Assignment to Disaster

It came to Durell at the K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency this way:

Calvin Jackson Padgett disappeared.

He vanished from his guarded quarters, slipped past the military police on duty, walked through a compound teeming with activity, passing hundreds of men, got beyond the barbed wire, eluded the radar screen, escaped the copter patrol, and vanished.

From Las Tiengas the orders poured out:

Find him.

A score, a hundred, a thousand men began to fan out from the desert experimental base, from Las Tiengas, from the whole state of New Mexico, from the entire Southwest.

Find him, stop him, gag him.

If necessary, kill him!

Calvin Padgett, M.S., Maryland born, electronics technician, age twenty-eight, six feet even, weight 155, sandy hair, blue eyes, small scar on right jaw, soft-spoken. Medical history: excellent check-out on physiological examination; psychiatric tests recently disclosed anxiety neurosis, cause unknown. Dangerous. Armed. Rebellious.

Throughout the country, the search was like a subdued electrical vibration, silent, pulsing, grim. One clue, finally: Padgett called his sister in Washington, D.C. There is a record of the long-distance call in the central telephone office at Las Tiengas.

So it came to Sam Durell:

Get to the girl. See if she knows where he is, why he ran. There isn't much time. Five days. If he opens his mouth, it will only take five minutes and all hell will break loose. He knows too much about Cyclops.

And what is Cyclops?

Nothing you need to know, Durell. Get to the sister. Work fast. Find Calvin Padgett!

Durell stood stiff-legged, feet apart, scowling, listening to the silence in the apartment. It was four o'clock in the morning. A light, cool mist was falling over Washington. He had searched the three rooms carefully, but everything was tidy, nothing to show that every inch of space had been examined. Durell was an expert In the kitchen, Art Greenwald had put a microphone bug under a cupboard shelf; another was pinned under a lamp shade, another under the bed. A touch of Art's humor. What the hell, Durell thought, what is this?

He had been asleep two hours ago. Now this. Callahan was standing on watch in the dark doorway down the street, near the corner. In the apartment basement, Greenwald and O'Meara, headphones clamped to their ears. In the car parked in the next block, Kelly and French.

But the girl was not here.

She had not slept here tonight, but she was coming back. Or was she? Her suitcase stood in the tiny foyer. It had been locked, but Durell had opened it and looked through it and now it was locked again. Deirdre Padgett, ready to travel. Where? When? And why wasn't she here?

He stood still, listening, absorbing, feeling the girl's presence in these rooms. Nice. Delicate perfume. Good clothes, smart styling. A tall girl, pleasant, clean, attractive. Red hair and long-legged (he knew this from his search, the lucite brushes, the neat sheer hose), a fine figure (he knew enough about women's clothing, brassieres, lacy underthings to make a damned good estimate). He felt he knew her intimately. It was part of his job, part of his training. You took nothing for granted, for sometimes death came very suddenly to the careless man.

He lit a cigarette, the click of his lighter noisy in the silent room. The misty dawn wind blew the curtains inward, but tomorrow promised to be hot in Washington. Durell was a tall man, in his early thirties, with a thin dark mustache and blue eyes as quick to change temper as the sea. He had a heavy musculature. His work in the past, with the old OSS, had required anonymity, and he knew how to keep silent and live with himself in silence, if he had to. His liaisons with women had been quick and easy, nothing deep. You didn't want anyone worrying about you, to make you overcautious, the surest way to get killed. He had inherited impeccable manners from his grandfather, whose notorious career as a Mississippi gambler had left him with some strange gifts.

The telephone rang and he picked it up quickly. Art Greenwald, in the basement.

"Sam? What gives with this bum?"

"I don't know."

"Hot?"

"Signal red."

"Damn. My wife and I were just about to…"

"Get off the line, Art," Durell said. "I'm waiting."

"Check. Roger. Salaam."

Durell hung up.

His cigarette burned down and he crushed it out in an ash tray and then put the butt in his pocket and wiped the cloisonné clean. Somewhere in the modest apartment house a door banged, an elevator whined. He tensed, listening. No one came to the door.

The street lamps were ringed with iridescent halos. Durell swore softly to himself. He wished he knew more about this one. He felt as if he were groping in the dark. He had never known a tighter security clamp.

The telephone rang again. Joe Masterson, at the bus station.

"Sam? She's spotted."

He blew out air. "Where?"

"Just got off the bus from Prince John, on the Chesapeake. I checked Swayney. Hell, there's a tumbledown ancestral home on the shore. Nobody knew about it, but that's where she's been."

"Damn it. And now?"

"She couldn't find a cab. She's on a bus, heading your way. Give her five, ten minutes."

"Good."

He hung up, relief working in him. Then he called Greenwald again and told him to touch Callahan on the corner, and Kelly and French in the car. Time was suspended afterward, while he waited.

