.

Something hung from one of the hooks.

It was a naked male body, almost unidentifiable from the carcasses of steers she had once seen in a slaughterhouse.

The man had been mutilated and tortured. With knives and with fire. She began to vomit. The big iron hook had been inserted into the jaw of the head, and the body was suspended that way from the iron hook.

Slowly, through spasms of retching, she looked into the face of the dead man.

Looked into the glazed, insane eyes of the dead man.

It was Martin.

Part Three

CA’D’ORIZON

Chapter Seven

It was cold and wet in Washington. When they landed at National Airport at two o’clock in the morning, the stars had been out and there was a balmy feel to the pre-dawn air, promising some Indian summer weather. But during the taxi ride from the airport, the wind shifted to the east and freshened, and a faint drizzle began when Durell and Deirdre arrived at his bachelor apartment near Rock Creek Park. It was a place he had stubbornly kept as a home base, even with the deterioration of the neighborhood.

The K Section plane at the airstrip near White Spring Spa had taken them all quickly out of the mountain area. Durell sent Franklin to be hospitalized with a chipped ankle bone. Marcus and Henley were told to stand by at Annapolis Street, turning in at the dormitory there on the third floor. Durell had given Henley a verbal report for General McFee.

Marcus was doubtful. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Not yet. Perhaps later.”

Henley coughed and poked his glasses up on his aristocratic nose and looked meaningfully at Deirdre. “Let it go, Marcus. Durell is the boss. Ours not to reason why, eh?”

Marcus grumbled, “I’ve got reports of my own to make out for the DIA.”

“Then make them,” Durell said briefly. “You’ll hear from me later.”

“Cajun.” Henley was patient. “You’re supposed to work with us. We’ve got a potential fiasco on our hands. You don’t have private plans of your own, do you?”

“You’ll hear from me tomorrow,” Durell said. “We all need some rest, right now.”

Deirdre did not question him when he took the taxi to his own apartment instead of going to No. 20 Annapolis Street. It was three in the morning before the cab pulled up in front of the red-brick building, with its familiar marble trim, near the park. There were several similar buildings on the tree-lined street. The mizzling rain had freshened, and Deirdre shivered in her rough hiking outfit. Durell studied the parked cars at the curb. There were no pedestrians in sight. Mist moved along the tops of the poplar trees in front of the apartments.

There was some mail, a white envelope, visible in Durell’s mailbox. He looked at the box but did not touch it.

“What is it?” Deirdre asked.

“Somebody tipped him off.”

“Are you talking about Tomash’ta?”

“Yes. That’s how he knew I was on this job. That’s why he told the little Akuro girl to call my name, at the Spa.”

“But nobody could know—”

“We know. And people in DIA.”

“I don’t like that, Sam.”

He looked about the deserted apartment-house lobby. The glass front doors showed the street outside to be empty, dimpled by the rain. “Let the mail wait, Dee.”

“You really think it was someone in K Section who tipped Tomash’ta we were going into the mountains?”

“I’m betting it was one of Eli Plowman’s people.”

“Tell me about him, Sam. I don’t know anything about Plowman.”

“Count yourself lucky for it. There isn’t a dossier on him anywhere. There’s nothing about his ‘sanitation squads’ and nothing about the people he recruited. He had his own private fund for his projects. We don’t even know who worked for him. It’s not the sort of thing you risk publicity on by keeping records. If he enlisted anybody, nobody knew about it; and his hired killers naturally never talked about it.”

“Still, you worked with him in Sumatra.”

“In a way. He had his own ax to grind there. It gave me trouble. After I reported him, he was ordered cleaned. But he vanished in Singapore. He knew we were after him. All his funds were cut off. But he’d be able to manage as an independent operator, I think.”

Deirdre started for the elevator, but he caught her hand before she pushed the button. “We’ll take the stairs.”

He went up the worn marble treads in silence, keeping Deirdre close behind him. Instinct shrilled warnings to him. The first landing was empty. His apartment was on the third floor. The next landing was clear, too. On the wet street outside, he heard a single car go by, tires swishing in the rain. The motor faded away, speed undiminished. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had been in the business too long. No one knew this address. He was rarely here, and he always took precautions about being trailed here. But he had never known anyone like Eli Plowman before, either. To Plowman, the simplest and final way of dealing with an enemy was by killing. Murder was a way of life with Eli. He remembered the man’s innocuous round face, his drab appearance that had the fine facility of blending into his surroundings. And Plowman’s anonymous squads were drawn from any outfit available here in Washington.

The corridor to his apartment door was empty. He was careful inserting the key. Nothing happened. He turned the lock, listening for any unusual sound in the tumblers. Nothing. He drew his gun and eased the door open with his fingertips. Light from the hall behind him edged inside, a trapezoid pattern on his Oriental Sarouk rug. There were no explosions. No shots. He felt for the inside switch. There could be explosives anywhere. In the mailbox, the door lock, in the light switch. Someone could be crouching by the fireplace, beside the wingchair that Deirdre had re-covered last year.

Nothing.

His tension did not ease. He pulled Deirdre inside with him in the darkness, pressed her back beside the door, felt for the screw slots that held the switchplate in place. The screws were aligned properly, the way he had left them.

He snapped on the light.

The telephone rang.

The sound was as shocking as if someone had thrown a grenade. He felt Deirdre jump, but he did not look at her. The apartment was now softly lighted. He looked at the bookcases packed with his old legal texts from Yale, shelves of history, politics, philosophy, the now-silent stereo built into the paneled wall beside the fireplace. The draperies were tightly drawn. It felt too warm in the living room. He could see from the hall door into his bedroom. All the closet doors were closed. The place reflected his rather austere personal tastes. He had a few good oils by lesser French impressionists, an Amy Bessar Connecticut scene framed in worm-holed gray oak, some Ashe prints.

The telephone kept ringing.

Deirdre lifted smooth brows. “Only McFee and I know your number, Sam.”

“Hopefully,” he said.

“It has to be McFee, Sam.”

“Let him wait.”

“But you can’t just ignore the boss, darling.”

The telephone rang two more times, then was silent.

Durell said, “McFee told me to keep you safe. I intend to do that, Dee. If there’s a leak somewhere, I have to find it, and fast. Don’t move away from the wall yet.”

He moved on through the apartment. His instincts still screamed of hidden danger. There was nothing in the rooms to give away the business he was in, except for the legal texts in the bookcases. Nothing had been searched. You secured a place by establishing patterns, large and small. As far as he could see, nothing had been disturbed —the bath cabinets with his shaving gear, his clothes in the closets, the positioning of certain pieces of furniture, the arrangement of kitchen things. Everything conformed to the patterns in which he had left them. He took his time about it, while Deirdre watched with calm eyes from near the entrance door. None of his apprehension about her safety evaporated, even when he was through. “Everything seems all right,” he said quietly.

He thought of voice-activated explosives, of trip-bombs, of acid in the showerhead, poison smeared inside the coffee pot or impregnated in his Louisiana brand of coffee, or other bombs triggered by an open refrigerator door or by an unwary tread on the carpet beside the bed. He shook his head. The place looked clean. Maybe he was overreacting. But with a man like Eli Plowman, who made murder his business, you were wise to be too careful. He said, “Let’s get some rest now.”

“Thank goodness. We can use some coffee.”

He looked at her. “Later, Dee.”

“Oh. But I need a shower.”

“That’s checked out. Go ahead.”

While her shower was running, he checked everything again. He picked up the telephone by its base and looked at the pattern of screw slots in the bottom, put it down again the way it had been positioned on his desk.

Nothing.

He didn’t like it.

Then Deirdre came out of the bath and memories of her body and her generosity in lovemaking moved in him. She was almost as tall as he, with long lovely legs and swelling hips and a narrow waist. She moved in nakedness toward the bed and turned, smiling slightly, lifting her arms to let down her long, shining, copper-black hair.

“Come here, Sam.”

“I thought you were exhausted.”

“Not for you, Sam.”

He turned out the bedroom lights. Outside, beyond the drawn draperies, the rain fell with a small, comforting sound.

The telephone rang again shortly after dawn. Durell awoke immediately, aware of Deirdre warmly beside him. He turned to look at her serene brow, the spread of lustrous hair on the pillow; listened to the even sound of her breathing. The phone rang insistently. She sighed and turned toward him and her hand on his chest gentled him down. With her eyes closed, she said, “Let McFee wait. It’s been a long time, wonderful Sam.”

The telephone kept ringing.

Her mouth smiled; her long lashes were tiny fans against her cheek. She whispered, “Last night I felt as if, for the first time, I’m a chain around your neck. I don’t want you to worry about me like this, darling.”

“You could have been killed in the mountains last night, Dee.”

She moved against him. “But I’m very much alive, yes?”

“Yes, Dee.”

“I’m glad I’m here with you. We’re apart so often. It’s not easy doing clerical work for McFee while you’re off in some jungle or desert on the other side of the world. I’m glad you want me close to you on this job. Close, like this.” She touched him, smiling. “Don’t go away, Sam.”

“I won’t.” He grinned.

“You know what I mean. Is Plowman such a horror?” “Worse.”

The phone had stopped ringing.

“I never knew you to be so worried about anyone before, except that Madame Hung. But she’s dead long ago, isn’t she?”

He thought about it. “Yes.”

“But Plowman—

“He’s amoral, has no respect for life. In a sense, he’s a dead man, himself. He’s lived with killing for too long, it’s meaningless for him. He knows his life is up for grabs, since I made bim run in Sumatra. But I’m surprised he’s here in the States, though. He has plenty of escape-holes in Southeast Asia, where he usually operated. He’s also a member of some far-out sect that claims affiliation to Buddhism, but it’s an unlikely relation to that gentle religion.” He felt her warm, firm breasts against his chest. “Let’s not talk about it now.”

She laughed softly. “I hoped you’d say that.”

★    ★    ★

At noon he slid out of bed and showered, letting her sleep a few moments more. But she was alert to everything about her, and when he returned to the bedroom, toweling, she was awake, her head propped on one hand, observing him curiously.

“Are we going somewhere? I haven’t any clothes* really, darling.”

“You didn’t tell me about the sand,” he said quietly.

“What sand?”

He moved the window curtain a fraction of an inch and looked down at the street below. It had stopped raining. The street looked normal. A taxi went by. Some boys played along the line of parked cars across the street. A woman with a shopping bag of groceries went into the building opposite.

“What sand, Sam?” Deirdre repeated.

He picked up her short boots, examined the soles, looked at his own footgear, checked the cuffs on the trousers he had worn last night in the Alleghenies.

“There’s sand on the tiled floor in one corner of the bathroom. I couldn’t see it last night, under artificial light. White sand, very fine, very powdery.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“It could be a message.”

She did not understand. He said, “It’s plain that the real objective of this terrorist outfit, of which Tomash’ta is only a small cog, is your Uncle Rufus’s Q.P.I. Eli Plowman is Tomash’ta’s boss, but even Eli isn’t at the head of this corporate gangsterism, which seems to aim at a world-wide network of media outlets. These outlets could change public opinion any way the Shumata zaibatsu. wants. The real boss of Shumata, now that the dissident Yoshi Akuro was eliminated last night, is still an unknown quantity.”

He watched her get out of bed and dress in her rough hiking clothes. She was beautiful. He thought she had never been more desirable, more precious to him. He ached for her. He watched the way her dark hair fell forward as she bent to lace up her boots.

“Your Uncle Rufus’s Q.P.I. is the last link they need for this world-wide network, Dee. The biggest, the best, maybe the most important. Tell me about him, Dee.” “Rufus Quayle? I don’t know anything, really. My relationship with him is practically academic.”

“But you’ve met him.”

“Only once, when I was a child.”

“Where?”

“At that fantastic, crazy house of his, the Ca’d’Orizon, on the Jersey shore.” She broke off suddenly and stared at him. “Is that New Jersey sand?”

“It could be.”

“But—”

“I’m supposed to find it, I think. To take me to New Jersey, to your uncle, Rufus Quayle.”

“But Rufus wouldn’t—he doesn’t know you or anything about you.”

“Eli Plowman knows me. Maybe too well. That sand shows he was here. In this apartment. Maybe just before we got here.”

Deirdre hugged herself. “But you found nothing, Sam.” “Only the sand. As if from his shoes.”

“But you said he was so professional.”

“Exactly. The sand here is no accident. He left it for me. To get me there.” He paused. “So tell me what you can remember about that house on the Jersey shore, the Ca’d’Orizon.”

It wasn’t much, he thought later. She had been only twelve years old—she wasn’t sure—and she did not recall how the invitation had arrived to her parents. It was a holiday, maybe Thanksgiving; she remembered it was wintery. Her parents were dead now, there was no point trying to recall the occasion.

“Just your impressions, Dee,” he urged.

“Bigness. Very ornate. We came there by boat. He was younger then. Of course, he seemed like an old man to me. I remember his hair was dark, just slightly red, like mine. He was very tall. Big. He—I recall feeling afraid of him.”

“Why?”

“His voice. It was just beginning to get that rough sound—you know, the way he sounds on the radio when he delivers his monthly editorials.”

“Nobody has heard his voice for over three months.”

“I know. Do you think Rufus Quayle is dead?”

“If we could find your cousin, Deborah Quayle, we’d probably know. But other people are looking for her, since she disappeared in New York.”

“You think Rufus is at Ca’d’Orizon? He couldn’t be. People have gone there to ask questions about him, since his editorials stopped.” Deirdre bit her lip. “No. Everything shows he isn’t there. He has other houses, other homes. He could be anywhere in the world, Sam. He has the money to hire a small army of guards, servants—you know the sort of thing. The richest man in the world.” “And maybe the poorest,” Durell said.

“Why?”

He didn’t reply. He asked her to recall her impressions of the house on the Jersey shore. Deirdre said they had stayed at a hotel in Atlantic City. She remembered lights, amusement piers, the Boardwalk. A private yacht took them from there. “I don’t know why I was afraid, Sam, but I was.”

“How long were you on the yacht?”

“A few hours. We left in the morning, and the holiday dinner was at mid-afternoon. The place was so strange. It felt cold. Big rooms, old statuary, big paintings on the walls. I remember the smell of the sea, of tidal marshes.” “Anything else?”

“Not really. We left by boat again that evening. I was glad to get away.” She paused. “I remember—there were so many people there. Not just servants, but business employees. There was a big office in a tower. He showed it to us. A huge desk and teleprinters, taped market computers, a broadcasting booth. Yes, that’s right, there was a radio transmission tower there, too. But that was over twenty years ago, Sam. It’s probably all changed.”

She paused again. “I remember, I thought this big scary man with the strange voice, who ordered all these people around—I remember thinking, for a long time afterward, that he—that he was lonely.”

The telephone rang.

Deirdre said, “I’m going to answer it. I’m not going to let you walk into a sandtrap on invitation by Plowman.”

As she reached for the instrument, Durell suddenly called, “Don’t,” and knocked her hand away. Pulling her with him, he retreated to the door. From a small table against the wall, he picked up a bronze copy of Don Quixote that she had given him some years ago. He urged the girl out into the corridor, pulled the door almost shut, then tossed the heavy statuette accurately at the ringing telephone on his desk. Almost instantly, he shut the door and pushed Deirdre down the outer hall.

The explosion made a dull, flat crump! and pieces of metal and plastic rattled like shrapnel against the closed panel.

Deirdre’s face drained of color. Durell said, “One of Plowman’s gimmicks. The phone was rigged with plastic explosive, timed to go off on the third series of rings.”

There was commotion down the corridor, and a woman in a blue wrapper with matching plastic hair curlers thrust her head out of a doorway, looked at them, opened her mouth, and vanished.

Durell opened the door. The apartment was a shambles, filled with acrid smoke. There was a hole in the desk, another in the wall near where the phone had been. If he had picked it up and held it to his ear, it would have blown his head off.

“Come on,” he told Deirdre.

He took her hand and they went quietly down the stairs to the street lobby.

Chapter Eight

Marcus and Henley were just coming through the lobby doors from the street. Henley had a peculiar expression on his narrow, scholarly face. Durell kept going, and Marcus said, “What’s happening up there? What in hell was that noise?”

“Nobody’s hurt. Where did you come from?”

“McFee told us to keep an eye on you.” Henley stared upward. “It sounded like a bomb, Cajun.”

“It was. Have you a car?”

“We’ve been sitting in it all night. McFee thought you might be up to something on your own.”

Durell led Deirdre out into the street. The two DIA men followed. Henley kept looking backward. Off in the distance, a police siren sounded.

The car was a nondescript Buick at least ten years old. Henley took the wheel. The engine ticked over like a watch. “Where to, Sam?”

“National. You’ll do the flying.”

Half an hour later, they were airborne, heading east over the Chesapeake and then north across the Delmarva Peninsula and over the Delaware across the fiat scrub pines of southern Jersey. By three o’clock that afternoon they touched down at Bader Field and by four they had registered at a Boardwalk hotel and made arrangements for renting a powerboat at the inlet fishing docks between Absecon Island and Brigantine.

The afternoon was cool, with a thin layer of high clouds over the sun. There were few tourists at this season of the year. Deirdre had taken a packaged lunch from the hotel, and Marcus brought two bottles of bourbon. The tide was coming in. In the grassy channels that twisted northward toward Tom’s River in a maze of watery paths, the sun was obscured by tall reeds, and the scent of ozone was sharply penetrating in the cool breeze. The wind came from the east, over the Atlantic. Seagulls followed them hopefully, screaming in protest when they found no scraps of bait in their wake. A sport fisherman with a black hull and high white superstructure came their way, and the man piloting from the flying bridge waved to them, his eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. Durell pushed the throttle forward and their wake washed into the six-foot high reeds on the sand banks to right and left of the channel.

It was an area where land and sea met and blended in a manner that left it hard to define water, air, and land. The tidal flats smelled pungent. Deirdre passed around sandwiches against the growing chill in the air. There were few horizons among the meandering salt-water creeks. Now and then a leaning pole indicated the course to follow. The gulls left them. Once, crossing a wider channel that might have been a small river, they glimpsed the mainland as a dim line of scrub pines and a wooden trestle bridge carrying a road north and south. To the east glimmered the slate-gray reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. “Anything familiar?” Durell asked Deirdre.

She shook her head. “It was a long time ago, Sam.” Marcus said dubiously, “Nobody’s at the Rufus Quayle place. I hear it was abandoned and ruined years ago. Even if the old bastard is there, you’ll never get in to talk to him.”

“That’s what I want to see.”

A small crab boat with an open cockpit passed them, heading south. The fisherman called something that was lost in the wind. The tall reeds and grass-covered dunes blocked out the horizons again. The wind was sharper, and Deirdre hugged herself as she stood beside Durell at the wheel of the chartered boat. The channel twisted northwest, turned south, came to a fork that broadened into a wider inlet. A fishing shack with gray weathered shingles stood on stilts at the intersection of the waterways. A sign tilted to one side, in faded, weatherbeaten letters, read:

NO TRESPASSING

PRIVATE PROPERTY

Durell took the prohibited channel and throttled down. They were going north again. The sky had turned a dark gray in the east, but there was still a watery glimmer of sunlight over the mainland, which lay at least six miles to the west, beyond the tidal marshes. Half a mile onward, they saw a second sign:

WARNING!

RESTRICTED

It was in slightly better repair than the first. A small pier lay collapsed among the high reeds, the stilt poles canted every which way. Durell glimpsed metal or glass among the tall grasses growing on the tidal dunes. A narrow path had been cut through the growth, leading back over the dune and out of sight. He looked at the other bank, nosing the boat forward at slow speed. Again, no one was in sight.

For a time they could see nothing but the gray skies and murky waters of the swift tidal channel. The boat handled well. Henley stretched out in the cockpit, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, and closed his eyes; Marcus took a slug of the bourbon and ate the last of the sandwiches.

A third sign, with reflector letters, stood in the very center of the passage:

DANGER! DANGER!

NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED

Marcus said, “We’re getting closer, but I don’t see anybody or anything.”

“Look over there,” Durell said. “To right and left.” He slowed the boat. “There in the grass. And there, where those poles stick up. Electronic beams, crossing the channel.”

“Hell. You think they’re activated?”

“We’ll soon find out.”

The sun was almost down, but a high gray light persisted in the colorless sky. A herring gull flew over them, winging purposefully west over the miles of flat water, dune, and tidal creek. Sandpipers ran on stilt legs along a tongue of sand beside the channel. A fish splashed in the waters ahead. Durell suddenly cut the boat’s engine and faced astern. “Did you hear that?”

Henley, lying on his back with his hands supporting his scholarly head, kept his eyes closed. “It’s another boat, Sam. They’ve been following us for about five minutes.” The boat rocked silently in the current. “I wasn’t sure until you cut the engine.” Henley opened his eyes, put on his glasses, and took his gun from the pocket of his short quilted jacket. “Do we wait here?”

“No,” Durell decided.

He started the engine and they went on. Deirdre looked at him, but he said nothing more. The channel turned abruptly to port, and for a moment they glimpsed something large and hulking against the dark eastern sky. At the same time, Durell heard distant surf on the beach and smelled an increasing sharpness from the ocean.

A wire fence, built across the channel on solid pilings, blocked their way. A freshly painted metal sign read:

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

DANGER!

THIS IS A FIRING RANGE!

“Marcus?”

“Yo.”

“See if you can find wire-cutters in the toolbox.”

Henley said, “It looks like a gate, but it’s padlocked.” Deirdre said, “Someone is coming.”

Durell let the boat drift toward the blockade across the

channel. A high sandbank, overgrown with sawgrass, reached almost fifteen feet above their heads from the deck of the boat. There was a sharp burst of sparks as the metal fittings on the bow pulpit touched the fence. The wires were electrified. Deirdre bit her lip. At the same moment, there was the sharp crack of a rifle, and a bullet whipped across their bow.

