Assignment - Manchurian Doll

Two things about the hotel room bothered him, although the first was a matter of routine and Sam Durell had run into it before. The day was hot, even for September, when he landed at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, on the Pan Am flight from Wake. No one had met him, although he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Eliot Barnes’ freckled, Midwestern face among the Japanese crowds. But that was as it should be. He wasn’t even troubled by the taxi that followed him into the big, sprawling complex of the most cosmopolitan city in the world. He could look into that later. What he didn’t like about this hotel room was the air-conditioning that sealed the windows and the Japanese translation of Colette’s short stories that lay in plain sight on top of the dresser.

It was Durell’s first visit to Japan in six years, and he looked forward to some days in Tokyo, getting the operation on the road. It seemed like a simple deal. Back in Washington, when General McFee briefed him, the little man had referred to it as a vacation. Durell discounted sixty per cent of what his boss usually said, but this time it really looked like a straightforward assignment.

Tokyo had changed since his last visit. It was always changing, like any living organism. He liked this vast city, largest in the world, a true melting pot of the world’s cultures. He checked in at eight a.m. at a small hotel near the moated Imperial Palace, and from the suspiciously sealed windows—thanks to the distasteful air-conditioning—he could glimpse a yagura, one of the palace’s corner towers. There was a white haze in the hot morning sky. Tagashi had made the reservation, and his greeting at the desk had been quietly anonymous. Tagashi was chief field head for K Section in the Tokyo district, and it should have been all right.

But it wasn’t.

He fanned the hotel room as a matter of routine, and in three minutes found a microphone behind a Hiroshige wood-block print, hanging on the wall by a spider-thin wire. Anyone might have planted it, and he left the bug where it was, satisfied just to know it was there.

The Colette book was another matter, because it did not belong in the room at all.

He didn’t touch it until he examined every inch of the dresser with caution, because he had known good men who had been blown to bits by such innocent-looking booby traps. Air-conditioning and sealed windows made another simple way to die, through the introduction of poison gas. Johnny Crown went that way in Singapore, a year ago. The alternative to risk was to leave the hall door open, which wasn’t much better, because then you chanced the nameless face and figure that might suddenly pop up in the doorway and with a single, silenced shot cut you down, all in an instant of eternal dismay.

He decided to risk the air-conditioning, since Tagashi himself had chosen this hotel.

But the book—

Durell was a careful man. He had to be, since his survival factor in his business had long since run out. He was a subchief of K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency, which meant he was a field man in the dark, silent war of defense that was fought in every corner and alley of the world. He was a tall man, with black hair touched with gray at the temples, with dark blue self-contained eyes that occasionally betrayed a flash of Cajun temperament. His home was in Bayou Peche Rouge, in Louisiana, and in his vocation as a hunter of men, he’d had to learn the care of being the quarry as well.

He wore a dark blue suit and a white button-down shirt and a narrow blue knitted necktie. In a special holster tailored inside his coat was his snub-barreled .38 Special. His single black suitcase was a tricky affair built for him by the lab men at No. 20 Annapolis Street, in Washington; it contained several gimmicky devices of his trade. He rarely used them. He had no special cover identity on this trip. He had come in his nominal rating in the Foreign Service as a senior economic advisor, a free-wheeling attache to the Embassy. The mission did not seem to call for anything else.

The telephone rang while he still considered the bright jacket of the paper-bound Japanese edition of Colette. He let it ring for a few seconds while he checked the instrument. It seemed clean. He picked it up, but he said nothing. “Hunh-hunh,” a voice breathed.

He waited.

“Sam? Is that you, Cajun?”

It was not Eliot Barnes. It was not Tagashi.

“This is Waldo,” the voice said. “Jeezus, what an hour! Only for you, Cajun, would I get up this early.”

“Waldo,” Durell repeated, waiting.

“Waldo Fingali” The man was aggrieved. “Don’t you remember me, Sam?” There was a cackle of laughter. “See, I’m still in Tokyo. How about that?”

“Are you still drunk, Waldo?”

“No, no, no. Not today. Special occasion, just for you, Sam, I’m stone sober. You sound funny, Sam.”

