Double Identity (4 page)

Hafed came and squatted in the entrance of the tent. It was too dark to see but Nick could visualize the guide’s face, swart and button-nosed and slant-eyed and covered with a curling, greasy beard. The smell of Hafed came to him now in the gloom.

“How is it going?” Nick queried tiredly. “The men still going to quit?”

Hafed moved farther into the small tent. “Yis—they not go any more than this place. They are Sherpa and this not their country, you understand? They also much afraid of Chinese soldiers.”

Nick struggled to remove the yakskin coat, then fumbled in the pockets of the quilted suit for cigarettes. Hafed lit them from a faintly glowing punk-cord. “Better not to show light,” he said. “Chinese soldiers have very sharp eyes, I think.”

N3 cupped his cigarette in his palm. “What do you think, Hafed? Are there any Chinese around?”

He could sense the man’s shrug. “Who knows, sar? Perhaps. But it is
karma.
If the soldiers come, they come—that is all. We can do nothing.”

“On the map,” Nick said, “this area is marked as having an undefined border. I don’t suppose that means anything to the Chinese!”

Hafed chuckled grimly. “No, sar. Nothing. Is better for them—in such places they put their flag and say so sorry but this now our land. It is their way.”

N3 smoked his cigarette and brooded. He didn’t give a damn for the Chinese at the moment, except as they were behind, must be behind, this
Doppelgdnger
bit! Anyway he was too tired to think; his head felt light, like a balloon that might detach itself and float away any minute.

Hafed went away for a moment and came back with a huge cup of tea heavy with
tsampa.
“Better you drink this,” he commanded. “I think you not feel good, sar? I watch all day. You sick.”

Nick forced some of the tea down. “You’re right,” he admitted. “I feel lousy. And that’s bad— I can’t afford to get sick.” He grinned feebly as he spoke. Hawk wouldn’t like it. An AXE man never allowed illness to interfere with a mission.

“Is all okay,” Hafed said comfortingly. “You just have mountain sickness—all foreigners have it, I think. Is the altitude is all. You be all right in two, three days.”

They smoked for a time in silence. Nick fished a bottle of Scotch from his pack and spiked their tea. The warm, peaty-tasting whisky made him feel a little better. Hafed spread his bed roll beside Nick and lay down, scratching vigorously. He gurgled contentedly over his tea and whisky. Outside the wind was beginning to howl like a great white wolf after prey. The cold began to pry into N3’s marrow, and he knew there would not be much sleep for him that night. Perhaps it was just as well. He needed time to think, to catch up with himself. Since Hawk’s phone call had pulled him away from a warm bed and a hot woman he had been going at a frantic pace. Rather absurdly the refrain of an old Gilbert and Sullivan tune ran through his brain. In parody.
An AXE agents lot is not a happy one!

Perhaps not. But it was the lot he had chosen. And, despite all his bitter griping at times, he knew it was the life he wanted and loved. So why complain when he was hauled from between a pair of velvety thighs in the dead of night and sent to Tibet!

An AXE jet had gotten him from New York to Washington in less than an hour. It had been a crazy chaotic night. His boss, Hawk, was livid and tired and disheveled and in a rage. AXE headquarters, behind the innocent facade on Dupont Circle, was in an uproar. Hawk, an unlit cigar rolling in his tight mouth, had spoken with Nick betweentimes as he shouted into half a dozen phones.

“You,” he snapped, pointing the cigar at Nick, “are somewhere in Tibet right now. You are on official business, top secret, and you contacted our head man in Tibet—a Buddhist monk by name of Pei Ling. You milked him for all the information you could, but then you made a mistake. There was something you didn’t know—your own Golden Number!”

N3 had long ago shaken away the daze of sleep and the drug of Melba O’Shaughnessy’s kisses. His icy mind was clicking like a computer.

“So that’s where the impostor slipped up? He didn’t know his Golden Number?”

Hawk had grinned a little smugly. “He didn’t even know there
was
a Golden Number! Chinese Intelligence is good, I admit, but we still have a few secrets. And the Golden Number, thank God, is one of them. They’re smart enough to know that they couldn’t foresee everything, but I doubt if they expected their man, this phony Nick Carter, to be blown so soon. It’s a hell of a break for us—now you can get right on his track. I don’t have to tell you the orders— seek out an destroy! You leave in half an hour—there will be no time for briefing and no time to arrange a cover. You’ll have to work naked, as yourself. On your own. By guess and God. Find this bastard, son, and kill him before he can do a lot of irreparable damage.”

