Assignment Unicorn (13 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Nonsense.”

“They’ve performed seemingly impossible feats.”

Meecham said, “They are elite, highly trained mercenaries.
Employed by
someone
. Someone who
knows all about K Section and the ISB. Someone who wants to destroy us.
Experts. Honed to a fine efficiency. Nothing more.”

“They behave abnormally,” Durell insisted.

Meecham was silent. They had walked back across the Rhone
River and had taken small side streets to the Rue des
Alpes
and Cornavin Railroad Station. Meecham turned right, then right again. Durell
watched the traffic. No one was following them. He did not see the gray Porsche.
No one and no other car had appeared near them with any consistency. The wind
was stronger, blowing the length of the lake, from Lausanne. The rain had
stopped. The cold wind had blown away the mists hanging over the ancient city,
this city of international money and politics and Swiss conservatism.

“There’s another avenue to investigate,” Durell began.
“Aside from the way they’ve avoided hitting at our agency strings and instead
struck directly at our Centrals, stolen our funds in transfer, killed several
of our people. In every instance, there have been innocent bystanders killed.

Meecham swung his umbrella and did not reply.

Durell said, “I’d like to have the computers run down dossiers,
if any, on all of these innocent victims.”

“Do you think there is a connection?”

“Everything that has happened has been carefully planned. To
an extreme detail. Maybe the bystanders were included in the plan.”

“Far out,” said Meecham.

“May I use the computer files and check the read-outs?”

A passerby bumped into Meecham. Durell’s hand dropped into
his pocket, wrapped itself around his gun. The passerby muttered apologies in
Schweitzerdeutsch
and hurried on. Durell’s hand felt sweaty
on the gun.

“You’re jumpy, Cajun.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can rest and sleep on the plane.”

“You’re sending me back to the States?”

“You and Wolfe and the girl. God help me, you can operate
out of the Fort. I think that would be best. Perhaps safest. I’ve cleared it
with General McFee.” Meecham paused on the sidewalk outside the small stone
apartment building that constituted the safe house. He looked up at the blank
curtained windows. Then he reached into an inner pocket and took out an airline
envelope. “
Here.
Tickets for all three of you.”

“You knew all along, sir?”

“I wanted you to persuade me. You have.”

Meecham’s mouth twitched. “Wilderman will have orders to
accommodate you. You look angry. I wasn’t toying with you. I wanted to hear
your thoughts. You have the privilege of calling me whatever you wish.”

“Bastard,” Durell said.

They shook hands and parted.

26

No. 20 ANNAPOLIS STREET, headquarters for K Section of the
CIA, was located in a modest
graystone
building whose
brass address plates announced various import-export offices, several lobby
firms, and governmental services of an innocuous nature. An innocent
intruder would get as far as the main lobby, simple and rather shabby-looking,
and be turned back with one excuse or another parrying his inquiries.

From one window in General Dickinson McFee’s office—den, you
could see Pennsylvania Avenue and a corner of the White House. Washington was
enjoying a bland Indian-summer day. Everything looked soft and misty in the
golden autumnal light. The thin night, compounded of Potomac fog and smog,
quietly nibbled with acid and moisture at the nation’s precious monuments. The
White House, known to K Section as Sugar Cube, lay in quiet enthrallment to
Washington’s web of bureaucracies, captive to the system that, like the
proverbial juggernaut, kept rolling on toward undefined goals with a
momentum and self-serving life of its own.

McFee‘s small den was in shadows. There was a red brick
fireplace whose chimney was laddered on the inside and offered an escape
hatch to the roofs. The place was scented with leather and the dim fragrance of
cigar smoke, although McFee did not smoke. Durell listened to the elevator hiss
softly shut at the end of the corridor and Dickinson McFee said, “Come in,
Samuel, come in. How are you?”

“Fine, sir. Same as always.”

“No problems?”

“No, sir.”

“Any results with Miss Donaldson?”

“Some, sir.”

“Sit down, Samuel.”

Durell chose a small leather easy chair on the opposite side
of McFee’s desk. There were scatterings of foreign newspaper cuttings, Russian,
Chinese, French, Egyptian—Durell did not know how many languages the General
read and spoke.