Henley rolled off the transom and raised his gun. Marcus ducked aft into the cockpit, his own weapon ready.

A bullhorn spoke to them.

“You people are intruders. This is private property! You have been warned. Turn back!”

Durell looked up at the high sandy bank to starboard. Nothing else happened. The boat drifted against the electrified barrier again. More sparks showered over the bow. The electronic voice spoke again.

“You people are intruders! This is private property! You have been warned. Turn back!”

Durell said, “It’s a tape recording. Triggered to go off if the gateway is touched. There’s no one on guard.”

“But someone fired a shot at us,” Deirdre said.

He nodded. The boat slid aground on the sandy shore with a deep grating noise. The deck canted a little. “Marcus, see anybody?”

Henley said, “He’s moving. A bit to the right of the highest tuft of sawgrass. Over there. Astern.”

“Do you hear the other boat now?”

“No.”

Durell said, “I’m going ashore. Stay here, Dee. You too, Henley. Marcus, come with me.”

He jumped for the steep embankment that sloped overhead, slid downward a little, touched the rail of the boat, and shoved himself upward again, gripped a clump of rough grass, climbed, found a foothold, and paused with his head just below the crest of the grassy dune. Although he was only ten feet or so above the deck of the boat’s flying bridge, the advantage of this height gave him a sweeping view to the west and south. The antenna of another boat among the marsh reeds caught the last beams of sunlight and reflected it in a thin, upright thread of bright metal. It was about a quarter of a mile behind them. Marcus jumped from the deck for the embankment after him. Henley stood beside Deirdre while Marcus clambered up beside him.

“Did you know we were being followed for the last two hours, since we left the hotel, Sam?”

“Yes.” Durell lifted his head carefully above the crest of the dune and looked through the high grass on top. The sound of the ocean surf was louder here. He could see the Atlantic, darkening by the moment, directly ahead, and the surf made long white combers on a wild-looking stretch of sand beach overgrown with wild plum and seagrape. To the right, where Atlantic City lay many miles behind them, there was a faint glow in the evening sky. The sea wind blew sand against his cheek. He looked the other way and saw Ca’d’Orizon.

It was half a mile northward, a stone and clapboard structure of ominous bulkiness, with a ruined tower to the south end, nearest him, and a crenellated wall around the flat roof of the rest of the structure. A vista of dunes and a few wind-bent pines intervened between here and the building. There was a brooding sense of lonely isolation in the imitation palazzo. It stood on a rise of about six feet. The narrow Gothic windows were tightly boarded up. He tried to see how the land ran toward the palazzo, but the tangle of seagrape and high grasses blocked most of the view. He saw where jetties had been thrust into the surf to build up the sand. There were two sets of them, made of pilings and gray rocks, and he guessed these were outlets for the canals dug to satisfy Rufus Quayle’s whims. There should be some bridges, he thought, over the waterways.

Directly ahead on the other side of the dune, the electrified fence that crossed the boat channel was continued across the width of the island. Beyond was another fence of barbed wire. He wondered briefly if there might be land mines. Anything was possible. There was an air of unreality about the huge house that seemed to float on a thin layer of mist that crept in among the dunes from the sea.

Marcus moved uneasily beside him.

Just then a second rifle shot clipped the top of the dune and spattered sand against Durell’s cheek. The flat sound of the weapon was whipped away by the darkening wind. He looked to the right, where the surf curled in long pale lines against the beach. A clump of gnarled pines and a low barrier of seagrape made a kind of demarcation line across the island.

“Come on,” he told Marcus.

He went over the crest of the dune in a quick, lithe movement, ran in a crouch down the opposite slope of sand and grass. Marcus kept pace with him. Durell ran straight for the spot among the seagrape where he thought the sniper was hidden. The sound of the surf was louder in his ears. Halfway to the line of brush he threw himself flat on the cold, yielding sand. A slight movement betrayed the rifleman. There was a brief glint of watery light on a rifle barrel. A third shot whined harmlessly overhead.

Marcus gasped. “He’s pretty good. Can you see him?” “It’s not one of Quayle’s guards. They’d give us a chance to explain our trespassing.”

“Tomash’ta, then? I’d like to get that son of a bitch.” Marcus looked angry.

Durell said, “Swing around the left along the channel and keep him busy. I’ll take him from the front.”

The DIA man nodded and slid away behind the dune, then got up and ran. Immediately there were two more shots and Marcus jerked and fell down, vanishing in the tall grass. Durell sprang up and sprinted for the seagrape. Something tugged at his shirtsleeve and he dived, rolling forward, and came up into the prickly tangle of brush. He waited a moment, thought he heard Marcus off to his left, then crawled along the edge of the channel. He came up against the electrified wire barrier, saw where the seagrape had grown up against it, rolled the brittle branches forward, then lifted himself up and over on the brush, coming up on hands and knees on the other side. He looked for Marcus, but could not see him. Behind and to the left, the channel water murmured softly with the tide. The rank smell of marsh gas touched him. Ahead, the gloomy pile of Ca’d’Orizon loomed against the darkening sky. There was no more than twenty minutes of daylight left. He looked back along the channel and saw the boat, but he did not see Deirdre or Henley on deck.

A two-foot trough formed by seawater running to the beach on the outgoing tide had been furrowed out of the island’s surface. He rolled forward into it, moved rapidly back to the right again where the sniper had been hidden.

Something made a burst of movement amid the brush and scrub pines. At the same moment, he heard the crash of Marcus’s gun. The running figure zigzagged, leaped high over a second fence, splashed through shallow sea-ware, reached a second dune and vanished. Durell moved forward toward the surf. His purpose was to edge the man out toward the flat expanse of open beach, where the tides had exposed flats of sand free of the tall grasses. The furrow he had been using flattened out a few feet farther on. From behind him, he heard Deirdre call.

“Sam? Sam!”

The wind snatched her voice away. The crash of the surf erased a second cry. He looked back briefly, then went on. Now he saw another barrier on the way to the big, sprawling house. It was the first of the two channels he had seen from the top of the dune behind him. The water did not look too deep. He slid down into it in a small avalanche of sand. The tidal water was icy cold. It came up to his knees. He splashed through it, climbed the other bank, and ran for the open beach. To his right he saw another figure, small and quick, racing for the safety of the trees inland.

“Hold it, Tomash’ta!” he called.

The figure whirled, started to bring up his rifle, paused. A look of confusion momentarily touched the man’s small, snarling face. Marcus appeared on the other side of him. Tomash’ta turned his head to right and left, looking for a way out. His face suddenly was bland. He raised his arms over his head, holding the rifle.

“Wait,” he said.

He began walking toward Durell, arms held high. Marcus yelled something. From behind him, he heard the sudden muffled sound of the boat engine being started. Durell felt torn in two directions. He wanted to go back to see what was happening to Deirdre and Henley. “Marcus! Take him!”

Tomash’ta swung toward Marcus, suddenly lowering his rifle and firing it at the DIA man. Marcus fell back as if kicked in the chest. Tomash’ta kept turning, bringing the gun lower, turning it toward Durell. Durell came down the beach in a long, running dive that hit the Japanese just above the knees. Tomash’ta went down like a bowling pin, but held on to his weapon. He came up with his round face plastered with sand. His eyes were gleaming, feral slits. He spat something in Japanese, tried to break free. His body was like a bundle of coiled wires. Durell glimpsed Marcus sitting up, his face convulsed with anger and pain. He was holding his right leg.

“You will die,” Tomash’ta hissed.

“And so will you.”

“But I am dedicated to death. I follow the tradition of the kamikaze warriors—”

Durell felt him slide from his grip. He hit the man as they both grappled, rising to their knees. It was like hitting spring steel. Tomash’ta grinned and kneed Durell in the stomach. Durell heaved the rifle out of reach and came down across the writhing Japanese, chopped at To-mash’ta’s throat, missed, felt the man wriggle out from under his weight, chopped again, caught the man on the side of the neck, and flipped his .38 around to drive it against Tomash’ta’s head.

“One move, Kokui. Just one.”

The man’s slanted black eyes were fanatic.

“You may kill me, if you wish.”

“Yes. You’ve killed plenty of others.”

“I am ready to die.”

“Not yet. Not this easily. Get up.”

“Kill me!”

Durell drove his knee into the man’s groin, putting all his weight into it. Tomash’ta’s breath came out with a thin hissing sound. His big teeth gleamed in the fading light. Durell called, “Marcus?”

“I’m all right,” Marcus called back heavily.

“Can you walk?”

“Reckon so.”

“Go see what’s happening back on the boat.”

“I want Tomash’ta. That son of a bitch—”

“The boat, Marcus.”

Durell got carefully to his feet. He did not take his eyes off the Japanese for a moment. Tomash’ta lay on his back on the sand, his thick hair fallen across one side of his face. The man wore a gray sweat-suit and heavy boat shoes trimmed with blue stripes.

“Stand up.”

The man said something in a quick spate of Japanese that Durell understood only too well. He hit Tomash’ta across the side of the face with his gun, and realized too late that the man had deliberately incited him to the act. Tomash’ta staggered, then whirled and came up with a long, leaping kick that caught Durell just under the rib-cage. He went backward, saw Tomash’ta lunge for the rifle, came up and dived to intercept him. He could not catch his breath. A desperate ache flashed up through his chest and he heard his breath whistle through his teeth. Marcus was gone, hobbling out of sight toward the boat channel. He staggered, managed to stamp his boot on Tomash’ta’s reaching hand. Tomash’ta yanked his hand free through the yielding sand, spun around, pirouetting like a dancer, and came up with a wide-bladed knife that gleamed in the fading light. The blade flashed like a serpent’s tongue. Tomash’ta’s grin was crooked and unnatural.

“Now you must kill me,” the man said.

“Are you so anxious to die?”

“Dying is my business. I will fulfill my oath.”

“To Eli Plowman? He couldn’t care less.”

Tomash’ta danced around him, making Durell turn his back to the sea. “Go ahead, pull the trigger, CIA man.” They were alone on the empty beach. Marcus had vanished over the dunes. Sandpipers still ran along the curling, foam-edged water. A black-headed gull laughed at them as it belatedly winged westward.

Tomash’ta laughed, suddenly jumped for him, the broad blade slicing at Durell. Durell squeezed the trigger. The .38 bullet smashed into Tomash’ta’s kneecap and hurled the man sidewise. He shrieked with dismay. The knife flew aside and buried itself in the sand. Durell kicked it away. Tomash’ta writhed on the sand, clutching his shattered knee. Beads of sweat popped out on his round, brown face. Blood spread into the sand from the wound. Durell stood above him.

Tomash’ta gasped. “But you must not—it is not fair play—I did not expect—”

“I don’t play by the rules, Tomash’ta. Does it surprise you?”

Fear glimmered in Tomash’ta’s eyes, through his puzzlement and pain. “I think I am going to faint. It hurts so much—I will be crippled—”

“You’ll soon be dead,” Durell said. “You’ve killed too many men and women and children. You killed the Akuro family at the Spa in Virginia. And how many others, working for Eli?”

“I swore an oath—”

“Where is Plowman now?”

“Ah.”

“On this island?”

“He sent only me. I am very good at my work. He has most confidence in me.”

“You failed him this time. Did you get into the house over there?”

“No, it is impossible. You will see for yourself.”

Durell said quietly, “Do you want a bullet through the other knee?” There was a peculiar color in Tomash’ta’s face.

Tomash’ta said, “Yes, yes, I see what you are now. Plowman warned me about you. He said you are different. I believe you will do anything you say you will do.”

Durell waited.

Tomash’ta gasped. “Go see Plowman. He will tell you about Rufus Quayle. He is waiting for you, if I fail. That is what he told me. If I fail, I am to send you to him.” “Into another trap?”

Tomash’ta said, “You will learn that for yourself.”

“Tell me where to find him.”

“He is waiting for you—or for my report—at the Pacific Motel. Not the best place. Plowman shuns extravagance. He is at room fifty-six at the Pacific. He will laugh at you, Durell. He will not fail, as I have failed. He will kill you.”

“We’ll see. Who is Plowman working for?”

Tomash’ta grimaced. “He works for himself.”

“Don’t lie to me now.”

“I do not know who engaged him and his apparatus.” “But it’s all aimed at Rufus Quayle?”

“Yes.”

“You took his daughter, named Deborah? And her ex-husband, Martin Pentecost?”

“Possibly.”

“Where did you take them?”

“I have answered enough of your questions, Cajun. Enough to kill you.”

What happened then, in Durell’s eyes, was ugly. He said, “Who told you about me? Who gave you my name, Tomash’ta?”

“It was Plowman.”

“And who told Plowman I was in it?”

Tomash’ta laughed, and coughed. Dimly, Durell heard someone cry out, far behind him. The sounds came from where he had left Deirdre and the boat in the tidal channel. From the corner of his eye he saw Henley running along the top of the dune and then down across the beach, through the barrier of seagrape, toward him. The man’s tall figure looked awkward, but he moved with surprising speed. Tomash’ta began to laugh again, through gritted teeth.

“You lose the game, Durell.”

Henley paused about thirty yards away. He stood spread-legged and raised his gun, holding it in both hands to take careful aim.

The gun was aimed at Durell.

Chapter Nine

WHAT IS GOING ON OUT THERE?

“Intruders, sir.”

WHY WERE THEY NOT STOPPED?

“Your orders, sir. To see who they were and what they want. There seems to be two groups of them on the beach.”

DOING WHAT?

“Trying to kill each other, I think.”

SUCCESSFUL?

“Not yet, sir.”

ADJUST THE TV SCANNER, PLEASE.

“They seem to be some distance away yet, sir. The light is failing. And the evening mist is coming in, too.”

DAMN THE MIST. I WANT TO SEE THEM.

“I’m sorry.”

WHAT ABOUT MY NIECE?

“She’s been injured, sir.”

BADLY?

“Difficult to say, sir. Her attacker has come after the K Section man. Durell, you said his name was.”

SO SHE’S ALONE?

“On the boat, yes. Unconscious, at least.”

GOD DAMN IT TO HELL. IT’S TIME TO INTERFERE.

“I’ll send George and Robert.”

GO YOURSELF, YOU IDIOT. YOU ARE THE

BEST SHOT HERE. THEY SAW THE WARNINGS, DIDN’T THEY?

“Yes.”

THEN LET THEM TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES. “Do you want me to bring Durell here?”

AND THE YOUNG WOMAN. YES.

Chapter Ten

Durell threw himself aside as Henley fired. Perhaps it was the wind, or anxiety, that made the man miss. The slug tore past him and hit something with a dull slapping sound, and then he saw Henley suddenly rise on his toes, throwing his arms wide. A second later he heard the flat sound of the second shot from the looming, bulking house down the beach.

Henley sat down suddenly on the sand. He looked bewildered; it was the last conscious expression he made. The rifle shot had hit him low in the chest, bursting the aorta, causing an internal explosion of blood within the body cavity as the heart beat once or twice more before dying.

Durell turned. Tomash’ta was looking at Henley with wide eyes. Then the Japanese stared down at his stomach, where a great welling of blood showed through his gray jump-suit. Henley’s bullet, meant for Durell, had taken him in the belly.

Three men came running toward them from the stone house, still at some distance down the beach.

Durell knelt beside the Japanese.

“Tomash’ta, was Henley your informer?”

“Hai.’’

“Henley was one of Eli Plowman’s men?”

“Hai. You did not know?”

“I suspected. It had to be him or the other one. How long did Henley work for Plowman?”

“I do not—know.”

Durell got up and walked over to where Henley lay on his back on the beach. The man’s scholarly face looked pinched and white in death. His heavily framed glasses lay crookedly across his nose. Durell felt both anger and regret. Plowman bought men and their capacities as a woman visiting a supermarket for specialties. It had been a bad flaw in K Section, discovered only after his assignment in Sumatra, to give Eli such a free hand, such an autonomous position and a generous budget. There will be a wide cleanout after this, Durell thought. There were no files to show who worked for Plowman. It could be anybody. There was no way to know. He could not now consider himself safe, even among the men he knew best.

The three men coming at him from down the beach were quite close now. He saw their faces through the gray mist that rolled in from the ocean. They were armed with Uzi automatic rifles; his own gun was useless against them. They ran as if they knew what they were doing, as if they’d had combat training not long ago, perhaps in Vietnam. They wore their dark business suits as if they were uniforms.

They breathed with no difficulty at all, even after their long sprint from the distant house.

The first one said, “You all right, Mr. Durell?” He flapped an arm to his companions. “Go get his girl, Bob. I think she’s all right.”

“I’ll get her myself,” Durell said.

“Take it easy. Who was the fella I had to fade?”

“His name was Richard Henley. He worked for the government.”

“One of your people?”

“Not really.”

“I guess not. He was about to zap you, from what we could see. What about this Japanese fella?”

“Accidental death. He deserved a lot worse.”

“Right, right. We saw him hanging around. He got a bit of a bum on the wires. Had to give him a half jolt to warn him off. I figured he’d come back with insulated gloves, but I don’t see any on him.”

Durell turned and watched the young man named Bol come back over the dunes. Deirdre was with him, anc Robert was helping her; but when she saw Durell she shook off his arm and began running awkwardly towarc him. Behind them, limping, came the squat figure ol Marcus.

Durell put his arm around Deirdre and hugged her and looked at the small bruise on her forehead and felt a surge of rage that she should have been touched by Henley. Marcus walked over to Henley’s body and turned to stare at Durell under thick, lowered brows.

“You burned him, Sam?”

“No. These gentlemen took care of it. He was the squawk for Eli Plowman.”

“Oh, Jesus. Henley? There’ll be hell to pay.” Then Marcus’s voice deepened. “I see you got Tomash’ta. Did he tell you anything?”

Before Durell could reply, the first of the three neatly dressed guards said, “Mr. Durell, the boss wants to see you. Rufus Quayle. You’re privileged characters, the three of you. He hasn’t had a visitor since he came back three months ago.”

“Quayle is alive, then?”

The man nodded. “If you care to call it that.”

The Ca’d’Orizon smelled of must and decay, sea slime and mildew. A canal had been dug from the ocean to the front of the building, and seaweed and moss grew along the massive stone embankments. The canal formed a moat around three sides of the pseudo-palazzo, and a large terrace faced the mainland side, reaching all the way to the tidal channel Durell had followed earlier in the boat. Some striped Venetian mooring poles leaned precariously out over the moat where a Gothic arched doorway opened on a landing beside the sea canal. Above the landing were narrow leaded windows of stained glass that looked out over the coastal island. The beat of the surf was sullen and monotonous. The day was done, and the salt marshes that stretched for miles away toward the mainland were bathed in a misty, foggy darkness.

“What do you do here for amusement?” Durell asked the leader of the three guards.

“The old man keeps us busy.”

“Do you ever leave the island?”

“No. We sign on for two years. The pay is good. At the end of it, he sets us up in business.”

“In return for what?”

“In return for answering no questions, Mr. Durell.”

The guard touched a button in a steel stanchion and a footbridge came down over the canal. An electronic sensor was visible, set into the stones to the left of the paneled door. Deirdre shivered and held tight to Durell’s arm as they were urged across the footbridge and through the doorway. Old tapestries, ruined by mildew and the sea air, hung from the interior walls. There was a small foyer, a flight of stone steps, and an interior lobby large enough for any metropolitan hotel. Rusty suits of armor stood in corner niches. A series of glass terrace doors opened toward the black Atlantic. To the left was another staircase, going up and then dividing at a landing, to right and left.

“Over there,” the guard said.

A lighted panel flickered to life on the wall beside the staircase. A buzzer sounded. The panel went black, then brightened again, and black letters moved across it as if produced by a computer.

LET THEM COME UP, SEARCH THEM FIRST.

“Yes, sir,” the first guard said.

AND REMOVE THEIR WEAPONS.

“Yes, sir.”

Marcus said, “Hell, no.”

“I think we’d better,” Durell decided. He felt the muzzle of the nearest automatic rifle graze his elbow. He gave up his .38 and watched Deirdre take a small pistol from a bra holster. The other men looked at her legs while she handed the gun over. Marcus scowled stubbornly, then yielded, too.

VERY WELL. BRING THEM UP.

Durell looked about for a TV scanner in the huge room, but could not find it. He followed Deirdre up the staircase.

Another screen at the top of the steps flickered.

STOP DAWDLING!

Durell said, “Is that Rufus Quayle?”

The guard nodded. “Himself, no less.”

“Can he hear us?”

“He can hear, see, do everything but talk.”

“He can’t speak?”

“You’ll see, in a minute.”

An elevator took them up into the tower. There was an air of decayed voluptuousness, of old wealth here, as if it had once been designed for ultraluxury and then was left to the elements for many years. Durell let himself be urged forward.

CHILD?

Deirdre said, “Yes, Uncle Rufus.”

YOU WERE NOT INJURED SERIOUSLY?

“No. I’m fine.”

YOUR ASSAILANT IS DEAD?

“Yes, Uncle Rufus.”

DO YOU REMEMBER THIS PLACE?

“Vaguely. I was only a little girl when we came here for Thanksgiving. Dad and Mother and I. But I’ve never forgotten Ca’d’Orizon.”

YOU FIND IT CHANGED?

“Sadly. Yes.”

EMPTY AND FORLORN. LIKE ME. BUT STILL STRONG AND STUBBORN. NOTHING WILL DEFEAT ME. DURELL?

The large screen set in one wall of the big tower room flickered and flashed, the black letters marching with electronic swiftness across the white, bright expanse, in reply to the swift manipulations of the old man’s fingers. There was something hypnotic in watching the quick bursts of words and symbols flicker into life and then die. Durell turned from the screen to look at the old man.

