Assignmnt - Ceylon (2 page)

He asked again, “Do you know, Aspara, who the kidnappers are?”

“I could guess.”

“Let me hear your guess, then.”

“It’s the PFM, of course. The Tamil rebels. What country does not have their violent equivalent? They need money, they need financing for the mobs they raise for their rioting. What do they want? The ancient wars between Tamil and Sinhala are long over. Will they revive the old hatreds, split our new nation, divide family against family, neighbor against neighbor, religion against religion? I do not know. I tell you, Ira was always an innocent. They have taken him because your country will pay the ransom without making too much of a fuss.”

“We’ll pay only if I say so,” Durell told her.

“I would not want Ira to be harmed.”

“It’s possible that he will be. The innocent are so often the victims in our world today,” he said.

“Sam?”

“It’s my job, Aspara.”

“I would not want you to be harmed either.”

He smiled. “I’m not an innocent.”

She turned to him. Her great dark eyes seemed enormous, reflecting the sky and the quiet sea, the lush green of the village. Something more seemed to move in her gaze, he thought. Fear, perhaps. Her concern was not for him. Her thoughts might be as ancient as her proud ancestry. She was tall for a Sinhala, and perhaps one of her ancestors had been a Dutch colonist long ago. Her face was gentle, somehow tragic as many Sinhalese looked tragic. He wished he knew what she was thinking and how she was thinking—as a woman? A diplomat? A former wife? A former lover? He wished he did not have to live with perpetual questions and suspicion. But in this business he was what K Section had made of him. Then he corrected the thought: he was what he always had been, what his potential had insisted on him being and doing. He preferred the solitary life, the danger, the caution required to subsist in the cities and jungles of the world. The planet was going mad, he sometimes thought. He did his best to stamp out the insane sparks and brush fires that sprang up here and there in the far corners of the earth. It was his job. He did it well. He wanted peace more than most men, because he had too often seen the face on the other side of the coin. He did not call himself a patriot; but he had risked his life, and his body bore too many scars of too many encounters with the forces of those with ambition, with lusts for power that were almost an anachronism in today’s tightly knit, interdependent world.

He stood up.

Aspara said, “You are going?”

“I’ve sent two men to Kandy to inquire about Ira there. He had a house near the city, where he studied Ceylonese antiquities.”

She nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“I have to look after them,” he said.

“I thought each of you accepted his own risks.”

“That’s true.”

“Then stay, Sam,” she said.

The creaking bullock cart, with its arched roof, had passed the bungalow. He watched it out of sight. The carter had seemed an ordinary man of Negombo. But one could never be certain.

He said, “I don’t want to implicate you in this, Aspara. Your political position is delicate, and any scandal—” “No one knows I am here with you.” She smiled. “Why did you watch the cart that way?”

He shrugged. “It’s habit.”

She shivered a little. “As I said, you somehow frighten me, and yet—”

“Do you want me to buy Ira back from the PFM?”

“Not out of personal motives. But it would be the easiest solution to the problem.”

“Where do you suppose they are keeping him?”

“We still have jungles and mountains, swamps and caves, in the interior of Ceylon where few men go.” She waved a delicate hand vaguely. Her great eyes regarded him with a new light. Her silk saree changed colors with the lowering sun. Under the silk, her body was ripe and gentle, an offering to him, spoken with her eyes, her hands, the way she leaned forward, and he remembered her with an intimate hunger.

“Dear Sam Durell-—She checked herself. “I would be devastated if I believed you came to see me only on your— your business. Do stay.”

“You should be more discreet, Aspara. If your political opponents learned of a liaison with me—”

“I told you—we are secret here, no one knows.”

“Don’t count on it,” he said. “My man in Colombo, a Mr. Dhapura, might want to get in touch with me. He’s pretty good at it.”

“The hotel man?” She laughed softly, dismissing the risk. Her laughter was like the distant tinkling of the monks’ bells in the Angurukaramulla temple. “We will be most discreet, dear Sam.”

He thought, Aspara in the Sinhala language means heavenly maiden.

He sat down again.