He watched for her from the window, deciding what he could say to make her tell anything she knew about her missing brother. It would have to be played off the cuff. Swayney would have liked to work on this girl. He thought of Burritt Swayney, his immediate superior. Swayney had pale codfish eyes and a pursy mouth and an eternal rutting desire. Damn Swayney. I've been in this game too long, he thought. A spy. I ought to go back to something clean and honest, like Grandpa Jonathan's gambling.

He knew he was only kidding himself.

The girl appeared suddenly from around the dark corner. One moment the street was empty, wide, peaceful, pooled with shadow under the poplar trees. The next, here she comes, almost running, wearing a light tan topper over her shoulders. From the window, Durell watched her walk, almost skipping in her haste, from shadow to shadow on the old brick sidewalk. Long legs, red hair. Right. He glimpsed her face. Good bones, wide eyes shining. Shining with what? He saw her run now. Fear. Fright was in her.

Where in hell was Callahan? Durell looked down from the third-floor window at the empty street, the running girl. A lump of darkness sprawled in the doorway where Callahan had been. What had happened? He had left the window only to answer Masterson's call from the bus station.

Alarm jangled in him when he saw the car. It nosed around the corner silently, tires hissing on the wet asphalt, a big car, dark and powerful, sliding up upon the girl. She turned her head and saw it and a small scream came from her that reached Durell and then she started to run in earnest. Durell saw no more of it. He was already moving. Fast.

The door hit the wall as he flung it open and then he was at the steps, going down with great springing leaps, three at a time, swinging on the newel post at each landing. The lobby was dimly lighted. The glass door was heavy, resisting him with the suction of its pneumatic stops. The cool, damp air of dawn slapped at his face.

The girl had stopped running. She stood trembling on the sidewalk, like a doe caught in a trap, not knowing which way to run. Her tan topper had fallen to the wet bricks and he saw she was wearing a rust-red suit, a gold blouse, comfortable shoes. There was something wild and delicate and stricken about her.

A man jumped from the dark sedan and moved purposefully toward the girl. There was menace in his squat body, the swing of his arms as he reached for her. The girl dodged around him, started running again, saw Dwell, halted, thinking he was one of them. The man saw Durell at the same time. His face was a white anonymous wedge in the shadows, his mouth spreading in a tight grin. He swung something at Durell and Durell hit him three times, nape, navel, and kidneys. The man folded forward, then backward, and was on the sidewalk, his neural controls paralyzed. Without pause, Durell caught the girl's arm and flung her to one side. She tripped and stumbled as the shot flared from the driver of the dark sedan. The bullet slammed past Durell's ear. His head rang.

"Callahan!" he yelled. "Art!"

He had his gun out and the driver in the car saw it and slammed the sedan into gear. The car lurched ahead, engine roaring. Durell fired at the rear tire, missed, fired at the gas tank. The car was doing sixty at the corner. It swung in a wide skid, rear wheels spinning, hit the curb, straightened, and was gone.

From around the opposite corner came another car. Kelly and French were in it. Durell waved them on in pursuit of the black sedan. Kelly took the next corner with an identical skid. Durell did not have much hope that they would catch up with their quarry.

He drew a deep breath, turned, and saw that the man he had knocked down on the sidewalk was up again, running with a queer, staggering gait toward the corner where Callahan should have been waiting. And this time Callahan was there, on hands and knees, crawling out of the doorway. The gun glinted in his hand, rapped once, and the running man tripped over his own feet and skidded face down across the wet bricks and flopped prone, topcoat spread wide, like a dead bat. Durell swore and ran toward him.

A face that didn't mean anything. A hole through the side of his head. Dead. Silent. Who he was, what he was, why he was after the girl — gone.

Ignoring Callahan, Durell swung back to the girl. She had not moved. She stood pressed against an iron hairpin fence, the back of her hand to her mouth. Her eyes glinted white with her terror.

"Miss Padgett?"

She nodded quickly, mutely.

"You're all right. Please stay here. The danger is over."

"You're police?"

"In a way."

He saw that she was not going to run away again, and this time he crossed the street with a long stride and went to Callahan. He heard Greenwald and O'Meara come tearing out the basement door of the girl's apartment building, but he didn't look back. Callahan was on his feet now, holding his head. Blood made dark wriggling lines down the side of his face.

"What happened to you?" Durell asked.

"I don't know. One minute I was standing here, watching, like. The next minute the lights went out."

"Somebody caught you from behind. They were laying for this girl and they knew we were waiting for her, too. Who?"

"Christ, who knows?"

"Did you shoot for his head?" Durell asked.

"No. Hell, is he dead, like?"

"Like a mackerel. Forget it. You couldn't help it."

"Sam, I'm sorry."

"Forget it. Check out. Take care of your noggin."

Greenwald and O'Meara were with the girl. Durell waved them away and took her arm.

"Are you all right, Miss Padgett?"

She nodded, eyes still wide, still frightened. And more. Her eyes hated him. Durell caught it before her expression was veiled.

"Let's go upstairs. We've got to talk to you."

"About my brother?" She resisted his hand on her arm.