The report on Rufus Quayle put him at sixty-two years of age. He looked twenty years older, a giant wreck of a man, like the gallant hulk of an old sailing vessel driven ashore and left to rot, a victim of time and tide. His thick hair was totally white. His big frame, with wide shoulders and long legs, looked wasted under the worn brown bathrobe draped over his figure. He sat in a large chair on a dais, and an extension desk to his right supported the button keys of what looked like a teleprinter. His big hand hovered over the keys like the talons of an eagle. Opposite, on the wall, was the screen. His mouth swooped downward, lips tightly compressed in eternal silence. A wide silk muffler hid his ravaged throat. Under heavy, bushy white brows, his dark eyes were harsh and piercing.

DURELL?

“Yes

ARE YOU SATISFIED, NOW THAT YOU HAVE FOUND ME?

“Not quite, Mr. Quayle. You have a lot to answer for. The government would like to put some questions to you.”

WHAT MADE YOU SO CERTAIN I WAS HERE?

“Deirdre told me a few things about you and about this place. There were other leads. I simply followed them.”

THERE HAVE BEEN NO STRANGERS AT CA’D’ORIZON FOR A LONG TIME. YOU MAY CONSIDER YOURSELF PRIVILEGED. AS YOU CAN SEE, I HAVE SOME MEDICAL PROBLEMS THAT I PREFER NOT TO BE MADE PUBLIC. THERE IS THE MATTER OF PROTECTING THE' IMAGE OF Q.P.I. OF COURSE.

“You can’t speak, is that right?”

MY LARYNX HAS BEEN EXCISED. CANCER. PROSTHETIC DEVICES TO GIVE ME A VOICE OF SORTS HAVE FAILED.

“And that’s why you haven’t been broadcasting your editorials over your radio stations for the past two months?”

CORRECT. WOULD YOU LIKE SOME COFFEE? I HAVE SOME LOUISIANA TYPE, WHICH I UNDERSTAND YOU PREFER. OR PERHAPS SOME BRANDY? DINNER?

Durell shook his head again. It was cold in the room. Outside, beyond the wide window that faced the sea, the early night was marked by the thick sea mist that rolled in over the beach. The three men who had escorted them stood quietly by the tower room doors. Durell was not sure if he was a prisoner here or not.

He said, “We’ve come about your daughter, sir.”

YES. DEBORAH. HAVE YOU FOUND HER?

“We’re looking for her.”

AND MARTIN PENTECOST?

“He’s missing, too.”

YOU HAVE NO LEADS?

“Some. Have you heard from her kidnappers?”

Rufus Quayle stirred in his chair. His hovering fingers over the teleprinter were still for a moment while his eyes, under the bushy white brows, glared at Durell and then at Deirdre.

ROBERT, BRING ME SOME BRANDY.

“Yes, sir.” One of the men promptly left the room.

MR. DURELL, DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE COMPANY?

“They’re after the Q.P.I., yes.”

MARTIN PENTECOST, MY GENERAL MANAGER, HAD MADE A STUDY OF THEIR ACTIVITIES. THEY HAVE BEEN ACQUIRING, BY THREAT AND VIOLENCE, CONTROLLING INTERESTS IN A NUMBER OF MEDIA CHAINS SIMILAR TO Q.P.I. ARE YOU AWARE OF THIS?

“That’s what brought you to our attention.”

MY DAUGHTER DEBORAH HAS THE CAPACITY TO INTERPRET, ANALYZE, AND DRAW CONCLUSIONS FROM A MASS OF DATA. MARTIN WISHED HER TO DEDUCE WHAT SHUMATA’S NEXT STEP WOULD BE. HE WAS FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT Q.P.I. WAS THE NEXT TARGET, BUT HE WANTED CONFIRMATION FROM DEBORAH. NOW THEY HAVE BOTH DISAPPEARED. THE PATTERN SEEMS CLEAR ENOUGH.

“Have you heard from the kidnappers?”

NOT YET.

“Are you willing to pay to get Deborah back?”

A REASONABLE RANSOM, YES.

“In money?”

THEY HAVE NOT YET NAMED A SUM.

“They want Q.P.I., Mr. Quayle.”

THEY SHALL NOT GET IT.

“Nothing else will satisfy them.”

I WILL NOT SELL Q.P.I.

“Not even to save your daughter’s life?”

NOT FOR ANYTHING.

Robert came back with a tray holding a brandy decanter and glasses. Rufus Quayle waved the tray negligently aside, his eyes fixed on Deirdre.

REMARKABLE.

“What is, Uncle Rufus?” she asked quietly.

YOU LOOK MORE LIKE MY DEAD WIFE, IN HER YOUTH, THAN DEBORAH DOES.

“Does that please you?”

IT DISTURBS ME. DO YOU RESENT THE FACT THAT WE HAVE NOT COMMUNICATED THROUGH ALL THESE YEARS?

“No. It doesn’t matter.” Her hand felt cold in Durell’s. “I’m sorry you’re ill, that’s all.”

A MATTER OF STUPID PRIDE, HIDING LIKE THIS. IT WILL PASS. HAVE YOU BEEN THREATENED, TOO, MY DEAR?

“Not directly.”

The piercing blue eyes glared at Durell. The hovering fingers flew over the keys of the teleprinter. Letters flickered and raced across the screen, forming words and sentences.

DURELL, I HAVE HIRED THE BEST PRIVATE AGENCIES I CAN LOCATE TO FIND DEBORAH. SO FAR, THEY HAVE TURNED UP NO CLUES WHATEVER TO HER WHEREABOUTS. I WANT TO FIND HER. PERHAPS YOU CAN DO IT FOR ME. WILL YOU HELP?

“We’re working on it, Mr. Quayle, for reasons of our own. Not to save Q.P.I. for you, if it’s merely commercial and international business pressures, but to prevent terrorism and anarchy anywhere in the world. To put an end to it, Mr. Quayle. It’s going to stop right here. We have our own interests in getting the criminal people at the top of I. Shumata.”

YOU KNOW WHO THEY ARE?

“Not all of them, no, sir.”

I’D LIKE YOU TO WORK FOR ME, MR. DURELL.

“I have a job already, sir.”

STRICTLY FOR ME. NAME YOUR PRICE.

“You couldn’t pay me enough, Mr. Quayle. I don’t hire out for private enterprises.”

DAMN IT ALL, I WANT MY DAUGHTER BACK!

“But you won’t give up Q.P.I. for her.”

NO. NEVER.

“Not even if they kill her?”

DO YOU THINK I AM A MONSTER?

“In some ways.” Durell stared levelly at the sick giant. “In other ways, I’m glad you won’t surrender to these people. They want to control the media, to move the minds of people all over the world, for their own purposes; in this case, I suspect, it might be war. We don’t want any of that to happen. It’s imperative that this zai-batsu’s growth, through violence and terror, end right here.”

THEN WORK FOR ME, DURELL.

“I’m already employed, Mr. Quayle.”

FIND DEBORAH!

“I intend to. But you have a problem, Mr. Quayle.” SEVERAL, I AM SURE.

“One major problem,” said Durell. “Are you sure you’re quite safe here?”

SAFE ENOUGH.

“But I found you here. A simple matter of reasoning it out, checking your other facilities to see if you were living somewhere else in the world. It came down to Ca’d’Ori-zon. The Shumata people know you are here, too. The man named Tomash’ta who was killed on the beach belongs to them. He was a kamikaze killer, a Red Lotus type. If he came, they’ll send others.”

SO MY LIFE IS IN DANGER?

“Yes.”

YOU WANT ME TO BE MOVED ELSEWHERE?

“As soon as possible.”

A long arm gestured toward the teleprinter screen.

I LIKE IT HERE. THIS IS MY HOME. THIS IS WHERE I STAY. NO SON OF A BITCH IS GOING TO MOVE ME OUT.

“They might. Feet first.”

I’M NOT AFRAID OF THEM.

“Then you’re not very wise,” Durell said.

NOBODY SPEAKS TO ME LIKE THAT.

“It’s time someone did. You’re being stupid. You think you’re safe here, but you’re not. You’ve already been exposed. I don’t care how good you think your men are. They’ll get in, sooner or later. They’ll make it all the way in and put a bullet through your head—if not worse.”

I’VE BEEN THREATENED BEFORE.

“Not like this.”

I WONT LEAVE HERE. I DON’T WANT POLICE PROTECTION. A LOT OF STUMBLE BUMS. I’M BETTER OFF HERE.

“How much do you love your daughter, Quayle?”

I TOLD YOU, I’M NOT GIVING AWAY Q.P.I. FOR HER.

“But suppose they manage to kill you? What happens to Q.P.I. then?”

WHAT’S THAT?

“Your hearing isn’t impaired, is it?” Durell said savagely. “It’s time you faced reality, old man. I don’t care how powerful you are. Who can you trust to keep Q.P.I. out of the hands of these people?”

NOBODY. JUST MYSELF. AND YOU CAN’T TALK TO ME—

“Suppose they kill you? Assume it as a possibility, if not a probability.” Durell's voice was deliberately harsh. His words echoed in the big stone tower room. “If you’re dead, who runs Q.P.I. then?”

MARTIN PENTECOST.

“But they’ve got him. Would he hold out the way you do?”

A troubled frown moved the heavy brows on the old eagle’s face.

I’M AFRAID FOR THE WORLD, DURELL.

“So am I.”

Q.P.I. HAS A LOT OF POWER TO MOLD PUBLIC OPINION. I’VE ALWAYS DONE MY BEST TO USE THAT POWER PROPERLY. I DON’T THINK MARTIN WOULD HOLD OUT.

“Right,” Durell said. “And if they manage somehow to kill you, which I think they’ll do if you stay here, who inherits everything you own?”

THAT’S NOBODY’S BUSINESS BUT MINE.

“Who is your heir, Mr. Quayle?”

There was a long pause. The distant boom of the night surf on the beach came dimly through the thick walls of the house. Mist moved in gray ribbons against the black windows. The old man stirred uneasily in his chair. He touched the scarf at his throat and looked impatiently at the teleprinter buttons at his fingertips. He started to tap at them, changed his mind, and looked angrily at Durell.

YOU’RE A HARD MAN.

“Who inherits Q.P.I., Mr. Quayle?” Durell insisted.

DEBORAH, OF COURSE.

“And where is she now?”

DON’T KNOW.

“You do know. You know these people have her.”

YES.

“And those people have no scruples about using any methods they care to try on her. They’ll make her sell. It will all be done nicely and legally, just as all the other networks around the world were yielding to whoever is behind I. Shumata. I think it’s one man, Mr. Quayle. With distorted ideas of manipulating the world. He’ll get Q.P.I. from Deborah.”

There was a long silence. The boom of the surf sounded louder. The old man did not move for several moments. He seemed to be staring at something Durell could not see, something in the far past or the future. Quayle touched the scarf at his throat again and seemed to shrink within the shabby fabric of his worn bathrobe.

YES. YES, GODDAMN YOU. WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?

Part Four

THE QUESTIONING

Chapter Eleven

Deborah felt as if a violent storm had ripped wide paths of destruction through the orderly fields of her mind. She did not know how much time had passed since she had seen Martin’s body hanging from a hook somewhere in this desolate place. Perhaps a day. More likely, two days. She dimly remembered a night, then another, passing by while she was ignored in her cell. It was not the same cell that she had occupied before her first questioning. This one had an arched roof, in Mexican-Indian fashion, and she could see out through a narrow barred window over the empty, heat-hazed plain below. Like a princess in a tower, she thought with grim irony. That’s what she had always been, in a sense. A prisoner of her father, first, who used the queer talents of her mind, and then of Q.P.I., too, whose every facet was another grain of wheat in the fields of her mind.

“Miss Quayle?”

She did not turn away from the barred window. It was the same voice, mellifluous and cold, filled with a pungency she could almost smell, like fire and brimstone from some other nether world whose existence she had always, as an intelligent woman, calmly denied.

“Miss Quayle, you will proceed with the attendant. You will not be blindfolded this time.”

Her mouth formed a denial. “No.”

“Can you hear me, Miss Quayle?”

The voice came through some amplifier; it had a thin metallic quality. There was a pleased, unctuous tone in it. As if some new horror was ready for her, and the fat man could hardly wait to demonstrate it.

“It will do no good to pretend illness. Of course you are ill, sadly. I will not say I regret it. Perhaps you will now realize the seriousness of your unhappy situation. A woman like you has always come to expect happiness, as it is called, as your right. Something you deserve, eh? But you have been extraordinary. You are extraordinary. Blessed with such strange talents, eh?”

She would not reply to the hypnotic, honeyed words. Like the serpent of evil in the Garden of Eden. Through the barred window of her cell, she watched purple shadows move and lengthen across the barren wilderness of the desert. She could not remember the first day she had spent here, after seeing Martin’s mutilated body. She tried to shut out the memory. Nothing moved in the flat plain far below the cell window. The sky remained blue and cloudless. She had been unable to see anything alive down there.

Food had been presented to her on metal trays, slid under the bottom of the heavy planked door. The first day she touched nothing, neither the simple meat and rice, nor the pale yellow wine in its pewter cup. There had been utensils, nothing sharp she could use as a weapon to turn upon herself and end this nightmare. But on the second day of her imprisonment she had fought upward, like a drowning swimmer seeking the pale, glimmering light of air above. She had spent hours minutely examining the environment of her cell, looking and listening, exercising her senses as she had never done before.

The walls were of rough stone and adobe. Some of the plaster was loose, and she could scratch it in thin, powdery flakes from between the blocks of stone. But it would take months, without tools, to work a single block loose from the outer wall. Even then, she suspected that below the cell window there was nothing but a sheer drop of about a thousand feet to the desert floor. She had given up, and ruefully nursed her bleeding fingertips and broken fingernails.

The door was of heavy oak planking, cut to fit the rounded arch at the top. The strap hinges were of roughly, forged iron. There was no handle on the inside, nothing she could grab and shake the door with. No amount of pressure could make the door move measurably.

Now and then the image of Martin’s body and of the gross fat man who had questioned her drifted across her mind. It was like something unspeakably black and wicked. Yes, evil. That old-fashioned word. Satanic, even. A Messenger of Satan. Then her mind formed a denial, insisting on rational thought, and she picked herself up from her slumped position of despair and continued her careful examination of the cell.

It offered nothing.

It certainly offered no hope.

From studying the desert below, she guessed that she might be in New Mexico, or even in the barren desert of Baja California. She could not be certain. But when her searching fingers traced the image of a cross on the middle panel of the cell door, she felt confirmed in her estimate. There had once been a cross of metal fixed to the oak plank, and decades, perhaps centuries, of slow, dry weathering had left its mark, even though the door had been sanded and oiled and refinished not too recently.

Perhaps she was in a monastery somewhere.

But she heard only dull, brazen gongs now and then. Not church bells. Gongs. And through the cell window, where the hot wind of the day blew erratically, as if the air currents were deflected by the shape of the mesa or the form of the building in which she was imprisoned, she had heard chanting, four or five times through the day.

Hardly Gregorian, she thought.

She had heard something similar once when she had traveled with Martin years ago on a business trip to Kuala Lumpur. But this could hardly be Malaysia, or anywhere in the Orient.

There was rattling of the locks on the other side of her cell door.

“You will come to me now,” said the voice. “Please do not make the attendants force you to obey.”

She bowed her head and turned.

“All right,” she whispered.

****************************************

“Miss Quayle, have you thought about your father?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been thinking about Martin.”

“Ah.”

“Of what you did to him. And why you thought it was necessary to kill him so brutally.”

“You truly loved Martin?”

“Yes.”

“And you also love your father, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“But your affection for Rufus Quayle is different?”

“Of course.”

“Because he trained you to work for him?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“My dear Deborah, Rufuse Quayle recognized your peculiar feats of memory, your ability to correlate and integrate varied data relating to Q.P.I., from the time you were six years old, did he not?”

“He trained me to exaggerate my mental capacities, yes.”

“But you had an inborn gift, true?”

“So people say.”

“From your earliest years, you were trained to memorize various corporate structures, both large and small, within the Q.P.I. organization?”

“It was meaningless to me then.”

“But you developed a capacity for detail and the ability to see relationships between one commercial enterprise and another, almost a gift of industrial development foresight, is that not correct?” “Yes.”

“He came to depend on you as a living, breathing, walking business file?”

“Yes.”

“A living computer?”

“Everyone’s mind can operate as a computer. The most intricate and infinitely developed machine known in the universe. Billions and billions of cells, synapses, neural connections that make our computers look like Tinker toys.”

“But not everyone has developed your abilities?”

“I suppose not.”

“You agree you have an extraordinary talent?”

“If you say so.”

“You are surprised I know this thing about you?”

“Not many people do. My father. Martin did. That’s all.”

“You played the part of the daughter of an extraordinary and eccentric billionaire very well indeed. You lived the normal international social life. You belonged to what I believe was once termed the international jet set. Perhaps that term is now outdated. But you trained yourself to present a facade of athletic prowess, of hectic social activity, an international playgirl, so to speak.”

“Yes.”

“All as a coverup for your true talents?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about the I. Shumata mercantile trading corporation of Nagasaki, Japan?”

“Very little.”

“Why is that?”

“Very little data is available in the open market.”

“Was Martin concerned about I. Shumata?”

“He mentioned it, yes.”

“In what way?”

“It was part of the problem he wanted me to solve.” “Did he tell you what the problem was?”

“No.”

“Can you guess now?” “Yes.”

“Tell me what you guess.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Tell me, Deborah.”

“No.”

“Martin was stubborn. I must remind you.”

“You are a monster.”

“Of course.”

“There are a number of highly influential media networks that consciously or unconsciously mold public opinion one way or the other. They can topple governments. They can work up public anger for war. I am not talking about the large, obvious syndicates and corporate entities such as the London and New York newspapers, the major TV and radio networks. Big as they are, powerful as they are, there are many more small, rural-type networks that in readership and listening and viewing audiences far outnumber and outweigh the impact of the larger groups. My father, Rufus Quayle, saw this at an early age. He went into weeklies, small-town radio stations, independent corporations with perhaps no more than four or five branches. He created a network of his own. He is a wonderful man.”

“Wonderful?”

“He is sincerely patriotic. He is sincerely dedicated to the advance of all human welfare everywhere in the world.” “You speak of Rufus Quayle in the present tense.”

“Why not?”

“You do not think he might be dead?”

“He cannot be dead.”

“Why not?”

“I simply would know it. Or feel it.”

“That is not a rational response.”

“I am sorry. I am still only a human being. And a woman. I grieve for Martin.”

“But Martin divorced you because he claimed you were too rational, too devoid of a woman’s normal emotions.” “You seem to know so much.”

“Not as much as you—at least, about Q.P.I. About the problem that Martin wanted you to solve, and which you say you guessed and perhaps solved for yourself—tell me about I. Shumata.”

“I told you, I don’t—”

“Please be more responsive, Deborah.”

“Am I on trial here?”

“In a way.”

“For my life?”

“Most definitely.”

“I think you’re going to kill me, anyway. You’ll never let me go away from here.”

“I might. If you help me.”

“Why should I help you? I think you are disgusting. You sicken me. You make me angry and sick to my stomach. You revolt me, you great, fat, smiling freak of a creature, you nauseating caricature of a man—”

“You cannot offend me with such childish words. Or pretend to such rage. I see through you, Deborah. You are cold inside. Intellectual. You weigh and measure everything. You analyze all things within your peculiar capacity. As you have analyzed the movement initiated by I. Shumata.”

“To hell with Shumata.”

“Your impatience sounds insincere.”

“And you sound so—so—”

“Evil.”

“Yes.”

“I. Shumata Corporation, Deborah.”

“Well, under cover of swallowing up, through a wide series of violent events that were directed at corporate executives the world over, I. Shumata has undertaken control of various conglomerates that have one major issue in common. Each entity controls , a media outlet, or series of outlets, like Q.P.I. The network is almost complete. Almost world-wide. The great link that is missing is Q.P.I.”

“Ah. Very good. Very, very good.”

“I’m glad you are pleased.”

“We shall get along very well, if you continue this way, Deborah. Now let us have some details.”

****************************************

She was not imprisoned in the chair as she had been during the first term of questioning. She was not bound or blindfolded. The room was the same room in which she had first been interrogated. The same arched, high, roughly plastered ceiling. The same great window that looked out high over the endless desert. She did not look at the big iron hooks embedded in the black beams across the ceiling. She did not look at the hook from which Martin Pentecost’s body had been hung, for her shock and edification.

The man who questioned her was seated on a massive thronelike chair of Spanish design that added a small confirmation to her guess as to the location of this place. He was enormous, with a small bald head and massive belly and thick chest. She could not guess what race or nationality he had sprung from. It was somehow difficult to meet his eyes, and she could not tell their color. He wore a robe of some sort, a saffron-colored tentlike outfit of the hue usually adopted by Buddhist monks and priests. Which fitted, she thought, with the sound of temple gongs she kept hearing in this place that had once been dedicated as a monastery for Catholic priests and monks. Baja California, she thought, somewhere in the interior mountains, away from the coast. It was an area that was still one of the wildest and most remote on the continent.

The small dancing man she had noted before, the one with Oriental manners, was missing in attendance. Two other men stood by passively, behind and below the questioner. It was as if they were symbols chosen to emphasize the ugliness of their master. One was small, slightly hunchbacked, with short bowed legs and a thick thatch of corn-yellow hair that hung low to his shoulders, disheveled and greasy-looking. His face was like a gnarled knot of oak, out of which pale blue eyes leered at her. His companion-guard was monstrous, too, a bearded man with massive shoulders and long, muscular arms, who eyed her in a way she did not like, as if weighing her like a professional butcher in a slaughterhouse. She wondered which of them had killed Martin. Probably both. Inwardly, she shuddered.