Dickinson McFee was a small man whose presence in any room
or group of other men always seemed enormous. He had a predilection for grays
that went with his hair and eyes; his conservative suit, shirt and necktie were
gray of various shades. Durell sometimes thought that if a man’s soul had a
color, McFee’s soul would be gray, too.

“Meecham says you have been handling yourself very well.
Wilderman is not so enthusiastic. You seem to have ticked Wilderman off. But
then, no one cares much for Internal Security, including myself. A necessary
evil, they say. A result of Congressional watchdog wisdom. Well, perhaps so.
One’s attitude toward the ISB is a direct result of one’s conscience. They are
rather annoyingly independent of control, however.”

“Yes, sir,” Durell said, and waited.

McFee’s neat gray head turned aside toward the window which
gave upon the view of Pennsylvania Avenue. “We have a problem, of course. You
and I and perhaps two others are fully aware of its scope. K Section’s defenses
have been infiltrated. Breached. Broken. Without intelligence, this
nation is like a blind giant staggering about in a locked room full of sly, quick
assassins.”

Durell waited again. He knew that McFee would get around to
making his point soon.

McFee said, “I have been accused of being too powerful and
independent here in Washington. Not quite so. The Internal Security Bureau is
too big. In the years since it was established by the preceding Secretary, it
has superseded every other intelligence agency in the country, including the
FBI. The very nature of its mandate gave it options for independent activity
that have grown much too dangerously. Its name is a contradiction. ‘Internal
Security’ refers not to domestic intelligence, but to security within every
other data-gathering agency that’s been established.”

McFee swung about in his swivel chair in the quiet den and
picked up his blackthorn stick, waggled it slightly. “Your first loyalty,
above all, is to me, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

McFee sighed. “I knew Hugh Donaldson a long time ago. Back
in the old days of the OSS. Before your time, I really think. What is his
daughter like?”

“An ex-junkie.”

“You lack compassion. Are you taking good care of her? Got
her in one of your safe houses now?”

“No, sir. We don’t have any safe houses any more. I have to
operate under the assumption that K Section has been blown sky-high. No place
is safe. But Wolfe is with her.”

McFee almost smiled. “Have you laid this girl, Samuel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“True Durell tradition. But you haven’t gotten what you want
from her, as yet?"

“I’m getting there, General.”

“I gather from John Meecham that you have several excellent
ideas as to what should be done, Samuel.”

“Some leads, yes.”

“I have others working on it, of course.” McFee looked
thoughtful. “I told you, we are blind until we find out who is worming
into K Section. And even the ISB. We can’t afford to be blind among the
assassins out there.”

McFee looked again at the window, and his voice was deeper,
showing anxiety for one of the rare moments since Durell had known him. “I want
it stopped. As of now. Immediately, if not sooner. We can trust no one. Not
even me. Not even yourself. I’ll clear the decks for you. Ostensibly, you will
be working in Internal Security for a time. Under Meecham’s and Wilderman’s
orders. But you will be
my
man, mine
only, in that mare’s nest of hypocrisy, double-dealing, hypochondria, murder
and mayhem. Use the girl. Use anyone. Watch Wolfe, of course. A strange man. We
have a big scene coming up, a conference on an international scale to be held
on Mattatuck Island off the coast of Maine. You know it, of course.”

Durell’s face was without expression. “Yes sir, very “Yes.
Well, that’s for the future. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be blind then.”

“How long are you giving me, sir? How much time?”

“None at all.”

“Do I have a free hand?”

“Yes, but don‘t show it. Not unless you absolutely have to.
The silvery-haired head turned sharply back to Durell, then tilted to rest
against the back of the leather desk chair.

“Yes, sir,” Durell said.

27

THE FORT, from outward appearances, was merely a collection
of rather shabby beachside cottages on the Atlantic side of the Eastern Shore.
Weatherbeaten
, tilted on stilts, surrounded by a wilderness
of dunes and marsh grasses, it seemed singularly unattractive. No more than a score
of the cottages existed, connected by ill-kept paths and dune-buggy roads, and
the for-rent and for-sale signs were faded by sun, wind, and scouring of the
blowing sand until they were all but illegible.

