Assignment - Ankara (7 page)

Nothing happened.

Kappic’s lantern showed a barren little cell exactly like all the others they had passed. There were two cots in it, but one was empty. Durell expelled a long breath and walked over to the man who lay on his back on the other cot.

“Is it Dr. Uvaldi?” Kappic asked, his voice harsh.

“Yes,” Durell said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

Durell stared down at the man on the cot. There was no mistake about Uvaldi’s identity, according to the description given to him by Dinty Simpson in Ankara. Short, dark of skin, with a broad flat forehead and a shock of gray hair and spade beard, Uvaldi lay in his clothes with his eyes open, the whites faintly glittering in the light of Kappic’s lamp. The man’s tongue protruded slightly from between his small white teeth. Durell touched his cheek with the back of his fingers. The flesh was still warm. There was a mottled bruise on the dead man’s flat forehead that had already turned yellow in the past twenty-four hours. A bandage had been neatly applied to the left wrist—apparently the work of the Turkish doctor below.

“But what is it?” Kappic insisted hoarsely. “I was told he was recuperating very well, that he was only slightly injured and resting—” The Turk’s military boots scraped harshly on the stone floor as he neared the cot.“Was it a heart attack, do you think?”

“No,” Durell said.

He flashed the light all around the cubicle. If Uvaldi had been ready to leave for the States, there was no trace of luggage, either handbag or attache case. Gently, Durell turned the dead man over.

There was a small tear in the back of Uvaldi’s checked coat, and he parted it with careful fingers, aware of Kappic’s tight breathing beside him. Under the torn cloth was the gleam of a shining steel pin, an eight of an inch in diameter, and certainly long enough to reach a man’s heart. Durell had seen a weapon like this before, among samples taken from the equipment of enemy agents. He straightened, and as Lieutenant Kappic started to ask another question, he said flatly, “We’re a few minutes too late, Mustapha. Uvaldi was just murdered.”

He turned away from the dead man, aware of Kappic’s silence, aware of a sense of defeat. He hadn’t known Dr. Uvaldi, except as a name, a contact to be made and a package to be escorted home. If Uvaldi had died naturally, or as a result of the earthquakes, he would have accepted this and gone on, accustomed to the ironic turns of fate. But this was neither an accident nor a natural event.

Someone had had a purpose in killing Uvaldi. And it had been done recently, within the past half-hour.

There was no expression of surprise on the dead man’s bearded face, but that was not necessarily of significance, because this method of killing was swift and practically painless.

He made a rapid, thorough search of the sparsely furnished cell, opened the single narrow window and looked down at the courtyard below. The smell of charcoal smoke and dung, of huddled cattle and sheep and men, filled the cold night air. He heard the mutterings and groanings of the ragged refugees and the thin bleating of a goat. He returned to the dead man and searched the body while Kappic held the lamp.

There was nothing to be found. The tapes were gone. “Mr. Durell?” the lieutenant said quietly.

“Somebody beat us to it.” Durell’s voice was hard, angry. “There was a leak somewhere, somehow. Somebody knew that Uvaldi had something important for us.”

“But how could that be? Your security was excellent.” “It couldn’t have been. It rarely is.”

“But this means—”

“Somebody is in this village with us right now,” Durell said, turning to the door. “Trapped in the valley, too. He’s got the tapes, and we’ve got to find him.”

“Are you sure it was a man?”

Durell looked at the dark face of the Turk. “I’m not sure of anything. Something bad must have happened to Bert Anderson. He’s tough and knows his business.” He paused. “You may be right, though—it could have been a woman.” “Perhaps the Stuyvers woman—or the girl we found, who calls herself Dr. Uvaldi’s daughter?”

“Let’s ask her,” Durell said.

Kappic started out of the cell first. The stone corridor was still dark where the lanterns had been removed, and only a dim glow filtered around the hall corner from the other area of the ancient caravansary.

There was no warning as they moved out. The man charged them like an enormous engine of fury.

Kappic, who was built like a bull, was hurled aside like a child. He slammed into Durell, was thrown off balance against the cell doorway. There was a grunt and curse from the Turk, the scrape of driving shoes on the stone floor. Kappic’s strangled shout echoed oddly as Durell spun around him, glimpsing a tall shadow that leaped toward the lighter comer of the corridor. The man who had been hiding in the dead end of the hallway had tremendous size and strength. But before he could get away from Kappic’s thrashing figure, the other had burst free and leaped out of sight.