She thought her inquisitor might be Eurasian. His swarthy skin was not Indian or Hindu or Latin, but a mixture of all, with the merest trace of the epicanthic fold at the corners of his eyes that gave him his Eastern appearance. She looked away from the trio and down at the worn, intricately tiled floor. This room might have been a chapel once dedicated to God. A place for worship and divine prayers. It had been turned into a charnel house for her, dedicated to inhuman brutality. . . .

****************************************

“Your ring, Miss Quayle.”

“What?”

“On your right hand.”

“Oh. What about it?”

“It seems a bit unusual.”

“My father gave it to me, when I was sixteen.”

“Can you take it off?”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve never taken it off, and now I can’t.”

“The ring has great emotional significance to you?”

“My father gave it to me.”

“It is a pretty little thing.”

“Yes. No more than that.”

“Of not much intrinsic value?”

“The sapphires are small. The gold is nineteen carats. It’s worth less than a thousand dollars, if you’re interested.”

“But it’s sentimental value, I assume, is without price?” “To me, yes.”

“Rufus Quayle would recognize it if he saw it again?” “He once said he was pleased that I always chose to wear it.”

“Did he normally express such affection?”

“No.”

“But he wanted you to wear the ring?” “He gave it to me for that purpose.”

“Place your hand on the table, Deborah. Spread your fingers a bit. Yes. There. Just so.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing, yet. You still persist in being evasive. Do you know a man named Sam Durell?”

“No.”

“Do you know of an agency of the government called K Section?”

“No. I’ve never heard of either.”

“Please do not remove your hand from the table.”

“Why not? What are you going to do to me? I want to know.”

“There are many things we would both like to know, Deborah. You do not know Sam Durell. Or K Section. But you do know about the I. Shumata zaibatsu. A process of deduction?”

“I don’t know how I do it. It just comes to me. Like putting two and two together. I was thinking about what Martin might be worried about, and that’s what I came up with. I. Shumata is after my father’s Q.P.I.”

“And means to have it.”

“Never.”

“And will have it.”

“Not while Rufus Quayle is alive.”

“He is that stubborn?”

“More so.”

“You do not know for certain that he is alive. Or where he is. You know all his places of residence, Deborah. We have had them under surveillance for some months. He has not been seen. Neither has he been heard from. His Q.P.I. goes on of its own momentum, of course, but as a headless, mindless thing without a heart or soul of its own. Why has Quayle vanished?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why has he abandoned all those dedicated people who work for him, who show such devotion to him?”

“He hasn’t abandoned anyone. He’s done this before.” “Vanished? Ah. When?”

“Two years ago.” “Indeed?”

“For two months.”

“On what occasion?”

“My father did not always confide in me. I was distressed by it. As I am now, on this occasion.”

“How did he reappear?”

“He simply showed up one day, the same as ever.” “Exactly the same?”

“Yes.”

“You hesitate?”

“No.”

“How was he different?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he look different then, when he reappeared two years ago after that other disappearance?”

“No.”

“Or behave differently?”

“No.”

“You hesitate again.”

“You have a keen ear.”

“He sounded different?”

“Tired.”

“Could he have been with a woman?”

“My father was devoted to my mother’s memory. There were no other women in his life. I am sure of that. I would have known. No, no other women.”

“Perhaps this time, though?”

“He’s too old now.”

“Old men get foolish fancies.”

“Not Rufus Quayle.”

“Old men dream of young girls.”

“Not my father.”

“You do not know him all that well, Deborah. Nor have you seen him for over two months. Or heard from him. As a matter of fact, you really know very little about his personal life, do you?”

“I know enough to be sure of that.”

“Then perhaps he is ill?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Was he ill two years ago?” “I would have noticed.”

“Was he?”

“No.”

“You are being difficult. Suppose you wished to communicate with him? Suppose you had to transmit some important business information to him? Martin Pentecost wanted to do so, did he not? But he could not, and so, despite your personal differences that culminated in a divorce, he came to you. Surely, somewhere in that intricate network that comprises Quayle Publishing Industries, there is a single thread, a thin but unbroken line, between you, his daughter, and Rufus Quayle, this man of mystery.”

“He always communicated with me.”

“Always? But sometimes you had traffic for him in the other direction, of course.”

“He didn’t care. He chose his own time to see me.” “And where would those places be?”

“The last time was in our Djakarta office.”

“Were all your meetings face to face?”

“Yes.”

“He never used the mail, the telephone, the cable?”

“He didn’t trust them.”

“Why not?”

“It was a business idiosyneracy.”

“So you last saw him in Djakarta. Was he in good health?”

“He was as well as ever.”

“Where would he go if he were ill?”

“He always had his own physician with him.”

“But if his illness required surgery, perhaps, and hospitalization?”

“Rufus Quayle could buy and sell his own hospitals and surgeons. Nothing but the best.”

“Did he in fact own a private hospital?”

“No. He was never ill to my knowledge.”

“Why are you smiling, Deborah?”

“You’re up a tree, aren’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it has done you no good to kill Martin and kidnap me, since you can’t reach Rufus to terrorize or intimidate him with these facts. What good does it do you to have a hostage, if you don’t know where to send your demands?”

“Ah. But you shall tell us.”

“I can’t, because I don’t know, myself.”

“I cannot accept that reply.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Only the truth as you believe it to be. But deep inside that remarkable mind of yours, Deborah, you know otherwise.”

“I wish I did.”

“Would you cooperate if that were so?”

“To help you against Rufus? No.”

“Name me your father’s residences. I understand he often lived in one or another of his varied domiciles for quite some lengths of time.”

“He owns the hotel in Hong Kong—the Quayle Empress; he keeps the fiat in London, of course—everybody knows about that. And the villa on the California coast at San Hernandez. The Chicago office complex of Q.P.I.; he has the penthouse apartment there. The compound in the Florida Keys—two houses, the Tower, the whole of Black Pelican Key northeast of Key West. The chalet in Switzerland, above Lugano, and the other one at Montreux. The Q.P.I. Building—another penthouse establishment— in Manhattan, of course. He also has the apartment down on Wall Street, on top of the Geoger-Hall Building.”

“Why do you pause?”

“I’m thinking.”

“But you have all these places at your fingertips.”

“Yes. There’s his yacht, of course. The Expediter. He used to live on that a great deal, down among the Greek islands. The old Quayle family house—the farmhouse— out near Topeka, Kansas. It’s the only evidence of sentimentality he has ever expressed, keeping that.”

“And?”

“Sometimes he slept wherever he happened to be.”

“And the Ca’d’Orizon in New Jersey?”

“Of course. Everybody knows that place.”

“You were born there?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you put it last?”

“Subconscious, I suppose. I’ve always hated it.”

“Why?”

“It’s too lonely. Too gloomy. Too monstrous a joke. It goes back to what Rufus calls his ‘Era of Bad Taste.’ ” “When he first—ah—struck it rich?”

“Before he knew better. Before he became more sophisticated, perhaps.”

“And your mother died there.”

“Yes, there’s that, too.”

****************************************

She remembered.

She had been summoned home from college to watch her mother die. She was just seventeen then, intent on learning all she could about the news media, with plans for a master’s at Columbia’s School of Journalism. Rufus wanted it that way, and she was agreeable. She sometimes felt such a close affinity to her father’s interests that she suspected a nascent jealousy-rivalry for him against her mother. Certainly her mother, in all the years of Rufus Quayle’s astonishing prosperity, never quite lost the Kansas farmgirl background that had captivated Rufus in his youth. Deborah often thought that her mother had become confused by the whirlwind growth of Q.P.I., by the publicity, the world-wide travels, the aura of power that surrounded her genius-husband. Her defense had been to retreat from that power and the spotlight of attention that followed Rufus Quayle wherever he went. As she retreated, Rufus had drawn closer to the daughter she had presented him, to Deborah, herself a child of this new and dizzying world of money and power.

She remembered.

She could still smell the cloying odor of antiseptic, medicines, of illness and hovering death. Her mother had looked a stranger to her. She had been repelled, and afterwards felt guilty for drawing back from the dying woman, this mother who never understood her or recognized her peculiar talent. But then Rufus had held her and urged her implacably forward, and whispered, “Kiss her. Say goodbye.”

She remembered.

In all that splendor of Ca’d’Orizon, they had been isolated, she and her father and the woman who died that night. Rufus Quayle was already a figure to be noted, photographed, written about. The grotesque old building in the Jersey marshes was like a besieged fortress, with chartered boats and the little bridges and roads—the bridges and roads were burned and bulldozed out of existence, afterward—all filled with reporters watching the great Rufus Quayle’s personal bereavement.

They would have tom her apart with their questions. Rufus told her later of the way to get in and out of that ornate stone house without being seen and noted. . . .

“Deborah? Miss Quayle? What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You remembered something?”

“I was thinking of my mother.”

“Yes. I reminded you that she had died at Ca’d’Orizon. But what else troubled you in that memory?”

“It was just a bad time for me, that’s all.”

“What else?”

She remembered that Rufus had given her the ring, two days after the funeral. He had said, “Send it to me if you ever need help, Debbie. But I doubt that you’ll ever have to give me such a signal.”

“I’ll always need you, Daddy.”

“And I’ll always need you, honey. Times are going to change. We don’t know what the future holds for either of us. You’ll never want for anything, of course.”

“And you, Daddy?”

“I’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“But won’t you ever need or want anything?”

“I doubt that, little girl.” He had towered over her, emanating a sense of masculine strength that was almost brutal; but the strength encompassed her and she felt safe

within his presence. His blue eyes changed, looked dark and far-seeing for a moment. He had stared out over the marshlands from the tower window where they stood together, and for long moments he seemed at a distance from her. Then he said, “Some day I’m going to die here, honey. Every man has to go through that, of course. When it comes, I want it to happen here.”

“Why here?” she asked. “I don’t like this place.”

“It will be here,” he said. “This is where you will find me.”

****************************************

“Deborah?”

“Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“What were you thinking of this time?”

“My father, of course.”

“Something came to you. You are a clever girl, a remarkable girl, but you have a transparent face. You have thought of something I must know.”

“No, it—”

“You have reasoned out where Rufus Quayle may be found, am I not right?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“You know where and how to reach him.”

“No!”

“Ah.”

“I don’t.”

“We will send him that little ring you seem to prize so highly.”

“I can’t get it off my finger.”

“And then he will agree to discuss terms with us.”

“He won’t give you a dime for me. That’s the way he is. Maybe he loves me, in his strange way, but he would never surrender to blackmail or terror. Never, never. No matter what you do to me, it won’t change his mind.”

“We shall see. Antibolus?”

The shorter, squatter of the two hideous men behind her inquisitor stepped forward. He had a long, wide-bladed knife in his hand. Deborah tried to yank her hand from the table before her, but he was too quick for her.

He was not gentle. She felt as if her arm was yanked from its socket as he caught her wrist and flattened her hand painfully on the table. She looked at the ring on her finger. The man used the knife swiftly and expertly, and she was too stunned to feel the pain."

He severed her ring finger with one quick slicing motion.

She stared at the sudden spurt of blood from the amputated stump.

The squat man held up her finger with the ring shining and winking and twinkling on it, and her inquisitor nodded and smiled.

Then everything faded away for Deborah in a red, swirling haze.

Part Five

ATLANTIC CITY

Chapter Twelve

Marcus limped after Durell across the dark expanse of the bus terminal parking lot. It was eleven o’clock at night, and the few street lamps held haloes of iridescent mist around the globes. Marcus’s wound turned out' to be superficial, just creasing the flesh along his upper thigh. Rufus Quayle’s resident doctor, a glum man unhappy in his position as personal attendant to the old man, had fixed it up, argued with Marcus about a day’s rest in a hospital, and then vanished at a wave of Quayle’s clawlike hand. Durell had telephoned to Washington and spoken to McFee.

“I have him,” he said. “I think he’s agreed to come into D.C. and let us protect him. He has a small army of guards, mostly ex-G.I.’s from Vietnam, but I think he’ll be better off with us.”

“Will he make a deal with the Shumata people?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even to save his daughter?”

“He’s heard nothing from her yet. Apparently, they don’t know yet where to send a ransom demand, although Tomash’ta was snooping around. Tomash’ta is dead, incidentally, although from his clothes, I think he was in New Mexico or out there somewhere in the last few days. And one other thing: Eli Plowman owned a piece of us.”

“What does that mean, Samuel?”

“Henley worked for Eli. It may be just the tip of an

iceberg. I don’t know how many others are in Plowman’s pocket. He always worked secretly.”

There was a bitter pause. “I hate the thought of rogue agents, Samuel.”

“No more than I, sir.”

“How is the old man?”

“He’s dying of cancer of the larynx.”

Another pause. Then McFee said, “And Plowman?” “He’s in the area. I think I can reach him.”

“Can you make him talk?”

“I’ll try, sir.”

McFee clucked. “You know Eli’s methods. Be very careful, Samuel.”

“I try to be.”

“And have Mr. Quayle brought in here to me. He can stay at No. 20 Annapolis. I have an extra bed. It’s important enough.”

Durell hung up. Rufus Quayle had been listening on an extension line.

I’LL GO IN WITH MY OWN PEOPLE.

“As you wish.”

DO YOU THINK ANY OF THE OTHERS IN THIS CRIMINAL GANG ARE STILL HANGING AROUND?

“Where you see one cockroach, you can be sure of others,” Durell said.

TAKE CARE OF DEIRDRE. IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO DEBORAH—

“Yes, sir.”

THERE IS A WAY OUT OF HERE THAT ONLY DEBORAH AND I AND ROBERT KNOW ABOUT. USE IT. YOU WON’T BE SEEN.

The canal alongside the Ca’d’Orizon seemed to end in the big stone terrace on the west side of the big house. Robert was young and tough, wearing the same dark gray conservative suit the other guards wore. He led them down a mildewed staircase and along a wine cellar with empty racks, touched a small button, and a door slid open to reveal a canal banked with flat stones, reaching into the darkness under the western terrace for a hundred yards.

A powerful launch was tied up to the underground stone dock. The smell of the sea was pungent down here.

“Don’t use the boat’s spotlight until you get into a screen of sawgrass at the other end. I’m turning off. the electronic snoopers to let you get through into the channel. Otherwise you could be gassed or shot, Mr. Durell. The boss uses this private entrance to avoid the press when he wants to come in or go out. You’re not to talk about it, sir. Someone else might look for it and get killed trying to break in.”

Durell looked curiously at the young man. “How long have you been working for Rufus Quayle, Robert?”

“Four years, sir.”

“Do you like him?”

“No, sir.”

“Is he rough on you?”

“He’s a tough old bastard. He’s rough on everybody.” “Then why do you hang on with him?”

“He needs help now, sir. You shouldn’t have said that on the telephone, that he’s dying.”

“Quayle knows it, doesn’t he?”

“Sure, but—”

Robert shrugged and watched Deirdre get into the launch, offered a hand to a glum Marcus who pushed help angrily away, and said, “I’ll take care of your chartered boat. It will be returned in the morning, with the bill paid. Don’t worry about it.”

The motel that Tomash’ta had revealed as Eli Plowman’s headquarters was a dingy place on a crosstown street named after a Western state, to the west of Atlantic Avenue. The night felt clammy. When the fog lifted, Durell thought, it would surely rain. It didn’t matter. Plowman could be waiting for him like a small, fat spider in the middle of a web. Eli would not discount the possibility that Tomash’ta could be taken—and made to talk before he died. The way Eli’s mind usually worked, he might even have anticipated this.

A square block of houses had been razed for urban development across from the motel, and the expanse was still littered with rubble, old lumber, piles of bricks. A wrecking crane stood like a sleeping prehistoric monster amid the piles of equipment and debris. Fog moved in thick tendrils over the open area. The lights of the motel were out, and none of the rooms showed signs of occupancy. Even the office was dark, except for a single gooseneck lamp on the desk, visible through the plate-glass window.

The parking lot behind the row of small, shabby rooms was empty, and there was no way to tell which unit was occupied by Plowman.

Marcus paused beside the back door of the office. “I’ve got a picklock. Let me check the register.” In the gloom, his square face still looked angry. “Be only a minute.”

“Go ahead,” Durell said.

He waited with Deirdre in the gloom behind the motel. A cat scurried across the parking lot. They were three blocks from the Boardwalk and the wide beach that in summer was crammed with tourists. The rectangular masses of the waterfront hotels, built in another era for a different way of life, loomed high against the mist, like one-dimensional cutouts. A single flicker of light came through the glass panel of the office door. A moment later Marcus appeared.

“Number eight,” he said. “There are only three guests —a married couple from South Carolina, and a salesman registered from Pittsburgh. Name of John Tabin. It’s got to be Eli.”

Number eight looked no different from the other doors to the motel rooms. Marcus limped ahead and used his small flashlight to examine the lock.

“It’s a simple Kahn. Any third-rate picklock could do it. Want me to try?”

“Go ahead,” Durell said flatly.

Marcus looked at him from under scowling brows. “Would it be booby-trapped?”

“Could be.”

“How is he armed?”

“You can expect anything.”

“Cajun, listen—you’re sending me in first because you don’t trust me?”

“That’s right.”

“You think I’m a defector, like Henley?”

“I’m not sure,” Durell said.

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?”

“It’s one way to stay alive.”

“And you figure I’m expendable, is that it?”

“Right.”

Marcus shook his head. “A real bastard.” He looked at Deirdre. “I’ve worked with Henley for two years. A good man. I didn’t know he needed Plowman’s money, or whatever it was that made him work for Plowman. Maybe he just liked killing. You never can tell.”

“Go ahead,” Durell said.

Marcus bent to the motel door lock. Durell heard the Kahn tumblers click in less than fifteen seconds. He moved Deirdre to one side, away from the blue-painted door. Marcus paused with his hand flat against the panel. He grinned. “In we go.”

The heavyset man moved almost too quickly for the eye to follow. Gun in hand, Marcus slammed the door open, leaped into the inner darkness, crouched low, waited.

Nothing happened.

There was a peculiar smell in the sparsely furnished room. Incense. Durell drew the draperies, reached carefully for a lamp switch. The room held the impersonality of most motel rooms, a simply furnished cube with bath facilities. The paint was peeling in one comer of the cinder-block wall, where the ceiling leaked. There was only one change of clothing in the open closet, a single pair of small brown shoes, a few shirts in the chest of drawers, and a small travel alarm clock beside the bed. An overnight case that had seen better days and a grimy Pan Am flight bag completed the luggage. Marcus ducked into the bathroom and was gone for a few moments.

“All clean,” he announced.

There was a small clicking sound from the drawer in the night table beside the sagging double bed.

“Not quite,” Durell said. “Get out, Deirdre. Marcus, go with her.”

Marcus stared at the closed drawer; a faint humming had begun, inside. Durell urged Marcus and Deirdre to the door, paused, checked a small broken wire that dangled from the knob.

“Something has been activated.”

“Slow death,” Marcus said, staring at the night table.

“I think not.”

Durell waited until Deirdre was safely outside, then moved silently to the little table. The humming ended with a click as he put his hand on the drawer knob. A muffled voice said, “Cajun, if you’ve gotten this far, then I have a message for you.”

Marcus spoke from the doorway, “Jesus, we activated a tape recorder.”

“Maybe.”

The voice said, “Cajun, we have a lot to talk about. Tomash’ta must be dead, or you wouldn’t be here.” Marcus said, “What a smart-ass. He sounds pretty ordinary to me, though.”

“He isn’t.” Durell opened the drawer with care, listening for any other betraying clicks or activating mechanisms. The machine was simple and inexpensive, in keeping with Eh Plowman’s frugal tastes. The voice was familiar, even through the electronic distortions of the cheap tape.

“Go to the Krishna Maharanda Temple uptown, on the Boardwalk, Cajun. It’s something of a hippie joint, open all night for what the young people think of as meditation. I’ll be waiting there for you.”

Marcus grinned harshly. “Is he serious?”

“Yes. Plowman did his dirty work in the Far East and Southeast Asia for over ten years. He became a Buddhist of sorts.’ Learned all the tricks of the ancient fighting monks and used their temples as safe houses for himself and the assassins he hired.” Durell’s face was grim. “You can’t reconcile his work as a political assassin with such a peaceful religion as Buddhism, though.”

“You going to meet him?” Marcus asked.

“Yes.”

Deirdre stirred. “Sam, I don’t like it. It has to be a trap for you.”

“Quite possibly. But maybe he really wants to tell me something. He’s a rogue agent, remember. Maybe he wants to come back to our side. It must be lonely for him.”

“But you always said he’s so dangerous.”

“He is. But we won’t learn anything unless we go along with this.”

The tape recorder clicked off without any further additions to the message. Durell turned and began examining the room more carefully, using extreme caution. But there did not seem to be any booby traps, lethal explosives, or further messages. He stepped outside, looked up and down the roofed walk that ran alongside the motel room doors. No one was in sight at this hour. The fog persisted, growing even heavier. The air had a raw salt bite to it. A canvas-covered maid’s cart still stood on the walkway by the adjacent room, testimony to the sort of service the motel offered. The curtains to the next room were open, and the cubicle was unoccupied. Durell went to the service cart and looked inside the big canvas bag. There was nothing in it but some towels and an empty liquor bottle.

Deirdre said, “Something?”

“I’m not sure. This place has only two rooms occupied. The towels came from Plowman’s room and were left here when the maid quit for the day.” Durell reached into the bag and picked up the empty bottle. “Yes. Maybe something.”

The bottle was squat and square, somewhat distinctive. The label was unfamiliar. It had held Mexican wine from a small monastery in San Luis de Francesco, Baja California. The date was 1972. The cork was still in it. He sniffed at the fruity odor, looked at the dribble of liquor still in the bottom of the bottle.

“Look at that, Marcus.”

In Spanish, Marcus read, “Prepared by the Maharanda Monks of San Luis de Francesco. So?”