There are varying techniques taught at the Farm in Maryland, K Section’s training and refresher school for recruits and old hands. The methods and patterns of shadowing a subject or of shaking oft' a tail are constantly updated, studied, modified, and polished. There are the parallel methods, using two or more agents, the jump-ahead, the close or the distant pursuit, the use of transportation, taxis, buses, private cars, the overt contact, the brush contact. These are used whether the subject is the pursuer or the pursued. Durell knew all the techniques and had refined some of them to his own purposes. He was being trailed. He was a target for assassination. What he did not know in this instance was why he was the objective. Nor did he even remotely suspect the identity of his pursuers.

The taxi driver followed his instructions when he left the Pettah and headed for the Cinnamon Gardens. Durell told him to go slowly. He offered himself as a target. But nothing happened. At the gardens, in the residential area, he told the driver to circle the big museum. Traffic was

heavy. The big lumbering buses made splashes of red against the blend of modem and old when he rode back to the commercial fort area of Colombo.

Nothing happened.

He could not spot anyone.

Book technique in this pattern was fine, up to a point. It ignored the personal, the intuitive hunch, the primal sense of pursuit. Like a primitive in the jungle, he could sense in his gut that a predator was after him. It did not make sense. The incidents with the taxi and the angry carter could have been coincidence. He did not think so. He looked at the hawkers and at their wares spread on the sidewalks, at the sleek American cars, the mixture of Western and traditional clothes, the narrow alleys radiating from broad, clean boulevards. He thought of the Arabs, the Persians, the Chinese who first came here to trade for spices; the Portuguese, Dutch, and English who had followed. In the 14th century a Chinese trader named Wang Ta-Youan had first given Colombo her name; fifty years later, Ibn Batuta, a Moor from Morocco, named Ceylon the island of Serendib. Each had left a mark on the timeless island, once a land of elegant kingdoms, of Buddhist worship in conflict with a later flow of Tamil Hindus from India.

“Driver, I didn’t tell you to go here,” he said suddenly.

“There is trouble up ahead, mister. A protest march, yes? There have been riots, mister. Are you sight-seeing Colombo? I could take you to the zoo—the elephant circus there is outstanding. Or perhaps you would like to see the Kandyan dancers at the harbor? Mister?”

“Turn right,” Durell said.

The taxi driver kept straight ahead. “Nehe, karuna kara. No, please.” He chattered in Sinhalese for a brief spate. Durell looked at the back of his round head. “The Naga is raising a great political disturbance here, mister.”

“The Naga?”

“He calls himself the Cobra’s Bow. He heads up the PFM—the People’s Freedom Movement. Tamils, all of them.” The driver spat out the window of the taxi. “You would not want to see this. It gives tourists a bad impression of our country.”

Durell took out his gun, a snubby-barreled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. He held it on his knee.

“Turn right,” he said again.

“They talk—the PFM—of discovering the Buddha Stone. Have you heard of this?”

“No.”

“It is disturbing. A most precious religious relic! In their hands! It is not to be tolerated.”

Durell put the muzzle of his gun to the driver’s right ear. “Stop the car. Prevasimin. Be careful.”

The man turned his head, just a little. Durell could see only the curve of his brown cheek, the pouting mouth, the gleam of a dark brown eye.

“You’re not Sinhalese,” Durell said.

“No, sir. I am part Portuguese, part Tamil. I come from Trincomalee. My family, my wife and children, five there. Please, mister?”

“Stop the car. Who hired you?”

“You did, sir.”

“Who told you to wait for me at the Pettah and pick me up if I looked for a cab?”

“I do not know who the gentleman was.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“American or Hong Kong?”

“American, sir. Please. Your gun—”

“What did he look like?”

“He was black, mister.”

“African black or American?”

“How can I tell you that, mister? He spoke in good English.”

“British or American accent?”

“American, sir.”

It still didn’t make sense. He smelled the sweat of sudden fear from the taxi driver. The sophisticated techniques taught by K Section were suddenly scrubbed from his mind. Anger touched him, and he pushed it away. Anger never helped. He kept his gun at the driver’s head until they halted in a slot between bullock carts and stalls, somewhere near Dematagoda Road. There was a clash of brazen noise nearby, the mindless roar of an inflamed crowd. He smelled smoke in the humid afternoon air. He thought of making for the US embassy at 44 Galle Road, in the Kolluitiya district. Too late for that.