Durell sprinted after him. He could not tell if the tall man was armed, but he got his gun out before he reached the turn in the corridor. Kappic pounded hard at his heels. There was a shout from ahead, a cry of pain, and as Durell rounded the corner, plunging into the lighted area, he saw the white-coated doctor on his hands and knees, shaking his head in a stunned way, his stethoscope bent and twisted as if trodden on by a heavy foot. Grating footsteps clattered on the stone steps to the ground floor below.

He ran around the doctor, shouting, hoping to get someone downstairs to delay or stop the fugitive. So far, he knew only that the man was big, powerful and ruthless—and perhaps panicked by having been trapped in the corridor when he and Kappic arrived. The man must have been cursing his bad luck in choosing the precise moment when he and Kappic left Uvaldi’s cell to make a break for it. But beyond this, Durell had not seen the man’s face and had no idea of his identity.

He slammed down the worn, circular steps just too late to catch another glimpse of his quarry. In the main hall to his right, where the sick and injured earthquake victims had been gathered to lie on their straw pallets, a native woman stood staring, open-mouthed. She pointed wordlessly toward the open entrance to the courtyard, saw Durell’s gun, and tightened her mouth in antagonism. He did not stop to find out what this meant. With Kappic at his heels, he ran out into the courtyard.

Smoke from the campfires of the refugees drifted with the cold night wind across his face. He halted, looking at the strangely medieval scene. Kappic paused with him.

“Is he here?”

“I don’t know,” Durell said quietly.

“Be careful, then.”

The tunnel-like passage to the street opposite them was a dark hole beyond the fires and the huddled, listless shapes of the villagers. Durell was aware of a few curious, pale faces turned toward him, but there was a strange, oppressive silence that seemed hostile, like a dark pall of the family groups hunched about their fires. Any one of the black shapes around any of the campfires might be their man, holding those next to him in the silence of terror. He tried to pick out the biggest of the men, but they were only anonymous shadows in the strange, ruddy glow of the charcoal fires.

Kappic swung harshly toward the nearest group and barked a question in gutteral Turkish. He received shrugs and a gesture from a withered old woman. She pointed to the arcaded entrance of the courtyard. Durell started that way without waiting for more.

They were too late again.

A shadow suddenly lunged from the darkness of the tunnel, silhouetted against the gray night light in the street beyond. Durell shouted a warning and threw a snap shot at the dim, huge figure. He missed. The man vanished to the left, and as Durell plunged for the courtyard exit, a bundle of rags around the last campfire spitefully thrust out a foot to trip him. He stumbled slightly, kept going, but the momentary delay was enough. By the time he reached the village street, there was nothing to be seen again.

Kappic breathed hard beside him.

“He is fast, this one.”

“And big," Durell said.

“Not big enough to hide forever in the village.”

“We don’t have forever in which to find him,” Durell said.

They spoke in quick, soft whispers, scanning the ruined village street before them. Nothing stirred except for the shape of a cat slinking in the shadows of the rubble of a wrecked house. With the clearing sky, the stars shone like burnished metal over the dark gloom of the surrounding mountains. The air was cold, cutting at Durell’s face. The street slanted upward, following the shoulder of the mountain, for several hundred yards toward the huts where Durell had put Francesca and the Stuyvers couple. But nothing moved that he could see, except for the prowling cat.

They started up the street, hugging the shadows of the dark stone houses. Durell had the indefinable sensation of being watched. He tried to put himself in the place of the fugitive in order to out-think his quarry. The man was frightened, despite his size and physical strength. He had just committed a cold and brutal murder, and stolen the tapes from the dead Dr. Uvaldi. So far, he had been successful. But at the last moment, he had been unwittingly trapped in the caravansary, and it was plain that Durell’s arrival with the Turk had been totally unexpected. There was no way at the moment to guess the man’s identity. But it didn’t matter. He was a murderer, an enemy agent trained in cunning and force, in brutality and violence, dedicated to his mission. Durell wondered if he was armed. No shots had been returned for the one he had snapped at the running man. But that didn’t mean anything necessarily, either.