“I just checked in. How did you know I was here?” 

“I’ve got ways. Kaiwa’s got ways. Hell, I’ve been working for Kaiwa for a year now. Very important job, hunh. Listen, Sam, I’ve got to see you right away.
Right
away, understand?”

“No, I don’t understand,” Durell said carefully.

“But haven’t you seen my book? The Colette item?” “Yes, I noticed it.”

Waldo Fingal giggled tinnily in the telephone at Durell’s ear. “I’ll bet you did. That’s why you’re still alive. You opened it yet? No, I’ll bet you didn’t. Look, turn to page 57. Right? I left it for you. Great Buddha, burn the note, huh? It’s strictly between you and me.”

“Waldo, you’re not in the business any more.”

“I told you, I’m with Kaiwa Trading Corporation. But they do business with you, right? Listen—read page 57, then for chrissake try to make it. I like you, Sam. You were good to me.”

Durell said suddenly: “Did you bug this room?”

“What? No. Not me. Maybe the local cops.”

“Maybe.”

“All right, all right, I’ll get off the line. Read the book, hear? Then I’ll see you. It’s a big chance, Cajun. It’s just because you tried your best for me, and it isn’t your fault I flopped six years ago, hunh? It will be good to see you, Sam.”

“All right,” Durell said. He hung up.

Waldo Fingal had worked the K Section safe house in Kanda, the student quarter of Tokyo, six years ago. Durell remembered this clearly—he was trained to absorb detailed statistical dossiers, although Waldo Fingal was not just a statistic. He was a sad example of a good man throwing himself off a cliff to destruction. Durell was surprised that Waldo was still alive.

Even six years ago, Fingal’s bony frame and professorial head with its mass of wild grayish hair looked too fragile to survive the battering of Tokyo’s crowds. He had been a professor of European Literature at Tokyo University and did translating for a Tokyo publishing house, when he happened to stumble on a code book used by a foreign embassy. He took it to an American diplomat friend, and from there he was employed to run a safe house for K Section over a bookstore on the Jimbo-Cho.

Fingal’s trouble was fear.

Some men come live with it as part of their daily lives, and others let it drive them toward the fate they dread so much. In Durell’s business, fear was a part of everyday existence. Tempered with caution, the eternal danger could be controlled, even used as a tool to sharpen the work that had to be done. There was no escape from danger. Most men in the field, like those in an assault troop battalion, learned to accept it and work with it. Fingal let it destroy him.

His trouble was drink first, then drugs, then women. He was brilliant, sober or drunk, a bit of Western flotsam that somehow had drifted into Oriental waters. His personal appearance was not attractive. He had a long, thin nose that always looked bloodless and white, shaggy gray brows, and brilliant eyes. Fear, the daily terrors that haunted him, the nightmares he rode each night to sweating panic, made him utterly unreliable.

Durell saved him from quiet extradition proceedings that would have landed Professor Waldo Fingal in Leavenworth, back in the States, for an indeterminate sentence as a traitor. Waldo Fingal was not a traitor. He was simply lost in his own hell of weakness. Durell arranged for Waldo’s separation from K Section as harmlessly as possible, changed the safe house, and arranged a sanitary cordon around the man so that nothing Waldo knew or had known about K Section could possibly be of use to an enemy.

There were enough enemies.

So he was surprised that Waldo hadn’t been cut up into little pieces and dropped into Tokyo Bay long ago, for not having the answers to questions undoubtedly put to him by many curious foreigners.

Durell opened the Colette book.

His Japanese was rusty, but he could read the first pages with reasonable fluency, and he noted that Waldo Fingal had been the translator. He turned to page 57.

It was an old basic code that had been used during Waldo’s brief career with K Section, but was now abandoned. The message consisted of small dots to identify certain ideograms on the page, and it asked Durell to meet Fingal at the Matsushiri Shrine in the Chokurijo district east of Tokyo at eleven that morning. The last symbol expressed extreme urgency.

