Assignment - School for Spies, page 18
From somewhere, hidden for twenty years since the partisan fighting in these hills, Slomi got a shortwave transmitter and they risked a quick broadcast to contact Geneva Central. The K Section operator was efficient and impersonal, asking no questions that might betray their identity and safety. The encoded lists of names and stations took ten minutes to transmit, and when it was done, and only then, Durell allowed himself the luxury of feeling relief and exhaustion. It was all out of his hands now. As soon as the cipher experts decoded the names and stations, there would be quiet arrests all over Europe, and the whole apparatus of sleeper agents in K Section would be smashed. The school for spies would send no more beautiful girl graduates to lure men into betraying their work.
Deirdre awoke briefly when the radio transmission was ended, and Durell told her quietly what had been done. "It was your real mission, wasn't it, Dee? To do this job?"
She nodded. "General McFee thought I could make it. Washington had Bruno under observation for a long time, but didn't guess at the school, of course, until only recently. Then it was decided that we had to play their own game to beat them, and so I was recruited to get here, as an 'instructor,' in any way possible." She looked away and her eyes were clouded briefly. "I'm so sorry, Sam. I—it wasn't easy for me. I really failed miserably. Faulk knew all about me, from the start. But he just used me as bait to lure you on."
"Hush, honey."
"Can you ever forgive me, Sam?"
When he kissed her, her lips were cold.
He slept the clock around, and when he awoke, Deirdre was handing them meals in the cramped loft hideout. The hunt for them was still going on in Hohernitzen, but Slomi's peasant friends rallied to help. Slomi went out at night for recruits in the old partisan underground escape
line. It took time to arrange. Day and night merged in a strange nightmare of suspension for Durell. At any moment, he expected to be betrayed, to waken under arrest. But it did not happen.
When he awoke next, he knew that something had taken Deirdre a little farther from him, somehow. There was a remoteness in her manner, a shielding of her words, a secretiveness in her face. He did not press her about it. He did not want to think of Bruno Faulk between them. But soon, if they ever returned to freedom, it would have to be resolved.
After a week, one dark and rainy night, they slipped away from Hohernitzen.
The old escape line still worked well. They were passed from hand to hand, moving mostly at night, but for part of one day they rode in an official car for a score of miles, driven by the chauffeur of a Soviet industrial expert. For the two nights of their journey, they slept in small houses, once in Breslau, another time in a farm village. The trip grew more dangerous as they neared the frontier. A sterile zone stretching from the Baltic to Berlin seemed impassable. Berlin itself was out of the question, with the radio hammering out frenzied appeals for their capture, calling them "Western imperialist saboteurs." The sort of justice promised them, Durell thought wryly, would only mean a mock propaganda trial and a swift sentence of death for all of them.
On the last night before they were to try to cross, Slomi announced a delay of two days. Then the plan was changed again on the next night.
"It is impossible," Slomi said, "to slip through the guarded zone. The alert is still top priority."
"Is it hopeless, then?" Xanakias asked.
"No, I will arrange another way. I know you grow bored with East Germany and long for your noisy Athens and your noisier home and family. But you were patient a long time, about Bellau, and a little longer should not be too painful."
"I was never patient," Xanakias said shortly. His mood had turned to one of sullen anger and self-criticism. "I waited twenty years, and then he got away again."
"Bellau will not escape forever," Slomi said. His little eyes were tolerant. "You should not feel the satisfaction must be personal, Xanakias. What if someone else does the job for yon?"
"Who could do it, if I failed?"
"Ah, the egotism of the Greeks! Look, it is true that Bellau can never return to the West. And I am here with him in the East, right?"
"You are not coming with us?"
"Of course not! Would I give up my post as chief fireman of Hohernitzen? Never!"
"But surely you are on the suspect list, and your absence these past few days—"
Slomi waved it airily away. "It can all be explained. I will think of something. I've survived all these years, haven't I? And you owe me something, you know. I saved you all. We Silesians have no modesty, either, just like you Greeks. Admit that I saved you, and you owe me something."
Xanakias looked suspicious. "What can I pay, Slomi?"