“Plowman wants to meet me at a Maharanda Temple up on the Boardwalk.”

“You think he made a mistake, letting us find this?” “Plowman doesn’t make mistakes. He insists on winning, and always covers his bets. He left sand in my apartment to bring us here, in case the telephone explosive didn’t work. He’s asking me to walk into another trap on the Boardwalk.” Durell shrugged. “And if that doesn’t work, he’s leading me to Baja California.”

Chapter Thirteen

Deirdre said, “Maybe that’s where Deborah Quayle is being held a prisoner.”

“Maybe.” Durell nodded. “Call a cab, Marcus.”

He left Deirdre with Marcus, insisting that he had to go alone, and asked the cabbie to wait next to the ramp that led up to the Boardwalk. The lamp posts had great haloes of iridescence around them from the fog. Most of the shops and amusement piers that jutted out into the black ocean were tightly closed and dark. He heard the thin sound of a small drum and a flute from the only lighted area on the wide promenade; he turned that way, keeping close to the boarded-up stores that featured cheap souvenir trinkets, salt-water taffy, auction houses, a quick-sketch portrait place, a bicycle rental shop, a drugstore that featured more junk dolls, pennants, and candy. Farther down the Boardwalk, perhaps two blocks away, was the front arcade of a towering hotel that had seen better and more prosperous days. All of the blinking, winking, eye-dazzling neon signs on the piers had been turned out.

He walked slowly toward the dull, mindless reiteration of a small drum and the piping flutes. A long sliver of yellow light lay diagonally across the Boardwalk, shining through the partially drawn curtains of the Maharanda Temple. There was only a small, crudely lettered sign over the recessed entrance. When he was ten feet away, he came to a halt.

A tall figure in a black robe, tied with a crudely knotted laundry line around the waist, stepped out to meet him.

“Mr. Durell?”

The voice was gentle and peaceful. The young man was very thin and very tall, taller than Durell, with a shaven head except for a scalp-lock that grew into a braided Mandarin pigtail. The young man’s eyebrows were shaven, giving his long, bony face an expressionless appearance. His floor-length robe was made of rough black material, and from his waist dangled a small black kite made of the same material. When he walked toward Durell, the kite leaped up and bobbed erratically a few feet to the rear, catching the faint wind that pushed the fog inland off the sea. The youth paid no attention to the strange appendage moving up and down at his heels.

“Mr. Durell?”

“Yes.”

“You are expected. The new Prophet waits for you.” “Are you talking about Eli Plowman?”

“We do not know him by that name. He came to us from nowhere, and in only a few hours, the Prophet has given us much wisdom. The Brotherhood is grateful.”

“I’ll bet,” Durell said.

The boy seemed harmless and sincere. Inside the alleged temple, the flute and drum went on and on with its inane melody.

“He waits for you over there.” A long bony arm came out of the black robe and pointed toward the nearest amusement pier. “On the beach, lucky pilgrim,” the youth said.

“Thank you.”

The young man bowed and retreated, the black kite shooting up from his heels to over his head, then settling again as he opened the door and vanished inside. Durell waited a moment, looked backward, then crossed the wide Boardwalk to the metal rail overlooking the beach. The few lights on the promenade made only small pools of illumination, which faded into the darkness that reached into the distant surf. The fog seemed even thicker. A ramp led up from the beach to the walkway alongside the pier. A grilled non gate was drawn across the ramp. A flight of steps took him down to the fine, yielding sand. He thought the drum and flute sounded momentarily louder, behind him. The Boardwalk at his back was in darkness. The skin tingled on the nape of his neck. He could see no one on the dark beach. He walked out into the fog, his nerves screaming warnings. Nothing happened. He saw no one on the wide expanse of sand. The breakers made dim white lines that stratified the ocean darkness beyond.

“Durell?”

He heard Plowman’s thin voice come out of the darkness to his left. Nothing. He turned and walked toward the ramp. The scissors-type gate was not locked. The hinges squeaked slightly as he shoved it aside.

“Up here, Durell!”

In the center of the amusement pier was something advertised as a Sky Needle, a ride featuring cabs that lifted upward two hundred feet on tracks that spiraled around the red-painted central cylinder. At the very top of the shaft was a railed platform and a small structure reached by an iron ladder, housing the machinery. The fog all but hid the high top of the shaft. The voice had come from up there. Durell moved under an angle of the pier so he was not directly in line with the small platform high above.

“Eli?”

“I want to talk to you, Cajun!”

“Not like this.”

“One minute, please.”

Durell took out his gun and held it ready. The sound of the surf rolling in among the outer piers echoed louder in the dark fog. He moved past the admission booth, walking slowly along the wooden wall. Ahead, the pier’s deck held a giant slide reaching almost as high as the Sky Needle. He moved faster, toward a triple flight of stairs leading up to the top of the slide. There were other amusement devices: a hall of mirrors, a kind of trampoline, a ferris wheel, and a circular ride in which the patrons stood in cages and were whirled around by centrifugal force. He took the steps to the top of the giant slide three at a time, his feet silent. He heard a small scraping sound behind and below him, and saw Plowman come out of a small door, built like a bulkhead, in the base of the Sky Needle.

“Durell?”

Plowman looked thinner and smaller than Durell remembered him in Sumatra. There was a dim night light over the main housing of the pier, and his dark shirt and slacks were marked against the garish red of the high cylinder. His round face looked very ordinary. His head turned to right and left, searching. Durell could not see a weapon in the man’s pale hands. It was difficult to believe —and this was one of Eli’s greatest assets—that such an ordinary man was one of the world’s best professional killers. You would never give Plowman a second glance, passing him on the street or standing next to him at a bar.

Durell did not reply to Plowman’s call. He saw the man’s shirt flap in the wind, the tails out from the dark slacks; he remembered that Eli always wore an armored vest that covered him from chest to crotch. In Sumatra, that vest had saved his life, although Durell had left him for dead. He remembered Eli’s preoccupation with death, the lack of any guilt or remorse for his victims. No one had liked him. Everyone was afraid of him.

“Durell?”

“I’m here,” Durell called.

Eh turned sharply, outlined against the towering cylinder. In the distant glow of a single lamp, Durell saw his lips part in a tight grin.

“Ah. On the slide, eh?”

“Keep your hands hi sight, Eli.”

“We have no quarrel, Cajun. You’ve done very well. You’ve come a long way on the trail. I could have killed you several times, you know. I may still do it.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“You’re a careful man. Is McFee after me?”

“He hates rogues. So do I. Who employs you now, Eh?”

“You might be surprised.”

“Someone I know?”

“Oh, yes. Intimately. It’s a big project, you see. Bigger than you can imagine. It’s a matter of achieving power. Of shaping history, Durell. You ought to be a part of it.” “Are you making me an offer?”

“Name your price.”

“I want Deborah Quayle.”

“You might get her.”

“Alive,” Durell added.

“That could be arranged, if Quayle signs over Q.P.I. to my people.”

“You won’t get that.”

Eli Plowman sounded quietly urgent. “Durell, you can name any other price. We want you with us. Otherwise we’ll kill you, you know. And Deirdre, too. Not very pleasantly. I know all the ways, Cajun. You’re aware of that. So be sensible. You’ll be treated very well, I assure you. I hold no grudges. It’s just a matter of business, that’s all.”

“You know better than to try to buy me.”

“I’ve been asked to make the attempt.”

“I don’t go into anything blindly. Who employs you?” “At this point, I couldn’t tell you that. Come over the wire, Cajun. You won’t regret it.”

“You’re finished, Eli, and don’t know it. K Section will catch up with you sooner or later. They won’t sleep or rest until you’re finished. You’ve subverted too many good people for McFee to forgive and forget.”

“I’m interested in you, not McFee.”

“To hell with you,” Durell said.

“That is your last word?”

“No. My last word is goodbye, Eli.”

The man down below shrugged. “It’s your call, Cajun.”

Plowman moved in a blur of speed. His gun had been up the sleeve of his loose shut, and as he raised his hand, as if in a parting salute, he shook the weapon loose into his fingers. The shot was silenced, but Durell was already moving on the platform atop the giant slide before he saw the muzzle flame. The bullet hit the pipe railing with a thin screech and ricocheted out to sea. Durell’s gun jumped in his hand as he fired in return, but Plowman

had already stepped back into the doorway to the interior of the Sky Needle. Durell flung himself onto the slide, let gravity and the impulse of his jump take him down the slippery waxed chute to the deck level. The bulkhead door to the cylinder was closing when his feet hit the planking. He was up, rolling to one side. Then he sprinted across the narrow railed walk past the admission booth. His single shot had raised no alarm. He did not know if there was a watchman on the pier. At this season of the year, the place was ready to close down for the winter.

The NO ADMITTANCE sign was painted in large red letters. He pushed down on the lever handle, standing to one side, and pulled the steel door open. Footsteps slapped on the iron treads of a spiral stairway going up toward the hoisting machinery. A single light shone high on the platform supporting the lift, making Plowman’s shadow move around and around the interior of the metal shaft. Durell started up, taking the steps several at a time. There was only a thin rail to protect him from the drop into a dark pit below. He wasn’t sure if the cylinder was anchored in the sea bottom or not; he thought he heard the gurgle and slap of sea water in the darkness below.

It was a long, dizzying climb. Halfway up, he paused and listened for Plowman’s footsteps. They were silent. The dim light, apparently left on permanently, gave him no clue now to Plowman’s location on the spiral treads. Then he heard Plowman’s gun again, louder within the confines of the big cylinder. The man was much higher, almost to the level of the hoisting platform, and across from him. The bullet made a loud spang! against the curving steel plates next to Durell. He did not fire back. The diameter of the cylinder was about fifteen feet. He could feel the structure sway slightly in the night wind, but obviously the guy wires were secure enough. He suddenly raced on, climbing upward. A shadow flickered in the gloomy, cavernous interior as Eli reached the upper platform and ducked under the night light. Durell put everything into a last burst of speed to catch up with the man. Then all at once he saw a dark rectangle open up there; Eli had found an outer door; and at the same time he heard the dull rumble of machinery starting up. The tower vibrated as one of the cars started up from the bottom platform, making a steady, spiraling climb up on the tracks attached to the needle’s outer skin.

“Eli!” he called.

Durell’s breath echoed over the sound of the motors put into operation. The steel plates vibrated against his back as the car passed him, invisibly, on the outside of the Sky Needle on its way to the top. Plowman was planning to meet the climbing car. Durell moved upward, reached the hatchway, started to haul himself through, then drew back as Plowman fired a third time. He felt a stinging sensation as the bullet grazed his forearm. The next moment the hoisting machinery reversed itself and the car, after a moment’s pause, started its downward circular trip. It traveled much faster than Durell could retreat down the spiral interior stairs. He wriggled through the hatch, stood beside the clanking, spinning gears of the hoist, and watched the taut cables vibrate. The night bulb shone directly overhead, showing him the red safety switches. He thumbed one marked STOP and the motors whined to a halt. He had stopped Plowman in the car halfway down to the deck of the amusement pier.

The hatch by which Plowman had escaped was still open. Durell leaned out high above the pier and the slashing black sea below. Plowman had opened the car door and was climbing down the slats of an exterior ladder. Durell could not bring his gun to bear on him. He looked up at the taut cables supporting the cylinder. There was a pile of waste rags beside the winch inside the motor chamber. He caught up a handful, wrapped his hands in them, reached for the nearest guy wire, and swung out into space.

For a moment or two, his slide down the cable was too precipitous. If he struck the deck at this speed, he would be killed, or at least stunned and left to Plowman’s mercy. He swung his legs upward and out, hooked one knee over the slanting cable, tightened his thighs against the steel. Pain from a friction burn slashed into his belly. But his momentum was checked. His feet hit the pier deck seconds later, just as Plowman dropped from the exterior ladder at the bottom of the Sky Needle. The man saw him between the tower and the landward end of the pier and began to run the other way, toward the railing over the dark, heaving sea.

Durell raised his gun, steadied it in both hands, started to squeeze the trigger. He checked himself. He wanted Plowman alive.

The outermost end of the pier was even darker than the rest of the place. White-painted amusement buildings, shuttered booths, more rides, all cluttered the wide deck. Under the planking, the swells of the sea hissed and rumbled amid the concrete and wooden pilings.

Plowman paused, crouched, lifted a hatch, and dropped through. Durell crossed the pier, found a companion hatch, lifted it with care. A slatted wooden ladder led him down under the deck. The noise of the sea engulfed him. It was almost totally black down here. The only light came from the distant lamps on the Boardwalk, far behind him. The catwalk was slippery with sea moss. The big columns supporting the pier were encrusted with barnacles over scaling paint. To touch them meant getting cut as if by a thousand small razors. He looked for Plowman, could not see him in the strange, dank gloom. The system of catwalks extended all the way to the end of the pier, with occasional cross planks only a few feet above the hissing rise and fall of the cold sea.

He could not see Plowman. It was a cat-and-mouse game now in the half-gloom, but Eli had the advantage. Eli wanted to kill him; but he himself wanted Eh alive, if possible. He crouched down to avoid striking the great beams overhead that supported the pier planking. Plowman had moved outward on the pier, unwilling to expose himself to Durell’s cross fire. Durell thought he saw the man’s shadow momentarily, found a cross walk, and moved lightly across it, aware of the treacherous, moss-covered footing. Now he was definitely between his quarry and the beach. Plowman was trapped. There was only one last crosswalk going back to the one he had just left.

The concrete piers and cross-braces under the pier made a latticework of hiding places. And it almost trapped him.

Plowman was waiting for him behind the next column. The man was not a coward. Durell saw the knife-blade flicker an instant before Eli struck. His hand shot up, caught at Plowman’s wrist, tried to deflect the blow. Plowman stepped back, breath hissing, tried an underhand stab at his belly. Durell came up against the barnacle-encrusted column, felt his shirt rip, kicked at the knife, caught it on his heel, slipped on the moss and went down. The knife fell into the sea below. Plowman tried to kick him, slipped also, staggered against the flimsy rail. The rotted board broke under the impact and he started to fall, caught at Durell’s arm, tried to pull himself back. His eyes gleamed, reflecting the distant light from the beach. A comber came in toward them, breaking spray and filling the underside of the pier with loud thunder. Salt spray hit Durell's face.

“Give it up, Eli.”

“Sam, listen—”

Plowman had lost his gun somewhere. Durell still had his .38. Plowman’s mouth opened and closed. Durell said, “Tell me the name of your boss, Eli.”

“Sam, there’s millions in it for you—”

“Not interested. You can tell me—”

Plowman made one last eflort to escape. He tried to chop at Durell’s arm, and at the same time kicked for his groin. The man was like a small bull, stronger than his appearance indicated, with the speed and devices of a practiced hand fighter. Durell felt a blow low in his belly. Pain shot through him and he saw Plowman suddenly grin; his gun flew free into the water below. Neither was armed now. But Plowman was too eager. He was also accustomed to doing his killing by trickery and device. Durell slammed his forearm against Eli’s neck, driving the man’s head against the barnacles on the concrete pillar. Plowman screamed as the flesh of his face was scraped away. His movement was convulsive, instinctive. He jumped backward and his feet shot out from under him, slipping on the wet moss that covered the planking. His back was to the broken plank rail of the catwalk. He went over into the darkness, his round face showing surprise, his eyes wide, suddenly despairing.

There was a small splash in the deep sea below.

And suddenly Durell was alone on the catwalk.

He pulled himself up and stared down at the heaving black water down there. He could not see anything. Then he glimpsed a pale blob that might have been Plowman’s face.

“Durell, the Messenger said—”

The thin, echoing voice was abruptly cut off as a large comber smashed in among the columns and struts under the pier. Plowman was lifted up and thrown against the seaweed and barnacles encrusting the support pillar. Durell heard the thud of his body against the concrete, saw a single hand rise above the seething, hissing foam; and then it vanished.

He waited a long minute, watching and listening.

Plowman was gone.

Chapter Fourteen

It was a warm, sunny morning in Washington, D.C. Durell had gone over his apartment again inch by inch, dismantling lamps, the telephone, the kitchen appliances. He found no other souvenirs of Eli Plowman. Deirdre was in the kitchen, making coffee and broiling Canadian bacon and scrambling eggs. Marcus slept in the spare bedroom. Deirdre had picked up some fresh clothes at her house in Prince John before they returned to Durell’s apartment. None of them had had much sleep. It was a Sunday morning, almost noon, and from somewhere came the sound of church bells.

General Dickinson McFee wore his inevitable gray pinstripe suit, white shirt, and solid charcoal tie. He looked at the splintered desk where the telephone booby trap had exploded and then sniffed at the aroma of Deirdre’s brunch being prepared in the kitchen.

“Samuel, do you think that Plowman left that bottle of Mexican wine deliberately?”

“It was Eli’s style to do that, yes.”

“And you think Eli is dead?”

“I don’t see how he could have lived down there.” “Could you have made it?”

“Possibly.”

“Then Plowman could have made it, too.” McFee waggled his walking stick. “I don’t like it. I am personally distressed by having to share my quarters with Rufus Quayle. The man is arrogant, irascible, and arbitrary.”

“But he’s safe with you,” Durell suggested.

“I am not happy about it, Samuel. I offered to arrange a safe house for him in Maryland, a fine house, where he could have both his people and ours for protection. He now refuses to leave my quarters. He insists that we find his daughter, Deborah.”

“He isn’t talking about selling out Q.P.I., is he?”

“No. He’ll never yield on that.”

“Count your blessings,” Durell said. “We’d lose the whole ballgame, then. And in a year or two, given a subtle but massive propaganda campaign from all the news-media chains that I. Shumata has acquired, the world could be talked into blowing itself apart.”

“Very likely. This wine bottle that Plowman left for you, Samuel—”

“I’m going to San Luis Francesco,” Durell said.

“You’re convinced this is their headquarters? Why would Plowman give it away?”

“It was only in the event that I got out alive from that meeting on the amusement pier. Plowman covers his bets. He figured if I didn’t deal with him and got away, he’d have another crack at me by leading me to Baja California. It’s the way his mind works. But he told me a lot more than that, sir.”

McFee waited. He walked to the window and stared down at the quiet, tree-lined street, sighed, and turned back.

“I suppose you are waiting for my curiosity to get the better of me, Samuel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, what did Plowman tell you?”

“I know who owns I. Shumata. I know who our real enemy is.”

“Yes, Samuel?”

“In the shock of his fall from the catwalk into the sea, he shouted something to me about a messenger. You should remember the term, sir. You were with me on that assignment in Ceylon—Sri Lanka—and the Andaman Islands.”

McFee looked at him with no expression. “The Messenger of Satan. Dr. Mouquerana Sinn. The international predator, eh?”

“No one else.”

“You truly think it is he, Samuel?”

“Nothing smaller would suit Dr. Sinn. He took over Madame Hung’s private intelligence apparatus in Singapore, you remember. He tried to change the whole shape of religion in Asia by pretending to have discovered new writings of Buddha that would inspire a whole shift in traditional attitudes from a peaceful movement to one of violent expressions. Most of all, Dr. Sinn’s prime motivation is his search for power. Nothing less than radically shaping history to his point of view would please his monstrous vanity.”

McFee said sharply, “That man was insane. Pretending to be an incarnation of Satan—or one of his wicked angels. Nonsense, Samuel. Nonsense.”

“I wish it were. Mouquerana Sinn may be insane, but he’s also a genius, sir. A man who truly believes in evil as an entity. A man who claims that God has deserted this world, or lost it to Satan and the forces of darkness. He is a man convinced that this planet is the domain of wickedness, isolated from the rest of the universe. He may be insane, yes. But he has the intellect and the drive to win. I think Plowman worked for him, when he went over the wire. Dr. Sinn was always recruiting new rogue agents, buying them or blackmailing them into his ranks. Mouquerana Sinn owns the I. Shumata zaibatsu. It’s taken him months to build it up, to acquire the other press and news media abroad. Q.P.I. is the last link he needs. With control of such a network, he could do more damage by twisting and warping public opinion than several nuclear bombs. Dr. Sinn’s field is fishing in troubled waters, in manipulating international events. With Q.P.I., he could turn this world upside-down.”

McFee picked up the empty Mexican wine bottle and studied the label. “I’ve checked out San Luis Francesco. It’s nothing, Samuel. There’s the monastery in the mountains and a few American 6migres, nothing more. It is not a popular place. I can give you Jackson’s readout on the village. It’s reached by a gravel road, forty miles inland from the Pacific, off the beaten track.”

“Just the place Dr. Sinn would pick.”

“I’m not certain, Samuel.”

“I’m going there. I owe Sinn something for what he tried to do to me in the Andaman Islands. He has Deborah Quayle; she has to be there. If he can use her to make Rufus Quayle change his mind, we’ve lost the game.”

“Yes, yes. But you’d need a number of men with you—”

“I’ll take Marcus and Deirdre.”

“Quayle offered you some of his own men, did he not?” McFee looked annoyed. “I can send them in one or two at a time, as drifters.”

“If you insist,” Durell said.

Deirdre came in with their lunch.

McFee said, “When do you want to leave?”

“As soon as we eat.”

Part Six

BAJA, CALIFORNIA

Chapter Fifteen

Dust blew across the plaza of San Luis Francesco, stirred by the ovenlike evening wind that came down across the high central desert of Baja California. There was the usual baroque Spanish church, a relic of Conquistador days, and a single telephone line that followed the winding gravel road for miles up from the coast, through the barrier of mountains. There were no power lines to provide even a minimum of modern facilities, although a one-lung diesel generator behind the cantina provided D.C. power for the radios and a few unshaded electric lights in the dim interior of Vincente’s bar.

