Assignment — Angelina (23 page)

The sound of his gun raised smashing echoes in the underground room. Fleming went down as if his leg had been yanked out from under him, and the gun in his hand went clattering to the tiled floor. He began to scream before the echoes died away, staring wide-eyed at his shattered leg. Durell spun around toward Jessie Corbin at the table. She wasn't there. She was running for a door at the far end of the plotting chamber, carrying her precious camera. Durell raised his gun, then lowered it. He couldn't shoot her. She knew too much. She knew the name of the traitor in Washington.

Fleming's screams followed him as he plunged into a back corridor behind the plotting room. Apparently Jessie Corbin knew exactly where she was going; she ad thoroughly memorized the blueprints to this maze. He glimpsed her as she darted through another doorway, and as Durell ran after her through the exit, a man on his hands and knees got in his way and Durell stumbled and fell over him and slammed hard against the wall. The man was an army sergeant, crawling stolidly toward a telephone on a desk in the corridor. The thought touched Durell that Corbin's gas was wearing off a few minutes earlier than expected. In a few more moments, all hell would break loose as the stunned garrison came back to life. There would be no time for questions or arguments with the aroused guards. They would shoot first at any stranger they saw.

He raced on after Jessie Corbin. There was a long stairway ahead, at the end of the corridor, and instead of climbing them to an upper level nearer the surface, she darted downward. Durell sprinted, glimpsed her as she turned a corner in the far depths, and heard a low, moaning alarm siren groan into life. More of the garrison members were coming to. He hit the stairs hard, his left hand sliding on the bannister, spinning on the newel posts at each landing. He had no idea where the girl was heading. Possibly for an elevator she knew about down here. She still had the camera, and he yelled her name, ordering her to halt. She didn't bother to look back. She was more than fifty feet ahead of him, running down a long ramp at the foot of the stairway, when he fired a shot over her head. Her body flinched, but she didn't stop. There was a door ahead, with large red warnings printed above it, and she yanked it open and ducked through. Durell looked at the atomic insigne and plunged after her.

He was in another huge, circular room, standing upon a gallery that ran high around the circumference of the pit below. The walls were tiled in ceramic white. More warning signs were hung everywhere. A technician in a white smock was standing dazedly on the floor of the pit far below the railing where Durell halted and looked down. The man was scratching his head and looking around as if wondering what had hit him. Durell saw the bank of instruments down there, the lights flickering, saw the massive wall of the atomic reactor, the shielded pipes, the dials and the controls, the doors on the gallery opposite the door he had entered.

He did not see Jessie Corbin.

The technician shouted something from the floor below, and his voice reached Durell in garbled, querulous echoes. He didn't bother to reply. He looked to right and left, searching for the woman. Panic touched him, lest he lose her. There were other doors, some painted red, some yellow, all closed. She had vanished behind one of them, ducking off the gallery. He chose the one that read,
Emergency Exit,
spun on his heel, slapped the swinging panel open, and went through.

They were waiting for him here. It was a small room, painted yellow, with an archway beyond leading to another gallery that in turn opened onto a conventional power plant that drew the steam for its turbines from the atomic generator behind him. This was the source of the steady pulsing pressure of energy he had felt far up on the surface, before his descent.

"Come on in, buddy boy."

He saw Slago and Angelina. Jessie Corbin was punching the buttons of an emergency elevator set into a recess beside the archway. Her face looked pale and savage. Slago had Angelina's gun. He held her with one massive forearm locked around her waist.

Angelina made a gasping sound. "Don't worry about me, Sam. Please."

Jessie looked at Durell and said to Slago: "What are you waiting for? Take him! He got Mark..."

"The elevator won't work," Durell said. "Drop the gun, Slago. The garrison is waking up. Mark can't help you, either. Nobody can help you now. You can't get out of here."

He saw that Slago was not going to surrender. He knew that Slago was the kind who would fight with insane violence to the bitter end. He yelled wildly a split second before a tiny facial spasm warned him that Slago was going to shoot. At the same moment he lunged to one side, driving into Angelina. Slago's gun slammed explosively, but Durell's yell had jolted him, and he missed. Durell kept driving, forcing Angelina between them, feeling her twist and claw at Slago in her effort to escape. Jessie Corbin shrank away to one side. The elevator wasn't coming. One hand touched her throat, and her other hand still held the camera.

Slago tried to club at Durell with the Luger, and hit Angelina instead, and the girl suddenly became a dead weight falling back against Slago. Slago tripped, shouted a curse, and stumbled against the wall. Durell's gun barked once, and he knew the bullet had gone home. Slago turned, staggering toward an iron stairway at the arch that opened into the power plant. The man had the strength of an ox, the persistence of a bull. His face was white and his eyes were hooded as he grabbed at the iron railing. He was going to climb down into the pit below. Durell plunged after him, felt the heavy blow of Slago's forearm slam across the bridge of his nose. Slago's gun fell and clattered to the steel plates of the floor far below. Durell hit him, using a judo cut that would have paralyzed any ordinary man, but Slago was beyond ordinary reactions. His breath came in a quick, gasping puff and then he reached out and snatched Durell to him and they both slipped and staggered down the first few steel treads of the spiral staircase. The man's strength was frenzied. A steady stream of bitter curses came from him. Durell could not break his grip. He felt himself starting to fall — and then he felt a sudden jolt and he was abruptly free of Slago's weight.

Angelina had done it.

She had picked herself up, circled behind him, gotten to the stairs and tripped Slago. The man screamed as he lost his grip on the steep treads. For a few steps he went stumbling downward, his arms flailing at the air, and then he hit the rail and fell over backward. He did not stop screaming until his body struck the steel floor iri front of the turbines far below.

