Assignment - Budapest (7 page)

“There’s been an accident,” he said tersely, and he gave Deirdre Padgett’s name. “Send a doctor and an ambulance at once.”

When the operator rang off, Durell held the line open for a moment, and Greenwald said: “Sam? You all right?”

“It’s Deirdre. Korvuth was here.”

“Damn it, how could—”

“We need some men, fast,” Durell said. “He’s in the woods nearby. Zoltan Ske is dead. No sign of the girl. And Korvuth got away.”

He hung up and went back to Deirdre. As he knelt beside her again he saw that her eyes were open and watching him steadily, and he felt a vast wave of relief and thankfulness wash over him, leaving him shaken and uncertain. “Dee, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Sam,” she whispered.

“You’re going to be all right. I’ve sent for a doctor.”

“Yes, I heard you.” Her voice, her eyes were remote. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, Dee. So sorry.”

She turned her head away from him. Her mouth shook and he thought for a moment she was crying, but he couldn’t be sure. He looked down at the blood on his hand from his own wound, conscious of a dull throb of pain now.

“I had to do it. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Did you get—did you kill him?”

“No. He got away.”

She turned her head suddenly to look at him. Her eyes were cold, bright, incredibly angry. “Then you’re wasting time, aren’t you? Why bother to help me? You want to get out there and hunt him down, don’t you? Don’t waste any sympathy on me. You don’t have to pretend anything. You’ve called for a doctor, and now you can go and do what you really want to do. Hunt and kill. It doesn’t matter who else gets hurt, does it? I don’t matter, and you don’t count yourself as of any value to anyone, either, do you? Certainly not to me. And you—”

He touched her lips with her fingers. “Please, Deirdre.” She looked away from him again. “Leave me alone,” she whispered.

Her eyes were closed, but he knew she was still conscious and able to listen to him. But he did not know what he could say or do to make her understand. He had never felt so helpless in his life. He had never known such torment as he knew now, looking at her, hurt and helpless, because of what he had done.

“Deirdre, listen to me. Don’t turn away from me, honey. He was going to kill you. I had to do it. I had to take the chance, don’t you understand? I’m sorry you got mixed up in it—I had men here to protect you, because this man wanted to hurt me through you. He’s dangerous and he’s got to be stopped. I’m not important and neither are you, compared to the damage and destruction he may do. I had to stop him, even if it cost—at whatever cost,” he said gently. “He was counting on the fact that I would do as he asked to save you. But I knew he meant nothing he said. I knew he would fire, anyway. I had to call his bluff.”

“You didn’t care if he killed me,” Deirdre whispered.

“It isn’t that,” he said desperately. “Deirdre, you know I love you. I know I’m doing a poor job at explaining it, but you’ve got to understand. I’d give anything if I could have prevented this happening. We were lucky. You’re going to be all right. We’ll still get him. Now, look, don’t try to answer me now. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re going to a hospital, and when you feel better, we’ll talk about it.”

She turned her head to look at him again. Her eyes were cold and remote. Her face was a mask of cameo. Her lips moved for a moment before she spoke.

“I don’t ever want to see you again, Sam. Not ever again.” She closed her eyes. “We’re finished. Forever and for good. I know the meaning of your love now, and I don’t want any part of that kind of love. Don’t come to see me. I don’t want to talk any more. Just go away now. Go on with your hunting. That’s what you’re really anxious to do right now.”

He heard a siren keening distantly in the night. The front door opened and closed, and Lew Franklin came into the library and paused, his young face lean and sober. Durell straightened, wincing as his arm gave him a sudden stab of pain.

“Any sign of Korvuth?”

“Not yet,” Franklin said. He kept looking at Deirdre. “Is she going to be all right?”

“Of course.” Durell’s voice was suddenly harsh. Then it softened. “You look beat,' Lew. Stay here with her. The ambulance is coming. See that she gets the best of care, will you? I’m going out after him.”

“You could use a doctor yourself,” Franklin said.

“Later.”