“It could be a trap,” said Nick. “To draw me within killing distance.”

Hawk’s false teeth clamped on his cigar. “You think we haven’t thought of that? Of course it’s a trap! But that is probably only a part of it, boy. They wouldn’t set up an elaborate deception like this just to kill you. There has to be something else—something bigger. You’ve got to find out what that is—and you’ve got to stop it.”

Killmaster lit one of his gold-tipped cigarettes and watched Hawk with narrowed eyes. He had seldom seen his boss so upset. Something really big was brewing, no doubt of that.

Hawk was at a wall map, pointing. “This phony you is heading due east. We’re projecting, of course, guessing if you like, but I think we’re right. If we are, and he does go east, then there is no place to go in that desolation but the Karakoram Pass. And
that
leads into northern Kashmir. You begin to get the picture?”

Killmaster smiled and crossed his long legs. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” he said. “And I read tonight, on the way down here, that India and Pakistan are getting ready to sign another cease-fire agreement. U Thant seems to be making a little headway.”

Hawk went back to his desk and sat down. He put a pair of scuffed shoes on a leather-backed blotter. “Maybe there will be a cease-fire and maybe there won’t—there certainly won’t if the Chinese have anything to say about it. Right now we’re doing a lot of wild guessing, I admit, but it is almost certain that this phony agent is being sent into Kashmir, or India, or Pakistan or wherever, to keep the war going. The Chinese Reds have
got
to keep that pot boiling—they stand to gain a lot. Just
how
they plan to do it we don’t know—that’s your job to find out.” Hawk fixed Nick with a hard little smile. “It’s really not at all complicated, son. Just find this double of yours and kill him! That will clean up the whole mess. Now you’d better go and talk to Transportation—you leave in twenty minutes. You’ll have everything behind you, as usual. The CIA, FBI, the State Department, all of them. Ask for anything you want. If you have time, of course. There’s not much of that. And stay out of trouble—don’t get mixed up with any foreign police. You know we can’t acknowledge you. You’re completely on your own in this one, my boy.
Carte blanche.
A free run—so long as you don’t involve this government.”

Hawk tossed Nick a thick brown envelope. “Here are orders and traveling instructions. No time to read them now. Read them on the plane. Goodbye, son. Good luck.”

There were times, though the world was never allowed to see it, when Nick Carter, as realistic and hard-boiled as the two-legged tiger he was, felt like a motherless child.

He had time, barely, to call Melba in New York. She was still in his bed in the penthouse. Warm and sleepy, but with an icy edge to her voice. Nick knew what the trouble was, but it was not a thing you discussed on the phone. He had left Melba hanging again, and not for the first time. When Hawk called you moved—and Hawk called at the goddamndest times! It was too bad, really. Melba was a doll. But she wanted a man there when she needed him. Nick, as he hung up and walked to the waiting jet, had an idea that he wouldn’t be seeing Melba again. Not in bed, anyway. He sighed as they strapped a chute on him—what matter? It would be the same with any woman. AXE was his real true love.

AXE planes took him as far as Mandalay, where he was turned over to the Air Force. The next stop was in Thimbu, in Bhutan, where the plane fueled at a secret airbase which, it was hoped, neither the Russians nor the Chinese knew about. Then over the Hump— Everest was pointed out to him—and he was dropped in a black parachute onto the Soda Plains in the midst of a magnificent wilderness. Hawk, with his shouting and his phones, had wrought a logistical miracle. Hafed, with his Sherpas, was there to meet him. Killmaster did not examine the miracle. He was content to accept it. You dropped into the night, twelve thousand miles from home, and there was Hafed awaiting you. Sherpas, ponies, smell and all.
Formidable!

Hafed’s odor filled the tent now and Nick lit another cigarette against it. He was still nauseated and light-headed and each of his arms and legs weighed a ton. The mug from which he drank tea and Scotch must weigh at least ten pounds. Actually N3 was much sicker than either he or Hafed knew; high altitude is a killer of men if the exposure, without oxygen, is long enough. A lesser man, without Nick Carter’s superb body and razor-edge condition, would have been raving and helpless long before this.