The mob poured down the narrow street like a flood released from a bursting dam. As riots go, it would scarcely make the local headlines. But Durell sensed an immediate and personal danger in it. He saw the red banners fluttering, with Sinhalese, Tamil, and Arabic script, heard the chanting of “Naga! Naga! Naga!” and saw several streams of men pour toward him like the reaching pseudopods of some elemental beast.

He jumped from the taxi behind the bullock cart. The driver slid out on the other side and vanished. Durell let him go. He put his gun away and pressed back against a fruit stall. The pungent smell of ripe melons touched him, along with the smell of the crowd. There were smashing sounds, yells. More smoke drifted across the narrow street. A woman screamed, making a high ululating sound in the steamy air. People ran everywhere, jostling and striking each other in an effort to escape. Some stalls were smashed. A window was shattered, a crystalline sound above the yelling.

Durell felt the presence of someone near him. A wildeyed man with a red rag tied around his head edged around the bullock cart. The man was wiry, dressed in a worn Western shirt and stained slacks. There was blood on his left arm. He was bald, brown-skinned. Black, Durell thought. A black American. Not this one.

The man screamed at him. A knife flickered. Hi
^r
ed help. Durell hit the man with the edge of his hand against the neck, not hard enough to kill him. The man went down, strangling; rage faded from his dimming eyes. Durell moved around to the front of the cart. The narrow lane was a flood of shouting, struggling men. He kept close to the buildings, felt himself bumped and shoved, backed into a doorway. The killer was nearby. He could feel it. He recognized none of the congested faces around him. He felt for the doorknob behind him, turned it. He smelled stale cooking, the effluvium of poor sanitation, and stepped backward. His heel touched the lowest tread of stairs behind him. Carts and stalls were being overturned by the angry mob. A torch was thrown at the bullock cart he had just quit.

He backed up two steps, heard a sound above and behind him, felt dismay at the tall dark figure looming at the head of the dingy steps above him.

A professional job, Durell thought.

A press of ragged men blocked the street door. He could not get out that way. He had been neatly boxed, first by the taxi driver who’d dropped him in this special spot, then by the rioter’s halfhearted attack that backed him into this doorway. The thoughts flicked through his mind in split seconds.

“Hello, Cajun.”

The voice echoed in the steep, dark staircase. He could not see the face above him. But the dim light ran a liquid finger along the barrel of a Luger in the man’s hand.

“Sorry, old man.”

“Why?” Durell called up to him.

“It’s my job.”

“To kill me?”

“All in the day’s work, old man.”

The voice was garbled by the echoing walls of the narrow, dingy staircase. It tickled something in the back of Durell’s memory. He could not place it. The straddlelegged man above raised the long-barreled gun a few millimeters. Outside, the crowd roared and smashed things and chanted slogans, as crowds did everywhere in the world. He smelled curry cooking. He thought of Aspara and the beach and the placid Indian Ocean. He cursed his failure to rate his shadow as important, from the first.

“So long, old man.”

It was the other’s mistake. The warning gave Durell time to move. There was a dark-painted brown door to his left. He spun, smashed at it as the Luger suddenly crashed. The door panel was flimsy. He felt the bullet tug at his shirt sleeve. A professional, up there, but not armed well enough. To ensure a killing, you use automatic rapid fire. He felt the second slug graze his right arm, then he was through the broken door, stumbling into shadows, the smell of cooking, and the rapid rattle of the other’s heels coming down the stairs. He glimpsed a sparsely furnished

room, a large Chinese bed, a Grand Rapids dresser, a portrait of the lady prime minister on the wall. A woman stood there, frightened by his sudden assault on her home. A small child in a white dress hugged the skirt of her saree. Durell had his gun in his hand now. He leaped for the opposite door. The steps on the stairway suddenly halted. In the street outside, the chanting and burning and smashing went on. He halted in the doorway, drew a deep breath, leveled his gun at the empty entrance he had smashed through. The woman whimpered. The child stared at him with great, liquid eyes. The woman had a Hindu caste mark on her forehead.