The fat man said softly: "Give Bellau to me."
"I don't—"
"Give the job to me. I can wait. I'll be near him. You will not get back this way easily again, but I shall be close by. One day, I will get my hands around his skinny throat—so—until I lift him from his feet and hold Him — so—and then he will stop kicking."
"The job has always been mine," Xanakias mourned.
"Then swallow pride and give the work to someone else. I am as good an assassin as you, old friend." Slomi laughed. "Is it agreed? You see, I want you to sleep peacefully, once you are away from here."
Xanakias was silent a long time, then he lifted his dark head, sunk in his thick shoulders. "You would somehow let me know, when—when it happened to Bellau?"
"Of course."
Xanakias nodded slowly. "Then it is agreed."
Thirty
Eventually, they used a small fishing boat out of a hamlet on the Baltic coast. The entire crew, with their wives and children, defected with them, when they landed in a Danish port In Copenhagen, Durell took Deirdre at once to the Embassy, and an American doctor looked at her scalp wound and did what was necessary to hasten its healing.
An hour after they arrived, CIA security agents came and placed Durell under house arrest.
He knew the charges might be serious, unless mitigating circumstances were considered. He had flatly disobeyed orders, and perhaps jeopardized security by crossing the frontier without official sanction. The men who gave him his orders to remain within the Embassy were strangers and noncommittal. Xanakias was given an airline ticket to Athens and escorted to the plane. Their goodbyes beforehand were brief.
"Cajun, you must be good to her, you understand. Deirdre is a remarkable woman. You do not doubt that she loves you, whatever has happened?"
"I don't know," Durell said.
"You must believe it. It is plain enough to me."
"But not to me," said Durell.
He accepted his arrest with patience. He did not see Deirdre, although he knew she was somewhere in the Embassy. Those around him were strangely neutral. On the last day there, however, he was permitted to check the results of his coded message detailing the personnel roster who had infiltrated K Section's operations.
The results were gratifying:
It was as if a mortal wound had been healed, the flow of life blood halted.
But nobody thanked him for it.
He was flown alone, without Deirdre, to Washington, where he was advised to stand by pending disposition of his case. He guessed that a quiet furor was taking place over his fate. He supposed they could sentence him to a prison term in Leavenworth. An unofficial trial might find him guilty even of treason. But he obeyed orders and remained quietly in his bachelor apartment near Rock Creek Park. No one came near him, and his telephone was silent for four days.
Not even Deirdre called, and he did not know where she was.
A last Indian summer warmed the District with a benevolent sun. The leaves were still in color, and the Maryland hills were green and golden where the horse farms spread their rolling pastures and fences across the countryside. Eastward, there was fishing on the Chesapeake and anticipation of hunting in the marshes along the great Bay.
Durell waited.
He was pleased with his freedom in the masculine apartment where he lived, with its view of the park and the red-brick colonial neighborhood. He knew he was under surveillance—he even recognized some of the watchers lingering under the poplar trees in the street. He read and brewed his Louisiana coffee, with its strong chicory flavor, and drank bourbon in the evening and brushed up on history and European politics in his books.
On the fourth day, General Dickinson McFee came to see him, unannounced. McFee was a small, gray man who strove for a neutral identity, but whose personality and force of mind often betrayed him. When he was in a room, you were instantly aware of him. The impact of his presence was unavoidable.
He sat down precisely in Durell's favorite leather chair, his sad, intelligent eyes considering Durell's heavy frame, the ragged sweatshirt and khaki slacks he had on.
"Cajun, if you were my own son—which you are not, fortunately—I could not have been more biased in my arguments with the Computers." McFee referred to his nameless superiors as the "Computers"—the board from which his own directives came. "They were all for hanging you, you know. I don't mean figuratively, either. Literally.”
"I know," Durell said, and smiled.
"Doesn't that trouble you?"
"How is Deirdre?" he asked abruptly.
"I'm talking about your future, Sam, your whole life. Aren't you listening?"
"Deirdre is my life—and my future."
McFee touched his gray moustache and smiled—perhaps. Durell was never sure. "That's what I told them. And I surprised myself. The Computer has a heart, after all”
Durell said dryly: "And I'm forgiven?"