He went out, aware of the strange look on Franklin’s face as he stared at Deirdre again. It had finally stopped raining, but the night was cold and dark and dripping wet, with an icy wind blowing from the east, over the Chesapeake. Nobody had touched Zoltan Ske’s body. Durell walked past it, down the path and into the woods to the north, bordering the cove. He drew in long, deep breaths of the icy air and told himself that Deirdre was shocked right now and not sure of what she had said, and it would be all right tomorrow. It had to be all right between them. He had to make her understand why he had risked her life in order to try for Korvuth. He told himself he could do this, and yet one dark part of his mind kept telling him that he had lost her forever.

It was an effort to turn his attention back to Korvuth. He halted just inside the pine woods and tried to put himself in the other man’s place. A narrow path meandered through the wet pines toward the water’s edge and he moved that way, his gun in hand, aware of a growing weakness in him from his own wound. But there was no time to think about himself. From his left, inland, came the flickering of flashlights as George Mester was joined by Art Greenwald’s crew. In a few more minutes there would be a dozen, maybe a score of men joining the search. But Korvuth had escaped this sort of cordon before, and there was no reason to think he couldn’t do it again. He had spent over ten minutes with Deirdre— time enough for anyone with training to get away.

He called to George Mester and moved toward the lights. A narrow dirt road, frozen hard, ran northward along the edge of the woods, and it was here that the searching men were gathering, trying to establish a cordon to keep Korvuth bottled in against the shore. A car came along fast, and three more men from the Maryland State Police joined the search. Durell put Mester in charge and struck off alone toward the waterfront. Some of what Deirdre had said to him was true. He felt in him a deep and sullen rage, a lust to kill. His objectivity was gone. He wanted Korvuth for himself now. Nothing else would satisfy him. And for this reason he wanted to search alone, following the hunch that teased the back of his mind.

The bullet hole in his arm had stopped bleeding, but he had to hold himself carefully. The path toward the waterfront twisted and turned between the soughing, dripping masses of pines. Now and then the wind strengthened and a shower of icy water drenched him, and he shivered with the chill. When he came out on the rough shingle of the beach, the wind from the open Chesapeake cut bitterly through his wet clothing.

There was no sign that anyone had passed this way, but that did not necessarily mean anything. He turned north, moving in the shadows of the pines until he came to a swampy area that he knew was a favorite spot for duck hunters. Several old blinds had been built along the waterfront here, visible now through the brittle reeds growing along the ice-crusted shore, and Durell checked each one carefully before going on. The path led inland for a short distance and then came out again on the shore, this time to the north of the cove. Tom Yordie’s pungy was still out there, its riding light dimly visible through the laced pattern of brittle weeds. Apparently it was at anchor, because he couldn’t hear the sound of the old engine. He could see no one aboard, either.

The Prince John Gun Club used this area occasionally, and its members had built a shelter hut over on the far point. Durell had walked here with Deirdre many times, and he knew the ground well. A stretch of swamp, often inundated with tidal water, served as a barrier between the shelter hut and the more solid land to the west, where the search was going on. Durell looked back, but the lights of the searching men were obscured by the trees. He held his gun a little higher and walked through the cold darkness to the point.

Without a torch to guide him, he had to move with care, and slowly, through the black night. Only a faint, luminous glow to the north, from the street lights of Prince John village, broke the utter darkness, but the reflected light from the low, scudding clouds only served to make shapeless shadows and strange patterns out of the land and the bay, the massed swamp oaks and pines and the dully glistening expanse of the Chesapeake. Durell moved forward to within twenty yards of the shelter hut before his straining eyes identified its vague shape against the deeper blackness of the night. A small, rickety wharf projected into the cove, and two skiffs had been pulled up and overturned on the shingle nearby. Durell looked out at the anchored pungy, then at the low, looming bulk of the shelter hut. Suddenly he was sure he had come to the right place. Korvuth was here. He was somewhere nearby. Every instinct told him this, and he stood very still, watching and listening, hearing the lap of icy water against the shore, the sigh of the wind, the brittle clashing of branches behind him. His training urged him to go back for help. But he wanted Korvuth for himself. This was something that had to be settled between the two of them.

