Assignment - Mara Tirana

Durell stood at the living-room window watching the late afternoon sunlight reflect the October colors of the trees on the lawn and the blue of Chesapeake Bay. Deirdre was gone. He had known it before he had stepped through the doorway of the old, pink-brick Colonial house. All his morning phone calls had gone unanswered, and he knew he should have come here sooner.

He lighted a cigarette and stared out at the flat shoreline and the distant roofs of Prince John. It looked empty and peaceful. Sidonie Osbourn was upstairs calling Deirdre’s name, but he knew it was no use.

She called downstairs. “Sam?”

“I’m here,” he replied quietly.

“All her usual travel things are gone.”

“I know.”

The house echoed with Deirdre’s presence. He could see her and feel her everywhere around him. It was almost a year since he had stood in this serene house. Far too long. He had been to the ends of the earth, in many dark corners, and he had come back at last—come home, he thought— but it wasn’t home at all, when Deirdre was not here.

Sidonie came down the white, curved stairway. She was a small woman with a petite French face, the mother of twins, the widow of a man whom Durell had worked with and admired. They were close friends. Sidonie worked as a secretary at No. 20 Annapolis Street, a job Durell got for her when Osbourn was killed. There hadn’t been any trouble about security clearance for her, not with General Dickinson McFee. No. 20 Annapolis Street was the anonymous headquarters for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency, and before her husband was killed, Durell and Osbourn were a working team where life and death depended on each man’s intimate knowledge of the other. Now, when Durell was in Washington, he never failed to call on Sidonie at the little house in suburban Virginia, across the Potomac, where she lived with the twins.

“Sam, don’t look like that,” she said now. “Please,

Sam.”

He managed a thin smile. “Does it show?”

“It’s not like you to act like this.”

“How do you expect me to act? Deirdre is gone, isn’t she? As a matter of fact, I had A1 Hogan check on her for me. She met Harry Hammett and flew with him to Paris, and then went on to Vienna.”

Sidonie said gently: “But you have no right to check on Deirdre any more, darling. You set her free a year ago. She’s going to marry Adam Stepanic, and you can’t claim her again, Sam.”

“Did she tell you she would marry Adam?” he asked angrily.

“No, not in so many words.”

He drew a deep breath. “You misunderstand me, Sid. It isn’t a matter of jealousy. This is my work, my business. All right, let’s say Deirdre was going to marry Major Stepanic. And Major Stepanic, our first astronaut, crashed yesterday after two or three orbits around the earth. We don’t know where Stepanic came down. He may be dead. The whole world is looking for him, and it’s only a thin assumption that he landed behind the Iron Curtain somewhere and is still free to get out, if we can reach him in time. That’s Harry Hammett’s job; to go in there, find Adam Stepanic, and get him out before he’s picked up by their security police and pumped dry. We want Stepanic’s information to ourselves, right? Well, Harry Hammett has no right to take Deirdre with him to Europe. It’s foolish of Deirdre to go there just in the hope that she’ll be that much closer to wherever Adam may be.”

“Sam, please.”

He turned away. “I’m sorry, Sidonie.”

“Deirdre had to make a life for herself, after you broke up with her. You’re being very illogical.”

“Of course.”

“Then why not forget it? Deirdre isn’t in any danger.”

“I can’t forget it. I don’t want her with Harry Hammett, I don’t want her in Europe, and I don’t like the whole idea.”

“You have no claim on her, Sam.”

“Perhaps I do,” Durell said quietly.

He turned back to the window and stared at the bay. The autumn wind was cold, and there were small whitecaps on the glimmering width of the Chesapeake. He watched a seagull slide down the edge of the wind and he felt an unexpected pang of loneliness, a feeling of loss he had never anticipated. He knew that Sidonie’s advice was sensible and good. But he could not accept it. He couldn’t, because nothing was safe in the world that Durell had fashioned for himself these past years. He had reached a point of no return long ago, and there was nothing for him except his job in the silent war of espionage, to which he had dedicated himself.

He could never go back to ordinary civilian life again. And he did not want to. He was a man alone in a world of dark and dangerous shadows.

Long ago, he tried to explain to Deirdre Padgett how he felt about this. He had gone from the old OSS during the war into the Central Intelligence Agency, training at the Maryland “Farm” before being assigned to K Section under Dickinson McFee. Since then he had worked with many men who were now dead, killed in different corners of the world—some with a garotte, or a knife in the back, some crushed by speeding cars, or shoved from subway platforms, in a Hong Kong alley or the Thames Embankment in London or in a skiing “accident” at Montreux. But what mattered in this business was not the way in which a man died but that the future was too uncertain to undertake any permanent commitments.

In this business, the man who survived was the man who walked alone, without emotional entanglements. It was safer that way. You learned to react to stimuli that ordinary men never noticed. You locked your doors and checked in closets and behind the pictures on the wall, and you always looked over your shoulder, wherever you happened to be.

It was not a life he wanted to offer Deirdre. He knew what Osbourn's death had done to Sidonie. But still Deirdre had been willing to share his life. They had discussed it often. But each time he’d drawn back, asking her to forget him. And each time she refused.

They were lovers, and he knew there would never be another woman like her in all time, in the world, for him.

“Sam, what are you thinking of?” Sidonie asked quietly, standing behind him.

“Of Deirdre. And everything. And nothing.”

“I think you need a drink. Deirdre probably has your bourbon in stock,” Sidonie smiled.

“In the kitchen,” he said.

His thoughts continued when Sidonie left him. He stared unseeing at the gulls hovering over the darkening waters of the bay.