The cat suddenly scampered away up the middle of the stone-paved street, tail erect, moving in quick erratic leaps, as if chasing an evasive rat. It vanished among the towering mass of rubble where a stone house on the slope above had collapsed in yesterday’s tremors and poured a small landslide of building blocks and timbers on the house below. The street was partly blocked at this point, almost like a deliberate barricade. He could not see completely around it, and halted again.

“I do not like this, Durell,” Kappic whispered.

“You think he’s waiting somewhere for us?”

“We are his only known enemies. It would be wise for him to get rid of us—”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Kappic was slightly ahead, halted under the crumbled wall. At that moment the cat uttered a thin scream of fright and came scampering out of the rubble again, streaking across the village street. Another movement caught Durell’s eye, overhead on top of the wall. It was only a vague shifting of the shadows up there in the ruined house, but it was enough—

He shouted a warning, leaped forward, and shoved Kappic ahead and out of the way with both hands. Simultaneously, a huge building stone came loose from the top of the wall and crashed down upon the spot where the Turk had been standing. Durell jumped over it, ignoring Kappic who was sprawled in the street, and leaped up onto the rubble heap. Above him loomed the tall, massive figure of his opponent, outlined for a frozen instant against the starry sky. Then, with astonishing speed, the man turned and leaped away and vanished.

“Halt!” Durell shouted.

He fired again at the flickering shadow, then jumped from the rubble after him. Kappic shouted something from below, but Durell did not pause. Beyond the wreckage of the house, a flight of stone steps led up into a narrow alley that climbed the mountainside. Several other houses had suffered collapsed roofs here, and their tiles littered the paving. Durell scrambled upward, gun in hand, angry at the other man’s attempt to kill them and frustrated by the fugitive’s speed. He reached the top of the stone steps and looked to the right and left. The wind blew across an open field that tilted sharply upward to a stone wall, where barren fruit trees rattled their limbs under the starry sky. He paused, drew a deep breath. To the left were more houses; to the right were the back gardens and plots of the villagers, reaching toward the end of the settlement where Francesca Uvaldi was quartered. He started that way.

The man had fewer choices of hiding places now, having been flushed out of the village streets and away from the earthquake rubble. But again he was nowhere to be seen. Durell moved cautiously, aware of the danger of another lethal trap. He heard Kappic call faintly from the street below, but he did not reply, hoping their quarry might think they were both still down there. A stone wall with a wooden gate in it blocked his way. Beyond was a small orchard, a field of brush, and a stone hut. He eased up to the gate, paused, listened, breathing lightly, hoping to catch some sound that might betray the other’s position. But he heard nothing except the wind in the fruit trees. Then there was a vague shouting from the dark shadows of the caravanary behind him. He turned his head and saw lights flickering down there, and a small group of men came out into the street with torches and lanterns. Perhaps the doctor had rallied them to hunt for the murderer. The villagers scattered, some heading toward the small bridge over the flooded river at the lower end of the village. A few others moved tentatively in Durell’s direction; but they were too far away to do much good, and he did not want anyone else to confuse the area at this moment.

He went through the gate fast, dropped into a crouch, felt something whistle through the air close to his head, breaking with a clatter against the stone wall. It was a rock, thrown with brutal strength and speed. Durell leaped up and ran forward through the orchard. The earth was hard and rubbly underfoot. He heard a man’s thick-throated cry and saw his quarry rise like a giant from the shadows and run away again, from the opposite side of the clustered fruit trees, zigzagging into the brushy field beyond. Durell drove after him, holding his fire. If the man had had a gun, he would have used it instead of throwing the rock. And if it was possible to capture the killer alive, he wanted to do so.

He fired once into the air, however, as a warning, and kept running. He closed the gap only slightly. Ahead, and a little to the left down the slope, was Francesca Uvaldi’s hut, and beyond that was the one occupied by John and Susan Stuyvers. The big man wavered, slowed, half-turned. In the starlight, Durell saw his chest heave as he struggled for breath, saw the dark open mouth in a strong, frustrated face, and also saw that the man was wearing a dark suit of Western clothes. The man ran again, evasively, down the hill—and then suddenly went down with a cry of alarm and surprise to go headlong down the gravelly slope.