Nothing moved in the windy darkness. He stepped forward again, closing the distance toward the hut. Now he saw that one of the skiffs on the beach beside the pier was not overturned, but rode on the tide, moored with a line to one of the pier pilings. His pulse quickened, and he turned back to the shack.

The shot and the scream of warning came simultaneously. The muzzle flare came spitting from the hut. The scream seemed to echo from the shadows under the pier. Durell threw himself flat. The voice that had warned him was a woman’s, and it came again, sharp and clear. He did not understand the words. She seemed to be talking to the man with the gun who had been waiting for him. Talking to Korvuth, in rapid, bitter Hungarian. A curse answered her. Another shot cracked the silence wide open. From far away, beyond the tongue of marsh that almost made an island of the point, came the alarmed yells of the searching troopers.

Durell was pinned down on the beach. There was agony in his arm and shoulder, because he had dropped instinctively, without thought for his wound. It was bleeding again, and for a moment the earth heaved and turned under him.

“This way!” the woman called.

He did not think he could get up. A wave of weakness kept him on his belly on the beach. He looked up and someone was running from the hut, back toward the dark swamps. He got his gun up with an effort and fired once, twice. His vision was blurred. The woman called out to him again and he got to his hands and knees and tried to stand. He had missed. The running man, Korvuth, was gone. He did not understand what was happening, but he turned toward the beach. His legs were like rubber, and he felt the warmth of his blood running alarmingly down his arm and off his fingertips. The girl came toward him, up the slope of the beach, with a gun in her hand. She wore a red hat. She was the girl who had followed him from New York.

“Oh, you fool,” she said. “You let him get away!”

“Ilona?”

“Who did you think?” she said bitterly. She came close to him, her gun held warily, and he could see the anger in her face. “What is the matter with you? Are you hurt?”

There was a strange roaring sound in Durell’s ears. He tried to reach for her gun and his hand went wavering off to one side and he looked at it in surprise before he felt his legs slowly buckle and he pitched forward and down.

For some time there was darkness, and a strange mechanical creaking sound, and a feeling that the world had become a queasy, unsettled place, without stability or solidity. He felt hands on him and heard the girl's voice talking, and he listened to learn if someone answered her, but no one did and he guessed she was talking to herself, bitterly and angrily. He felt himself being pushed and hauled and once the pain in his shoulder became so great that the darkness swallowed him again for several long minutes, and when he opened his eyes again he was not sure what time it was or where he could be. He felt a vibration all through his body, as if an engine were running and shaking the bunk on which he lay on his back, and he looked up at the silvery light that seemed to have no earthly point of origin. This last was correct, because he turned his head and looked out of a small porthole and saw that the wind had scoured the sky clean and a half-moon was shining, cold and distant and bleak, upon a waste of water, reaching everywhere in the small arc that he could see beyond the glass. He was on a boat, and he was sure it was the pungy.

He turned his head and looked at the bunk on the other side of the narrow cabin. An old man sat there looking at him. Durell had never seen the man before. Shaggy gray hair, shaggy beard, a weathered face like ancient leather, bright eyes alert with curiosity under massive eyebrows. The old man had no teeth, and he mouthed his gums a moment before he spoke.

“Feel pretty sick, hey, young feller?”

“I’ve felt better.”

“She took pretty good care of you, son. Right smart girl. Kind of frightening, in a way. Ain’t used to women like that no more.”

“Are you Tom Yordie?” Durell asked. “This is your boat?”

The old man nodded. “She come out in the skiff and hauled you aboard. Made me help, at the point of a gun. Then she used my medicine kit to take care of that bullet hole in you. You were lucky, young feller. The slug went in and out, clean as a whistle. No trouble at all. She knew what she was doing.” The old man chuckled. “Here, have a nip of this. Made it myself. Always prefer my own mix.”

Yordie extended a gnarled, rope-hardened hand with an old brown bottle. Durell took it, nodded thanks, and swallowed deeply. The liquor was not unlike the mule he had known long ago, back in the bayous. It exploded warmly in the pit of his stomach and spread its heat through his body. He looked at his shoulder and saw that a neat bandage covered the wound. He looked for his gun. It was gone. Tom Yordie grinned.