Someone played a mournful Indian lament on a guitar inside one of the adobe houses. It was a bit like a scene from the last century, Durell thought, as he waited for the moustachioed proprietor to bring him a drink out on the sidewalk terrace. A tattered and dusty awning with faded stripes offered some grateful shade. It was almost noon, and two days away from Washington. Across the plaza, in front of Rosario’s grocery, some American hippies, three long-haired, bearded young men and one girl in tight jeans stretched across ample buttocks, sat and smoked grass and looked listlessly at the dusty sunlight that lay in blinding slabs in front of the closed wooden doors of the church.

Two battered vans were parked near the church, in an alley that ended in a crumbling stone wall that surrounded the churchyard. The vans were painted with all the usual symbols of the lost and wandering children whose day had really ended, although they didn’t know it.

The only symbol of modernity was the cinder-block plastered inn at the opposite end of the plaza, the dubious relic of an ambitious American whose dream of establishing a new desert resort had crumbled into the apathetic dust. Durell and Marcus and Deirdre were lodged there.

The hippies stuck to their vans, not communicating with those of the Establishment who preferred the questionable quarters at the inn.

“Your drink, Señor Durell.”

“Thank you.”

“What is it that goes with you, señor?”

“Nada, Vincente.”

“She will be here soon, señor.”

“Bueno, Vincente.”

“San Luis Francesco is not an exciting place, is it, señor?”

“One seeks peace in a strange land,” Durell said.

Vincente, the skinny Indian proprietor of the cantina, carefully poured Durell’s uncertain bourbon. He said, grinning, “Shalom.”

“Exactly.”

“She is a drunkard, señor. She will be here soon for her daily bottle.”

“Bueno.”

“And do you like her wine?”

“I prefer the bourbon.”

“I fear it is not good, this bourbon, a poor variety, fit for nothing but to damp down the dust.”

“You are a connoisseur, Vincente, a perceptive man.”

“May I ask you something, sir?”

“Ask away.”

“What does a gentleman like you do in our poor little village? I can understand those others, the crazy, homeless bearded ones, always with their radios and loud music, like infants clinging to their mothers’ tits. But you are different. You and your señora—”

“We are not married,” Durell said.

“Oh.”

“And I do not know the others, Vincente—those children of the sun. Like the locos, they are mostly harmless. Except to themselves.”

“Not all crazy people are harmless. My brother-in-law, three years ago, he went crazy and killed his wife and two poor children, and ran away into the mountains.” “Yes, the mountains,” Durell said, looking at them.

To the west, they formed a harsh barrier between the upper plateau and the Pacific. Eastward was the stretch of desert, with a secondary range in the far distance. A few fiat-topped mesas loomed at a distance of four or five miles from the village, across a featureless waste.

Vincente looked at Durell’s bearded, scruffy men gathered about their vans; he hawked and spit into the dust of the plaza. He looked as if he had tuberculosis.

“You do not like the hippies, Vincente?”

“They have no money.”

“Do you fear them?”

“I do not think they would kill their families like my former brother-in-law. But they are strange. A man in this world can trust only what he knows. I am not an intolerant man, señor. I even accept the new ones, the strange Asiatic monks in the old monastery. I cannot remember what they call themselves, but they are not Christians. Still, I am tolerant. They have money.”

“You have seen these monks?”

“Twice, in groups. And they come to the village for supplies. They wear robes like a Catholic priest, but they have children’s kites tied to their waists, small black things, like bats. It is a disturbing thing to see. But they are formal and polite, and express good wishes to all.”

“You said the old American woman who made wine in the monastery would be here at noon.”

“As always, señor . One can ring the church bell by her arrival.”

“She must be rich,” Durell said.

“Ah.” Vincente rolled his black eyes at the brazen sky. “One wonders how much these strangers paid her for the use of her winery these past two weeks.”

“Much,” Durell said. “It must have been much.”

“Truly, one cannot imagine so much.” Vincente sighed. “Another bourbon, señor?”

“I think I’ll try the Maharanda wine.”

The church bell across the plaza announced the noon hour with twelve claps of its iron bell. A dusty old Chevrolet came around the churchyard and rolled noisily to a halt in front of the cantina, and the old woman Durell had been waiting for stepped out.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Wendy O’Hara. You’ve been looking for me, Mr. Durell? Vincente, you old thief, is it ready?”

“As always, Señora  O’Hara.”

“I’m not married, you little s.o.b., and you know it. Are you going to get all this down on tape, too?”

“Si, señora.”

Durell stood up. “What tape is that?”

“Oh, the bunch of crazies who took over my place for a month. One of them is studying native Indian villages down here. Wants a record of cantina talk.”

Durell looked at Vincente. The little man grinned. Durell said, “You taped our conversation, Vincente?”

“Si, señor.”

Durell made no more of it. Wendy O’Hara was a big woman in her sixties, with crisply cut short gray hair, a gray silk suit, a white ascot at her throat. She stuck out her hand to Durell like a man, and her handshake was firm, a little calloused. She sat down with a thump. Her face was square, her eyes Irish-blue, and her skin looked as if several desert sandstorms had helped scrape the bloom of youth from it. She was hardly the doddering old woman he had been led to expect.

“I see you’re drinking my wine,” she said.

“It’s not bad.”

“It’s not good, either. I get my grapes from Lopez, over there.” She waved toward the western mountains. “Sometimes, by the time they get here, they’re sunstruck. Used to have vines here on the mountain nearby, at the monastery, but the water dried up about ten years ago. I’m strictly a gin drinker, myself.”

Durell gestured. “Vincente, a drink for Señorita O’Hara.”

Vincente vanished. Across the plaza, Marcus came limping around one of the vans and went to the public fountain with an armful of laundry. The sounds of transistor rock radio came from inside the nearest van.

Wendy O’Hara eyed Durell frankly. “What are you, a cop?”

“What makes you think I’m a cop?”

“The police always answer questions with another question. You can’t be an American tax snooper. I’m all paid up. The winery officially belongs to the Francesco Bank; we’re nominal partners, the bank being the majority shareholder. Mexican law prohibits gringos from buying up the country. I don’t mind. So what’s wrong?” Durell was about to ask why she thought anything might be wrong. Instead, he said, “I’m just curious about the people who rented your place.”

“Oh, them.”

“Yes, them.”

“They’re strange, huh?”

“Maybe stranger than you think.”

“Listen, I’m a member of the Maharanda sect myself. Before I started up the winery again, I took the old monastery that was deserted about a century ago and turned it into a Maharanda temple. It’s a way of peace, man. Nobody in it rips off his brothers. That’s why I came down here in the first place.”

“Are many brothers living up there now?”

“I got a few in, at first. And a lot of kids. But they got tired of the dust and sun and nothing around here. So I started up the winery again. And then these people flew in here in their private jet and leased the place for a month, couple of a weeks ago.”

“They flew in?”

“One of those company executive jets. It comes and goes, all the time.”

“Where does it land?”

“Oh, the desert’s flat as a billiard table out there. Easy. They signed an agreement to pay me good money, said it was for the Maharanda Brotherhood, they’d heard about me, but they needed it for a big mucky-muck who wanted to meditate. They promised me good money. But I haven’t seen a peso of it yet.”

Durell clucked sympathetically. “Señorita O’Hara—”

“Wendy.”

“Wendy, did you meet any of these people?”

“Only their Mexican lawyer from the Federal District who came down to close the deal. Twisted my arm a bit. All kinds of laws about wineries and temples and such, they could really pressure me. So I signed. I’m living over in the posada—not the Orient Hotel you’re in. The posa-da is about a mile out of town, where I have my orange trees. Tried to grow an orchard there, but it’s going sour. Again, no water.”

“Have you been back to the monastery since you left?” Wendy O’Hara leaned an ample bosom on the round cantina table. “You are a cop, aren’t you?”

“In a way.”

“In what way?”

“We think they’ve got somebody up there who shouldn’t be there. A young girl. We’d like to get her back.”

Wendy O’Hara seemed to be enjoying herself. “Oh, you’re a private cop. I like detective stories. Paperbacks, mostly. What is it, a snatch? A runaway?”

“We’re not sure.”

The woman stared at him. “Well, you’ll never get her out of there without a small army, I can tell you that.” “How come?”

“Only one road up to the top of the mesa. They’ve put all kinds of contraptions on it, too, so the big mucky-muck won’t have his meditations disturbed. They could swat you like a fly on a wall.”

“I see. What kind of contraptions?”

“I don’t know. Warning devices. I went up there last week about my rent money—tried to get up there—anc before I was halfway, a couple of their kite-flying acolytes politely but firmly sent me back again. I was kind ol annoyed.”

Wendy O’Hara narrowed her eyes against the glare oi the sun on the dusty plaza. An Indian leading a loaded donkey made his way slowly from the grocery store and vanished around the corner. Dogs slept in the dust. A woman with a green parrot leaned out one of the upper windows of a house at the far end of the plaza. Two children played listlessly on an iron-grilled balcony that looked as if it were about to come loose from the crumbling facade of the house. The place was one of the world’s dead ends. Durell didn’t like the thought. He listened to the crashing, repetitive rock from the vans and watched Marcus splash his laundry in the fountain. Marcus had grown a two-day beard, wore patched denims, a Western shirt, and a battered straw sombrero.

Wendy O’Hara said, “Who is the girl?”

“I was hoping you could help me get up there.”

“Can’t do. I told you, even I couldn’t get in, and I own the place.”

“You and the bank.”

“Yes. I can describe the layout inside the winery and the chapel to you.”

Durell said, “That would be helpful.”

“When are you going to try it?”

“There’s plenty of time,” Durell said.

“But will you tell me when?”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

“Hell,” said Wendy O’Hara.

When she was gone, Durell got up and went into the cool interior of the cantina. Vincente came up behind the bar and put a cold bottle of Carta Blanca in front of him.

“You are angry with me, señor, about the recording tape?”

“No. A man must make a living somehow.” “You are indeed a gentleman, señor.”

“How many tapes have you delivered to the winery?” Durell asked.

“One every day, sir. Like a clock. Like the Señora O’Hara.”

“How and when?”

Vincente hesitated. “I cannot tell you that. I am afraid of them.”

“I’ll pay you enough to make you forget your fear.” Vincente coughed. “Fifty American dollars?”

“It’s plenty.” Durell gave him the cash. Vincente stuffed it into his pants pocket and Durell said, “Where do you keep the recorder?”

“Here. It is a little thing.”

The device was concealed in a package of king-sized Camel cigarettes, a trim and efficient Japanese model operating on 1.5 batteries, miniaturized to perfection. Durell opened it and took out the small spool of very fine mylar tape and pocketed the tape and kept the recorder, too. Vincente looked very troubled.

“I’m afraid of these foreigners, señor.”

“How do they pick it up?”

“Each evening, one of the monks with the black kites comes here for it. At six o’clock.”

“How does he arrive?”

Vincente shrugged. “He walks.”

“It is over three miles, Vincente, to the winery.”

“He walks, señor.”

“At six o’clock?”

“Punctually.”

“Vincente . . .”

“Yes, señor?” The man had begun to sweat. “Vincente, if you give them warning, you will be killed.” Durell’s voice was quiet, but there was an abrupt hardness in it that made Vincente tremble suddenly. Durell said, “I will be here at six o’clock to meet the man with the black kite. You will make yourself absent for the moment. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly, si, of course.”

“You’re very agreeable, Vincente.” “I am a man of peace,” Vincente said.

“And you have much greed. You will be paid another fifty American dollars when the kite man arrives.”

“Yes, I am a greedy man. I belong to you, heart and soul, Señor Durell.”

Chapter Sixteen

He made slow, quiet love to Deirdre during the hot, dusty afternoon, Loving her, holding her dearness close to him, he did not want six o’clock to come. He knew that what had to be done was something from which he might not return. He was accustomed to taking risks. He had done so many times in the past. The scars on his body bore testimony to the times he had escaped from enemies in almost all the dark corners of the world. He remembered Dr. Mouquerana Sinn, and the jungled island in the Andamans in the Indian Ocean, and how he had been hunted like an animal, for sport, as a game to amuse the man. He had hoped, after it was over, that the man was dead. Dr. Sinn had the cunning of perverted genius. If Sinn was mad, it was the madness of brilliance, made all the more dangerous by his personal hallucinations. He knew that what he had to do would not be easy, and the long hours of this afternoon with Deirdre were made all the more precious by this knowledge.

The Orient Hotel was a low, stone building with a scraggly lawn turned gray by the desert sun. The lobby had once been pretentious, with Spanish tiling on the floor and walls, and a small fountain in the center court that no longer seemed to work. Through the slatted shades of Durell’s bedroom window, he could see across a mile or more of desert to the abrupt rise of the mesa, on top of which was the former monastery and winery. He thought about Wendy O’Hara and felt concern for the woman for a time, and then decided she could be trusted in the information she had given him. He was not sure about Vincente.

“Sam?” Deirdre said softly.

“Yo.”

“You seem worried.”

“I’m always worried. Dr. Sinn worries me.”

“I don’t want you to do it.”

“I have to, Dee.”

“That’s what you always say. It’s your job. It must be done. Someone has to do it, so you go in. And I wait here and wonder if you’ll come back.”

“I’ll come back. With Deborah.”

“You’re not even sure this is the right place.”

“It must be.”

“I wish we were home, back in Prince John.”

“So do I. We’ll be there, soon. There’s a little town on the coast here, though, maybe fifty miles from here, that hasn’t been spoiled by tourists yet. We’ll go there first, spend a few days together, like this.” He smiled at her lovely, oval face, touched her eyebrows with his fingertips. “Don’t worry about me, Dee.”

“I do, darling. Come back here.”

But Marcus knocked on the hotel room door, and after Deirdre put on a robe, Durell let him in.

Marcus moved to the window and stared out at the distant mesa, at the empty, blinding gray desert, and turned a scowling face at Durell.

“You saw the O’Hara woman. So what now?”

Durell told him about Vincente’s tape recorder and the monk with the kite who came regularly at six o’clock to collect the tape.

“So what does that do for us?” Marcus argued. “The guys in the vans are restless. Andy and Roger are ready to go. The girl we picked up doesn’t know anything about anything. Lou has been banging her all day. He won’t be worth a damn tonight. Harry and Dave are okay, but I don’t see how we can go up there and crash in unless we call on the Federales.”

“No cops,” Durell said. “I’m going in alone.” He paused. “The rest of you can follow me after an interval. But I’ll want you to stay close behind.”

“How can we get past their detection devices?”

Durell said, “There’s a way—if it works.”

“If.”

“After I’m in, the rest of you follow like you were going to blow the place apart.”

“I know the technique,” Marcus growled.

“Then just be patient.”

Vincente shivered in the back room of his cantina, although the heat of the day’s sunshine still lingered here with stifling breathlessness. In an hour, the chill of the desert would settle in. The plaza was already in deep shadow, and some of the young men of the village were gathered about the vans, talking to Marcus and his men, exchanging cigarettes and drinking beer. Durell waited in the back room for Vincente. Time seemed to stop moving. Each minute was an eternity.

Finally he heard the thin tinkling of a small handbell. Vincente stirred. “He comes.”

“Bring him back in here,” Durell said.

“I always give him the tape recorder at the bar. That is where he pays me.”

“Tell him you left it in this room. Tell him you think the tape ran out.”

“Si. You will kill this man?”

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“I change my opinion of you, señor. I think you are a cruel person. I fear you more than I fear the others.” “Good. Keep that thought in mind.”

The tinkling bell stopped. Durell urged Vincente gently toward the doorway and out of the back room. It was dark enough in here, he thought. He took out his gun and listened to Vincente talk to the monk in Spanish. Vincente’s voice was strained and the monk noticed it and asked if anything was wrong.

“The recorder—it may be broken—the tape does not work. Perhaps the batteries—it is not my fault, padre—”

“Give it to me, Vincente.” The man’s voice, which hac been polite at first, revealed a sudden hardness.

“I left it in the back room, sir.”

“Bring it out.”

“I put it down, I cannot remember—”

“Go. Bring it.”

Vincente stumbled through the doorway as if he had been shoved violently inside. The monk’s bell jingled. Vincente’s face was very pale in the gloom. He stood and trembled. Durell, flat against the wall beside the doorway, put the muzzle of his gun to his lips in a signal for silence There were cartons of canned beer, racks for wine, some old furniture gathering dust in the storeroom. Vincente began to shove the cartons around, deliberately making it sound as if he were searching for the tape recorder. But he was trembling too much to make a decent pretense of it.

A shadow seemed to leap from the doorway into the dark room.

“What are you doing, Vincente?”

“I— am sorry, señor. I cannot find it.”

“You had better.”

The man came into the room through the doorway. His little kite dragged unheeded on the plank floor behind him.

Durell slammed his gun into the man’s ribs.

“Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Don’t breathe!”

The man was big, powerfully built. He was also either stupid or desperate. His hands went up, starting to clasp together above his head; one finger reached for a ring or the opposite hand. Durell hit him with the gun on the side of his head and the man staggered, fell against a stack oi wine boxes, tried to clasp his hands again and at the same time kicked at Durell. His robe hampered him. Durell hi1 him again, heard Vincente suck in breath in his terror. The monk fell sidewise and several bottles broke and the pungency of spilled wine filled the shadowed storeroom. A knife flickered from the black-garbed man’s sleeve. Durell caught at it, broke it free. He did not want to fire his gun and arouse the whole village. He struck again, and the big monk went down to his knees. Once more. Durell felt himself begin to sweat. The monk collapsed on his face, lay still.

“Stand back, Vincente,” Durell said.

Vincente nodded. Durell checked the man’s hand, found the ring, saw the small wire leading from it along his palm and up the sleeve. Very carefully, he opened the monk’s robe and took it off, peeling it back by following the tiny wire. The wire was connected to the rope that served as a belt around the man’s waist, and from there it went to the bell and the kite. The kite itself served as an antenna, in turn attached to a small box, no more than four inches long, thrust into the waistband of the man’s denim slacks.

It took time and care to get the man’s costume completely off. Several minutes went by, longer than Durell expected. What it amounted to was a broadcasting monitor that spotted the monk’s movements from a central control, keeping track of the man.

The monk’s outfit was a walking electronic arsenal of detection devices. Within the folds of the black robe was a “blind spotlight,” which looked like an ordinary flashlight. Hand held, its beam was so brilliant as to temporarily blind anyone. There was also a small plate that Durell guessed would respond to alarms triggered by infrared beams. And a tag that, if the activating mechanism were not turned off, would also set off an alarm like that used to outwit shoplifters. Added to that was a microwave receiver that would send a certain signal within an area protected by high-frequency radio beams. Durell had seen similar gadgets in K Section’s basement lab—honeycomb logic circuitry that could detect the difference between birds, small animals, and a man. He was aware of miniaturized sound detectors, barriers of strong, invisible infrared laser beams in which the pulse of radiation is passed from one unit to the next to form a circuit. When broken, alarms went off.

The monk, with his robe and his kite, would be the only human being able to pass through such barriers on his way back to the Maharanda winery.

Durell slipped into the monk’s robe quickly, adjusted the ring and rope belt and kite to his own frame. Again, he was delayed by the need for care.

“Can you tie him up, Vincente?”

“Yes. I can lock him in the cellar. I am glad you did not kill him, señor.”

“Be careful. He’ll kill you, if he can.”

Durell stared out of the storeroom behind the cantina. At the same moment, someone came in through the front entrance facing the plaza.

It was Marcus. His face was battered and bloody. He staggered as he walked.

“Cajun?”

“It’s me,” said Durell, wearing the robe.

“Oh, Jesus. Cajun, they came to the hotel. They got Deirdre. They took her away. I’m sorry, Sam. I’m sorry.”

“Sit up straight, Deborah.” “Yes.”

“Look at me, please.”

“I can’t.”

“Am I so ugly, then?” “You’re all ugly.”

“Look at me.”

Chapter Seventeen

“Deborah, is this her picture?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you recognize your own cousin?”

“I haven’t seen her for years and years.”

“Come, come.”

“It’s the truth.”

“This is Deirdre Padgett, is it not?”

“If you say so.”

“This is not a proper answer. I must confess, I grow totally impatient with you. You have delayed and lied and offered me nothing, in exchange for my kindness to you.”

“Kindness?”

“You are alive, are you not?”

“Without my finger.”

“Ah. It still hurts?”

“No.”

“You had excellent medical treatment.”

“Have you sent it—sent it to my father?”

“You told us he was at Ca’d’Orizon, did you not?”

“Yes. But I added that it was just an educated guess. I can’t be sure.”

“But it took you several days to decide to tell us that.

And now our quarry has flown.”

“I’m glad.”

“Glad?”

“He’s my father. I don’t want him killed or hurt by your monsters.”

****************************************

She felt as if everything had been harvested now from the fields of her mind. She was empty and drained of everything she had owned, all that she had been. She would never be the same. With her head bowed, seated in the same chair, before the table on which her finger had been severed and the ring taken from her, she felt an exhaustion of mind and spirit from which she would never rise. For a day and a night she had remained in shock, confined to her cell. She heard the chanting of the Maharanda monks from a distance. The striking of various gongs marked the hours that drifted by. She slept and dreamed and woke to find the stub, where her finger used to be, bandaged, the pain eased. She had been questioned again, and this time she had allowed the replies to come out, knowing it was all being taped, knowing that the capacities of her brain were being leached bit by bit, grain by grain. She had talked about Q.P.I. and Martin and most of all about Rufus Quayle. Finally she had told them about the canal that went underground, under the wide sweep of terrace behind the house. And how Rufus had told her he would die in that house.

She was changed. There was a listlessness to her spirit that she had never known before. Her life-long dedication to her father and his enterprises, using her unique talents, had come to an end. She felt she had betrayed everything that gave meaning to her life.

“Look at me, Deborah.”