Hafed finished his tea and whisky and put down the mug. “Is also big storm coming,” he said. “That scare men too. Is first snow of winter—is not so bad, I think, but men not like. Anyway is excuse. Maybe they not be here when we wake up in morning, I think.”

Nick was too tired and sick to care much. There was, however, the mission to be considered. He couldn’t accomplish much if he were stranded in a Himalayan pass in & blizzard. In these parts they didn’t even send around the St. Bernards with a cask of booze.

Hafed sensed his concern and said, “Not to worry, sar. They will leave us ponies and supplies. Sherpas honest people. Take only what is theirs. Anyway the lamasery—what you call convent—is only maybe five, six miles up the pass. We be much okay there until storm over.”

“That’s nice to know,” said Nick wearily. “I hope the girls there have learned about tubs and hot water and soap. I’ve got a few guests I’d like to get rid of.”

As though on cue Hafed began to scratch. His cigarette glowed in the little Blanchard tent, double-lined against the wind and cold. Hafed’s next words were a blunt question. “Why you go to Lamasery of She Devils, sar?”

N3 considered for a moment. Hafed was probably to be trusted— most likely was working for CIA—yet he could not be sure. Nick could not afford to give anything away.

Nick tapped the breast of his quilted jacket. “Orders. That’s all I know, Hafed. I’m to go to this place—the Lamasery of the She Devils—and make a contact with someone called Dyla Lotti. A woman, I guess. Probably the High Priestess or whatever they call her. That’s all I know.”

It wasn’t quite all he knew, but it was enough for Hafed to know.

Hafed appeared lost in thought for a moment. Finally, “How much you know about this place, this lamasery? About this woman, Dyla Lotti, sar?”

Nick lit a cigarette and tossed the pack. “Nothing. Not a damned thing!” Again this was not quite true. Dyla Lotti was, in fact, working for AXE. It was she who had gotten the message through to Hawk about the murder of the AXE man in Tibet.

Hafed’s cigarette sparked in the gloom of the tent. Outside the men and ponies had bedded down for the night and the only sound was the rising wail of the wind down the pass.

“It is a bad place, this lamasery,” said Hafed at last. He sought for his English. “Is real reason the men will not go on—they are afraid of the women there. They are all bad women!”

Nick, in spite of his aching head, felt interest kindle in him. What was Hafed trying to tell him?

“How do you mean—bad? The place isn’t a prison is it?”

Again Hafed hesitated before answering. “No—not real prison. But is place they send bad girls—priestesses who go with men. Is against religious law, to be with man, but these girls do it anyway and so they are sent to this place for punish. To Lamasery of She Devils! You see now why my men not want go there?”

N3 had to chuckle. “Not exactly, Hafed. Seems to me they
would
want to go there—with all those bad girls running around loose!”

Hafed made a sucking noise with his lips which Nick interpreted as Tibetan for disapproval. “You not understand, sar. My men all good men— much married. You notice little leather boxes they all carry on string around neck?”

“I’ve noticed. Charms of some kind, aren’t they?”

“Yis—good charms. Usually only Sherpa woman wear them—but when men go away for a long time they take
dablam
with them. Is like—like taking spirit of wife with them. You see, sar? Spirit of good wife watch over man— he can do nothing bad then? Understand?”

Nick laughed. “I understand. They’re afraid they might be tempted in a lamasery full of loose women?”

Hafed joined in the laugh for a moment. “Is maybe part of it, sar. But is more—lamasery have bad name for happenings. Is no men there, you see, only women! And are many stories also—sometimes when men stop there, travelers, they do not leave again. No one ever see them more. That is bad, no, sar?”

As sick as he was Nick still had a bit of impishness left. “Depends on your viewpoint, Hafed. Some men I know would consider it a lovely way to die! And maybe they don’t die—maybe the girls just keep them in cells, or something, and use them whenever they feel like it. It might not be such a bad life—while it lasted!” Nick smiled in the dark. He could think of a dozen old jokes based on just such a situation, but it was no use wasting them on Hafed.

A thought struck him. “How come
you’re
not afraid to go to the place of the She Devils, Hafed?”

“Not married,” said the little man succinctly. “Not have
dablam
with spirit of wife in it. I not afraid of yellow priestesses. Maybe even I like! Goodnight, sar.”