Although it could not be noticed from the landward side or
the air, an elaborate system of barbed-wire fences, electrified wires,
heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision scopes and trigger alarms surrounded
the perimeter of the desolate little colony in triple depth. An old wooden lighthouse
served as command headquarters for the defenses. There were guards and dogs
posted around the clock, although the guards seemed like sluggish vacationers
idling about the dunes or surf-casting fishermen who never had any luck.

The road that approached from the west, branching inconspicuously
from the main highways that pipelined tourists north and south, seemed to die
in the dunes some distance from the nearest visible cottage. There were a few
warning signs.
Private. No Trespassing.
Keep Out.

The Fort really existed underground. From certain of the
cottages, hatchways in the floor led to concrete steps going down into a
hidden labyrinth of corridors, offices, filing compartments,
laboratories, and the computer known as the Beast. Because of the low elevation
of the land above sea level, pumps were constantly needed and air conditioning
was mandatory to keep the atmosphere reasonably dry. No expense had been
spared. Everything was aimed to make the Fort a viable, hidden underground community
of at least fifty times more people than had been assigned to occupy the
above-ground cottages. There were living quarters, garages whose exit ramps
came up through the rickety attachments to the cottages, and vehicles
camouflaged as milk, bread and telephone trucks. There were soft lights, pastel
colors, fine wood paneling on office walls and doors. There was a
canteen, a rather elegant executive dining room, private conference offices, briefing
halls.
Microphotographic
files kept the need
for space to a minimum. The worldwide radio network operated through the tall
wooden lighthouse on the beach, which in turn relayed through Andrews Air Force
Base. For most of those who labored in ISB‘s Fort, time was artificially
controlled by the dimming of lights to simulate sunrise and sunset. The
Internal Security Bureau under Enoch Wilderman’s original guidance had done
itself proud, making reasonably efficient use of its yearly growing budget.

The place had all the comforts of home.

Durell’s plastic pass, slid into a slot in an ID device, gave
him access to most of the Fort’s combinations. His fingerprints were
matched, his picture was taken, and the door slid aside at the foot of the
concrete steps leading from a hatchway in the cottage kitchen where Maggie and Wolfe
slept. Durell made his way along the corridors and down the elevators to the
medical laboratories.

Dr. Saul Sinberg was relatively young, small and slender,
but with a sedentary belly hung over his loose slacks. Although prematurely
bald, he sported a Rudolph
Rassendale
waxed mustache
that curled up ferociously. His eyebrows were also luxuriously thick, coming to
a point above brilliant dark eyes that regarded Durell with skeptical
amusement. He wore a white medical coat over his undershirt and he kept shaking
his head, getting up from behind his desk, pacing back and forth, and sitting down
again.

“Impossible,” Dr. Sinberg said.

“But I saw them myself, Saul,” Durell insisted.

“It’s true that men under stress or panic or psychotic motivation
can perform extraordinary feats of physical strength and stamina. But such men
are wild and undisciplined and violently irrational.”

“These men were disciplined and rational,” Durell said.

“And you think they were under the influence of some kind
of superdrug?”

“Yes.”

“No such thing.”

“I’m certain of it,” Durell insisted.

Saul Sinberg scrubbed fingers through his bristly
eyebrows. He looked suspiciously at Durell with bright black eyes. There was
nothing stupid or dull about him. “Did Wilderman send you to quiz me, Sam?”

“No, it’s my own hunch.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Is he here at the Fort?” Durell asked.

“He’s here. He left word with Nancy that as soon as you’re
finished with me, you’re to go see him.”

“About the drug,” Durell urged.

“No such thing. Believe me, Sam.”

“But is it a possibility?”

Dr. Sinberg flung himself into his chair. Under his white
medical coat, thick wiry hair pushed up above his undershirt. “Well, let’s see.
There’s dopamine, of course. Trade name is
Inotropin
.
This chemical is the immediate forerunner of norepinephrine, which in turn is
the immediate precursor of epinephrine, which is adrenalin. Found in the
peripheral nerves and in the adrenal gland, of course, as well as in the central
nervous system—the brain and brainstem and spinal cord. There appear to be specific
receptor sites for dopamine in the brain, brainstem, heart, blood vessels—with
particular effects on the renal blood supply. It has the ability to increase
cardiac output without increasing cardiac oxygen consumption. The
significance of that is obvious.”