"Not entirely. You get a desk job for six months in Synthesis and Analysis. You hate that sort of work, so it serves you right. On the other hand, you'll be helping to clean out the nests of young chicks who infested our granaries. We've already gotten most of them—thanks to you and this Slomi person you reported on."
"And Mike Xanakias."
"Yes. He's back at our Athens office."
"Any word on Bellau?"
"No. He was in Moscow, last we knew. Then gone. Maybe the fruit is tastier with the Chi Corns in Peking. But we just don't know." McFee stood up. His eyes went cold. "You could have gotten her killed, you know. I sent her to play Bruno Faulk personally. My orders, Cajun. I told her to marry him, if necessary. I know you never wanted her in the business, but she was the best for the job. Are you sore at me?"
"I don't know," Durell said.
"Well, don't think about it too long. There's an empty desk for you at No. 20 Annapolis. Class C office. No air conditioner. Punishment routine, eh? Report on Monday."
"And until then?"
"Why don't you go see Deirdre?"
Durell was silent.
"Are you afraid, Sam?"
"A little."
"Don't be. She's waiting for you." "I'm afraid of myself," Durell said.
Her house at Prince John was on the Chesapeake shore, and he drove there in his eight-year-old Chevy in the evening, when all the colors of the sunset daubed the calm waters of the bay. The old rose brick home he knew so well looked unchanged. It was very dear to him. It had been, in dark nights in equally dark comers of the world, the very symbol of everything for which he risked his life.
She waited on the terrace with his favorite bourbon and a crystal pitcher of ice, while dinner became fragrant in the old-fashioned copper and black cast-iron kitchen nearby. The setting sun touched her black hair with color. Her oval face was calm and serene again; her intelligent eyes smiled slightly; and except for the slight trembling at the corners of her mouth, it might have been like any other evening when he had come to see her. "Darling, did they rap your knuckles badly?" "Not badly enough, perhaps." He kissed her, holding her shoulders in both hands, and he felt a slight tremor in her body. He touched the trace of scar that was left, just below the hairline on her forehead. "You're all right?"
"That remains to be seen. Physically, yes. No permanent damage. It depends on how you feel about it." "About what?"
"About me and Bruno Faulk. How much does it change things with us, Sam? You were always a terribly possessive man."
"I'm very humble, just now."
Her eyes searched his face. "Are you, really? I think not. You never could be. It's only one of many reasons why I've always been in love with only you." She poured a drink for him. She wore a light pink sweater against the growing chill of evening over the Chesapeake and the fishing hamlet of Prince John, hidden behind the beech trees at the edge of the lawn. He was suddenly reminded of Marge Jones, of the green eyes and all the traditional Americanisms she had learned to love at such a terrible price. Deirdre caught the change in his face and said quietly, "What is it, Sam?"
"I was thinking of guilt and blame and responsibility."
"We're responsible for each other," she said.
"Not always."
"You sound strange, Sam. Am I so different because I was married to Bruno Faulk for a few days?"
"No."
"Then what is it?"
"I've been so wrong, Dee, all this time, in putting off what I was reluctant to face, the dangers you were in, without considering how you felt each time I went away on another job. The shoe was on the other foot."
"My heart always went with you, Sam."
"I know that—now."
She said: "McFee wants to use me again. Another job." She smiled gently at the look on his face and made a soft sound in her throat. "No, not like the last. He won't ever ask that of me again. No need for Cajun jealousy, darling. It's simple and it won't take long. You see, after loving you for so many years, I'm at last in the business, too."
"I suppose now I'll have to sit at a desk for six months and worry about what's happening to you" he said wryly. "That's McFee's real punishment for me."
"Can you bear it?"
"I'll try for a quick parole," he said. "When do you leave?"
"You report on Monday” Dickinson said. He's a dear man. That gives us a very long weekend here, darling."
Durell moved toward her. He hesitated only a moment, and then he saw the quick longing in her eyes and her hands came up for him and he said quietly: "Let's make the most of it, then." And they did.
Edward S. Aarons, Assignment - School for Spies