There were months when he’d had to vanish without telling Deirdre where he was going or when he’d be back. Her home here in Prince John, on the Chesapeake, was also home to him, after his grandfather’s place down at Bayou Peche Rouge, in Louisiana. Deirdre had always waited patiently at one place or the other for his return. Yet each time it became a little more difficult. He found himself taking precautions that only added to his danger, because he was thinking of her. He found himself longing for her, thinking of her warm smile and her desire and her lovely body. It was dangerous to himself and to the others who depended on his objectivity in carrying out the missions to which he was assigned.

Durell was a tall man, over six feet, and he carried his solid weight of one-ninety easily and deceptively. He moved lightly, always without sound. He had thick black hair, touched with gray at the temples, and a small, trim moustache. His hands were strong, narrow, quick. He was adept at card tricks. In another place and at another time, he would have passed as an old-fashioned Mississippi riverboat gambler.

His grandfather, Jonathan Durell, had been among the last of that dangerous breed. The old man, past ninety now, had taught him every honest and dishonest trick of the business, inculcating in him a gambler’s temperament, a habit of weighing odds and calculating risks that was often the despair of his superiors at K Section headquarters.

He owed much of his temperament to the old man and to his boyhood spent aboard the old hulk of the Mississippi sidewheeler, the Trois Belles, which was moored among the towering gum and cypress trees of the bayou that was his boyhood home. The veneer he later acquired at Yale made no real change in his Cajun heritage. He was equally at home in both the dark fastness of the cypress swamps of the bayous and the glittering capitals of the world. The main thing was that he had survived in a business where the survival potential was less than encouraging.

He turned as Sidonie Osbourn returned with his drink. It was fast growing dark outside. The light on the bay turned to a delicate lilac hue. Sidonie’s smile was small and tight and strained.

“Sit down, Cajun. Let’s talk about it.”

“There’s not much to talk about—but you can tell me more about Deirdre and this Adam Stepanic.”

“Sure you want to hear it? You’ve been away a long time, Sam. Everyone knows that she was going to marry him.”

“ ‘Was?’"

Sidonie shrugged. “Major Stepanic rode a rocket into space, didn’t he? Like an arrow shot into the sky—and he came down no man knows where.”

“K Section knows. They’ve sent Harry Hammett to get him.”

“I suppose so. And Deirdre went along.”

“Why?”

“Because she loves Adam,” Sidonie said simply.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? Because of your pride, darling? But you gave up all claim on Deirdre back in the Mojave Desert almost a year ago. She was patient for such a long time. I tried to tell you how she felt, so many times. And you pointed to me as an example of her possible fate, if you were killed on a mission. But have I ever regretted marrying? Did you ever see me cry, because my husband was killed doing his duty? I regard it as a privilege to have been married as I was."

“But you’re alone now,” Durell pointed out. “And I don’t want Deirdre to live that way. Forgive me for being blunt, but that’s how I felt then, and I still feel the same now.”

“But do you really love her, Cajun? Or are you just being possessive?”

“I still love her,” he said.

He turned away, wondering at the sudden anger in him. Perhaps it was foolish, he thought. True, he had no business interfering now. Then why was he here? Deirdre could take care of herself. She didn’t belong to him any more. The long easy days and warm passionate nights he had known with her were in the dead past.

The thing to do, Durell thought, was to walk out of this house and drive back to his Washington apartment and stay there.

But he couldn’t do it.

He remembered that temporary assignment doing security work at the Mojave base where the astronauts were training for their flights into space. Deirdre came to join him, staying at a desert motel complete with luxury swimming pool, five miles from the base. He remembered Major Adam Stepanic, who had been chosen to ride the rocket into orbit for the first U.S. effort to put a man into space. He had introduced Adam to Deirdre one day, and thereafter Adam had made his feelings plain.

Durell blamed no man for falling in love with Deirdre. He remembered how she looked the day he had finished the assignment and was ordered back to Washington. He remembered everything about her, in tormenting detail.

Hair black as midnight. Eyes clear and wide and gray, shining with an inner serenity. She was tall, with a body he had come to know frankly and intimately, and one which harmonized to his needs as his had to hers. She moved fluidly, with clean-limbed grace. She was a woman who caught all eyes not simply because of her beauty, but because of a harmony of mind and body he had come to love and cherish, above all things. . . .

“Except your job,” Deirdre had said quietly, that day at the motel pool in the desert. “That always comes first, darling.”

“I’m sorry. I do what I have to do.”

“Where will you be sent now?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if you did, would you tell me?”

“You know the rules, Dee.”

She was silent, watching the tourists in the pool, her eyes grave, her long tanned body in the white suit relaxed in a deck chair. “I’ve decided not to go back East with you, Sam.”

“Why not?”

“I want to stay here,” she said. “I want to say goodbye to you, Sam. Here and now. You don’t understand, I know, but—I don’t want to go on like this forever. I want— I’m not sure what I want, darling, but this isn’t enough. I want to belong to you completely, in every way, and you shut me out and won’t let me.”

“But we—”

She shook her head gravely. “There’s no future for either of us in that world you’ve built for yourself, Sam. Not the way you feel about things. And you refuse to change.” “Don’t we have enough?” he asked. “You and I—” “Not enough for me. Perhaps I’ve been mistaken about myself all along. I thought I was like Sidonie Osbourn, but I’m not. I’m not as strong-minded as you are. I can’t live in your shadow world—you won’t let me in, will you? —and I can’t endure waiting, like Penelope, and wondering if you will ever return.”

“Then what do you want?” he had asked.

“Peace, and a little security. Solid ground under my feet.”

“You know I can’t give you that and stay in the business.”

“I know.”

He had tried to smile her out of it. “You’re just in a mood, Dee. It will pass.”

“No. I’ve thought about this for a long time. Either you let me into your world, Sam, and take me there with you—”