He was monstrous, in a flowing yellow robe, with tiny feet, his shaven head shining in the light from the window that looked out high over the empty desert. Yes, she

thought, there was something innately evil, a malice that seemed unearthly, in him. Her mind rebelled weakly against accepting this, and she felt enslaved by this creature who called himself Dr. Mouquerana Sinn. She was beginning to accept him and his long quiet talks, laced with acid amusement, that defined him as a Messenger of Satan, a harbinger of open wickedness to the world. As if the world wasn’t wicked enough, she thought bitterly. It was true, as Sinn argued, that man called upon God to relieve humanity of war and hatred and bigotry and natural devastations; and so often, God did not seem to respond. You could rationalize it in many ways, searching for a greater good to come from mankind’s barbarity; but such goodness was difficult to find. You were urged to have faith. Faith, she thought dully, had not helped her. A cry to heaven had not saved Martin. It would not save herself.

Rings flashed and flickered in heavy jewelry on Dr. Sinn’s short, fat fingers. He was vain. He was contemptuous. Most of all, there was no end to his cruelty.

His guards were scarcely better, those two omnipresent companions who stood behind Sinn’s thronelike chair and stared at her with small, unwinking eyes. Most of all she feared the one called Antipholus, as if he were the Devil’s right hand. He was the one who had calmly, swiftly amputated her finger. He looked at her strangely, she thought. Now and then his face betrayed an odd, flickering smile. She looked back at him like a bird caught in the hypnotic stare of a serpent. He wore a short tunic over his great barrel chest, and very tight trousers of thin white cotton that ended in elastic just below the heavy knees. His genitals bulged enormously under the flimsy white cloth. She looked away. She sat up straighter and let her eyes go out of focus, so that she seemed to be meeting Dr. Sinn’s stare, but kept him in a blurred haze.

****************************************

“Ah. Better, Deborah.”

“Yes. What more do you wish to know?*'

“Would your cousin Deirdre Padgett recognize you, if she saw you now?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is there any way you could identify yourself to her so she would be convinced of your own identity?”

“I could tell her my name.”

“Nonsense. Do not anger me with simplicities.”

“I could tell her some details of how we first met at Ca’d’Orizon, on that Thanksgiving Day.”

“Ah.”

“I could describe her parents.”

“Better.”

“And some things that were said at the table."

“Yes.”

“Are you going to bring Deirdre here, too?”

“She is already here, my dear. Do you know her fiance, this man named Sam Durell?”

“No. I know nothing, really, about her life.”

“A dangerous man. Thanks to your tardiness in speaking frankly, thanks to your delay in being responsive to my questions, we have lost a few small skirmishes with the forces opposing us. It is an irritation. I am really very angry with you, Deborah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You will be sorrier.”

“Please don’t hurt me anymore. Let me go.’*

“Had you been cooperative, had your father Rufus Quayle agreed to our terms and given up Q.P.I., it would have been better for you. I mean to own Q.P.I., do you understand? Have you realized that yet?”

“Yes, I know that now.”

“Do you still think your obstinacy has been worth it?” “No, I don’t.”

“Would you sign over Q.P.I. to me?”

“I would, if I could. If I had the authority.”

“Indeed.”

“Don’t hurt me again.”

“You need another small lesson, Deborah.51 “Oh, please!”

“Yes, yes. I am very angry with you. You have caused me delays, the loss of two—perhaps three—excellent aides. Your female cousin and this man Durell have been most persistent in seeking me out, trying to save you. But they shall not succeed.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I cannot hear you. Do not whisper, Deborah.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I am going to give you to Antipholus. He has developed a curious affection for you, watching you this past week or two. You may not survive his attentions.”

“What more can I tell you?"

“Ah. First a whisper. Now a shout. Good, good. You have been unresponsive for too long. Antipholus, you may take her.”

****************************************

What had been a nightmare before was now compounded a hundred times over. She had come to accept physical abuse, slaps and kicks, the sight of Martin hanging from the hook in the ceiling, the amputation of her finger. It was as if she had been here for an eternity, and had grown accustomed to this slavish way of life, to the constant hammering on her mind, the slow draining of her personality until she had become as slavish as a whipped bitch, cowering and drooling for pity.

Now, as the huge, gross attendant came toward her, she felt such a burst of revulsion at what was coming that she pushed back the chair and sprang to her feet. His big paw shot out and caught her arm and twisted it cruelly, toning her so that she fell on all fours to the rough stone floor of the chamber. Her hair swung down before her eyes, blinding her. Suddenly she felt choked as his fingers caught in the cloth of the yellow smock she had been given to wear. There was a ripping sound as he tore the garment from her. For a moment she was released. She sprang upright and ran across the long room to the window overlooking the desert. Naked, her body still proud, she turned and looked at the man. He stood a short distance from her, a crooked smile on his obscene face. Behind him, still seated in his big chair, Dr. Mouquerana Sinn watched with all the objectivity of a botanist pinning a butterfly to a display board.

“No, please,” she moaned.

This proud body of hers, that she had used with such pleasure and skill with Martin, that had been honed to a fine athletic point, was greedily devoured by the man’s eyes. He looked at her breasts, her navel, her hips.

“Please.”

Slowly he untied the cord that held his tight breeches up on his bulging belly. He let them fall to the stone floor. She felt a scream rise in her throat, strangling her. He was a freak. He was enormous. The lift and extension of his organ was unnatural, bringing terror to her that was like a paralyzing wave of ice in her belly. She shrank away. She could not take her eyes from him. He would kill her. He would tear her apart. It was the ultimate violation, the final pain, that Dr. Sinn had reserved for her.

“Wait,” she gasped. “Tell me what I can do. Anything. Make him go away.”

No one answered her. Dr. Sinn leaned forward in his big chair, and his eyes looked avid, alight with amusement. His gross body, like a giant toad’s, was turned to observe her. There was no one to help. No one. There was nothing she could do.

As the naked man reached for her, she darted to one side, flattened against the cold glass pane of the big window. She smashed backward at the glass with her elbows, trying to break it. Escape into death by throwing herself down to the desert floor, a thousand feet below, was better than this obscene humiliation, this inevitable death in itself.

The glass would not break.

She kicked it with her naked feet, hammered at it with her fists. She whirled, looking about for something that might help. She saw the chair she had been sitting on, darted for it, picked it up, tried to fling it at the window. The huge man caught it in mid-air, brushing it aside as if it were a twig. And then he had her arm and swung her about, threw her to the floor and stood over her, swollen and ready.

Her heart thundered in her ears. His knees came down ponderously between her thighs, forcing them apart. She felt a bursting sensation inside her, and she began to scream a protest at what was being done to her. The sound was as primitive as that of any helpless animal caught in a jungle by a predatory beast.

Chapter Eighteen

There was no trace of Deirdre or her captors on the trail over the desert to the monastery, high on the bluff above. The daylight had faded, although the sky was still pale against the first stars. Already the chill of the desert had begun to set in, and a small wind piped through the sage and cactus struggling to grow in the sandy plain.

Durell walked with a long stride, the bell tinkling, the kite bobbing and darting and leaping high over his head, a small black appendage that he hoped would act as the key to unlock the protective network around the monastery high on the mesa. He tried not to think of Deirdre or what had happened. Marcus had said they had come in fast, three of them, dressed in the same robes he now wore himself.

He wondered if the odds against him might not be pitched too high.

Obviously, the people in the monastery knew about him and about Deirdre’s presence in the village. And if they knew about Marcus, they also knew about the fake hippies with their vans parked in the plaza.

But he could not change his plans now. He closed his mind to what might be happening to Deirdre at this very moment. He walked quickly, but not too quickly that the devices monitoring his approach on the single road to the winery could arouse suspicion. He wanted to run. He could not. He made himself go on with a steady, long stride that matched—he hoped—the gait of the monk whose robe he now wore.

The trail had been used by trucks going and coming to the monastery, and it lifted upward toward the mesa by a series of tedious switchbacks, climbing every foot of the way. His bell tinkled. The kite bobbed overhead, darted to the left, swung to the right. He could feel its erratic tug on the rope that tied his robe around the waist. Behind him, the village was already lost in dark shadows. The wind whispered in the cactus, blew sand in dark dust devils against his face. It would be dark by the time he reached the top of the mesa. A low sickle moon hung over the eastern horizon, above the mountains on the other side of the peninsula. The winery loomed high above, seeming to cling to the very edge of the flat-topped mountain. He could see no lights up there. There was a dome at one end, surmounted by a wooden Spanish cross that had never been removed when the monks left long ago. Probably there was an interior courtyard, in the Latin style. He kept his head down, watching the old ruts left by the winery trucks. There were no vehicles in evidence now.

He had left Marcus with Vincente, who said he would get the priest, who doubled as a doctor in emergencies among the villagers. Most of the blood on Marcus had come from a scalp wound. Behind him, at a short distance, the two agents dressed as hippies followed Durell. He did not know them or their capabilities. He would have to depend on himself alone.

He saw the first unobtrusive stake set beside the road among a clump of cactus. A small metal box was attached to it. He could not see its mate, but he waved an arm and the two hippie agents closed up fast in a line abreast with him as he strode through the invisible electronic beam. His black kite bobbed high in the air above his head.

Nothing happened. He could only hope that the sensors could not detect the difference between one human body and three.

The two DIA men who had been with Marcus moved with efficient professionalism. The one named Andy wore a tattered striped polo shirt and blue jeans with a big red heart appliqued over his buttocks. He was of medium height, but he had the muscular build of a wrestler or an acrobat, and he moved with easy competence. His companion, Roger, was thinner, smaller, with a great shock of curly yellow hair almost like an Afro haircut. He had a beard that was equally curly, and bright blue eyes that always looked amused. He wore a denim jacket and tennis shorts that had turned a mouse gray with dirt and grime and sweat. He sported striped tennis shoes. His small smile seemed to be a perpetual fixture on his face.

The third man that Marcus had brought, along with the girl, was tripped out on something the girl had provided him during their afternoon in the van.

Nobody was perfect, Durell thought.

The image of Deirdre flickered through his mind. He saw her aboard their Chesapeake skipjack, her hair blowing in the wind. He saw her in bed beside him. He saw her walking a beach, her stride matching his. He put the images of her out of his mind.

There was one more switchback on the road and then a level space with the loom of the old stone winery behind it. They had passed several more detection devices. Andy had spotted one of them, pointing with a dirty finger to the clump of tough grass that grew beside the road. He had bent to study it, the red heart sewn over his buttocks stretching tight. Roger grinned and whistled softly and they had walked through the electronic barrier three abreast, as they had done with the others.

Again, nothing happened.

The sky was filled now with the darkness of the desert night. The stars looked as if a jeweler had spilled the contents of a diamond box out over velvet. The sickle moon gave them a surprising amount of light.

There was a smell of fermentation in the air.

A heavy plank door, with two panels and big iron hinges, opened into the old winery yard, where big casks were piled and stacked like giant cordwood. From somewhere, Durell heard the chanting of male voices and then the heavy sound of a gong.

To the right of the winery doors was a three-sided area bounded by arcades, enclosing a courtyard. One of the arcades led to what had been Wendy O’Hara’s house, which once had been used by the monks as a dormitory in days long gone by. Two feeble lights glowed there, and from another direction came the thump and bang of a diesel generator that provided power for the place. A truck without tires stood near the tall winery doors. The air of economic disaster and dilapidation did not speak too highly for Wendy O’Hara’s business acumen. She had not seemed like the alcoholic that Vincente had described, but evidently, in investing in the winery, she had chosen the wrong business for herself.

“Hold it,” Durell said.

His two companions checked themselves, came to an immediate halt.

The kite attached to Durell’s robe flopped limply to his heels like a broken-winged black bat. It was going too easily, he thought. He listened to the muffled chanting and wondered how many Maharanda disciples were quartered here, how many were genuine, and how many were creatures obedient to Dr. Sinn’s orders.

The wind made the shadows move in the deserted courtyard. It had a chill bite to it. He thought again of Deirdre, and her image touched his mind once more, in ski clothes, laughing from a spill in the Vermont snow. His stomach jumped and tightened, then grew quiet again.

“What’s the problem?” Roger asked. His halo of curly blond hair and thick beard made his face look almost angelic. His smile was steady. “We’re in, aren’t we? No alarms yet.”

“Maybe.”

Andy rubbed his buttocks. “Hell, I’m cold. Let’s have some action, huh?”

Both men lifted their automatic rifles, vicious, stubby weapons of enormous firepower. Roger reached inside his shirt and pulled out a grenade and a thermite bomb.

“All right, Cajun?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet, but—”

“Durell!”

The scream was thin and high, filled with alarm. It was Wendy O’Hara’s voice. It broke the quiet of the monastery courtyard like a thunderclap. Durell jumped for the protection of one of the columns in the nearest arcade. He could not see the woman, but her shout had come from his left, back in the direction of the winery warehouse they had just passed. Before the echoes of her single cry died, Roger’s bushy-haired head burst like an overripe tomato. The racketing burst of automatic fire filled the courtyard with deafening noise. Bullets whipped and flared and made small explosions all around them. They were all special cartridges, designed to burst on impact. Roger’s headless body stood upright in the courtyard for a long instant, then sagged to the flagstone floor, jumping and twisting and coming apart as more bullets sought out his corpse and struck him.

Andy dived behind the next column in the arcade that sheltered Durell.

“Oh, Jesus. Look at him! Goddamn it!”

There were two guns. They stopped firing as suddenly as they had begun. The echoes faded away.

Roger’s mangled body lay sprawled in the courtyard. Durell turned left, toward die point where Wendy O’Hara’s voice had come. He jumped for the shelter of the next column. Immediately, the automatics opened up again, blasting and bursting against the stone shelter of the arcade. Chips flew everywhere. Andy’s pale face, surrounded by his hairy growth of beard, made a startled blob in the shadows of his sheltering niche, two columns away under the arcade.

Durell waited.

The firing ended again.

Dim shouts of surprise came from inside the main monastery building. The speed and accuracy of the shots just ended warned Durell to move with utter caution. Twisting behind the narrow shelter of the stone column, he tore loose the little black kite from his monk’s robe. The wire inside was stubborn for a moment, then it

snapped apart. He calculated that they were using the wire to identify and spot his location with precision. The robe itself was a nuisance, and he tore that off, too, feeling less hampered by its bulk. It had gotten him through the detection devices for the most part, but evidently at close range the infrared heat-seeking beams had spotted three human bodies, not his alone. He was better off without it.

“Andy?"

“Yes, sir.”

“Into the winery. Follow me fast.”

Without waiting to see what Andy did, Durell broke from the arcade and threw himself into the doorway at the opposite end. This time there were a few tentative, uncertain shots sprayed after him, nothing more. He flung himself down in a darkness redolent of stale wine, must, sand, and the bulking shadows of huge wooden vats ranged against a far wall. Something pale moved off to his left. He raised his gun instantly. Andy’s feet slapped the cement behind him. He dropped to his knees at Durell’s side, breathing quickly and lightly.

“Mrs. O’Hara?” Durell called.

“I’m here. Oh, my goodness. Help me.”

She came wavering out of the gloom, down a flight of wooden steps from a gallery at Durell’s left. He looked up at the balcony under the high, beamed ceiling. Wendy O’Hara was drunk. Her old woman’s face looked sunken and ravaged, and she moved uncertainly, arms out wide to keep her balance. Her hands reached for Durell, but he avoided her touch, keeping his gun clear.

“Watch the door, Andy.”

“Yes, sir.”

The woman said in a slurred voice, “Mr. Durell, what in heaven’s name—?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I saw them take your girl. That lovely young person.” Mrs. O’Hara was weeping. “After all, this is my place. I rented it to these terrible people. It’s all my responsibility.”

“Keep your voice down,” Durell said.

“I had a—a l’il too much—of your gin.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think s-so. But I’m—I’m so s-scared. I’m only an old woman. I’m tired. They let me come in, but then they told me I had to s-stay. In here. They told me they’d sh-shoot me if I stepped out of the door.”

“Where did they take Deirdre?”

“She’s in my house. Across the courtyard. What are they, Mr. Durell? Kidnappers? Murderers? I don’t understand it. The disciples of Maharanda believe in peace and love. These people aren’t really Maharandas, are they? They’re fakes, that’s what they are.” The old woman’s voice grew stronger. “Killers, that’s what. They took your girl.”

“Did you actually see her? Was she all right?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I saw her. But she—-she was unconscious. Maybe—maybe—” She paused, anguished. “They were carrying her. She couldn’t walk.”

He remembered carrying Deirdre out of the surf at a small, rocky beach on Capri, when they had worked together on an assignment in Rome. Her weight had been negligible to him. He could have carried her in his arms forever. He never wanted to let her go. Her face had been beaded with the salt drops of the Mediterranean, and when she pressed her lips to his in a warm and promising kiss, he could taste the salt of the sea on her mouth.

“Oh, Sam,” she had said. “Sam.”

“What is it?”

“I couldn’t ever love you more,” she had said.

He turned back to Wendy O’Hara.

“When did you get here?”

“It was just a few minutes ago. I just obeyed an old woman’s curiosity, that’s all.”

It was clear, he thought bitterly, that she had come blundering up and had alerted all the detection gadgets so that when he followed with Andy and Roger, everything had been manned. They had been ready and waiting for them to walk into this trap.

But there was no point in regrets.

“You’ll be safe in the winery, Wendy. Can you tell us if there is another way into the main house? Not using the arcades and the courtyard?”

“The monastery? Oh, yes.” Her hand gestured, a vague blur in the gloom. Her voice echoed slightly. “There is an outside walk. That door, over there, gets you to it.” She began to weep. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry. I’m just a useless old woman who drinks too much. I started out just trying to forget things, and now I. .. I. .

Her voice trailed off. Durell turned from her, touched Andy’s shoulder, and he walked along the huge wine casks against the plastered stone walls in the gloomy cavern until he found the door she mentioned. There was no sound anywhere. Andy held his automatic rifle ready as Durell turned the massive iron key in the lock. It was stuck, rusted together, and had not been used, obviously, for quite some time. He felt impatient with the precautionary measures he had to take with each step of the way. He wanted Deirdre. A rage began to grow in him. He thought of Dr. Mouquerana Sinn and remembered the tortures the man had inflicted on him, long ago in the heat of the Indian Ocean. It would be different this time, he promised himself.

He opened the heavy door just enough to slip through. Andy followed close behind him, a grenade in his hand. Starlight greeted them. The cold desert wind blew stronger on this side of the mesa. The back wall of the winery storehouse was almost flush with the very edge of the mountainside, except for a narrow footpath built of flat, rough stones, with a wooden railing that served as a guard against the sheer drop to the desert floor far below. As far as he could see, beyond the reach of his vision, the desert stretched below and away, featureless and without color under the pale light of the thin moon. No one was on the walk. He moved quickly toward the main monastery building, and soon heard the voices of men, not angry but incredulous, asking questions, talking together. Presumably, these were the legitimate monks who had gathered in Wendy O’Hara’s Maharanda temple. Suddenly he heard two or three muffled shots. The voices fell silent. He did not know how many men Sinn had here. There had been two guns trained on them when they had ventured into the courtyard. There were surely others.

He came to another door at the end of the path. The door was recessed into the thick wall of the building. It was locked. He tested it carefully, aware of time running away from him. There was no key available.

He stepped back.

“Blow it, Andy.”

“A pleasure.”

They retreated to a safe distance and the long-haired man smiled and lobbed his grenade at the solid barrier. There was a violent burst of smoke and flame. Before it ended, Durell leaped through the broken, smoking doorway, his gun ready. Andy was hard on his heels. Coughing, Andy swung to right and left, spraying the interior darkness with wild bursts of automatic fire. There was no return fire. In another moment, they were racing down a long corridor. There was a row of monastic cells, all identical, each facing the sheer drop of the mountainside. The doors to the cells were all open, revealing emptiness inside, with slivers of moonlight shining through the narrow slots of the windows.

A man in a black robe, with a kite tied to his waist, appeared at the far end of the arch-roofed hallway. Durell fired once, saw the man stagger and fall, dropping his stubby automatic that was slung by a strap to his shoulder. Andy leaped over him. There was a dim light in the last cell at the end of the corridor. Durell checked Andy and stepped inside.

The huge, naked fat man who looked like nothing more than a pale, enormous bear, was in the act of turning away from the cot in the cell. His face was stupefied. Behind him, on the cot, was Deborah Quayle, her body covered with ugly, battering bruises. There was blood soaking the cot under her.

The naked fat man made a growling noise and tried to snatch at the girl to use her as a shield. Durell fired one shot at him. The slug smashed away the fat man’s nose, tore through his skull, and blew bits of bone, blood, and brains in a thin spatter against the yellow-stained walls of the cell. The fat man went backward, thick arms wind-milling, and crashed to the floor, dead.

“Watch the door, Andy.”

“Right. Is she your girl, Cajun?”

“No.”

“The Quayle girl?”

“I think so.”

Durell walked slowly to the cot. For a long moment, he didn’t know if the woman on the narrow pallet was alive or dead. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but she had not stirred or given any sign of awareness as to what was happening. She did not turn her head or look at Durell as he approached her. Then he saw the faint lift of her naked breasts as she drew in a slow breath.

“Deborah?” .

A thin whimpering sound came from her open mouth. “Deborah?”

Her eyes stared blindly upward, not turning to look at him. Andy made an impatient noise at the doorway. The girl breathed in again, a thin whispering, sighing sound. There were scratches on her face and her stomach, and he saw that her left hand was bandaged, where a finger was missing. He could not imagine the ordeal this girl had gone through during this past week in the hands of Dr. Mouquerana Sinn. But he could recognize what had been taking place in this bloody little cell, when he looked at the dead man, sprawling in obscene nakedness against the far wall.

“Cajun, let’s go,” Andy called impatiently.