Durell leaned over the rail and looked down at him. His breath came in agonized gasps. Slago wasn't moving. The man looked as if his back were broken. Durell looked at Angelina, clinging to the stair rail, sobbing, the anger fading from her eyes. He looked for Jessie Corbin. The blonde woman still stood at the elevator, punching at the button, Durell walked over to her and took the camera away.

The sound of the siren ended. Somewhere a whistle began to blow shrilly and authoritatively. Durell heard the pounding tread of running feet, attracted by his shot, and he turned back to Angelina.

"Thanks... Are you all right?"

"Yes... yes."

He looked down at Slago. "You don't have to worry about him any more. How did they get by you?"

"There was another door. Fleming came around behind me and took me by surprise. I wanted... I wanted to die. I thought I'd failed you..." She looked below and shuddered. "Slago was going to drag you down there with him."

"But he didn't. I owe you something for that."

He had no time to say more just then. An irate army major, followed by three of the guards, came storming into the room, pistols drawn. Durell dropped his gun to the floor and spoke quietly and rapidly to them, before one of the trigger-happy men could decide to shoot him.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Durell had been on the telephone speaking to Wittington and Kincaid, and he had had another hour's talk with the colonel in charge of Kittitimi Mountain. Slago was dead. Mark Fleming was in the hospital at Groversville, under police guard. Erich Corbin was in the local sheriffs jail, along with Jessie. While Durell had answered the colonel's questions, exercising care in telling just so much and no more, MacCreedy had come in with two more FBI men. MacCreedy looked as young and jaunty as before, but his eyes were hard and uncompromising when he asked Durell to get into his car and drive down the mountain into the town.

"There's going to be hell raised in Washington over this," MacCreedy said. "The FBI has all jurisdiction over domestic counterespionage, as you damned well know. You didn't tell me a thing back in New Orleans, but you might be interested to know that we had you under surveillance for most of your route."

"Then why didn't you show up when I needed you?" Durell asked.

MacCreedy gave him a cigarette. "There was a minor sort of snafu. It doesn't matter now. Anyway, you've got a lot of explaining to do."

"Not me. Ask Wittington about it. Or your chief."

"Now, look, I can't go to him and complain..."

"I'm tired," Durell said. "I'm happy to leave all the rest of it to you. You've got Mrs. Corbin's camera, haven't you? You've got her in jail? Have you talked to her yet?"

"I'm going there now."

"She's got a lot to tell you," Durell said, "but most of it you won't be able to use in the trial or in newspaper headlines. But the rest of it is up to you. Somebody gave her the blueprints to Kittitimi, and you'll have to make her talk about it."

"She'll talk," MacCreedy said. "Leave that to us."

Durell said, "What did your man do with Angelina?"

"She's at Amberley's house, for now. He'll be all right, by the way. In bed for a month, but hell be fine. His doctor looked after your girl."

"Drop me off there," Durell said.

The Canadian geese were still feeding the reeds along the shores of the lake. Amberley's house looked the same, except that now the Jaguar stood in the sweeping driveway in front of the yellow door, instead of being parked in the carport. Durell saw Mrs. Amberley moving behind the big window wall facing the lake. She opened the front door before he got to it.

"Your girl is down there," Mrs. Amberley said.

Durell looked to where she pointed and saw a faint movement down by the shore of the lake. He thanked her and walked that way and saw Angelina seated on the grassy bank of the lake, her back resting against a tall pine. He sat down beside her.

"Hello."

She looked at him and said his name and looked at the water. She had changed her clothes. The dress did not fit her too well, since it was a little too small, and when she saw him looking at it, she said: "The FBI left me here to rest and get checked over by Mr. Amberley's doctor. This dress belongs to Mrs. Amberley's daughter. I must look awful."

"You look fine," Durell said.

"Are you all right, Sam?"

"I'm tired," he said. "But it's all Over, and that makes me feel better. The FBI is going to take it all from here."

"Slago is dead, I hear. Did I kill him, Sam?"

"You helped."

She shivered suddenly. "I thought it wouldn't bother me, because I thought it would make me happy just to know he was dead. But I'm sorry I had to do it. I didn't want to, but I had to, didn't I? He would have killed you."

"He was trying pretty hard," Durell admitted.

She looked down and hugged her knees and then plucked at a handful of grass and let it trickle through her fingers. "What will you do now, Sam?"

"I have to go back to Washington; they're waiting for my report. I don't know what the next job will be."

"I've been thinking, Sam. The past is all over, isn't it? I ought to forget it, too."

"Not all of it," he said.

"Yes, all of it," she insisted. "Yesterday and today and years ago, too. That's the only wav to do it. I thought for a while that I didn't want to live any more. I was in love with you, as I used to be in the old days, and after Slago did — Afterward, I thought you'd never want me again, and there was no use in living any more. But if I could forget it, maybe I could start all over again. Do you think I could, Sam?"

"I'm sure of it."

She turned suddenly to look at him. "Would you kiss me, Sam?"

He kissed her. She clung to him fiercely, and when she let go she was crying. You didn't mind, Sam?"

"You said you were going to forget."

"It's not easy. I may need help."

Durell thought of the men in Washington who were waiting impatiently for him to make his report. He ought to be with MacCreedy, interrogating Jessie Corbin, trying to wind up the loose ends, keeping himself busy.

But he didn't want to go anywhere. He looked at the Canadian geese and threw a pebble into the lake and watched the ripples move out in widening circles touched by the warm afternoon sunlight. Everything you said and did made circles like that, like a pebble dropped into a pool, and there was never any end to it. The little waves kept going out and out, away from the middle where the pebble or the word had been dropped, or where the deed had been done, but after a time there really was no trace in the water where the pebble, the word, or the deed had been.

"I'll help you, Angelina," he said.

"But you nave to go back to Washington."

"Let them wait," he said.