Durell showered and shaved and chose a fresh shirt identical to the one he had worn on the flight from the States, and wondered if he should allow Fingal’s message to sidetrack him from his immediate program. The operation that had brought him in such haste from Washington to Tokyo had rated top priority, with an assist from SEATO. Joint Chiefs had also requested speed, at K Section’s weekly briefing session. General McFee had tried to shunt the job back to SEATO’s G2, with no luck.

They specifically requested Sam Durell. Nothing could be done, it was said, unless Durell headed the operation. At the time McFee regretfully told him about this, Durell had been planning a long and intimate weekend with Deirdre Padgett at her secluded home in Prince John, on the Chesapeake.

“Why me, specifically?” he had asked McFee.

The general was annoyed. “I told them to let Eliot Barnes handle it, with Tagashi, our man in Tokyo. But they insist on you, Sam, because you once knew Colonel Alexi Kaminov.”

“Kaminov? Yes, I’ve met him.”

“He was your opposite number during the Budapest days, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Kaminov is in China now. Or Manchuria. Or North Viet Nam. He’s military liaison chief with Moscow, sent out of Moscow. He seems to be disenchanted with his work.”

Durell said, “Kaminov seemed to be a sensitive man.”

McFee said, “What did you do with him in Budapest, buddy up to Mm? You don’t usually fraternize with KGB people.”

“Kaminov happened to look the other way when I took some refugees out, some folks Joint Chiefs wanted to talk to. I told you, he is sensitive.”

“You saved his life, too,” McFee said accusingly.

“One of the refugees wanted to put a bullet in the back of Kaminov’s head when he looked the other way at the Austrian border,” Durell said dryly. “I didn’t think Kaminov deserved it. We shook hands in the dark.”

“He knew who you were,” McFee said.

“They’ve got my dossier at No. 2 Dzherzhinsky Square.” “So he seems to trust you, Sam.”

“He shouldn’t,” Durell said harshly. “At another time, another dark night, and it may be one or the other of us.” “I see.” McFee sighed. “Well, our problem seems to be that, after due reflection for a number of years of working against us, Major Alexi Kaminov seems to want to defect and come over to our side. Understand? He’s disenchanted. As you say, he must be sensitive, notwithstanding his training. I don’t quite trust it. I can’t imagine, for instance, your going over to
them
.”

“No,” Durell said, and grinned slightly.

“Kaminov is a walking index file of Peiping’s military machine and staff plans for the new mobilizations along the Indian and Southeast Asian borders. The pot seems to be boiling there at the moment. That’s how SEATO comes into it. When we received Kaminov’s message, we found it stipulated two conditions, however.”

Durell waited.

“The first is that Kaminov will only surrender to you, Sam.” Durell waited again.

“
And
he wants his girlfriend, another KGB agent stationed in their Tokyo Embassy at the moment, to be on hand when he steps over the line to our side.”

“Her name?”

“Nadja Osmanovna. She’s a Grade Two Supervisor in their Group Area B.”

“I know about that one,” Durell said. “They say she’s hardly human. Beautiful, but a terror.”

“You never ran from beautiful women, Cajun.”

“She’s bloodthirsty.”

McFee said: “And Kaminov says he loves her and won’t defect without her. Make sense?”

“Some,” Durell said.

“How?”

“It’s a trap,” Durell said.

“Yes?”

“For me.”

McFee permitted himself a small smile. “So?” 

“I’ll go,” Durell said.

He was followed from the hotel.

He took the
shosen
, the Tokyo subway, and stood among the chattering, swaying workers heading to their jobs; he noted the incongruity of women in Western dress next to others in kimonos and
yakutas
, of men in blue business suits and others in traditional robes—even a yellow-garbed Shinto priest in full regalia. There is no such thing as the inscrutable Oriental, Durell thought, listening to the noisy conversations, watching the newspaper-readers, who were like subway riders anywhere else in the world. They were interested in the Tokyo exchange, the local baseball games, their lecture classes, gossip and shows. They laughed and frowned like anyone else. Their faces were open to him. They paid no attention to him, accepting his lean, muscular height and Western clothes as just one more of the
gai-jin
, people from the outside, a foreigner among the other passengers.