“Stay here with Miss Quayle. Throw that blanket over her. She seems to be in shock.”

“Damn it, I don’t want to stay back.”

“She’s important. I’ll get in touch as soon as I can.” “You can’t go in there alone, Cajun.”

“I have to.”

Durell pushed past him and out into the corridor again. A wide flight of stone steps led upward at this end, toward the next floor, beyond two landings. He moved swiftly and silently, not checking to see if the DIA man obeyed his orders. He did not rate his chances of success against Mouquerana Sinn very high.

A door opened at the top of the dark stairway, and a monk stepped out in the shaft of pale yellow lamplight.

Durell’s gun jumped up. Another monk appeared, and then another. Five of them, altogether. They did not seem to be armed. Neither did they have the little black kites tied to their waist belts. He eased the pressure of his finger on the trigger.

The first monk appeared to be an American. There was a Chinese, a black man, and another older white. The fifth to appear in the silent tableau at the head of the stone steps, surprisingly, was a young Korean girl. The group simply stood and watched him as he paused below.

“Please, sir,” said the American. “Do not use your gun. We do not believe in violence.”

“Who are you?”

“Dr. Sinn allowed us to remain here after he leased this place. We asked that we may be permitted to act as caretakers for the Maharanda Shrine, and maintain Miss O’Hara’s living quarters, pending Dr. Sinn’s departure and the return of our brothers and sisters.”

Durell moved up to the head of the stairway. From the landing, a short hall led to an open door into what looked like a communal dining room. The monks stepped back as they looked at his gun. The Korean girl blinked and looked tearful.

“Please,” said the leader again.

“Where is Dr. Sinn now?” Durell asked.

“He is in Miss O’Hara’s living quarters. Is Wendy all right? We thought we heard her scream. We know she came back here. They treated her disgracefully.”

“How many men are here with Dr. Sinn?”

“He is a false Maharanda. He and all his people are false. We realize that now. He came in the plane with five others. There were others who came and went. A Japanese man arrived with him, departed, returned, then left and did not come back. But he always kept five with him.”

Durell nodded. The odds were a bit better than he had hoped. He had taken out the one who came to the cantina down in the village, at Vincente’s. He had killed the fat man who had tormented Deborah Quayle. And there was the one he had shot in the lower corridor. Dr. Sinn had only two men left. They would be his best, of course. Under normal circumstances, Sinn would be vulnerable now. But he held the most potent weapon of all, in Durell’s mind.

He had Deirdre.

He spoke to the Korean girl.

“Will one of you take me to Dr. Sinn?”

“But we—”

“Walk ahead of me, then. All of you.”

The Korean girl whispered, “We are afraid.”

They looked helpless, this little band of idealists, these seekers of peace. Only in isolation, apart from the world, could they pursue their quest for tranquility. But despite their flight from the world, it had come to them, and there was no place for them to go now.

“Lead the way,” Durell insisted.

He gestured with his gun. Reluctantly, the five people in their simple black robes turned and walked slowly ahead of him, while he herded them as a shield and a barrier against any of Dr. Mouquerana Sinn’s devices.

He heard a bell ring, and then a gong announced a loud, vibrant alarm. The monks hesitated and looked back at him. Then they went on, herded ahead by his gun. There was still another short hallway, then a small antechamber. The monks had turned it into a chapel of sorts. Incense choked the air, burning before a plain, stone sculpture of Buddha with eyes downcast and a small, introspective smile on the carved lips. The American monk hesitated. His shaven head glistened in the light of stone Chinese lanterns that burned at either hand of the smiling Buddha.

“Go ahead,” Durell urged.

“Yes, do come in, Mr. Durell.”

It was the voice of Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.

Chapter Nineteen

The huge chamber was a part of the original monastery, with an arched ceiling from which chunks of plaster had fallen long ago, revealing the original brick with which the first monks had built the structure more than three centuries ago. The light came from a large candelabra of silver, holding thick, white candles. A wide picture window of plate glass, obviously installed recently by Wendy O’Hara, reflected their images against the blackness of the desert night and the high, starry sky. Durell turned to the thronelike chair occupied by Dr. Sinn. The stout man smiled serenely at him. At another chair, drawn up to a plain pine table, Deirdre sat in stiff hostility. One kited monk stood beside Dr. Sinn with a stubby automatic rifle ready; the other stood behind Deirdre and held a long, slender knife at her throat.

The other monks crowded in ahead of him. Durell could smell their fear.

“Dee?” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry you’re here, Sam. But please don’t pay any attention to me,” she said in a whisper. Her face was pale, but her back was straight and her head was haughty, and she showed her defiance in her bright, angry eyes. “I’m sorry they took me, darling. Marcus couldn’t help it. We both did the best we could. They came in saying you’d been hurt at the cantina.” She did not look directly at Durell. “It’s all right, though. Don’t mind me. Kill him, if you can.”

Dr. Sinn chuckled. “How noble of you, my dear. Do you offer yourself as a sacrifice? And are you prepared to have me kill these innocent young people, these disciples of peace, that Durell uses as a shield? Send them away, Mr. Durell. They are merely a nuisance. Their presence can change nothing. Or would you have their lives on your conscience, my dear boy?”

The monks looked at him with pleading eyes. Durell did not doubt that Sinn meant what he said. He nodded, and as one they turned and squeezed past him, their slippers scuffing on the stone floor, their coarse black robes rustling. None of them spoke. The last one out, the little Korean girl, quietly closed the heavy plank door.

Dr. Sinn chuckled again. “I rather expected you to let them go. You have the American temperament, Durell. Noble and self-sacrificing and unwilling to use helpless victims to further your aims. But you see Miss Padgett before you, as close to death as the edge of Mahmoud’s knife. Your gun is useless, although you point it at my heart. Will you fire at me? Deirdre will die before your bullet kills me. Again, I call upon your idealism to do nothing foolish. We will simply have a friendly conversation, you and I, and resolve this impasse.”

“We are not friends,” Durell said.

“But we can be reasonable enemies. Within an hour, I expect my plane to return again from the East Coast. A few minutes later, I shall leave this crude, disappointing place.”

“And where will you go?” Durell asked. “You’ve lost the game. You’ve lost Tomash’ta, and even though you killed Yoshi Akuro in Virginia, when he took over after his brother’s death and rebelled against what you were doing with I. Shumata trading corporation. You’ve certainly lost Rufus Quayle and Q.P.I.”

“I have his daughter,” Sinn said placidly.

“Yes, I’ve seen Deborah. She’s worse than dead.”

“But still a useful tool. How have I lost Rufus Quayle?”

Durell said flatly, “Mr. Quayle is with us. He is safe.

You will never reach him. He’s still stubborn and determined never to sell out to you.”

“My dear Durell, you know better than that. Time is on my side. What is time? A week? A month? A year? Can you keep Rufus Quayle safe indefinitely? You know our business. You know that, given patience, anyone can successfully achieve a killing. Sooner or later, the victim is exposed to the patient man. I have the time and the patience, sir. Your Rufus Quayle will yield.”

“And you’ve lost Eli Plowman.”

“Ah, yes. Another useful tool shattered. A competent man. His fault lay in always trying to cover his bets, eh? He led you on and on, from one trap to another, second-guessing his efforts to eliminate you. So he led you here, too. Well, you see what Plowman’s worth is to me. Is he truly dead? I rather hope so. He was too accustomed to commanding his own organization, and not too happy in taking orders from me.”

“He’s dead,” Durell said.

“And you are here. He did that for me, at any rate. You axe here with Deirdre Padgett. So I have you all, after all, eh?”

Mouquerana Sinn seemed pleased and jovial. He did not bother to look at Deirdre, seated at the table where Deborah had been interrogated. One of the thick candles in the ornate candelabra sputtered and went out. Sinn turned his head slowly and stared at the remaining light. Behind his eyes was the ruby glitter of madness. His tiny feet, that could scarcely support his great, gross bulk for more than a few tottering steps, dangled several inches above the stone floor. He wore a dark-red robe that did nothing to conceal his vast belly and thick chest; his head seemed small in comparison to the rest of his body. His face, that curious Eurasian mixture of features that had haunted Durell’s dreams for a time last year, seemed to emanate the evil that the man espoused.

Dr. Sinn spoke carefully.

“Another candle will go out in approximately one minute, Durell. And then another. There are ten candles in all. One by one, they will extinguish themselves while we talk. At the end of that time, when we are in darkness, Mahmoud will draw his knife across the young lady’s throat. Deirdre will die. You can be assured of that. Nothing will stop him. It is a device that amuses me. But I am sure you will agree to my terms long before the last candle dies and darkness comes to us all.”

“What terms do you suggest?”

“First, naturally, you will produce Rufus Quayle for me.”

“Impossible.”

“Not here, of course. Not now. But soon. You will return to your abominable K Section and use your wits to shake him free. And then you will bring him to me.”

“And Deirdre?”

“The young lady and her foolish, stubborn cousin will remain with me, of course. You will be paid well, incidentally. And you will have no choice, afterward, but to work for me. There will be nowhere else in the world for you to go, naturally. You are one of the best, Durell. I admit it. You could be most useful to me.”

“Rufus Quayle will never sell Q.P.I. to you.”

Another candle went out.

“I have been successful against stubborn men before,” Sinn said smoothly. “What is money, after all, compared to life? Most men become reasonable when I confront them with such a choice. If they do not, they are destroyed and other men become my tools. You and I have spoken of this before. Power is the ultimate reward for man. I crave it. I must have it. It is my destiny, even my duty, to possess it. More than jewels or women or even wealth, the ability to sway the destiny of mankind yields the highest reward. It can come to conquerors at the head of armies; but alas, I am not an emperor of material things. I command no heads of state as yet, no weapons of war. Would that I did! Still, there are other ways, you see.”

“You would like to control the minds of men,” Durell suggested.

“The power of communication media has been well illustrated in these days of advanced technology. I have made a start. I have acquired most of these tools. The network is almost complete. Already, I have tested the machinery of my media. There is war between several African states, revolution in Asia, and the peoples of two European nations have been angered with each other to the point of violence. In the Mideast, more war will most assuredly break out soon.

“All this has been done through suggestion, my dear Durell. Through messages that gradually instill the flames of passion and intolerance in the minds of men. It can be done here, too. With Q.P.I., the majority of middle America can be swayed in one direction or another. Even the most sophisticated society can be brought to an emotional pitch of self-destruction. I shall succeed. And although you checked me once before, as you say, I rise again, and in the future you shall be my good lieutenant.”

Two more candles sputtered and died.

There were shadows in the comers of the big room now. Durell moved a little to the right, away from the massive planked doorway at his back. He kept his gun pointed at Mouquerana Sinn’s heart. A little star twinkled through the plate-glass window. The guard at Sinn’s left hand stirred impatiently. A bit of pressure on the man’s trigger-finger, and Durell would be blown apart by the explosive bullets in the cartridge chamber.

He looked at Deirdre. Her face was pale but calm. She sat quietly at the table, her hands folded before her, her eyes reflecting concern only for him. The knife in the hand of Sinn’s creature behind her was only an inch from her throat.

“Well, Mr. Durell?” the fat man asked.

“It’s no deal.”

“But you are hardly in a position to bargain, my dear Durell.”

“Let Deirdre and Deborah go free. Then maybe we can talk business.”

“Nonsense. Do not insult me by presuming that I am foolish.”

“You can keep me. Let the girls go.”

Dr. Sinn shifted his great bulk irritably in his big chair. Still another candle sputtered and died. The shadows deepened.

“Your time for bargaining has run out, and will soon be finished, Durell. You will work for me. The girls will remain with me. If you do not return to me with Rufus Quayle, at a prescribed place and at a specific time, they will die. There will be no element of grace granted. They will not die mercifully, you can be sure. You may think I am weakened here, without much help in the way of aides. But I am not without other resources. You are a pragmatic, reasonable man. You have been in your business for a long time. You are good at what you do. Excellent, I may say. Do not protest to me that the task I set for you, in bringing Rufus Quayle to me, is impossible.”

“It’s not impossible. I could do it,” Durell said.

“Sam—” Deirdre began.

He did not look at her. The room was already cast in half shadow, and the great bulk of Mouquerana Sinn’s body cast a black blot against the ochre-plastered wall. The reflections in the big glass window were weaker now, and he could see more stars in the sky beyond its shimmering width.

He thought he saw something, just above the lower edge of the sill. A few of the lower stars were blotted out. Then several more.

Just a few more candles, he thought.

A few more minutes.

He did not look at the window again.

He looked directly at Dr. Sinn and spoke with blunt harshness. He said, “Rufus Quayle is dying. He has cancer of the throat. It seems to be beyond help. That’s why he disappeared from sight and his radio editorials are no longer heard. He was hiding out in Ca’d’Orizon in New Jersey like a wounded animal. He hasn’t lost his strength of mind, however. I tell you, he will not sell or sign over Q.P.I. under any conditions, Not for his own safety, which has become meaningless to him considering his private sentence of death—which makes one of your weapons, a man’s fear of his mortality, meaningless to him—nor will he give up Q.P.I., his private symbol of his life’s work, in exchange for Deborah’s safety. So you see, you lose whatever you try. Any trip back to Washington that I might make for you would be without meaning.”

“Is Quayle in Washington?”

“Yes.”

“With your people?”

“Yes.”

“How much time does he have?”

“A month. Maybe more. Maybe less.”

“It is enough.”

Sinn leaned back and sighed with satisfaction. His huge face creased in a smile.

He said, “There are many ways to persuade a stubborn man, even a man who is dying. Your own time is running out, Durell. You see, two more candles are gone. The shadows fall. Mahmoud likes to use his knife. Your woman is very beautiful. Would it not be a pity to have her die? It would be useless; and a terrible waste. And you would gain nothing by her death. I still have Deborah.”

“No, you don’t,” Durell said. “One of my men is with her.”

Sinn leaned his great bulk forward a little. “You have no other men. They were all killed in the courtyard. Otherwise, you would not have been so foolish as to come into this room alone.”

This time Durell was certain of the movement he had seen just above the windowsill, on the outside of the building. He saw the face of the Korean girl, the little acolyte monk, very briefly. Then the familiar mop of wild hair from Andy’s head lifted above the bottom of the window, peering into the room. He saw a glass cutter in Andy’s hand, and he began to talk again to cover any sound that the sharp little roller might make. He spoke of the secret passage into Ca’d’Orizon, and how Plowman might have used it to gain passage into the New Jersey house, and the way Plowman might have snatched Rufus Quayle long ago. He talked of the zaibatsu, how the

Tokyo government was even now beginning an investigation that would uncover I. Shumata as a commercial front for Mouquerana Sinn’s efforts to seize control of world-wide media conglomerates.

Dr. Sinn listened with the first signs of impatience glittering in his strange, colorless eyes.

There were only three candles left now. The room was deep in flickering, shifting shadows. Andy had completed cutting out the small circle in the plate-glass window. He raised his fist as a signal that he was ready to punch out the entire hole.

“You are running out of time, Durell,” Dr. Sinn said. “You are talking too much and too freely. It makes me wonder why. Your young lady will die in a very few minutes now. Do you or do you not agree to my offer?”

“No,” Durell said. “I do not agree.”

He raised his hand for Andy.

Andy’s fist came through the glass in a single, sharp, explosive blow. At the same moment, Durell swung and fired at Mahmoud, who held his knife at Deirdre’s throat. Both Sinn and the guard with the stubby automatic rifle had both swung in instinctive surprise toward the sound of breaking glass at the window. Andy’s gun clamored from outside. Everything seemed to happen at once. Durell dived, for the table, aware of Mahmoud falling, swaying like a giant tree, but still trying to raise the knife in his hand. Deirdre fell to the floor. The reports of Andy’s gun slammed back and forth in the big room. Durell hit the flooring tiles and turned, skidding on his right shoulder, and fired at the second guard. Andy had already hit him, driving him back against the wall behind Sinn’s chair; the man’s chest seemed to collapse while his automatic rifle stuttered and slammed explosive bullets across the room, gouging out great gouts of plaster from the opposite wall. The room was filled with dust and smoke.

Mouquerana Sinn half rose from his great chair and tottered to his feet. His feet were not capable of supporting his bulk. His face changed, looked incredulous, then enraged. A madness bloomed in it like some inner infection suddenly running wild.

“Dee!” Durell shouted.

“I’m all right, Sam.”

The great plate-glass window shattered with an explosive noise. Andy came tumbling in over the sill. Behind him, the Korean girl, still in her dark robes, followed with the agility of an acrobat.

“Hold it!” Durell snapped to Dr. Sinn.

The man was trying for Mahmoud’s lost knife. He had his fingers on it when Durell aimed carefully and shot him.

Durell walked to the broken window. It looked as if the building went down in a sheer drop to the desert floor a thousand feet below. But when he leaned out, he saw the narrow ridge of concrete, less than six inches wide, which ornamented the base of the monastery. It had been a reckless, hazardous path for Andy to follow.

Andy coughed and waved a hand in front of his face to dispel the drifting dust and smoke. He grinned as Durell came back from the window.

“The Maharanda people decided to help us. That ledge goes around the whole building and passes just under the window. The girl knew about it. She’s pretty good, Cajun. I was afraid to look down or I’d have lost my cookies.”

The Korean girl was looking at Sinn’s corpulent body and at the other two of Sinn’s guards. She began to weep.

“You don’t have to cry for them, sweetheart,” Andy said. He bent down to pick up the guns. The big red heart appliqued to the seat of his pants was torn. “The world is better off without them.”

Durell helped Deirdre to her feet.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

She nodded and clung to him just as the last candle in the room flickered and went out.

Chapter Twenty

Dickinson McFee’s voice sounded distant and crackly over the long-distance Mexican telephone lines and the faraway connections to Washington. He also sounded very impatient.

“But what about the Mexican police, Samuel?”

“It’s all taken care of.”

“But you say there was shooting and a number of casualties. Samuel, we try to be unobtrusive—”

“Sir, it’s going into the official reports as a kind of gang war between hippie smugglers of grass and hash and LSD —you name it. This Miss Wendy O’Hara is quite a woman. She carries a lot of clout locally. Whenever any young Americans showed up in San Luis Francesco, she bullied them into giving up their little caches of dope. She managed to collect quite a bundle of the drugs. Together, we stowed it around the winery so that any investigative cop would find it with no trouble and put their own two-and-two together. There’s no sweat, six.”

McFee said, “I see,” as if he saw nothing at all. “And what about Marcus?”

“He’s in the local hospital,” Durell said. “He’ll be fine.” “But you are not in San Luis Francesco at the moment, I gather.”

“No, sir. Forty miles away. A little fishing town on the coast. There’s a qualified hospital here and a little hotel. Deirdre and I are at the hotel. I’d planned to rest up a bit, perhaps for a few days.”

“You have a week, Samuel.”

“More than enough, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Are you being sarcastic with me, Samuel?”

“You haven’t asked about Deborah Quayle yet.” Durell paused. “You have Rufus Quayle and Q.P.I. in your pocket, so you’re no longer concerned, are you?”

“Of course I’m concerned, Samuel.”

“I’ll bet.”

There was an impatient pause on the crackling line. The hotel was on the beach facing the Pacific. Some tuna boats were moving across the horizon. It was just a little after dawn, and Durell had had no sleep since leaving the Maharanda winery and arranging with Wendy O’Hara for her silence with the cops. He knew that by calling at this dawn hour he had reached McFee at about eight in the morning. He didn’t care.

There was a big double breakfast waiting for him on a tray, and a large, inviting bed. The smiling manager of the posada had been more than cooperative. The place was small, untouched by tourists. The low Spanish arcades in the courtyard were filled with dark red roses, and a tiled fountain splashed pleasantly in the center of the court, where pigeons made early-morning burbling noises. The day promised to be cloudless. A stout, black-garbed Mexican woman hurried along under the columned arcade, carrying more trays. Two chickens fluttered and clucked at her heels.

“Samuel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought we had been disconnected. You’ll send in your usual report?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll have the happy task of telling Mr. Rufus Quayle that his daughter is safe.”

McFee’s voice was dry. “I assumed she was, or you would have mentioned it.”

“But she’s in a bad way.” Durell’s voice grew sober. “She’s had a very bad time of it, sir. She’s in the hospital with Marcus. They’ll both be out in a few days. She’s been physically and mentally abused to the point where

she’s in a state of collapse. It will take awhile for her to recover.”

“Rufus Quayle will see to all that.”

“Yes, sir. And Q.P.I.?”

“It stays independent, of course.”

“And the trading company, I. Shumata, that Dr. Sinn took over?”

McFee said, “The State Department will handle all that. It’s not your worry. They’re already in close cooperation with the Japanese government, investigating it. It will show up Dr. Sinn’s manipulations, of course, and his illegal acquisitions, through terrorism and murder. It will be broken up, of course. Moreover ...”

Durell stopped listening. Deirdre came out of the big yellow-tiled bath, wearing a thin blue bathrobe the maid had lent her. She had washed her long, thick hair, and it glistened like dark copper in the early-morning light. The robe was not tied about her slender waist, and he could see too much of her as she walked toward him.

He felt suddenly awkward, as if he had never been alone with her like this before. He looked carefully at her eyes, searching for anything remotely resembling the look in Deborah Quayle’s eyes. There was nothing to be alarmed about. Her smile was still the same warm, serene smile she always had; her eyes that met his told him all the close things she had always told him. He could hear the distant crash and sigh of the surf on the beach beyond the hotel’s red-tiled roofs.

“Samuel?” It was the telephone again.

“Yes, sir.”

“Deirdre is unharmed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Certain? Quite all right?”

“Very much all right,” Durell said. Deirdre came toward him, her hand reaching for him, and he added, “I’ll see you in a week, sir.”

Table of Contents

Part Two

Chapter Ten

Part Five

Chapter Nineteen